White Hat SEO Fundamentals
FUNDAMENTAL WHITE-HAT SEO TASK LIST
I provide here a list of what I believe to be the top factors. Other SEO specialists might have a different list. Get ten experts in any field into a room and you’re bound to get ten different opinions. Mine come from my own experience providing search engine optimization to a vast number of clients across a wide spectrum of markets and industries.
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So what works best for one may not work best for another, because every industry, every set of keyword phrases, is different. While one site might end up in 1st position at Google after you seed your top keyword phrase 45 times on the home page, while having zero back-links, another might need only one repetition of that phrase while having 3,500 back-links.
CAVEAT - In some situations, when it makes sense for a specific web site, or when I am targeting a specific market share, I skip or even ignore my own rules. I can get away with this because I may devote as much as 50 or 60 hours a month to just one web site’s effort, and because some of these rules are more relevant or have a higher value for some search engines, with that much time, energy and effort I can overcome the fact that I’ve failed to apply other, less relevant rules (for that particular site).
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1. KEYWORD RESEARCH
2. TITLE TAG CONTENT
3.
4.
5. ALT ATTRIBUTES
6. LINKS
7. PAGE CONTENT
8. BOLD, HEADER TEXT, STRONG, BULLET POINTS
9. IN-CONTENT LINKING
10. GOOGLE, YAHOO and MSN SITEMAPS PROGRAM
11. SEARCH ENGINE & DIRECTORY SUBMISSION
12. LINKS BACK / LINKS TO AVOID
13. ROBOTS.TXT FILE (yes, it’s the odd-man-in task!)
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A NOTE ABOUT SPECIAL CHARACTERS
This can be a contentious point between me and my team every once in a while. Personally, I like consistency of methods, and always want to ensure the absolute best possible results across as many search engines as possible. To do so, I prefer to never include apostrophes, commas, or special characters in any of my Page Titles or description fields. Instead, I only use plain text letters and numbers, and either the pipe symbol ( | ) or hyphens. Yes, I have seen top position ranking when commas are used in page titles. It’s also about the visual aesthetics for site visitors as much as whether it harms or helps in the search rankings though, and that’s just my preference as much as anything.
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1. KEYWORD RESEARCH
Before I begin any SEO initiative, I do extensive research to determine the best key word phrases for use on a particular site. While one person looking for women’s handbags might search using the word “handbag”, another might use the term “women’s handbags” and a third might use “pocketbooks”. You may think then, that you have to use all of these. Or you might not realize that a fourth person might use the phrase “designer bags”.
So it’s my job (and yours if you’re the one doing this work) to come up with an initial list, do some deep research, discovering other candidates, and finally analyzing which of the words make the most sense. From there, it’s a matter of implementing the use of these top words or phrases throughout the site based on important limitations set by the search engines, cross-factored by how much time and energy you can devote to the process offset by expected value return on your time and energy investment.
PHRASES - YOU KNOW YOUR BUSINESS - (A STARTING POINT ONLY)
If you are the site owner, you hopefully know your business. So you’ll know at least some of the words relevant to your offering that people might use when doing a search. That’s a good start. The problem with limiting yourself to these is that your clients or customers might not think about your products or services the way you do. Let’s be honest - you’ve been in the business for many years - you even have dreams about your business sometimes. You speak the lingo. But do your customers? Sure, some may think like you do, however time and again, I have found countless situations where site owners had their market’s lingo from a professional or industry perspective ingrained in their heads that they failed to consider a potential customer may have no clue about what those words mean - they work in a completely different industry perhaps, or their personal cultural or lifestyle background may have vastly different lingo when it comes to describing what you offer.
So it’s vital that you take the time to step out of your own shoes and think like your customers do. When you do that you may find there are one, a few or dozens of other words or phrases that fit what you offer.
DO THE RESEARCH
One of the ways I sometimes get even more words that may be just as or even more worthwhile, is to do searches using some of the words I think are best. What are my client’s competitors using as keywords on their web sites? (HINT - go to a top competitor’s web site - using your web browser, you can view the source code of the page - look to see if there is a “meta keywords” tag toward the top. That field will have some of the keywords the competition uses).
Once you’ve gathered a substantial list of possible keywords or phrases, you’ll need to find out which of those has actually been used the most by people doing real world searches. One way to find out is to use a free tool called WordTracker® that allows you to enter a word or phrase and where you can see how many people searched over a given day for those words. Be aware though, that this is just one resource - the reliability and accuracy of information is based upon that company’s software, research and methods.
It’s a good starting point, and can often be all you need, however you might also then go to GlobalPromoter® and use their tool, (update - GlobalPromoter’s free tool is no longer functional - instead, I now recommend Trellian’s Keyword Discovery - they offer a free keyword research tool and a subscription version) or even use Google’s free keyword tool, which will provide you with different numbers based on their specific software, research and methods, but where you can then gauge a foundation for what words work best. And each of these tools is going to make suggestions for alternative words as well, with a valuation in terms of popularity of use.
THE LIST - IS POPULAR BETTER?
So now you have a list of five, ten or five hundred possible words and phrases. When you look at your list, you may find that “handbag” got 5,000 searches, women’s handbag had 300, and “designer bags” had 25,543 on any given day or for any given month. So you’d think that “designer bags” was a must-have phrase to use right?
Well not necessarily!
Designer bags might be related to those Gucci pocketbooks you sell. But it could just as easily refer to Tumi® luggage, or oddly enough, designer diaper bags! Handbag in my example might be good right?
Yes and No.
Sure you sell handbags - that’s all you sell. So anyone searching for the word handbag will want to find your site, and might become a customer right? Not necessarily. There are web sites devoted to the handbag manufacturing process, or discuss the history of the handbag. Then there are all those web sites for handbag manufacturers, handbag distributors…
So in this situation, if you stick with the word ‘handbag” as a specific keyword, you’re having to compete with 17,000,000 other web sites all trying to get placed on the first page of results.
Now I’m not saying you DON’T want to have the word handbag on your site. Sure you do. But you don’t need to include it as a stand-alone word in your meta keyword tag. Just by the fact that you’re going to use phrases that include the word in them, if you do the rest of your SEO work well enough, you’ll get people finding your site when they just search by that one word. It’s quite often better to focus on more refined phrases so you can narrow down a potentially more qualified target when it comes to who’s doing the searching.
So when you are looking at that list, don’t assume a phrase that has a lot of searches is necessarily the best phrase for your web site.
This can often require experimenting, or adding more pages to your site where you have more of a variety of phrases split out, so that over time you can see what gets you the best results. (You’ll need to use a good site analytics tool like Google Analytics, and ideally include visitor conversion tracking to be sure…)
Next up - Group your keywords
Once you’ve got what you think is a good set of the best phrases for your site, you will most likely find that you have ten, twenty, or even 100 phrases that all make sense to you for use on your site. By following the limitations described below, you’ll see that it is unwise, (and even unacceptable to the search engines) to stuff all of them on every page of your site. Do that and you may just find your site banned from Google or Yahoo!
So you’ll need to group your phrases - placing different keywords and phrases on different pages on your site. Not only will this reduce the potential for being banned, it allows you to focus your content editing energy on fewer words on an individual page.
There’s no hard and fast rule about exactly how many words or phrases you should have on every page. Personally, I aim to have no more than four to six unique phrases on a page. Writing content around this will in many cases inevitably lead to you having some of the other phrases seeded gently on some of the other pages anyhow, which can only help. But focus your effort on the specific group for each page independent of that. This is the best way I have personally found to get results in mos situations.
PRIORITIZE YOUR GROUPS
When you have your groups broken down, you’ll have a good idea which group has the most important keywords. That group should be used on your home page, and when you’ve got more than a handful of pages, you can use that same group on other pages as well. I like to use one set for the home page, a different set for each of the primary offering pages, and to repeat the main set on the “About”, “Contact”, and “Customer Service” type pages. This isn’t a hard and fast rule though.
BUT WHAT IF I HAVE ONLY THREE PHRASES?
In some situations you may find that there are really only a very few words or phrases that really do fit your offering - even after all the research. This is usually a very rare situation, but if what you offer is so specialized, so refined, then that’s okay. In that situation, you can have all the same phrases on every page, but consider having them all one just one page of the site, and then split them between a couple other pages… Ultimately however, I’ve found that even if I have all the same titles and phrases on every page, if the content is unique enough on each, you can still get 1st page results.
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To ensure that all search engines display your entire title, it’s best to limit your title tag to 65 characters in length. Note that overuse of this aspect of seeding can become a negative in your ranking so don’t overdo it.
Example:
Marys Boutique | Designer clothes | Online Shopping | Discount Apparel
</title>
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3.
NOTE: Most search engines don’t even use the meta keywords field anymore, as it was over-abused for too long. At the same time, I include it in all my sites because Yahoo DOES use it, and smaller search engines use it so the few minutes it takes to fill properly are worth the traffic potential.
After an analysis is done on the best possible keyword combinations for the site, the top terms should be included in the Meta Keywords tag as described in item 1 above – using a comma to separate each set. No single word should be repeated more than THREE (3) times in each meta keywords tag, so if there are several terms that repeat any single word more than 3 times total, these should be split out to different pages on the site. Having too many repetitions is considered stuffing by the search engines and can lead to your site getting banned.
Example:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”designer clothes, online shopping, discount apparel, designer clothes online, online shopping, apparel shopping”>
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4.
I used to advocate writing a descriptive paragraph that repeats the words from your page title here. While I have seen 1st position ranking at Google even with this, I recently read, and now agree with the concept that it’s really best to come up with the absolute best descriptive paragraph based on what might draw someone to actually click on your link, even if it means not including key words in the paragraph. Again, I’ve still gotten many listings into the top 1 and 2 positions at Google and Yahoo, even when including those words.
It’s just that at Google I have seen their system sometimes skip my meta description content and pull some main page content into what they show on their search results page. And too, it can be very challenging to try and come up with a natural sounding description that is also filled with your phrases while sticking to the size limits of this field.
This paragraph needs to be written in a way that communicates the reason someone would want to click through to the site while using the top keyword terms embedded in the descriptive paragraph.
The maximum length for this is 200 characters, including spaces. The first 150 characters are the most important. (many search engines will only display this many characters). AVOID all capital letters and use of exclamation points, too many commas, too many uses of the words “and”, “or”, “a”.
Example:
<meta name=”description” content=”Marys Boutique - a truly unique web site with the best selection of clothing for the active woman, including top name brands as well as one of a kind finds at deep discount prices… ”>
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Each graphic image on a page should have an “alt” element. This element allows us to provide a text description explaining to visually impaired viewers what that image represents. Each alt tag should have one or more descriptive words explaining what the image is for, followed by one keyword term matching the page’s meta keywords tag. Rotate through the entire set of keywords for a page before repeating any keyword terms.
Example:
Header.jpg is used for the company logo. The alt element might then say “Marys Boutique – designer clothes” so the full image tag might then look like this:
<img src=”images/Header.jpg” alt=”Marys Boutique – designer clothes”>
About.jpg may be used for the link to the About page. The alt element might then say “about us – online shopping”
NOTE – Unless you have an absolute need to do so, try not to repeat any individual keyword more than three times in any single page’s alt tags. (we don’t want to over-saturate and garner the wrath of the Search Algorithm Gods)…
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Each link on the page should be written so as to be descriptive about what information can be found when clicking on that link, however if at all possible, it is a good SEO practice to include the keyword terms in at least some of the links on a page. If a site’s main page links do not make sense when doing this, it is our policy, with a client’s approval, to place a set of text links at the bottom of each page that go to the site’s main pages but where the wording does include or is exclusively based on the keyword terms.
Example:
If the keyword term in the meta tag is “online shopping”, instead of a link to the shopping section of the site being called “Shop Online”, it might instead be called “Online Shopping”. Because it would be too confusing to have a main link to the company information page be called “About designer clothing”, we would leave the main link “About” or “About Marys Boutique” and at the bottom of the page we would have the words “designer clothing” with those words being linked to the “About” page.
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7. PAGE CONTENT
Once all of the above aspects of SEO work are done, the person responsible for writing page content needs to review the existing content of each page and where needed, re-write or add additional text to that page so that the keyword terms for that page are well “seeded” throughout that page.
The challenge is to write text in a way that is both intelligent to the site visitor and communicates the message for that page while getting those keyword terms liberally embedded in the text. Current opinions of many SEO and SEM consultants is that this aspect, the “keyword density”, is either important or it’s irrelevant.
Generally speaking, in my experience, the more frequent the use of the keyword terms, written into descriptive content properly, the more relevant the overall page is from a page ranking perspective, but because there are so many other factors to consider, in my opinion, the ratio of keywords to overall content is not as much of a “top factor” as others might have us believe, yet having a lot of valid content can only help if it’s done properly.
NOTE – There is an “over-saturation” factor regarding repetition of keywords at the search engines. On any given day, Google and Yahoo might initially accept a page that has a keyword phrase repeated sixty times, and on any given day, either Google or Yahoo might deem that same page to be intended to spam the search engine ranking algorithm. Most experts who believe this aspect to be important differ on the seeding ratio – the comparison of how many times a keyword or phrase appears on a page as compared to the overall total word count. I don’t worry about the ratio as much when I write the content, but I keep an eye on how those pages do in the results.
The most important aspect is that the content be readable in an intelligent manner by site visitors. If you write your content in natural ways, you are more likely to get a balance that is well within acceptable parameters.
If there is very little text on the page, having your keywords seeding enough in the content is near impossible. This can be mitigated with a plethora of links that lead to unique, valid, and value-added pages on the site where those links include some of the keywords, but ultimately this is a subjective issue with no specific known rules.
One saturation rule that is agreed upon is that you never put content on your page that is keyword heavy and where the content is made invisible or barely visible, to the reader, or where you do nothing but repeat your keywords over and over and over - this is considered stuffing and can lead to your site being banned.
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8. BOLD, HEADER TEXT, STRONG, BULLET POINTS
Standard practice is to include your primary keyword phrases in an H1, H2 or H3 HTML tag as the very first content in the main section of each page, as well as repeated once again in a similar sizing treatment as the very last content on the bottom of the page. Throughout a page, keywords should be bolded at least once (bold or strong – either way – there is no specific known factor as to whether one is better for ranking than another). Yet one more way to tell a search engine that “this text is important” is to incorporate keywords into bullet points somewhere on a page.
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9. IN-CONTENT LINKING
Quality ranking value includes having select text on a page clickable to another page on the site where that destination page is keyword relevant to the word or words that are surrounded by the link code. Again, not every repetition of a keyword should be treated this way. First, it’s just bad practice from a readability perspective. Second, over-use of a ranking method can potentially be deemed as a spam attempt.
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10. GOOGLE / Yahoo / MSN SITEMAPS PROGRAM
Every site is better served in having an XML based file placed at the root directory level called sitemap.xml
Unlike traditional HTML based site maps, this is a specially formatted file that once created, is then submitted through the Google webmaster program, Yahoo Site Explorer, and hopefully soon, also through the MSN Live system. This file tells Google how to better index the site’s pages. This work is presently handled through our in house SEO engineer. If you can not generate an xml version of this file, a plain text version is acceptable, however the plain text version carries less power when telling the search engines about your pages. Google Sitemaps
Some people will tell you it’s not necessary to have a sitemap.xml file. My own experience has shown that when I have one on a new site, more of that site’s pages are indexed sooner. When I have one on a site that changes regularly or where pages are added regularly, by going to Google’s Webmaster Tools page and Yahoo’s Site Explorer page, I can instantly tell them to re-index the sitemap file and I see faster results in those new pages being indexed. At the same time though, if you’ve got your site indexed, new pages and more pages will be indexed eventually.
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11. SEARCH ENGINE & DIRECTORY SUBMISSION
Once everything above is addressed, we need to submit the site to all the top search engines and directories. After you’ve submitted the site’s sitemap.xml file as described above, it’s very good practice to then submit it to as many other quality directories as possible. Not only does this help due to the number of people who search at those locations, it also helps toward the next step below, getting links back to your site. The trick is that while there are some standard places every site should be submitted to (the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) for example), but to any web directory that either specializes in your industry (such as a Trade Association’s business directory or a Chamber of Commerce membership directory), or lists web sites for a particular region (such as a county or town specific business listing directory) if some or all of your customers are local and you have a physical store or office.
Some people will tell you that search spiders are so good that you don’t even need to submit your site - that it will be picked up anyhow. Well, my opinion is that I don’t want to wait around and hope that’s going to happen. I want to be proactive.
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12. LINKS BACK
One of the most important aspects of a pages ranking value at the search engines is now “how many sites link back to our site?” It’s all good and fine to create a pleasing site that is of value to site visitors, yet if no other sites on the Internet provide a link back to this site, the top search engines consider this site of little importance. As such, submitting the site, after all of the above work is done, to as many other web sites for inclusion in their “links” or “resources” section, is vital.
This process is still a challenge because many sites today are designed specifically to attract high ranking in the search engines, so they can then sell link listings. More often than ever before, Google is considering this a bad thing. They see sites listed at such places as potentially attempting to artificially gain ranking just by mere association. So Google now “frowns” upon paid text links.
LINKS TO AVOID
A word needs to be said about obtaining links from web sites that are or might become red-flagged from Google. This can include sites where the sole or primary purpose of the site is to charge web site owners for paid inclusion but where the site is filled with very low quality links, countless sponsored links that are clearly spam (if you see the key words repeated in text links over and over and over again without any sense of variety, that can be an obvious sign - like “online phramacy discount drugs”.
Also - what is the policy of the site? Do they have “quality submission standards”? Is there anything on the site that just looks like it’s a shady site? Sometimes this is a judgement call. My personal policy is that if you have to pay for submission, and if all they do is claim to be a link directory, to avoid the site altogether.
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5. ROBOTS.TXT FILE
Okay - so like every other “rule” to SEO, this one is something that really isn’t “100% mission critical to getting your site indexed. I include it in the top tasks however, because a properly designed, formatted and supported web site is sure to always get better results for a whole host of reasons than one that is not.
So this one is about what you want the search engines to index and what you don’t want them to. If you don’t have this file, the possibility of having something you otherwise might think is hidden from public consumption turns out not to be.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /design
Disallow: /visitor-logs
Disallow: /about/myprivatepage.html
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While the fundamental tasks outlined on this page are generally considered industry standards, SEO and SEM experts will always have differing opinions about some of the specifics contained here. What has been provided here is based on my own personal experience over many years and across several quite divergent industries and market focuses. As with any complex topic, take what works for you, and leave the rest.
