We recently had the good fortune of welcoming Mike Coughlin of WhiteHat SEO to one of our team meetings.  Mike did a wonderful job of laying out the three main elements of any SEO (Search Engine Optimization) campaign.

1. Research Keywords

At the beginning you research keywords.  A good keyword needs to accurately describe your business.  It also needs to receive search traffic and if you’re going to invest effort in “claiming” a keyword, you need to know that it is possible to displace those websites that appear on the first page of web results.

You can start with just a few keywords, but eventually you will want each page to help you build traffic towards some relevant keyword or key phrase.

2. On-Page SEO (or Proper Page Architecture)

As developers and designers we were, of course, interested in what we could do for our clients on their own pages.  It was sobering to realize that online searches have matured to the point where on-page SEO is no longer sufficient to earn a good placement on a SERP (search engine results page).  However, it is still a necessary step to maintaining what position you have.

Here are a number of things you can look at yourself to see if your site is properly built for SEO

Do your Page Titles work for you?

A good page title will say who you are, include the targeted keyword, and still be relevant to the function of the page.

Do you have Smart URLs (also known as Pretty URLs)?

Go to your web page and look at the address bar of your Web Browser.  If you can read the address and get a rough idea of what sort of page you are on, you have Smart URLs.

The CMS (Content Management Systems) that MB/I uses allow you to customized these Smart URLs so that you can include your primary keyword here as well.

Does each page have a Meta Description?

The Meta Description is what appears after the Page Title in a search result.  It is usually a short paragraph that shows why the link was included on the SERP.  If you do not write your own, Google will use a machine to try and figure out what’s most relevant about your page.

Have you thought about Headings?

Search Engines look at headings as well as titles when trying to figure out the topic of a page.  Your primary heading (marked with <H1> in the code) should include your keyword.

Have you described your Images?

Every time you post a new image online, you have the chance to name it and to provide an alternate description.  These are not only useful in making your site ADA compliant, but they also provide search engines with more information about your content, and introduce the possibility of someone finding your page through a Google Images search.

Have you included your Keyword organically?

It is important to use your keyword (and its typical variations) in your copy.

It is also important to remember that you are writing for real people.

Hitting this balance is difficult to do right off the bat.  This is part of why a good CMS is instrumental in a good SEO campaign.  It allows you to change your content on the fly, adding in content or normalizing vocabulary as you see fit.

We were pleased to realize that we were already ahead of the game, and that our designs and preferred content management systems already make it easy to manage these things.

3. Off-Page SEO (or Link-Building)

After your page has been set up properly, the SEO process continues by looking to other websites and finding ways to get them to link back to you.  Places where you can add in links to your website on your own are good for building up a volume of links.  However, you will also want a number of “quality” links.

Getting a quality link is something like making a sale.  You will want to research prospects and their value in building clientele, build a rapport, pitch your site, and ultimately convince your prospect to close the deal by linking back to your site.

In Conclusion

I would like to thank Mike Coughlin.  It was gracious of him to come to our meeting, and we are looking forward to seeing what WhiteHat and their strategies can do.