We’ve reached part three of the SEO guide series. So far we’ve looked at:

• Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization, Part I – Keyword research and your general approach to an SEO strategy and,
• Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization, Part II – How you should think about developing your site and creating content.

Now it’s time to look at link building, which as much as anything will determine where your pages rank for different queries.

We’ll also take a look at analytics so you can understand how your SEO efforts have been working and gain insights into how to improve them. Unless you’re measuring results you’re basically throwing things into the wind and hoping they land where you want. Analytics will let us know which way the wind is blowing and point us to jet streams to so our SEO lands where we want.

Let’s start talking about links and what makes one link more valuable than another.

4. Link Building

Links more than anything will determine where your pages rank. If you build a search friendly site and generate incoming links to your pages you’e going to get search traffic. The two main questions with links are where do you get them and which are the best links to get. Let’s tackle the latter question first.

Which are the best links to get?

Google popularized the idea of links as a ranking factor. Links are at the heart of Google’s PageRank algorithm. At it’s core the idea was that a link counts as a vote or recommendation by one page for another. Over time this has evolved quite a bit, but I think it’s still useful to think about links as votes or recommendations.

Consider the following scenario – You have 2 neighbors. One is the local plumber and the other is Albert Einstein. If you ask each a general question who’s answer do you think you’d be more likely to trust? Odds are you’re going to trust Einstein’s answer because you know he’s a pretty smart guy and probably knows the answer to a lot of things. Einstein likely has more general authority in your eyes than the plumber as a go to guy for answers.

Let’s say instead of a general question you have a very specific question about the pipes running through your kitchen. Now who’s answer are you going to trust? Probably the plumber. Einstein knows a lot, but chances are the plumber knows more about plumbing. The plumber has more topical authority when it comes to answers about plumbing.

Where do you get them?

Now think about the above analogy in terms of links. Some sites and pages have a lot of general authority. Think cnn.com, whitehouse.gov. wikipedia.org. A link from these sites likely carries a lot of general authority. People trust these sites and more importantly search engines trust these sites. What do they specifically know about web design though?

How about sites like smashingmagazine.com, the tutsplus family of sites, or hongkiat.com? These sites have topical authority around web design and web development. You would probably trust advice from them on the topic of design and development over the whitehouse.gov site.

I’ll ask again which links have more value for your site?

Page Rank

PageRank (PR) is Google’s idea of measuring authority, more specifically general authority. The PR of a web page is based on the PR of the pages linking to that page. However PageRank isn’t the end all and be all of search ranking. First the PR you and I see is not the true PR of a web page. We see what’s called toolbar PR (TBPR). Google updates it 3 or 4 times a year so most of the time it’s out of date. It’s also on a different scale than true PageRank and Google’s been known to edit the PR of certain sites for various reasons.

PageRank is still important and it’s still part of what goes into determining where a web page will rank, but know that if you’re chasing PR you’re going about things the wrong way. PR is only one factor among hundreds and it’s also a Google specific metric. It has nothing to do with how well your pages rank at any other search engine. At best it’s a quick and dirty measure of the authority Google sees in a page or site.

So what are the best links to get? Well it depends. It depends on the topic of your site and it depends on the competition around that topic. Links from the Wikipedia and CNN are always going to be good, however the link from the authority in your niche is probably even better.

As a general rule the harder it is to acquire a link the better, because that difficultly reduces the chances of your competition getting the same link and that difficulty likely enhances the authority a search engine sees in the link and consequently your page and site.

As a site note: Page Rank is named after Google co-founder Larry Page. Many people mistakenly believe it’s named after page as in web page and think page rank is the same as where your page ranks in search results. Nope. Page is for Larry Page.

Anchor Text, Nofollow, and Link Diversity

There are three more ideas we should discuss when talking about the quality of links:

1. The anchor text of the links in question,
2. Links with the nofollow attribute applies, and
3. The diversity of where those links come from.

Anchor Text
You probably know that anchor text is the clickable text that becomes the links. Those words and even the words around the link itself give an indication of what the page is voting for. If the anchor text linking to you says “web design” it will likely help you rank better for the keyphrase “web design” than if the anchor text said “click here.” Keywords in anchor text are a good signal for ranking.

Nofollow
nofollow is essentially a way to link to a web page while at the same time letting search engines know you’re not voting or recommending that page. Links with nofollow applied are not supposed to pass any link juice or link value. They shouldn’t therefore have any benefit in regards to SEO. However any link is still an avenue into your site.

If CNN told me they would link to my home page, but the link would have nofollow applied, I’d still be very happy to have that link. Many eyeballs would see it and hopefully many of them would click through to my site.

Link Diversity
Earlier I mentioned the concept of a link as a vote. In an election how many votes does one person get. Corruption aside it’s one vote per person. With web pages and websites there is likely a diminishing return when we’re talking about links back to your site. Consider two cases.

1. 1,000 links pointing into your site all from a single website
2. 100 links pointing into your site, 5 each from 20 different sites

The latter is probably going to have a greater impact. In the first case there’s no diversity in the links. In the second case there are more sites “voting” for you. Ideally links into your site or page should come from a variety of sources.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Link Diversity from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Quick Summary of Link Building

1. Build trust and authority in your site by acquiring links from general and topical trusted and authority sites.
2. Build trust and authority in a single page on your site by acquiring links from general and topical trusted and authority web pages.
3. Try to get links with variations of your main keyphrase in the anchor text.
4. Seek links from a diverse set of sites and pages.
5. Sometimes it’s simply a numbers game. More links or better more link juice, PR, or whatever you want to call it, is better. Quality though, is usually preferred to quantity.

Internal links (links from one page of your site to another) count as links, but what others say about you means more than what you say about yourself. External links (links from other domains) are better than internal links, but internal links do count. Make sure to link between pages of your site. Internal links are also one place you can guarantee control over the anchor text of the link.

In general the easier a link is to get the less value it likely has. Even if it does have great value your competition will be able to get that same link as easily as you thereby diluting the effect of the link.

Where to Get Links From

Now that we’ve discussed what makes for a better link how and where should we get links? Any page that will link back to one of your pages is a link. Most will help to some degree, but given the above discussion of link quality some links are going to help more.

I’ll point you to a few sources with specific ideas on how and where to get links from and keep the discussion here to a few general thoughts.

Low Quality Links

These
are usually easy to get. Forums, directories, blog comments are a few examples. These links are links and they should pass on raw link juice and value. However, because these links are generally low quality you probably don’t want to spend too much time trying to get them without having other reasons for getting those links.

For example I participate regularly in several forums and each contains links in my forum signature back to my site. I never post though just to get another signature link. I post in order to interact with the communities of those forums. That interaction has directly led to friends and clients and yes even some SEO benefit. Again the goal of post is not the link. That’s simply a nice side benefit.

The same thing applies to blog comments. The value in those comments is that you get to be in front of an audience that may very well be interested in you and your site. If you spend time leaving interesting or entertaining comments on a few blogs on similar topics to your blog you’ll find some of that audience will follow you back to your site and the blog owner may also do the same. If you simply leave a quick and useless comment you’re missing out. The link itself is probably not going to help much. It’s the quality of the comment that matters most. Any SEO benefit is a nice side bonus.

High Quality Links
They are harder to get and will ultimately give you more benefit. It makes more sense to actively work to get these links. Trusted, authority sites probably aren’t going to link to you just because you ask. You’re generally going to need to give them a reason to link to you.

That starts with your own content. The better your content the more likely someone will want to link to it. It’s always going to be easier to get people to link to quality than garbage.

Give to get. You want me to link to you? Why not link to me first? When you help others it makes them want to help you back. Think about how you can help the site you’re hoping will link back to you. One way you can do this is by guest blogging.

Many design and development blogs are actively seeking guest posts. You should get back a short bio which can include a link or two. Also if you have content that further explains some things you’re writing about you can add a link in the text. As long as the link points to page that is relevant to the guest post most bloggers will be fine with you adding it. Just don’t overdo it.

Remember first and foremost the goal is to write the best post you can for that other site.

Build relationships. Network with other designers. We’re all more likely to help friends than we are to help strangers. We’re also more likely to be familiar with the content of people and sites we know making it easier to link to that content.

In the end the best way to generate quality links is to have content worth linking to. Instead of spending all your time chasing after links with dubious benefit spend more time creating content others will find useful. You still need to give your content a push. If you build it they will come only works in the movies.

Resources

The following should generate lots of ideas for where and how you can build links into your site.

• 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity
• 30 Ways to Get Links Naturally & Stop Link Building
• 45 Link Building Tips To Help You Promote Your Blog
• Link Building Strategies: 69 Solid Tactics For 2009
• 6 Ways to Build Links with Your Graphic Design Skills

5. Analytics

All of the previous discussion on SEO is great, but how do you know if any of it is working? The answer is in analytics. You need to measure what’s happening in order to know if your efforts are successful and leading to a positive return on your investment.

SEO is not a set it and forget it proposition. It’s an iterative process. You try some things, measure how effective they are and learn what you can for the next round of iteration.

There’s no excuse not to have analytics set up on your site. There are many companies that offer solutions at varying costs. Google Analytics, while far from perfect, is free, easy to set up, and most importantly offers some good statistics to help you understand what’s happening with your site.

At the simplest level you can pay attention to how much traffic you’re receiving from search engines and other sources. Ideally your traffic will continue to grow, but if it doesn’t or if you notice you’ve suddenly lost a lot of traffic you can begin to look deeper to understand why.

A few easy things you can do.

• See what keywords are currently bringing traffic and expand. For example if your site currently brings traffic for “san diego real estate,” “san francisco real estate,” and “los angeles real estate” it’s a good indication you can compete for real estate in other California cities and even the more general “california real estate.”
• Track keyword rankings or at least what page in the results your page ranks
• Discover which content on your site does best. Which content is getting the most views, which content is attracting the most links, which content are people landing on most often. Can you create more content on the same or similar content?
• Find out which sites are sending the best traffic. Say you write guest posts for 5 different sites. Which site or site led to the most traffic? Did the traffic from one site stick around on your site longer? Did one lead to more people subscribing to your blog? Knowing which sites provide the best traffic lets you know where better to focus your efforts.
• Learn who visits your site. What browser and operating system do they use? Where are they located? The more you know about the people who spend time with your site, the better you can craft new content to keep them coming back and bring more people like them to the site.
• Identify what you do and don’t do well. Are you getting a lot of search traffic, but little referral traffic? Are people spending time on one page, but not clicking to others? Are people visiting lots of pages, but not spending time on any of them? How sticky is your site?

There are many things you can do with analytics, but before you can do any of them you need to have analytics set up. You need to understand what is happening on your site, what is and isn’t working, in order to know how to improve your site in the next iteration.

Summary

Way back at the start of this short series of posts I mentioned that SEO is a complex subject. We’ve really only touched upon the surface of search engine optimization in this series. No single post or series of posts could hope to explain all the nuances of search, especially when search engines work so hard to protect their algorithms and often change very quickly.

The aim of this series has been to help give you a foundation so you’re better prepared to separate good information from bad in your further research. While these posts won’t make you an SEO expert there are a few takeaways I hope you’ll carry with you.

• Search Engine Optimization is only one part of marketing. You don’t want to ignore all the other ways to market your site. Search traffic can be very good traffic, but it’s far from the only traffic you can get. Be realistic and make your SEO efforts a part, albeit an important part, of your overall marketing efforts.
• The latest and greatest SEO tips are often worthless. If you knew a secret that could bring you millions of visitors from search engines would you tell everyone and give away your competitive advantage? Probably not. Neither does anyone else. That’s not to say all SEO advice is bad. Far from it. But if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If someone promises you easy fixes like changing a single word on your site so all your pages will rank #1 be very skeptical.
• It’s important to understand how people use words, their intent in using those words, and how they are likely to search for you, your information, your products, or your services. The obvious keywords are not always best and success is often in getting small amounts of traffic to many pages across your site instead of focusing all your efforts on a single page or two.
• When building a site or writing content for a site, always think about real people first. When you make sites usable and accessible you also help search spiders crawl and index your site. When you write content naturally real people will respond better. It’s a good idea to understand what search engines like to see in sites and pages and make decisions accordingly, but always keep the real people using your site at the forefront.
• Links play a very large part in how well pages and sites rank in search engines. Not all links are created equal. Some are better than others. Generally the harder it is to get a link, the more likely that single link will benefit you. Low quality links are easy to get and so everyone gets them. High quality links are what separates you from the competition in most cases. Great content and creativity is the backbone for getting others to link to you.
• When you’re confused about a particular piece of SEO advice it sometimes helps to think like an engineer working at a search engine. Search is often a cat and mouse game between SEOs and search engineers. Search engines place value on a meta tag, people begin to abuse the tag, search engineers place less weight and then no weight on meta tags. If you imagine you’re a search engineer fighting spam you can sometimes tell what is and isn’t likely to work now or work in the future.

Resources

The following are some of my favorite blogs in the SEO community. If you follow the links in their posts you can easily build a pretty large list of SEO feeds in a short amount of time. SEO by the Sea has an extensive blogroll in the right sidebar to make building that list even quicker. I’ve also tried to link to a variety of sources throughout this series of posts.

• SEO Book
• SEOmoz
• Search Engine Land
• Huomah
• SEO by the Sea

Finally here are some free general SEO guides guides, checklists, and useful articles. They should cover much of what we’ve talked about in this series, albeit in slightly greater detail. I hope they help in your SEO learning.

• Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization
• SEO Fast Start
• Search Engine Ranking Factors
• Local Search Engine Ranking Factors
• SEO Checklist (supersized), hold the B.S.
• Free Search Engine Optimization & Marketing Videos

Have you read the previous 2?

This SEO guide for beginners comes in a series of 3 articles, if you ‘ve missed the previous Part I and Part II, here are the direct links to them:

• Part I
• Part II

In the first post in this series, Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization, Part I, we set the groundwork for developing our site and creating content. We thought about how to generally approach SEO and how to begin your keyword research.

As a quick reminder it’s best to think of SEO as part of your marketing. Sometimes it will make sense to do something that doesn’t help your SEO efforts and perhaps even hurts them a bit, because it helps your overall marketing. Remember – it’s about the big picture. You don’t want to get lost in the details.

Also keep in mind that the keywords you target set the stage for everything else. Pages don’t just rank. They rank for specific queries or keyword phrases. Your choice in keywords should be focused on what ultimately provides the most benefit for your business. Targeting a word like “free” may bring lots of traffic, but that traffic won’t be looking to spend any money.

With the above in mind let’s look at some of the things we can and should do when developing our site. Let’s begin by making sure search engines can find out pages.

2. Search Engine Friendly Web Development

Duplicated Contents

Search engines don’t want the same content littering their results. It makes no sense for them to present the exact same page multiple times for the same query. Unfortunately most content management systems create multiple URLs for accessing the same content. Categories, tags, and search results all lead to the same content being found through multiple URLs.

You might want to block some of the URLs from being indexed though a robots.txt file, or through the use of the meta robots tag (use noindex, follow so links on the page can still be crawled) or use 301 (permanent) redirection to point the duplicate URLs to your URL of choice. If you allow search engines to decide which URL to index it may not be the one you prefer. The canonical attribute on link tags is another option to help search engines determine which URL is the one you want indexed

You also want to make sure that every page on your site has unique content. Many ecommerce sites will have very thin product information. For example one product might come in several different sizes and each size gets its own page. The content on those pages will likely be exactly the same with the exception of the different sizes. Search engines are not likely to rank all of those pages. They’ll choose one. Better would be to create a single page and allow for a choice of size on that page. If each size must have it’s own page rewrite some of the content to increase the percentage of uniqueness on each.

Canonical URL & Duplicated Contents

Canonical URLs (different than the canonical attribute mentioned above, but the same basic concept) are another example of duplicate content. Canonical URLs are a fancy way of saying multiple URLs can lead to the same page. Your home page might be accessed via:

• domain.com
• www.domain.com
• domain.com/index.html
• www.domain.com/index.html

Those are 4 different pages in the eyes of search engines and again only one will be indexed. Just as important are the links pointing into those pages. Say one site links to domain.com and another links to www.domain.com/index.html. You might think that means your home page has 2 links pointing to it. Nope. From the perspective of a search engine that’s 1 link pointing to each of 2 different pages. You’ve effectively cut in half the benefit of those links.

If your server runs Apache with mod_rewrite enabled (More than likely it does), you can add the following to your .htaccess file to correct the canonical issue between www and non www versions of your domain. If not, don’t worry. There are a variety of ways to rewrite URLs. One key point is that the rewrite should be a 301 or permanent redirect. You want to tell search engines this content over here should always be seen on that URL over there.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Search Friendly URLs

Which of the following URLs tells you more about the content you’ll find on the page?

• domain.com?id=3648373729&cat=12
• domain.com/sports/baseball/statistics.php

The first tells you absolutely nothing about the page content, the second clearly tells you the content will be a page showing baseball statistics of some kind. That’s much more usable to real people as well as search engines. It helps search engines identify what the page is about, makes use of keywords, and is easier to crawl.

Note: Search engines can crawl dynamic URLs fine. However too many parameters can trip them up, especially when those parameters include session IDs. If you need to include parameters in your URLs try to limit how many. 2 or 3 are ok, a dozen could cause crawling issues.

Notice in the second URL above that keywords have been used in file and folder names. You don’t want to stuff keywords in there, but using them as above reveals a lot of information about your site and reinforces keyword themes. If your statistics page and your teams page and your players page all link back up to the main baseball page it helps reinforce the keyword theme baseball throughout that section. Assuming you also have sections for football and basketball and hockey all linking back up to your main sports page it further helps reinforce the keyword theme sports.

The idea of creating these keyword themes is a concept known as theming or siloing.

5 More Tips..

Be found.
The most important aspect of building a search friendly site is to make sure your content can be found and indexed. If your pages aren’t indexed they can’t appear in search results. Your first goal should be to prevent roadblocks to getting crawled and indexed. Build sites that are accessible and usable. The same principles you would follow for accessibility and usability will remove the roadblocks for search engine spiders.

Avoid Flash, Javascripts.
Search engines are better at crawling text than anything else. Avoid Flash, javascript, and images for the navigation of your site. Progress has been made in crawling each, but best practice still suggest coding links as straight html. If your design calls for Flash or Javascript in your main navigation then provide another navigational system for search spiders.

HTML Sitemap.
You can also help search engines find your content through html sitemaps. That’s HTML, not XML. XML sitemaps are meant to be a backup in case you’ve presented some roadblocks to being crawled. Create an html sitemap and link to it from your home page at the very least and even better from all pages on your site. It’s easy enough to add a link to your sitemap in the secondary navigation you might add to your footer.

Valid Codes.
Develop with clean valid code. Search engines don’t really care if your code is valid. In fact none of the 4 major search engines have home pages that validate. However since some coding errors can be show stoppers to getting crawled it’s in your best interest to write valid code. Search engines are mainly interested in your content and while they have little problems finding your content inside your code, the less code you make them wade through the better.

Speed does matters.
Speed is now also a ranking factor, at least at Google. Use CSS over <table>, move CSS and Javascripts to external files. Keep html file sizes as small as possible. Use gzip compression. Minify files. While it’s likely a minor factor, anything you can do to speed up your site will help your rankings with Google and probably the other engines in the not to distant future.

Some other thoughts about search friendly site development:

• Semantic coding can reveal information about your pages and site to any application that understands the semantics. Search engines are making more use of microformats when determining what to rank for a particular query
• Internal links – links are an important part of SEO and that includes internal links. Most every page on your site should link to other pages on your site. You also have complete control over the anchor text of internal links.
• Periodically test to make sure links on your site are working. Fix or remove any broken links you find.
• Use breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs help people and search engines understand the architecture of your site and they naturally link back up through your sections. See keyword themes and silos above.

Resources

Again there’s a lot more that can be said about SEO and site development. Here are a few checklists with additional tips

• The 5 Minute SEO Site Audit Checklist
• Findability Strategy Checklist (PDF)
• The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet
• Web Marketing Checklist (PDF)

3. On-Page SEO

Once upon a time this was SEO. People stuffed keywords everywhere they could and their pages ranked. Of course all that keyword stuffing was considered spam and no longer works as it once did. Today the idea is to write page content so that it reads well to real people. You also want to pay attention to a couple of key things.

Page Titles: <title></title>

Page titles are perhaps the most important thing you’ll write on the page for search engines. Page titles do play an important part in ranking. Keep your page titles short and include the main keyword phrase for the page. For low competitive phrases a good page title alone is probably enough to generate a good ranking.

Include your brand in your page titles. If your brand is well know you probably want to include it at the front. Keywords at the front of the page title are likely better for SEO, but a well known brand is going to induce more clicks. If your brand is not well known it’s probably best to include it at the end.

Make sure every page title on your site is unique. Far too many sites use the exact same page title (often the domain) across the site, which misses the benefit page titles give.

Also remember that your page title is what people see as the link in search results. Write your titles in a way that makes people want to click on them. A good page title should should contain your most important keyword phrase and make people want to read the page content.

Page Headings: <h1> - <h2>

Page headings might not be as strong a ranking factor as they once were, but I think it’s still a good idea to include keywords and phrases in them. Create one <h1> tag as your main page heading and then use <h2> – <h6> tags to present a hierarchy for the rest of the content.

Ideally your hx headings will use variations of the main keyword phrase you used in your page title. Many CMS applications like WordPress will generate an h1 heading that’s exactly the same as your page title. Ideally there would be some variation, but again hx tags may not be as important as they once were.

Meta Tags: <meta>

Meta Tags are not the end all and be all of SEO. There are 3 meta tags we’ll talk about here.

• Meta keywords are pretty much useless. They’re far too easy to spam and are no longer considered a ranking signal. Google and Bing don’t even read them and it’s highly unlikely the other engines pay any real attention to them. You can safely ignore them completely, but if you feel you must include them use some common misspellings of your keywords. Seriously if you spend more than 30 seconds writing meta keywords for a page you’re wasting your time. You probably wasted the 30 seconds too.
• Meta descriptions likely have little if any effect on where your pages rank for the same reasons meta keywords don’t. However sometimes your meta description will show as the snippet below your link in the search results. Write meta descriptions in a way that entices clicks. Use a strong call to action and maybe think of them as a mini-ad.
• Meta robots are used to tell search engines not to index a page or follow the links on a page. You never need to tell search engines to index of follow since that’s their default behavior. Most of the time you won’t need to include these meta tags, but in the case of duplicate content described above you sometimes don’t want a page indexed. Most of the time you’ll still want the links followed.

ALT and others

ALT and Other Attributes and Semantic Tags have also been spammed to death, however they can still be useful. ALT attributes particularly are one of the few signals you can give about images. Don’t stuff them full of keywords. Write them as they were meant to be written as short descriptions for people who can’t see the image.

If an image is just “eye candy” such as a gradient behind your navigation bar leave the alt attribute blank (alt=""). What is there to describe? Stuffing attributes with keywords is more likely to get you flagged for spamming than it is to improve your ranking

The same is true for things like strong and em and any other tag or attribute you can think of. It’s highly doubtful any will play anything more than a minor role in how well your pages rank. Use them as they were intended to be used for real people reading your content. Use <strong> to add emphasis to a keyword or phrase if it makes sense, but understand that the more you use these tags the less impact they have with people reading your content.

I don’t want to leave you with the impression that adding keywords to tags and attributes won’t help at all. The point is not to obsess over small things that will have a minor impact. It’s certainly ok and makes sense to emphasize keywords and phrases where appropriate, but it makes no sense to add strong or em tags to every mention on the page.

Ultimately when writing page content it’s far more important to think about how well the content reads to real people than search engines. Think about why you want the page to rank in the first place. It’s so someone landing on it will absorb your content and take some action. So what of the page ranks well if it reads so poorly that people leave instantly.

Write a good page title, use <h1>-<h6> headings to organize your content and allow people to scan the page and write your content for your readers. Write naturally. Don’t try to force keywords on the page and use variety in your language. Sometimes call it SEO, sometimes call it search engine optimization, sometimes just say optimization. The variety reads better and also opens up the page to ranking for a greater number of keyword phrases.

Resources

A few posts on writing page titles, page headings, page URLs, and other on-page content

• Optimizing WordPress Page Titles, Post Titles and Page Slugs – Good advice even if you don’t use WordPress
• Best Practices for Title Tags
• SEO Best Practices: SEOmoz’s New Policies Based on Updated Correlation Data

Summary

The most important aspect of building a search friendly site is to make sure search engines can find, crawl, and index your pages. You want to eliminate as many potential barriers as possible. Every time you do something to make it harder for search engines to find and understand your content, you put up a roadblock. Place enough roadblocks on all the avenues leading to your business and even if people want, they won’t be able to get there.

You can also develop sites in ways that reinforce your keyword themes and help search engines understand what topics the site considers most important and should rank for. It doesn’t hurt that these things also help your visitors understand the site better too. A usable and accessible site is usually a search friendly site.

With structure in place you have some tips for creating the actual pages on your site. While once upon a time most SEO happened here the impact of on-page content has been reduced over the years. There are a few key places you want to pay attention to and the good news is once you get a feel for it on-page SEO becomes as much good habits as anything else.

In the next (and final) post, we’ll be looking into:

• Link Building – What other sites say about your site by linking to it says a lot about your site and why search engines should rank your pages.
• Analytics – Help you determine what has and hasn’t been working so you can refocus your efforts and improve your site.

Stay tuned. Click here to read Part I of this article.