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Nicole Hurley
07-27-2011, 05:40 PM
Hey All!

I have never worked with coding before, nor have I developed a website before, and until recently the "word" SEO would have meant nothing to me... So logically, my boss asks me to research SEO and apply my findings to our website.

I will tell you what I have done, and what I haven't done just yet but think needs to be done... then I would love if you could tell me what else I could be doing, or if I would be wasting my time doing the things that I am thinking about doing.

What I have done:

Changed Meta Tag Keywords for each page
Changed meta discription for each page
Updated the title for each page


What I am thinking I need to do:

Create a site map
:confused: Alt Tags? - Not sure what they are but I will talk to my programmer - I think it is something like writing out the verbiage that are shown in the pictures on your site.
301 Redirects - kind of clear as to what that means... My understanding, I shouldn't have skywiremedia.com/blog AND blog.skywiremedia.com, I should have one 301 redirect to the other... ??
:confused: H1? Not sure what that means... still reading up on it.


Your suggestions and comments are much appreciated! Thanks!

Website link below in my signature!

billbenson
07-27-2011, 08:52 PM
Your boss really gave you an unfair task. To understand what you need to do is really a 6 month to 5 year learning task. The meta tag changes aren't going to do much as description tags should be unique per page and meta keywords don't have much value and if done should be implemented differently than what you are doing.

Until you know how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together its going to take time to learn before you can do them properly. If, on the other hand, you just need to do some stuff to make your boss happy, we can give you some guidance.

If you want to learn it, I know Vangogh has posted some good links in the past as well.

Dan Furman
07-27-2011, 11:27 PM
I think you did pretty good in the short time you've had for this - you definitely uncovered the basics. This stuff isn't that complicated on a basic level. The deeper stuff, like how social media and linking relates to it, etc, yea, that might take a lot of time. But for the basics, you're well on your way (and seriously, what you've already done is all your boss can expect from some web research.)

Some comments:

The metas are next to useless, but hey, it can't hurt, and it CYA. The titles and descriptions - that's good.

Alt tags are simple - they are nothing more than a line added to the HTML code for an image. You know when you hover your mouse over a picture and some wording pops up? That's an ALT tag doing its job.

Generally, image code will look like this: <img src="imagefolder/picture.jpg"> add the alt tag to make it look like this: <img src="imagefolder/picture.jpg" alt="keyworded statement describing the picture or content">

Redirects is a small text file that tells where old / renamed pages are now. Your blog is fine the way it is. (VG can probably answer this part better)

An H1 tag is simple HTML. It's a headline tag. SEO gives a little more weight to keywords in an H1 (H2, etc). So instead of having a headline be bolded and font sized to be a headline, use an H1 tag. I would suspect your site already does this if it was built in recent years. If not, you'll need to get into the page code for H1's and ALTs - have a web designer do this.

Aside from the stuff above, my biggest SEO tip is to just be the best site you can be on your topic. if you do that, Google will find you (they want to find you).

Dan Furman
07-27-2011, 11:47 PM
An addendum to the above... by looking at the source in my browser, I see your site is using H1's on pages that have content, but I did notice something about the site I really don't like - you have no content at all. Really - most of your product/service pages are little more than bulleted lists, and on some pages, half the list is TM'd products that nobody really knows what they are. Some product/service pages have a token paragraph, but goodness, aren't your services deep enough that you can write 500 words on them? You guys spend ten times the verbage on your internal workings / people (yourselves) than what you can do for me (the customer). That ratio should really be reversed. I know more about the CEO than what your company actually offers or why I should consider doing business with you. Why?

I don't mean the above to be harsh - it's meant to be constructive. You'll never get good SEO with the above like it is, no matter what you do.

vangogh
07-28-2011, 12:54 AM
First take a deep breath. Next forget most of what you just learned and take a step back. What I mean is you're approaching seo the way most people do by looking at specific bits of code and thinking if you add the right word to the right piece of code it'll lead to seo nirvana. It's not that those words and code aren't important, but before you can understand how to use them you need to understand the big picture.

Here's a good Beginner's Guide to SEO (http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo).


Changed Meta Tag Keywords for each page

Better would be to remove the the meta keyword tag completely from your site. Search engines do not look at meta keywords to determine what ranks where. All the major search engines have said they don't and many people have done tests to show they don't. Forget you ever heard of the meta keywords tag.

The meta description tag isn't going to help your pages rank, but it can help entice someone to click on your link in the search results. Think of them as a mini ad

The title for each page is very important both for ranking and for getting people to click.

SEO can be simplified into a few basic steps.

1. Keyword research - You need to research what words your customers use to look for your products and services. Not the words you use, but the words they actually type into search engines. Also consider how many other sites are competing with you for the same words and phrases. I'm sure your company would like to rank #1 for mobile app development. So would about 100 million other sites. You have to start by targeting phrases you can legitimately rank for and build from there. Better for now would be something like "ios augmented reality app development" which has about 100 times less competition. There's a link to a good PDF about keyword research on this page (http://www.polepositionmarketing.com/library/e-books.php).

2. Develop a usable and accessible site - You want to build a site first for real people. Second you want to build a site that makes it easy for search engines spiders to crawl your site so they can find your content and understand what the site is about. This step is the most technical and isn't going to happen overnight.

3. Create great content for real people - That's want search engines want to show in their results. You have to be very critical with yourself about how great your content really is. Most everyone thinks they create great content. Most everyone is wrong. No matter how wonderful your content is keep thinking of ways to make it better.

4. Promote your content - If you truly do have remarkable content in time your audience will promote it for you, but you need to give your content a push so people know it exists. Build relationships with bloggers who are likely to link to your content. Network with people on social sites who'll share your content. Basically get to know people and let them know you have this wonderful content on your site.

5. Measure what's happening - Set up some kind of analytics package. Google Analytics is free and easy to set up. You don't need to check your stats every day, but once a week or every other week spend some time seeing who's visiting your site and where they're coming from. Are you getting a lot of traffic through Twitter, but little from Facebook? What phrases are people typing in search engines to find your site? All the data will help you see what is and isn't working and you want to use that knowledge to continue to make improvements to all of the above.

Don't get trapped into looking for specific code to add magic words to. It won't work and it will only leave you frustrated.

thebizinator
07-28-2011, 04:02 AM
Create a sitemap - Depending on what platform you're using for your blog, a lot of them come with plugins that will create a sitemap for you.

Alt tags - To me, alt tags really aren't that important. They're there just in case you don't link to an image properly or if someones web browser can't support your code. Some say it can effect your search ranking, but in my experience it hasn't done much of anything. I wouldn't worry too much about this one.

301 redirect - This is the most search engine friendly form of a redirect. You can use it if your blog isn't you default home page. If you wanted to, a 301 redirect could point to yourwebsite.com/blog instead of yourwebsite.com

H1 - I'm assuming you meant to say <h1>, which is the html tag for creating a title. An example would be <h1>Your Title Here</h1>

I'm responding to this post a little late so let me know if you need any additional help with anything.

Nicole Hurley
07-28-2011, 01:12 PM
Thank you all so much for your feedback. I first want to mention that I feel like I may have been coming off rude and sarcastic when I mentioned my boss asking me to research and apply SEO tactics. For the record: I love learning about new things, and have enjoyed stepping out of my comfort zone to research something completely unfamiliar to me.

Now... as for your comments, they are MUCH appreciated. To those of you stating that we pretty much have ZERO content on our site... I couldn't agree more! I actually have written on my little SEO notepad "CONTENT" in huge bubble letters that are highlighted! As those of you who visited the site, you could clearly see that we have a massive amount of products and services that we offer. I am trying to figure out how to propose that we go into more detail without overloading the customer/reader with too much information. Then again, when they have read what they needed, or all they wanted to read, they will just move on, right?

As always, Vangogh, I appreciate your guidance and links to more. I was confused by something you said. First you said:

Better would be to remove the the meta keyword tag completely from your site.
...But then you went on saying:

1. Keyword research - You need to research what words your customers use to look for your products and services.
Help me out here... should or shouldn't I use keywords, or are you talking about two different types of keywords?

Anyways, I should be getting back to work - I have a huge meeting in about 20 minutes. Thank you all for the encouragement, feedback, and suggestions. I think that I am really starting to be intrigued by SEO and all it entails (which I am finding is way more than people think). I am hitting the ground running with the comments above and will return if I have any questions. Thank you again.

seolman
07-28-2011, 01:52 PM
A keyword is any word or combination of words found in your web page content. Google will pay attention to the most prominent keywords (that is - the keywords used consistently in many page components). For example: if your page is about "active volcanoes" and you have these words in your <title>, alt attributes, as bolded text, as headers etc...Google pays more attention to them because they are "prominent". This should come naturally when you write rich content and structure your page in a logical way.

Dan Furman
07-28-2011, 03:10 PM
Now... as for your comments, they are MUCH appreciated. To those of you stating that we pretty much have ZERO content on our site... I couldn't agree more! I actually have written on my little SEO notepad "CONTENT" in huge bubble letters that are highlighted! As those of you who visited the site, you could clearly see that we have a massive amount of products and services that we offer. I am trying to figure out how to propose that we go into more detail without overloading the customer/reader with too much information. Then again, when they have read what they needed, or all they wanted to read, they will just move on, right?

You're already doing that well with your site setup and menu navigation - dropdowns are very effective at breaking the info up, etc. You can have as many as you want (jeez, look at my site for an example of nine million dropdowns... but it's all easily digestable.)

When I said no content, I mean the site isn't really telling me much about your products and services - don't worry about overloading - as long as your copy is broken up nicely and reads well, and people have a jump off point always ready (contact us / get a quote / etc), they'll read as much as they want to read. Some will read a little and be satisfied (and hopefully contact you) - others will delve deeper. Both should be satisfied w/ your content.

Hope your meeting went well.

thebizinator
07-28-2011, 05:09 PM
The keyword meta tag and keyword research are two different things. When someone says keyword research they mean looking up the demand for certain strings of words for a particular topic.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal is a popular keyword research tool and is probably one of the easiest ways to figure out the demand for certain keywords.

vangogh
07-28-2011, 07:25 PM
Yep keyword research and meta keywords are two different things.

The idea behind keyword research is you need to research what words and phrases your customers and clients use when searching for your products and services. A good example is mobile phones. Companies used to refer to them as cellular phones where their customers called them cell phones. You want to use the words your customers use, because that's what they type into search engines.

If you sit down and brainstorm you can probably come up with a list of 50 - 100 phrases people likely use. Think phrases over words. You wouldn't target the single word mobile since it can mean so many things, it'll be harder to rank well for, and most people using the word probably aren't looking for what you have. Better would be mobile app development. Read the PDF I linked to above. It's not very long. It's about 20 pages or so if I remember correctly.

The meta keywords tag is an html tag that was meant as a place where you would use words and phrases to describe your page and help things like search engines understand what a web page is about. You would use some of the the words and phrases you found during research here. Unfortunately it's a very easy tag to spam. People used it to stuff keyword after keyword in the tag, mostly words that had nothing to do with the page. It reached a point years ago where it became pointless for search engines to spend any time looking over the words in the meta keywords tag so now they don't. They read the words in the tag, but more as an aid to help identify spammers. Nothing you do with that tag will improve where you pages rank. Most SEOs ignore it. I haven't included one on a site in years and have no plans to ever include it again.