With the advent of Rich Snippets in SERPs, I think I can safely declare that Microformats have now hit mainstream! Google is now presenting listings of pages with hReview microformat with slightly more attention-getting “bling”:

This will undoubtedly result in slightly higher clickthrough rates for those listings.

Any day, Google could add in special display treatments for pages that sport hCard or hCalendar microformatting, so companies that haven’t implemented these simple, semantic mark-up protocols will have missed the bus!

Be sure to check out Alan Rimm-Kaufman’s blog post on how Google Rich Snippets may soon give advantage to pages coded with hProduct microformat — internet retailers should pay attention. (As a side note, I previously helped some lucky internet retailer 500 sites optimize their store locators by adding hCard Microformats through GravityStream, back when I still worked for Netconcepts — so, at least a few IR 500 sites have enjoyed Microformatting before!)

Related posts:

1. Microformats Hit Mainstream!
2. Key to Relevance: Title Tags
3. Why avoiding meta keywords tag may be best
4. Google’s Ranking Advice in Blended Search at SMX West
5. Yes, you can automate SEO - we’ve done it!
6. Automatic Search Engine Optimization through GravityStream
7. When Google Changes Page Titles
8. Tips for University & College Website Search Engine Optimization - SEO
9. AMA Hot Topic Series: Search Marketing in San Fran
10. In other news, a new free Clinic

Yet, a great many sites continue to miss this vital key to relevance, and they wonder why they fail at ranking for their most apropos keywords. Keywords for which they’d otherwise have a very good chance at ranking upon!

W3C calls the TITLE the “most important element of a quality web page”

Yesterday I reviewed another major retailer website which had their brandname embedded in their page titles — and nothing else. Thousands of product pages all had identical TITLEs! This company could’ve had top three rankings on a great many competitive keyword phrases had they only customized their TITLE tags very slightly.

The W3C calls the <TITLE> tag “the most important element of a quality Web page.” Google has apparently paid attention to that, and all of the search engines have placed especial weighting upon the words found within page titles when evaluating the topics for which a webpage is associated.

It makes sense, when you think about it. A title should be a super-concentrated blurb that tells a user what a page is all about. In search engines, the title is often also displayed as the link text for each of the pages listed in the search engine results page listings. Informative titles appearing in SERP listings will get clicked upon more as users are reassured that the page they’re clicking upon is what they’re actually seeking. A page with an informative title will get clicked upon far more likely than a vague or unrelated page title.

I heard Googler Amanda Camp once mention that she’d recommended to a friend of hers to customized a page title, focusing it upon the main topic keywords for the webpage, and it immediately began ranking in the very first position for the keyword phrase.

And, I’ve seen it many times myself — engineer a good, simple, appropriate, keyword-rich title tag, and your page can  zoom its way above all the other nonoptimal page listings for the very same term.

Related posts:

1. Microformats Hit Mainstream!
2. Key to Relevance: Title Tags
3. Why avoiding meta keywords tag may be best
4. Google’s Ranking Advice in Blended Search at SMX West
5. Yes, you can automate SEO - we’ve done it!
6. Automatic Search Engine Optimization through GravityStream
7. When Google Changes Page Titles
8. Tips for University & College Website Search Engine Optimization - SEO
9. AMA Hot Topic Series: Search Marketing in San Fran
10. In other news, a new free Clinic

Although his research was really pretty definitive in my mind, there are so many search marketers that have some sort of nostalgic devotion to the tag and who continue to obsess over it and insist upon using it. There is a sort of mentality that “if it might help, then I’m damn well going to use it.” (See this recent thread at WebMasterWorld where quite a few express this viewpoint.)

However, I see some compelling reasons to avoid using it altogether…

Yahoo may be using it only as a “signal of last resort” — if they can’t find content matching a keyword search through other, preferable signals such as visible page body text, they might only then fall back on meta keyword content. As such, the keywords tag may not provide any sort of additional ranking weight, but may only be worthwhile when no other pages or visible text content matches terms. In this case, if you already have the terms in the visible text of the page, it’s just not necessary to have it in the Meta Keywords tag - your page likely won’t rank any better than it already does.

Google may still be using the content as I’ve outlined previously (see this article on the Resurrection of the Keyword Meta Tag), though not as a keyword ranking factor. It may be used by them as a negative ranking factor used to assess a page’s quality or to detect spam and “over-optimized” pages. For instance, they may be checking the tag to insure it represents text actually found on the page and that it’s not too crammed-up with terms. Pages with unrelated words in the meta keyword content or which are stuffed too much might be singled out for lower quality scores or penalizations.

If I’m correct, then the meta keywords tag can’t really help your natural search optimization, but it could easily hurt it. I’ve seen so many cases where people have placed all identical meta keywords tags throughout their site, or included words not found on the page, or over-stuffed the tags — since so many people do this wrong, it’s better just to leave it off entirely. It’s just not worth it.

Related posts:

1. Microformats Hit Mainstream!
2. Key to Relevance: Title Tags
3. Why avoiding meta keywords tag may be best
4. Google’s Ranking Advice in Blended Search at SMX West
5. Yes, you can automate SEO - we’ve done it!
6. Automatic Search Engine Optimization through GravityStream
7. When Google Changes Page Titles
8. Tips for University & College Website Search Engine Optimization - SEO
9. AMA Hot Topic Series: Search Marketing in San Fran
10. In other news, a new free Clinic

• Publish high-quality, well-captioned images;
• Have pages which already have good PageRank (use traditional SEO to achieve);
• Create a Google Video Sitemap;
• Update business listings in Local Business Center;
• Submit your feed to Google Product Search;
• Create a high-quality company blog;

Related posts:

1. Microformats Hit Mainstream!
2. Key to Relevance: Title Tags
3. Why avoiding meta keywords tag may be best
4. Google’s Ranking Advice in Blended Search at SMX West
5. Yes, you can automate SEO - we’ve done it!
6. Automatic Search Engine Optimization through GravityStream
7. When Google Changes Page Titles
8. Tips for University & College Website Search Engine Optimization - SEO
9. AMA Hot Topic Series: Search Marketing in San Fran
10. In other news, a new free Clinic

Inspired by this thread, Lisa Barone at Bruce Clay, Inc. responds with “You Can’t Automate Search Engine Optimization” (which is just the tiniest bit ironic, since Bruce Clay’s Dynamic Site Mapping tool arguably provides a level of automated search optimization).

While Commerce360 is looking to create search optimization automation, we’ve already been accomplishing it for quite some time here at Netconcepts, as I outlined in an earlier article on Automatic Search Engine Optimization. So, do I think SEO can be automated? Hell, yes!

Now, to be fair, Lisa and others who nay-say the concept of automation are primarily criticizing the concept of doing it 100%. Their contention that humans should be involved in the process is entirely realistic. To achieve quality, humans *do* need to be involved, since we haven’t really developed machines that understand both concepts and language.

But, there’s a couple of big reasons why I think the experts should not be so quick to shout out headlines about how one “can’t” do automatic SEO. The majority of sites I see out in the wild have technical barriers to indexation and other basic optimization factors that can be pretty easily solved through a programmatic approach. This basic, indisputable fact, is coupled with the industry-wide experience that most people who pay for SEO consulting don’t manage to actually implement all the changes recommended to them.

Large corporations frequently have a good deal of inertia which can make it difficult for them to have the focus necessary to perform good optimization for natural search.

In any case, our automated SEO solution isn’t purely automatic, either, although we do a whole lot more optimizations than virtually any other remotely similar solution in the industry. Just as Google has started removing the term “purely algorithmic” from their collateral materials due to the human element they’ve introduced via quality scoring and other rank-influencing interventions, our GravityStream solution also allows our professional optimization staff to hand-tune a client’s pages, and our admin interfaces allow our clients to view and approve changes. We have a solid foundation of purely automated natural search improvements, coupled with the classic, high-quality keyword research and copy writing necessary to run good search marketing programs.

Further, our offering of SEO in a sort of web services format allows us to roll out cool research and development improvements to a large number of clients simultaneously, allowing us to provide numerous cutting-edge improvements to our clients including such things as local search optimization, social media optimization, image search optimization, and more.  This software solution approach allows us to provide a suite of services that many companies would find quite hard to duplicate through purchasing of bespoke consulting and development services, allowing those companies to benefit from a team of experts that they couldn’t hope to build internally.

Not only that, we’re one of the very few companies willing to use a Pay-Per-Click financial model for how much we charge clients (available for certain types of clients).

Our GravityStream program has enabled a number of major corporations to increase their traffic and associated sales, as reported in various news articles like this one.

I’ll be interested in seeing what Commerce36 develops in the way of automation. We’ve been doing this for a long while, and it would take a considerable effort for any company to catch up with what we currently have operational and functioning for a large number of sites.

Will we go even further down the road of automatic optimizations? Undoubtedly. We have a considerable amount of brainpower working at Netconcepts with expertise in computer science, taxonomy, search marketing, usability, and interactive development. We’ll also likely continue to include the human element in our GravityStream product, but we’ll always be pushing for efficient, scalable ways to improve enterprise-wide sites for search.

So, can SEO be automatic? Hell, yes!

Related posts:

1. Microformats Hit Mainstream!
2. Key to Relevance: Title Tags
3. Why avoiding meta keywords tag may be best
4. Google’s Ranking Advice in Blended Search at SMX West
5. Yes, you can automate SEO - we’ve done it!
6. Automatic Search Engine Optimization through GravityStream
7. When Google Changes Page Titles
8. Tips for University & College Website Search Engine Optimization - SEO
9. AMA Hot Topic Series: Search Marketing in San Fran
10. In other news, a new free Clinic

GravityStream is a technical solution that provides outsourced search optimization to large, dynamic websites. Automatic SEO, if you will. Here’s what it does…

A lot of major sites out there have difficulty optimizing themselves to improve rankings in search engine results pages (”SERPs”) in order to increase their organic traffic. It requires a unique mixture of conditions to do SEO: an expert who can diagnose all the structural factors that block spidering; programmers and system administrators who can make all the changes recommended by the expert; statisticians who can interpret the web metrics to monitor the impact of changes; writers and taxonomy specialists who can perform keyword optimizations; and, strategic analysts who can find new advantages to exploit.

Most companies don’t have all the necessary capabilities on-staff to do optimization fully in-house, and many companies continue to ignore their natural search marketing in favor of less-complex initiatives. Yesterday, I analyzed the product catalog of Coca-Cola’s online store as a representative example of the sorts of problems internet retail sites have, and outlined a number of factors that they would need to improve in order to rank ideally for all the various search terms their products should be targeting/ranking for. Coca-Cola’s not unique in overlooking proper use of the common signals for search optimization.

Online retail sites frequently share a number of nonoptimal characteristics including:

• Title tags not uniquely formulated for each page;
• Non-unique or non-existant META Description tags;
• Sitewide navigation dependent upon Flash/Java/Javascript applications such as commonly found in dynamic menus;
• Non-unique or nonexistant H1 tags;
• Lack of link hierarchy exposing all pages to search engine spiders;
• Internal links using worthless terms in link text;
• Category nomenclature using keywords which don’t perform well;
• Page URLs containing stop characters which block spidering;
• Page URLs too lengthy;
• User session IDs parsed into page URLs, causing massive duplicaton;
• Page URLs do not include keywords;
• Insufficient text content on pages and image-only page content;
• Image tags not containing valuable ALT text parameter;
• Pages too tightly focused on keywords instead of including a few additional terms to enhance traffic;

So, why don’t companies address these issues? Many companies are missing one or more of the resources needed to handle everything internally. But, even those companies which bring in external consultants to provide SEO guidance do not accomplish all the most-basic optimization elements. It’s well known throughout the search marketing industry that companies often don’t implement the recommendations of search agencies. Most companies are very like big families - dysfunctional to some degree. The marketing managers who understand what needs to be done cannot get the IT resources to cooperate, and it’s hard to keep the focus needed to make sure all the optimizations are executed and maintained.

Even the companies which have awakened to the potential of search marketing and have staffed up to develop optimizations in-house may have substantial delays before they can deploy needed changes, due to the sometimes lengthy development cycles of major corporations or lack of coordination between development teams.

GravityStream was created to fill this gap, providing a near-turn-key solution to automatically optimize large dynamic sites quicker and more comprehensively than companies can do in-house, at a fraction of the cost in staffing up and developing the work. GravityStream can address all the problems outlined in the above list, correcting sites’ pages and delivering them up to the search engines in optimized format.

How does it do it? GravityStream is a solution which allows us to proxy a client’s website by taking the native site pages, dynamically processing them to improve multiple factors such as TITLEs, H1s, META tags, etc - and then we deliver the page back through the client’s own domain name. In order for us to integrate with a client’s site, we ask the client’s system administrators to install a few rewrite rules on the server which send various page requests over to GravityStream to process. We replace core content links when search engine bots visit the site, generating hyperlinks which the rewrite rules can identify and cede over to GravityStream for processing.

One common question we get with clients is whether GravityStream’s process is a type of cloaking. The answer is no! Cloaking is defined as an effort to deceive search engines by delivering up content that appears different to spiders than it does to humans. GravityStream delivers up the same content to users as to search engine spiders for a URL, except the hyperlinks are formatted differently.

For instance, one reason we clean up and rewrite URLs is to remove things like Session IDs which cause heartburn for search engines. Managing URL formats to resolve indexation issues is allowed under Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and follows their recommended best practices. Under their Technical Guidelines, Google states:

“Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.”

By working with a client’s application engineers, Netconcepts technicians can enable Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live and Ask to crawl a site without the pesky Session IDs, and with shorter URLs which include valuable keywords in them. Once an enduser arrives on the GravityStream formatted page, the hyperlinks revert back to the native site’s format, allowing all tracking and user-experience management methods to be used as normal.

GravityStream doesn’t have to be purely automatic/algorithmic. The GravityStream system also provides administrative interfaces which allow our taxonomy/keyword optimization specialists to inject keyword-rich text into client site pages, and allows them to hand-tweak TITLEs and other page signals as needed. For clients with in-house copy-writing staff, the admin interfaces can be used for hands-on content management so custom optimization can be easily accomplished by their own employees.

The system also provides performance monitoring tools and metrics on how much traffic is produced through the GravityStream pages, as well as information on indexing and keyword referrals.

Netconcepts has a couple of pricing models available to clients, one of which is particularly innovative in the search optimization industry: Pay Per Click! On this pricing model, the client is charged for the amount of traffic that the GravityStreamed pages bring to the site, and we do not charge for certain client brand name referrals such as the company name. How many other search optimization firms offer a pricing model based upon actual performance of their work?

GravityStream has provided best-in-class optimization work for a number of Fortune 500 companies and top most-recognized brand retail sites. Various news reports have also mentioned GravityStream’s success on behalf of clients, though some of our best success stories are kept confidential at the request of the companies involved.

I found the GravityStream product and success very compelling when I was considering joining Netconcepts, and I now  recommend the product for firms with enterprise-class, top retail sites in particular. GravityStream functions very similarly to a system I designed when in-house at my former company, where I had built an application which proxied a legacy site application in order to optimize our own pages more rapidly/easily. So, GravityStream has a basic approach which in my experience functions quite well.

Most companies may want to perform SEO in-house at some future point, but there’s typically a considerable delay between initiating efforts to staff up and work through a project plan to get everything optimal. For some clients, GravityStream has been a solution for bridging them over between their current non-optimal state and the future point where they’re ready to do it all on through their native site. It’s valuable to recognize that failing to optimize sooner will represent some lost market share and money left on the table in the here and now. With change happening so rapidly in the internet space, it’s vital to grab as much market share as possible, as early as possible. GravityStream is a way to get optimized rapidly - we typically can schedule and deploy GravityStream within about six weeks of contract signature.

GravityStream is still evolving, too. We’re working on a lot of new features which will benefit all of our clients using the service. While many companies have some search marketing managers in-house, most do not have the benefit of a broadly experienced staff performing cutting-edge research and development in natural search optimization. Contracting for GravityStream can instantly provide the benefit of a completely staffed department of specialists who know search optimization.

If you’re interested in what GravityStream could do for your site, contact one of our business development representatives at (888) 207-1109, or contact us online.

Related posts:

1. Microformats Hit Mainstream!
2. Key to Relevance: Title Tags
3. Why avoiding meta keywords tag may be best
4. Google’s Ranking Advice in Blended Search at SMX West
5. Yes, you can automate SEO - we’ve done it!
6. Automatic Search Engine Optimization through GravityStream
7. When Google Changes Page Titles
8. Tips for University & College Website Search Engine Optimization - SEO
9. AMA Hot Topic Series: Search Marketing in San Fran
10. In other news, a new free Clinic

I was recently researching some problems that a client was exeriencing due to bad advice given to him by a prior SEO agency (they’d encouraged him to buy links and participate in link exchanges, I found, among other sins). While looking into the site’s problems which included various over-optimizations and bad usability design, I discovered that when I used a particular keyword to search in Google, his site’s homepage came up with a completely different title in the search results. Most of his other desired keywords brought up his HTML <TITLE> text like normal, but this one did not…

Now, I already knew from Matt Cutts that Google sometimes changes the title and snippet text, but to my knowledge neither Matt nor other Googlers have ever documented for us the actual instances where this can be invoked. From looking at Matt Cutt’s post on the matter, I think Google’s algorithm has likely even changed slightly, where this is concerned. I’ve found one case where this can apparently be called reproduceably, so I thought I’d share.

So, what was the mysterious keyword sequence that caused this client’s site to abruptly appear with its DMOZ.org title, instead of the native one? This seemed to happen only when search terms were used that closely matched the client’s brand name.

You see, the earlier SEOs which had advised him had overdone it to the point where they’d removed his brand name from his title entirely, perhaps on the theory that it was undesirably inert material that should be thrown out to make room for more advantageous terms. Yet, his brand name matched his domain name fairly closely.

My theory is this: Google has decided that when a user types a search keyword that closely matches a brand name /domain name of a site, it’s possibly quite likely that the user actually desires to find that very site. The problem is that the site is so very badly designed that the brandname may not be reflected in the title tag, or perhaps the brand is located way at the end of a long title — so long that it would get snipped off prior to display in Google’s SERPs, or the user might miss the name located way off to the rightside. If the user doesn’t see the brand name in the SERPs, they might miss the very site they’re seeking — so I believe Google has found this to be a bad user experience, and found a way to rectify the prob in many cases by using DMOZ’s title for the site.

Aside from my client (who shall remain nameless), I found a few different sites which have this same situation going on:

Brand name / Domain name:
Reuters / www.reuters.com
DMOZ title: Reuters
HTML title: <title>Breaking News, World, U.S., Video, Investing and Business News & More | Reuters.com</title>
Google listing when searching for “reuters”:

Brand name / Domain name:
United States Small Business Administration (or “SBA“) / www.sba.gov
DMOZ title: United States Small Business Administration
HTML title: <title></title>
Google listing when searching for “small business administration” or “sba”:

Brand name / Domain name:
Sneaker World / www.sneakerworld.com
DMOZ title: Sneaker World
HTML title: <title>Discount Sneakers, Custom Apparel, and Custom Embroidery</title>
Google listing when searching for “sneaker world”:

Brand name / Domain name:
Mr.Tones / www.mrtones.com
DMOZ title: Mr.Tones
HTML title: <TITLE>Free Ringtones - Polyphonic Ringtones - Logos - Picture Msgs - Mobile Wallpapers - Mr.Tones</TITLE>
Google listing when searching for “mr. tones”:

Brand name / Domain name:
AccessoryGeeks / www.accessorygeeks.com
DMOZ title: AccessoryGeeks
HTML title: <title>Cell Phone Accessories, Mobile Phone Accessories, Wireless Phone Accessories</title>
Google listing when searching for “accessory geeks”:

Brand name / Domain name:
Best Buy Pool Supply / www.bestbuypoolsupply.com
DMOZ title: Best Buy Pool Supply
HTML title: <title>Pool Supplies, Pool Cleaners, Pool Heaters, Pool Pumps, Pool Filters - Pool Supplies Discounted</title>
Google listing when searching for “best buy pool supply”:

Aside from the takeaway that this may explain when/why Google chooses to display alternative TITLE/snippet treatment for a page when it appears in the SERPs, I think this is an indicator that as a part of good usability, Google has found that it’s desirable for good user-experience to display the brand name in the title. If so, the obverse might hold true as well: it’s perhaps a bad user-experience to neglect to have the brand name appear in the title, particularly on homepages. If one of Google’s many signals is the nebulous “quality score” of a page, then neglecting to have the brandname in the title might actually count a bit against a site.

Now, as Matt Cutts and the Google Webmaster Tools team have explained, you can control whether they revert to the DMOZ content by setting the NOODP meta tag on your page. But, don’t you want to perhaps first make adjustments on your native site to correct for the usability/user-experience issue that Google has apparently identified which invoked this treatment in the first place? To ensure a good user-experience (not to mention, to solidify your basic marketing work!), you should include the brand name or site name within the HTML TITLE text, and you shouldn’t push it so far to the right side that users will be unlikely to see it if they’re scanning a SERP.

Sure, you can have a few of your site’s main keywords which help outline what the site is all about, but leaving your brand name completely out makes you harder to find by users, can make your site appear to be of less quality, and may actually make it appear a tad fishy to Google.

Related posts:

1. Microformats Hit Mainstream!
2. Key to Relevance: Title Tags
3. Why avoiding meta keywords tag may be best
4. Google’s Ranking Advice in Blended Search at SMX West
5. Yes, you can automate SEO - we’ve done it!
6. Automatic Search Engine Optimization through GravityStream
7. When Google Changes Page Titles
8. Tips for University & College Website Search Engine Optimization - SEO
9. AMA Hot Topic Series: Search Marketing in San Fran
10. In other news, a new free Clinic

There’s lots of sites out there who have general search engine optimization (“SEO�) advice, so I’m only going to touch lightly on those tips. I’ve spoken at a WebDevShare conference before (oriented to college webmasters – WebDevShare was since merged up with another conference, perhaps Educause, I think), and I know that university webmasters are aware of SEO, so it’s not that they’re unsophisticated so much as that they’re typically asked to wear way too many hats at once, making it hard to do as much as they’d like to.

Typical EDU webmasters are often working multiple roles like: Marketer, Public Spokesperson, IT expert, Graphic Designer, Usability Expert, HTML Coder, Server Administrator, Copywriter, Photographer, etc. All at grossly underpaid rates of academia! So, it’s little wonder that many .EDU sites have some faulty infrastructure from the standpoint of being easily indexible by search engine bots and easily findable by people searching for info through search engines.

Even so, colleges and universities (particularly smaller ones) should pay attention to natural search optimization, because they often have limited advertising budgets or even no campaigns in paid search marketing.

So, what to do about SEO for college and university site(s)? In most cases, an entire website overhaul is going to be expensive, and other priorities will make it difficult-to-impossible to accomplish. So, I recommend trying to incorporate most of my tips into general webpage design standards so that as you work on new pages and adjust old pages you can iteratively improve your site rather than trying to bite off too much at once. At very least, try to first do improvements to your homepage, and then work your way down to other sections and pages of your site in order of precedence.

Tips for how to optimize .EDU sites:

• TITLE tags & keywords – The words you use within the TITLE portion of the webpage code appear in the upper bar of most web browsers. These words also appear as the link text in search engine results pages when users find the page through keyword searches. So, you should carefully consider the words used in the TITLE, including the top 2-3 keywords that a user would be likely to enter into a search engine to find that specific page. You can carry the university name throughout a website’s titles, but you may need to modify based on how long the name is. For example, on the homepage of Stanford, they use “Stanford Universityâ€?. On subsection pages, they’re using a format like “Stanford University: Researchâ€?. For the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I would use their full name along with their well-known acronym, “MITâ€?, on their homepage, and then just use the acronym for branding purposes in subsections, like: “MIT School of Architecture & Planningâ€?. If your school primarily focuses on one or two disciplines, you might want to include those words in the homepage title, if the university’s name doesn’t already mention them. Ex: “Xavier School, Focusing on Leadership Training & Upper Level Managementâ€?. For smaller, less-well-known schools, the specific discipline’s mention of your main programs is a must-have.

• Research your keywords – most colleges are likely already using good keywords where they make sense, and I’d guess that most are not likely using terms like “Apothecaryâ€? when they should be using “Pharmacyâ€?. But, it’s a good idea to check your assumptions about ideal keywords by using good tools to see what words are most popular on the internet. Here’s a great article on keyword research, and also check out Google Trends, which is a great tool that allows you to enter up to five terms simultaneously to see comparative popularity (enter each term, separated by commas).

• Optimize your H1 tags – the H1 tag is a sort of headline or title which appears in the body of the page text. This is another good signal for informing the search engine as to what the page is about, similar to the TITLE. Use similar or identical text that you’re using in the TITLE. Don’t include hyperlinks within the H1, since link text is typically more of a signal about the page which the link is pointing to, rather than the page it resides upon. Use styles to make the H1 look nice on the page. Also, don’t hide the H1 text, as this could look like you’re trying to trick the search engines! Hiding text is against their policies.

• Use good on-page text – just like in the TITLE and H1, use good keyword text within the body of your pages. Try to always include some main text body in a page, even if the entire page is mainly devoted to an image, Flash application, or video. Ideally, add a caption to the image or other object. Keyword searches function off of text found on web pages, so don’t create pages which look like little more than empty shells with no content.

• Use ALT text in image tags! This is important for making pages usable for vision-impaired people, and it’s important to the search engines, too. The ALT text should describe the image. Likewise, a common error is when designers neglect to use ALT text within navigation buttons and logos found throughout a site.

• Use good link label text. When linking to a page, the text used in the link informs the search engine about what that page is about. Use of good keywords in the link text is very helpful to you. For instance, you’ll see many cases where someone will link words like “click hereâ€? or “linkâ€? instead of using text that people actually search upon. If an image, such as a navigation button, is hyperlinked, the ALT text of the image is used just like the text in textlinks. So, if your sitewide navigation has buttons, it’s better to use text like “About Anytown University – Maps, Contact Info, Historyâ€? – don’t just label a link something too vague like “Aboutâ€?.

• Make your URLs easily crawlable – if possible, use server-side rewriting of your URLs to make them in a spider-friendly format. May be nonviable for larger universities, since many different departments may all be hosted on different platforms, programming languages, server software, etc. It’s hard to get all the various campus website owners to cooperate on common formats, I’m sure! Links formatted with querystrings like “http://www.example.edu/application.jsp?ID=1234&Pg=125&Section=articles&Dept=Humanitiesâ€? don’t work so hot. Instead, rewrite the URLs without the querystings, or with querystrings in a directory/subdirectory/filename format. Ex: “http://www.example.edu/Dept-Humanities/Section-articles/Pg-125.htmâ€?

• Create a detailed hierarchical site link index page/section. Usability is a major prob for most large university websites. Make this a navigation aid for each of your main constituencies: Potential Students; Parents and campus Visitors; Existing Students; Faculty/Staff; peers at other universities. Good for usability and also good for SEO! A must-have alternative link navigation system if you have homepages built primarily out of Flash, Javascript, AJAX, or “portletsâ€?. Include a link to this site index page or section in the footer of every page on your site.

• Consider using Sitemaps, too – one for each major website/division in the university. This can help overcome some of the difficulties search engines have in finding pages that may be hidden behind the various non-optimal URL formats you may have. Sitemaps are a standard format for a datafeed of a site’s URLs, informing search engines as to where all your pages are housed.

• Use Sitesearch/Websearch to provide your internal site keyword search utility – Google’s service to provide universities with their own site search engines is very useful, and some people feel that it could help get your pages indexed in Google. I don’t think it’s really going to help with indexation, but Google works better than most in-house, home-grown site search engines, so it can help site users find the info throughout your site. (Also, if you haven’t heard of the Google Apps for Education program, you might look into that since their collaboration tools are very strong and it appears that quite a few other university communities are planning to replace their in-house stuff with the Google Apps.)

• Use RSS in your news section. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndicationâ€?. Using this or Atom allows people to subscribe to feeds of your news/announcements content so they can get the articles in their RSS readers, and also allows them to take and display your news stories on their websites. This is great for increasing distribution of your news stories, and it also can help drive links back to your site! (Check out Stephan Spencer’s RSS optimization tips – he’s a recognized expert on RSS optimization. One of his tips is: provide the entire article in the RSS feeds, not just introductory preview text.)

• Police your own .EDU domain! Find out if parts of your university site(s) have been compromised by spammers! Do a site: search on your EDU domain along with keywords like “Viagraâ€? to see if some servers have been compromised and are deploying bad spammy content. Don’t become a bad neighborhood of links! Spammers try to gain access to .EDU sites because links from them are worth a lot more for achieving search engine rankings. They may hack into your campus servers, or bribe some poor, underpaid academician to give them access/links.

• Provide a “link to usâ€? section, and provide copy-and-paste HTML code for textlinks, badge links, and banners to your university site. On those same pages, provide instructions on how to cite the university and website and what the official Hex/PMS codes for your school colors are. Providing these official instructions for linking may help improve the ways people link to you and make them consistent (something to also support your trademark enforcement).

• Watch your referral traffic through your web analytics program. You should see healthy trend lines of visits from people coming in through Google, Yahoo, and MSN’s Live.com. (Google traffic should really dominate your trends, followed by Yahoo! And MSN Live. Also, some other, lower-tier search engines might be worth watching, since they can be used by larger amounts of the college student demographic: Ask.com, Dogpile.com, and Mamma.com.) If you see sudden drop-offs in referral traffic from search engines, say, after you’ve just deployed a new site-wide UI, this could be a major tip-off that you may’ve deployed something that made your site hard to spider, or may’ve impacted how your pages rank.

Stay tuned for some Advanced Online Optimization Tips for Universities and Colleges! I’ll post a followup article within the next few weeks which outline some advanced tips which could help in your online promotion efforts.

Also, the AMA Hot Topic Series on Search Marketing will be coming to New York later this month, and Chicago in June, so plan to attend if you’re able and you can get some more details on basic optimization steps for websites from my presentation.

Related posts:

1. Microformats Hit Mainstream!
2. Key to Relevance: Title Tags
3. Why avoiding meta keywords tag may be best
4. Google’s Ranking Advice in Blended Search at SMX West
5. Yes, you can automate SEO - we’ve done it!
6. Automatic Search Engine Optimization through GravityStream
7. When Google Changes Page Titles
8. Tips for University & College Website Search Engine Optimization - SEO
9. AMA Hot Topic Series: Search Marketing in San Fran
10. In other news, a new free Clinic

Read on for more details about the AMA Hot Topic Series day’s sessions.

Here are some pictures I snapped of each of the speakers (except for moi):

Stephan Spencer

Stephan Spencer, opened the day, speaking on “Inside the Head of the Searcher”, and he also later spoke on “Link Building Your Way to the Top of the Rankings”

Alan Rimm-Kaufman

Dr. Alan Rimm-Kaufman spoke on management of paid search programs in “You Gotta Pay to Play - Winning at Pay-Per-Click Search” - Alan went into a number of the complex and constantly-evolving issues which can impact paid programs. (Alan’s blog may be found at www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog)

(not pictured: Chris Silver Smith)

I spoke on “Organic Search is All About Content” which went over basic Search Engine Optimization tactics.

Amanda Camp

Amanda Camp from Google’s Webmaster Tools, spoke on “The Straight Scoop from Google”, which went into basics of how Google crawls and indexes pages, their strong tools they provide to webmasters, and some approaches which Google frowns upon.

Gene Chan

Gene Chan from HP spoke on “It’s All About the Bottom Line - Measuring Search Marketing with the Long Tail”, using real-world examples from HP’s best-in-class paid search campaigns.

Neil Patel

Neil Patel of Advantage Consulting Services spoke on “Social Media Marketing - Leveraging Online Communities to Create Links and Buzz”. Neil is expert on integrating with these Web 2.0 or Social Media sites like MySpace, Digg, and StumbleUpon, so this is probably some of the most cutting-edge stuff in this Hot Topic workshop day!

This AMA Hot Topic seminar day will be happening again in New York in May, and Chicago in June - so, sign up now if you’re interested in attending one of these sessions!

Finally, as promised, here is the link to my “Content is the basis of SEO” presentation from the day, if you have the patience to download a 8.4 mb file!

Related posts:

1. Microformats Hit Mainstream!
2. Key to Relevance: Title Tags
3. Why avoiding meta keywords tag may be best
4. Google’s Ranking Advice in Blended Search at SMX West
5. Yes, you can automate SEO - we’ve done it!
6. Automatic Search Engine Optimization through GravityStream
7. When Google Changes Page Titles
8. Tips for University & College Website Search Engine Optimization - SEO
9. AMA Hot Topic Series: Search Marketing in San Fran
10. In other news, a new free Clinic

A group of leading SEOs including Carsten Cumbrowski, Ahmed Bilal, and Rhea Drysdale will review one submission per week delivering a thorough review of usability and site navigation, link building, and copywriting from the perspective of placement in the four leading engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask).

It’s clear though that “free” is as free as having your site criticized in one of the SEO clinics experts like to host at conferences.  If chosen for review, the findings and recommendations will be posted for others to peruse.  I’d do as much myself and appreciate their efforts to help others with these case studies but as a website owner, someone responsible for SEO, or marketing manager for a major brand, I might not be so inclined to have my successes and failures outlined in detail for everyone to see.  That concern aside, I do hope they get some quality sites and develop a thorough library of reviews (perhaps I’ll sign up myself!).

To participate, simply contact the team here.

Related posts:

1. Microformats Hit Mainstream!
2. Key to Relevance: Title Tags
3. Why avoiding meta keywords tag may be best
4. Google’s Ranking Advice in Blended Search at SMX West
5. Yes, you can automate SEO - we’ve done it!
6. Automatic Search Engine Optimization through GravityStream
7. When Google Changes Page Titles
8. Tips for University & College Website Search Engine Optimization - SEO
9. AMA Hot Topic Series: Search Marketing in San Fran
10. In other news, a new free Clinic