SEO.
It’s a little three-letter acronym that has represented dreams of corporate success and online riches and padded the wallets of digital snake-oil salesmen and spammers ever since Google became a verb.
It certainly earns its both bad and good reputations in the worlds of digital strategy and consulting.
First, the bad: practitioners remain out there who swoop in with a wink and grin promising to own the first page of Google with a dizzying strategy of thousands of inbound links and horrible sounding pages of repetitive copy. Yeah, not cool.
This post is about practical SEO: the tactical things to think about when designing for users, not search bots. There used to be a difference between the two, but thankfully, those two audiences are merging.
Practical SEO is not about mystifying users while somehow tricking search engines in order to get a click-through.
The practice isn’t magical at all really, and there are a few steps, that, with a little leg-work, should improve how users get to your site. And you really don’t need “SEO Specialist” on your business card to successfully pull these things off.
1. Do Your Keyword Research
Anyone can crack open Google AdSense for free and with a little time invested, find out what words users are searching for in relation to their business/organization/blog/etc. Sometimes the results are obvious, sometimes they’re not.
As an example, I was designing the user experience for a destination site that was to include a listing of job postings in Calgary. The preliminary label for the page was “Working in Calgary”, that in my preliminary opinion, should have fared pretty well for SEO.
Yeah, not so much. People looking for work actually search for “Calgary Jobs” or any other such combination of “Jobs” and “Calgary” substantially more than “Working in Calgary”, “Calgary Employment” or the like.
A quick sanity check on AdSense resulted in changing the name of the page in the site map, site designs, copy and meta content. This wasn’t done to trick search engines in any way, it was done to reach those users actually looking for jobs in Calgary, the whole purpose of the website in the first place.
Even if you’re not doing any full-blown SEO research or keyword implementation, take the time to run your site labels through tools like AdSense or Wordtracker. You might be surprised at what you find.
2. Research and Craft Quality Meta Content
Copywriters rightfully focus on the website’s experience, including the information it provides and the emotion it conveys.
All too often though, meta content (most importantly titles and descriptions) goes ignored. A quick explanation for the uninitiated…
This is a meta title (and where and how it appears on the Google search results page):
It’s one of the most important things a search engine looks at for keywords. It’s crucial that you have a unique one for each page on your site, and that it accurately describes the page’s content and includes appropriate targeted keywords (ideally researched on AdSense or Wordtracker).
The optimal format is “Primary Keywords – Secondary Keywords | Web Site Name”.
This is your meta description:
You have 144 characters with spaces to describe the content of your page. Keywords are important here, but equally important is letting users know what they’ll find by clicking your link.
Essentially, these two components make up a free targeted ad for your website (AND every single individual page on you website). Make them count by actually enticing users to visit those pages and letting them know what they’ll find there.
3. We’re Social Animals – So Be Social
It used to be that the content on your page was enough to get you rankings: structure it and write it a certain way and you’d end up performing well in search engines. Now, the Googles of the world look at who’s linking to your site even more than what is on your site.
So is content no longer king? It absolutely is, because in order to get people to link to it, it needs to be as good, engaging and informative as always. Even more so: everyone’s a content creator so competition is high.
Essentially, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and countless others matter in the world of search.
This doesn’t mean you should go out and take the smarmy spam approach. Those Google folks are pretty clever, and they’ll catch on to spamming SEO specialists who try to illegitimately manipulate the rankings with pages upon pages of links.
It does mean creating engaging and informative content that is of value to users, and then telling them about it via Twitter, on a Facebook page, in a Flickr group, or in any other number of places that online conversations are taking place. A social media strategy is also an SEO strategy.
Those are the three biggest tactics that you can take to get started on your own initial SEO program. Like a lot of what we do online, it’s mainly a question of practicing common sense once we wade through the buzzwords and mystical nonsense.
To be successful, make sure SEO has its rightful place in your project plan, and assign someone (or some people) to do the keyword research, create the meta content, ensure those keywords make it into site labels, strategize and seed social media, and keep regular tabs on how it all comes together.