Here is what a “tag” looks like:

Do tags make sense for your business? If you are a small, locally owned business, or a franchise style organization, tags could make sense. You’ll pay $25 per month, but you listing will definitely stand out and it allows you a very simple method for differentiation, which can make all the difference for a small business looking for a way to pull out of the pack. Quick back-of-the-napkin math tells us that I would if a customer is worth well in excess of $25, then if you get just one more customer from implementing this, then it’s probably worthwhile to give it a shot. You can run a more detailed ROI analysis, but it might not even be worth it given the small cost of a test campaign. And for the first 30 days, its even free.

Tip: If you are going to give Tags a shot, try using a unique offer that you’re not using somewhere else so you can track the results and measure if it’s returning a positive return for you.

1. Competitors
In many cases a few industry leaders will dominate a web space. If you are starting a new website, or simply trying to topple a giant, you need to be aware of what the competition is doing well, and what it is not. Often the highest traffic keywords will have a group of 5 to 10 major competitors competing for them. In many industries, the large players will either have full-time SEO staff or will have SEO agencies on retainer, performing intensive organic search optimization. This can make it a time intensive and costly proposition to try to “dethrone” one or more of the leaders by getting a top 5 ranking in Google for a highly competitive keyword. To circumvent this problem, it’s often a good idea to start with a ranking analysis of your competitors. Determine what keywords they are ranking well for, and which ones they are not ranking well for. This will indicate areas of great opportunity for organic optimization. From there, spend time optimizing the keywords your competitors are not ranking well for. This will give you the advantage in niche areas where your website can be a leader.

2. Excessive Optimization
Excessive optimization, often called “keyword stuffing” is just as detrimental in 2010 as it was in 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006. People often ask me “what is the percentage of keywords” or “keyword density” that you can have on a page before the page should be considered “stuffed”. While we utilize a simple formula at Lucid Agency to give a general barometer, to be honest, it’s just as easy to follow this simple rule of thumb. If you can read a page and not tell that it is written for SEO purposes, and it sounds informative and readable for humans, then chances are it is not over-optimized. For example, did you realize that this section is optimized for “excessive optimization”? Probably not, because it was written to be informative and just happens to contain that keyword two times. Organic search rankings are intended to list the most useful and credible websites at the top of the list, so write with that objective in mind.

3. Not Utilizing Social Media in SEO Strategy
Social media is a great way to garner both traffic and inbound links, both of which are helpful for the objective of SEO – getting more qualified traffic to your website. While many search engine optimization strategies focus on the on-page and off-page elements of organic optimization, they often neglect social media. There are simple ways to utilize social media in search. A simple way to start is with a blog and a twitter account. Write a few good blog posts on topics relevant to your industry of expertise, providing useful information. These articles could be articles, picture posts, videos, interviews, white papers; really anything that your intended reader would find useful. Submit these blog posts via XML sitemap to the search engines. Then utilize a following of those interested in what you have to say on Twitter, and put up teasers to your blog posts. If you do this well, with any luck, some of your followers will put up links to your blog on their websites and blogs, gaining you both direct traffic from their reads, and also in bound links from their web properties.

4. Lack of Original Content
As they say in the world of search engine optimization, “content is king”. This has been the rule for many years, and is likely to prevail as one of the foremost guidelines in SEO. Search engines like content that is unique and new. And they like a lot of it. So just create a lot of good content and you’ll end up working wonders for your SEO campaign. If possible, lightly optimize this content and let the rest take care of itself.

5. Lack of Quality Links
Nothing new here…links are the foundation of the Google algorithm and what originally separated them from the other search engines. If you consider Google a great “democracy” of sorts, and each link from a credible website as a “vote” for your website, then it’s simple to see that he with a lot of votes and a clear, in-depth message shall be the winner. Recently, other search engines have followed suit, and it’s no longer just Google valuing these links, but the other search engines as well. In addition, it’s also important to make sure you have links from many websites and that the websites are credible (not link farms). Further, there is some value to the outbound links on your website. When it comes to outbound links, search engines like to see a few links to valuable and related websites.

6. Slow Page Load Times
From many accounts, the new algorithm Google released last year, fondly named “caffeine”, we noticed an importance placed on page load times. This makes sense. If Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information, and provide the best results to those searchers looking for this information, they wouldn’t be doing a great job if the top ranking websites loaded very slowly, or didn’t load at all – thus providing a terrible experience to searchers. To remedy slow load times, try cleaning up code, taking out extraneous flash or third party loading galleries. If this doesn’t help, try a “fresh rebuild”, i.e. having a developer go through and rebuild the website in nice clean new code.

7. Website Structure Issues
If your website has a complicated or unintuitive directory structure, you may want to think about redoing it. The directory structures that work best for top organic rankings are the ones that are simple and intuitive, as this will help search engines and website visitors identify where in the website they are. Search engines use a directory structure to try and determine a relationship between different categorical items and pages on your website. If your structure makes no sense, it can only be detrimental for your rankings, and often the user as well. Fortunately, this is easy to fix up-front, and if you have a website running on a popular CMS platform such as WordPress or Expression Engine, there are many free plugins you can get to quickly and easily adjust the directory structure of your website. If you have a website that sells products for the construction industry, you might have a directory structure like ##www.plumbing-co.com/supplies/welding-supplies.html##, where you would list all of your welding supplies, which would be clear to both search engines and users alike.

8. Inaccurate or Duplicate Page Titles
Search engines give significant weight to website pages that are clear in their content focus. Titles are one of the best ways to indicate the intended focus of a website page. It is a best practice to include a unique, descriptive and lightly optimized title for your website pages. Don’t utilize keywords that are not relevant to the content of the web page, just write something that is useful and accurate, and if it can include the keyword then perfect. Remember titles are shown in search engine listings, so you want your title to be informative and compelling. After all, you are not only trying to get the top listing in Google, but you want people to click on your listing as well.

9. Missing XML sitemaps
XML sitemaps are a very simple way to make sure websites with many pages, and frequently changing content, are thoroughly and accurately indexed by search engines. Since search engines love fresh content, it is advantageous to make sure your website utilizes an XML sitemap, to ensure your “fresh” content is found and indexed quickly. XML sitemaps are simple to make and most web developers can implement them quickly.

10. New Websites
If you work in the SEO field, you’ve most likely had more than one potential client come to you with little more than a checkbook and a domain name. Often this potential client will want to “rank number 1 in Google” for their keyword-de-jour. While most agencies will gladly develop a plan to accomplish this, one of the largest barriers is something that cannot be fixed with any amount of money. Google and Bing (MSN and soon-to-be Yahoo) value the length of time a domain has been in existence. This is something often referred to in SEO slang as “the sandbox”. According to many industry experts Google reportedly puts new websites in something of a sandbox for a while, in an attempt to thwart large scale link efforts for new websites. While this is more theory than fact, Google engineer Matt Cutts has said that there are elements of the Google algorithm that may have an effect such as what has been described as the sandbox. What we can tell you is that we’ve noticed it certainly takes a little longer to get rankings for a new website than an older website. This is partially because of the generally lower number of existing links going to new websites, as well as the variety of other issues that are usually present with many new websites. To best counter this problem, get a new website up quickly, and slowly build up links to the website after the initial launch.

In closing, many of the issues hindering successful optimization aren’t particular difficult to solve, nor do they take a PHD in mathematics to figure out. Follow some simple tried and true optimization techniques, develop great content, get the word out, track your results and the rankings will take care of themselves.

However, don’t go deleting your Meta Keywords just yet. This blog post by Randy Duermyer illustrates a test they did showing that Yahoo does utilize Meta Keywords currently in their algorithmic ranking. When the company doing the website removed the Meta Keywords from a website, the rankings in Yahoo dropped. When the Meta Keywords were restored, the rankings returned. Here is another article describing Yahoo and MSN using Meta Keywords.

Q: What is Bing?
A: Bing is Microsoft’s recently re-branded search platform. Microsoft calls it a “decision engine”, rather than a search engine. Although, it’s really still a search engine. Micosoft used “Live.com” as their search platform in the past, but now you will notice, live.com redirects to Bing.com.

Q: Does MSN search use “Bing Technology”?
A: Yes, MSN search actually uses the Bing search algorithm, and actually drops the searcher into a Bing results page. So no, you do not need to optimize for MSN any differently than Bing.

Q: What will change with the Yahoo!/Microsoft search partnership?
A: The Yahoo search infrastructure will be controlled by Microsoft in mid-2010. Until then, both engines will likely operate independently. At that point, there will finally be a pretty serious competitor for Google. So you can rest assured Google is working on some fairly clever things to try and differentiate itself even more by that point.

Q: What are the major changes in Bing?
A: A variety of changes/additions have taken place. Primarily smarter search functionality provides more “rich” results, including more images and better localization with the enhanced map platform. Also notice the specialized channels for things such as travel, which provide quite robust shopping comparison options. Finally, there is much more integration with other MSN and Non-MSN platforms. Do a search for a sports celebrity and see what I mean with Fox Sports stats integration. Or try a celebrity that “tweets” often and see the link to his or her Twitter profile above all of the search results.

Q: Is the advertiser cash-back program still available for e-commerce?
A: Yes, it’s still available. There are some criteria to apply and the process isn’t that easy, but it does provide a solid ROI option since it’s a CPA (cost-per-action) model. You’ll need to be able to maintain your datafeed, be based in the US and meet a few other criteria in order to apply.

Q: What major changes should be made for optimization?
A: We’re working on tests to reverse engineer the elements of primary importance in the Bing ranking algorithm. Here are a few hints (we can’t give out all of them to our competitors, now can we) about what we have found the Bing ranking algorithm likes:

• Bing likes older domains, plain and simple. bad news for new domains, good news for older ones.
• Bing likes content (more like it’s bigger rival). More than 300 to 350 words per page has a very positive effect.
• Bing likes bulleted lists and descriptive word strings, but use subtle optimization.
• Bing likes optimized page titles, and page specific metadata, more than it’s bigger arch-rival.
• Bing likes fresh content. a lot.
• Bing likes relevant outgoing links more than past versions. and incoming links more than past versions as well.
• Bing likes “personal” information. It’s a unique option for certain optimization tactics.
• Bing doesn’t crawl deeper pages as well as Googlebot. XML sitemaps will help.
• Bing doesn’t like pages with an optimization ratio above 3.5% to 4% very much (at least the way Lucid calculates our optimization ratios).
• Bing doesn’t seem to care much about sloppy code.

1. On-page Optimization
2. Off-page Optimization

Both are equally important, although implementation of a successful strategy for each is drastically different. On-page revolves around the changes made to the website itself to increase indexing and optimization of strategic keyword phrases. Off-page optimization refers to the strategic implementation of a plan to garner high rankings though link baiting, submissions, social participation and other tactics.

Want proof that off-page organic optimization is important? Deal. Check out the screen shot below. Notice how “Google’s Sandbox test site for Google Caffeine” is coming up for the 2nd organic search result for the keyword “Caffeine”. Well that’s strange. We might expect the Wikipedia entry and perhaps even Starbucks, but Google’s test search engine code-named Caffeine? This isn’t because the site is optimized for the keyword “Caffeine”, but rather because there are a ton of websites linking to it that are discussing “Google Caffeine” in their articles and often within the link to the Caffeine sandbox. This is unintentional off-page optimization.

off-page-optimization

-The results seem to come faster – almost 2x as fast as in the current Google search, although since there are no ads on the test version, it’s hardly a fair comparison
-There seem to be less images included in the new results
-More reliance on keyword “strings” rather than stand alone keywords
-More focus on off-page optimization elements

Here is “Caffeine” (top) and the current Google results page (bottom).

Here’s an interesting article with a bit more information.

But, some things have not changed…I still get emails from email addresses like “bobjsalquitz@seo-blast-top-ranking.ru” all the time asking if I am missing the boat because my business is not on “the tops of the search engines. guaranteed number 1 ranking. beat Google with secrets of code…”

And the crazy part is that this has been going on for at least 5 years. Look at this article from 2004: Internet Advancement told to refund clients
That illustrates a fine on a firm out of Seattle that was making false promises about “Top Search Engine Positions”. And yet, I still get emails from clients, friends and associates asking me about emails from random people promising the world, or at least top rankings in the world, for $39/year. I guess some things never change.