BradPace.com

We are working to get a solid search engine optimization strategy (SEO) for our various sites. We are starting by breaking down the strategy into 3 different areas of focus. I will blog on each of these areas separately over the next few days

1) Remove SEO Road Blocks
The first step in any strategy is to simply remove any existing road blocks. To do this you need to think like a search engine. Road blocks can be on the page or off the page. These are the red flags that can simply kill any hope of getting good search rankings. There are many possible road blocks but her are a few that I spend special attention to:

• Is there any code on the page that will stop the crawlers? How does the actual code look (View Source). Is there a bunch of javascript on the page?
• Are there coding errors on the page? Poor html, javascript or CSS can stop a crawler in it’s tracks. Also it can really mess up what the bot thinks comes first on the page. Broken tables are a perfect example of this.
• Missing meta tags. You must have a title tag and the various meta tags. Some crawlers don’t use these tags publicly, but I believe that they all use them in some manner to at least start the algorithm.
• Duplicate content. This is a real killer. Many sites have content that shows up on every page and often you don’t even think of this as duplicate content. Many sites have landing pages with the exact same content. The content needs to be excluded from the crawlers using the robots.txt file or the content needs to be made unique. Re-write the content if possible. At In2M we had about 10k financial institution pages that where all the same (except for the bank name). We ended up re-writing all 12 paragraphs and then randomizing each of these as well as randomizing the testimonials and images on the page. This made every page unique (or close to it). Go to http://www.mvelopes.com/mvelopes/credit-union-bank/m/mountain-america-credit-union-1494.php and hit refresh and see the page change for yourself. We actually had to un-optimize these pages because we where outranking the actual bank and credit union sites and they where complaining. One problem many companies have is they re-do their site and leave the old pages up and include the same content on the new pages.
• Bad back links. Check your back links and make sure you have no bad links from bad “neighborhoods”. Also make sure that you have backlinks from sites that relate to your site. A few good links is much better than a ton of junk links. Remove the junk first. Also check and make sure that your back links are legitimate (no purchased or bogus links).
• No black hat or questionable seo! It is often tempting to try and get ahead using shady techniques like buying links, bogus link structures or using bad text (same color as background ect). These tactics may be so 2000. But today it is very tempting to build bogus mini sites or doorway pages. Or to use crawled data to auto build sites. Just make sure everything you do is legit and above the table.
• Get any info you can from the search engines themselves. Which pages are already indexed and which ones are missing? Check the cashed version of your pages and see what is there and how old it is. You can learn a lot just by paying attention to the search engine results.
• Make sure you are in good standing with the search engines. Have you been banned by Google? Have your ranking dropped lately? Often you can fix these types of issues by contacting the search engine.
• Get a site map. If you don’t have a site map get one! This makes is much easier for the bots to crawl your site.
• Make sure your site navigation is search engine friendly. I am always supprized by sites that have all their navigation in javacript, flash or some other app that the bots can’t recognize. Then wonder why they don’t have any pages indexed. You can have fancy menues and such, you just need to provide some other simple way for the bots to crawl.
• Use bot friendly urls. This is important and there seems to be some confusion as to exactly what each bot can crawl. But it is so easy to fix using a mod rewrite that I don’t know why you would not do this. Make your data easy to access via a simple URL. The web dev team for World Vital Records did this for all the surnames in our database (this is not live yet). But a simple url with the surname will pull up all the results for that page.