Case Studies

These are some of our feature clients with details about how we've helped them.

Sandknop Family Practice
The Sandknop Family Practice provides patient care services.. more

Customer Reference Forum
The Customer Reference Forum holds yearly symposiums for reference program professionals in cities throughout the nation. In ... more

Moda Modelos
Based in Dallas TX, Moda Modelos specializes in talent acquisition for several media industries including print, television, and film. Moda ... more

Annabell's Boutique
Annabell’s Boutique specializes in unique gifts for newborns and their parents: personalized blankets made with the most luxurious ... more

Search Engine Optimization Strategies

This article is meant to serve as a comprehensive set of guidelines for the search engine optimization of your website. It is divided into six sections, with the final section serving as an “at glance” outline of the processes discussed. It is not exhaustive, centering primarily around the optimization of the website’s copy (text) as a whole – this being the primary objective and most relevant factor when optimizing. Other tactics, including link popularity and directory submission will be considered in upcoming articles.

1. Search Term Research

It is important to remember that your website should speak the language of first the website user, and then the search engine. The user experience should never be sacrificed for the sake of search engine ranking. This being said, the same techniques can and often are used to satisfy both criteria. By far the most important of these techniques is the use of carefully chosen words and phrases that appeal to web surfers and web crawlers alike (a ‘web crawler’ is a nickname used for the automated computer programs that browse the web and categorizes pages for search engines). This raises the question of a starting point, or an initial list of keywords to seed the process – and these should be gathered from two primary sources: brainstorming and a competitor analysis.

1a. Brainstorming

In this step, everyone who has some stake or interest in the website gets together to come up with an initial keyword list. Consider:

  • What types of questions will the customer be asking?
  • What are they trying to accomplish?
  • What special needs might the customer have?
  • How can we meet those needs?

and the like.

1b. Competitor Analysis

The analysis of client competition for the purpose of keyword generation can be initiated in a variety of ways, including the following:

  • Competitor website evaluations
  • Trade journals/literature within the client’s industry. These can be an especially valuable source since they use consumer lingo.

You should, ideally, already have the headwork for this step complete in your business/marketing plan – particularly an objective ranking of your company in respect to your competitors. If you don’t already have this step complete, there are several companies that specialize in this type of consulting.

2. Keyword Analysis

The tactics from the prior section should be sufficient in providing you with a competent set of words to use in generating quality keywords for your website’s copy. There are three primary websites designed to assist in this step. They are:

Wordtracker is by far the most valuable of the three tools, and as such, is the only one that requires payment for its services. However, they have flexible subscription plans sure to meet your needs at any particular time. Visit their website for details.

The other two resources, while free, still offer a good source of information, especially when used in conjunction.

3. Website Copy (Re)Generation

With the results of the previous steps, you should now have a rich set of quality terms that can be used within the your website copy. It would also be beneficial to make sure that your other marketing outlets (brochures, publications, etc.) use the same language. The keyword terms/phrases should be split into categories depending on their strengths, i.e., the likelihood that a potential customer will use those words when generating a search query (Wordtracker provides this along with a wealth of other information). They should also be partitioned according to the natural flow they could present to a page of text or an article.

  • Primary phrases: are the keyphrases that have the highest probability of being keyed into a search engine. In addition, they should present themselves as likely candidates for substantial amounts of elaboration. These are the phrases that will be used within website articles, how-tos and tutorials, etc. They should be dispersed liberally throughout the relevant text, but care should be given not to over use them. So doing is not only a sure way of blacklisting a your website, thereby obliteration it’s search engine rankings, it is also achingly obvious to the website user as shameless self-promotion.
  • Secondary phrases: are the phrases that are less likely to be used as search query terms and do not lend themselves as easily to literary articulation. They are not as important as the primary keywords, but should still be used where appropriate (as opposed to an equally descriptive phrase) and should be kept in mind when generating website copy.
  • Auxiliary keywords: are the remaining keywords from the list. These can be used anywhere and everywhere (within reason) while copywriting.

4. HTML Tags

Besides the website’s copy, the optimized keywords and phrases should be used within the proper html tags, including the meta (description, in particular) tags, and the title tags. The title and description tags are often overlooked, but this a mistake. Not only do search engines index the page’s title and description as highly indicative of its content, but this is also the fraction of the page the user sees when search engine results appear. That means they need to be concise as well as descriptive and enticing to the potential customer, warranting the use of primary keyphrases.

To search engines, anchor (link) tags are emphatic suggestions as to the content of the page it points to. As such, it is beneficial to use the gathered keywords and phrases as link text as opposed to generic link text such as “click here”.

It is also important to make the web crawler’s job as easy as possible. This means clean html code that validates (http://validator.w3.org/), and the moderation of elements such as flash objects, image maps, javascripts, etc.

5. Timeframe

Section 1: 3-5 days
Section 2: 3-5 days
Sections 3 & 4: 2 to 4 weeks

6. SEO Outline

  1. Search Term Research
    • Brainstorming
      1. What types of questions will the customer be asking?
      2. What are they trying to accomplish?
      3. What special needs might the customer have?
      4. How can we meet those needs?
    • Competitor Analysis
      1. Competitor website evaluations
      2. Trade journals/literature
  2. Keyword, Keyphrase Analysis
    • Wordtracker http://www.wordtracker.com
    • Google Keyword Sandbox https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox
    • Overture’s Keyword Research Tool http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
  3. Website Copy Re(Generation)
    • Primary Phrases
    • Secondary Phrases
    • Auxiliary Keywords
  4. HTML code
    • Title tags
    • Description tags
    • Meta tags
    • Anchor tags and link text
    • Validated code
  5. Timeline of 3 to 6 weeks

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