Site audits are a necessity when starting to optimize a website. Whether the site is large or small, making sure you’re targeting the right keywords and that your content and site structure are optimized for those keywords is the most important first step not many people think to do.

Search services are like anything else, you get what you pay for. Organic search optimization is not easy to do well, and that’s why it’s expensive. There are services out there for small businesses, but getting ranked for a single keyword won’t do you much good. Going after a lot of keywords requires content generation and link building … even after all the on-site changes are made.

If you’re a small or medium sized business SEO can be an expensive proposition. It’s one that can no doubt repay itself, but this takes time and resolution. This is why site audits can be a good first step towards a better presence online.

An on-site SEO audit is an organic search analysis of your site. A website audit is going to tell you everything you need to know to make your site optimized for search engines with regards to keywords that have traffic potential. You should have this professional develop a keyword list for you, and suggest a target ‘umbrella keyword’ that represents the content your entire site focuses on and which all other keywords will fall under. This umbrella keyword is going to be something you have a chance of ranking for, yet something people are actually searching for. Its pointless to optimize for a keyword without any search volume.

When you hire someone to do a site audit you’ll get a document detailing everything that needs to get done to make the on-page aspects of your site search friendly. This document can be taken to any developer for implementation. The SEO audit provider should be able to implement these as well, but if you have someone who’s familiar with your site it can take a lot less time for them to do it. If you use WordPress as a CMS the recommendations should be fairly easy to implement yourself. More than likely the audit is going to recommend changes to the majority of your site. In a lot of cases more content will be needed. Adding optimized content is one of the most valuable investments in any website. The more content you have on your site, the more content there is for Google to index and the more chance there is for someone to stumble across it.

There are lots of automated services that have popped up lately that can perform an audit for you, but if you want real actionable recommendations you’re going to need a professional. If you haven’t noticed by now we recommend Alysson Fergison for on-site SEO audits. She’s priced well and also does quality keyword research.

In summary, get a site audit done in conjunction with professional keyword research. Impliment those recommendations, and continue to add as much content as you can.

There are literally hundreds of factors that go into search engine optimization, and it’s difficult for most people to think about all of them.  That’s why companies are hired to perform SEO services, because they have the know-how and experience to get people ranked. Small businesses usually don’t have the resources to hire someone who’s going to do a great job for them. Like most things in life, you pay for what you get with SEO service providers. These days a lot of small business are trying to be smarter about search on their own. It’s not impossible to teach yourself SEO, if you have the time and desire anyone can learn enough to get by.

The best way for small businesses to increase their visibility online is through frequent and quality search friendly content generation.

They say content is king, and it’s true more than ever online. Generating unique and quality content, regularly, in a way that’s search friendly will provide more value in the long run than anything else. Think of the Internet as a spider’s web (duh!), and a single website occupies a small section of that web. The larger an individual website is, the more surface area it will take up and the more chance a fly has of landing on it. Everyday millions of flies search the World Wide Web, and the larger your portion of the Web the more traffic you’re going to get.

Of course, this takes a while to start seeing results. Google doesn’t just trust any website. You need to have history and you need to have authority on the whatever it is you or your business is about. Once search engines realize that you aren’t a spammer, that you’re trying to add real value to the world and help others through your content they start to show you love in return. A good portion of it is a volume game, like I said, the more content you have, the more opportunity there is for someone to stumble across your site. You’ll start to see people visiting your site after they’ve typed in some odd looking search terms. If you’ve concentrated on a subject, a theme surrounding those search terms should emerge. These are called ‘long-tail searches’ because they’re made up of more than three words and very few people search for those terms individually. It’s important to realize that, though few searches occur for long-tail terms individually, there are more people using long-tail terms as a whole than there are short-tail searches. They can really add up, but only if you’ve done your job right. More on that later …

Good content has great side effects too. With how easy it is for people to share information there’s a good chance a decent blog post will get passed around through email. Or maybe a colleague will post it on their Facebook profile, or perhaps someone submits it to Digg.

If you don’t swing the bat you’ll never hit the ball. Don’t over analyze, just do it. Just write and good things will come.

Next up … automating content generation by empowering users and enforcing SEO best practices.  What was that!?  Sheesh … sign up with WordPress and start a blog already!

Tags are all the rage these days.  We’re seeing them everywhere, but why?

Tags offer a few different benefits. Essentially, tags are a way to quickly visualize what a certain type of content is about. Tag clouds can convey a lot of information very legibly. Take a look, for example, at this tag cloud of Obama’s inauguration speech. Which words stand out to you?

I see: new, nation, America, every, people and common. If I hadn’t heard the speech I would have a good idea of what he spoke about and why.  Read Write Web has a great post with a few word clouds from different inauguration speeches. These tag clouds summarize what speech writers at the time found important to the American public.

From a human usability perspective hopefully you can see why this is important. With a tag cloud people can quickly get an idea of what a post or blog is about. With these tags as links, they can drill down to interesting posts in only a couple clicks. From a search engine’s standpoint it’s easy to tell what your content is about also. If you look at the source code of a WordPress blog, for example, you can see that each tag in a tag cloud is explicity said what size it should be. WordPress has implemented tags in a very search friendly way. A lot of SEO is common sense usability. If you build it right for humans, and pay attention to the details, it’s going to be easy for search engines to understand.

The number of tags you use to describe a post is important. Again though, think about it from a usability standpoint. If you litter your content with tags, then the majority of those tags aren’t going to be relevant to the post. It’s the same reason why keywords stuffing doesn’t work. If you litter your content with keywords, just to include keywords … you’re going to confuse your readers, and you’re going to confuse the search engines. How can you tell what a post is really about when the important parts of it are diluted.

Jason Baer over at Convince and Convert has implemented tags well. On average he uses less than 10 associate with each post. He capitalizes tags that should be capitalized (according to a what looks like an AP writing style) and he includes them at the bottom of each post. I wish he would put a cloud in the right hand column, but having them at the bottom of each post gives people a way to continue reading about topic they’re interested in, and it reinforces the content within the post. I also wouldn’t use both categories and tags. Pick one or the other and stick with it. If you use both you run the risk of duplicate content, or having the same content accessible at different URLs. If you’re the New York Times, it would be something to worry about, but the average blogger should spend time on quality content, not duplicate content. Check out Google’s official statement on duplicate content for more info.

When tagging video content, there are a few other things to worry about. When most people use video within a blog post it’s uploaded at a third party provider like YouTube, or UStream for instance. There’s an entire niche around video SEO, but when it comes to content tags the important thing to worry about is making sure that your post is ranking higher than the actual video for the things you’re optimizing for. So make sure the content tags you used on your video, are on your actual post somewhere, in a way search engines can understand them. In the case of LuckyStartups, the startup that interviews startups, their tags are embedded in a flash file, which is useless for search purposes. Their lucky Ustream isn’t optimized that well, and that they have more original text content on the site, or they run the risk of their Ustream videos out ranking their posts.

In summary … Tag your content. Use tags that are relevant to that content. Don’t stuff your tags with keywords you want to rank for. Again, be relevant, but always think about what people might search for.  Don’t use all your tags in every post.  Use tags repeatedly across posts when it’s appropriate.

Linking to other websites correclty is extremely important in establishing your blog as an authority online. A little primer first … there are literally hundreds of factors that go into ranking well for a certain subject. Google looks at how your website is coded, how quickly it responds, what other sites are on your IP address, what content is on your site, etc.

One of the most important factors, though, is who’s linking to you and in what way. When someone links to you using relevant anchor text it’s like saying to Google, “Hey, this site is about ‘insert keywords here.’” Google uses that anchor text, the text around it and the overarching theme of the page it’s on to determine relevance and authority of where those links point to.

So, if you’re linking to other relevant, useful resources for people who visit your website or blog you’re doing your visitors a huge benefit. If you link to them in a way that’s easy for Google to understand what that site is about, your helping search engines do their job that much better. If you’re diligent about providing good resources that reinforce your content and linking to them correctly, over time Google will ultimately trust your site as an authority on whatever your subject is.  When thinking about linking, also make sure to link to other articles within your site. Whatever you do, don’t link to something with ‘here.’

What do you think?  Is this helpful?

Since the launch we’ve been signing up accounts left and right.  A lot of people have been asking … “Ok, so now I have this ranking info, now what?”

I’ve explained the way AuthorityLabs can provide serious value when used in combination with a good analytics system and keyword research tool a few times, so I thought it would make a good blog post.

First, if you have a website already and you don’t have analytics installed DO IT, right now! Google Analytics is easy to install, easy to use and best of all it’s free. Analytics information is invaluable these days. If you have a contact info form, or you’re actually selling something set up goals so you know what your conversion rate is. Use the Google Analytics Help Center to learn how to set up goals. Once you do this, wait a month so you have some decent data and then find out how much traffic you’re getting from search and which keywords people are using to get there.

Search referrals are telling you how people are finding your site through search. This is basically telling you what Google thinks your site is about. You’ll have some shorter phrases that are probably sending you some traffic, some branded keywords (keywords surrounding your brand name), and a lot of long-tail keywords as well.  Your long-tail keywords are probably making up a good deal of traffic. Go through these keywords and find the ones that are generating the most traffic for you, then export these in a .csv file.

Once you know which keywords are sending you traffic, add those to your AuthorityLabs account. In a day you’ll know where you rank for all those. Here’s where you can find some serious opportunity. For a lot of your keywords you might be near the first spot on Google. For most though, you’re probably not. You’re probably ranking on the 3rd or 4th page for a lot of your keywords. If you’re getting 50 visits a month (for example) and you’re on the 4th page, imagine how much traffic you can get if you’re on the 1st? Finding the keywords that are generating traffic, but where you’re not ranking that well is the first step of the optimization process.

You don’t want to optimize for terms that you don’t have a chance of ranking for, and you don’t want to waste your time on keywords that won’t drive any traffic.

Now that you know what’s going to be worth your time to target get into your favorite keyword research tool. I like Keyword Discovery, but WordTracker is a great one as well. You want to find keywords that support your targeted keyterms.  Keyword research tools will try and give you an idea of search volume. They’ll also give you an indication of how difficult those keywords will be to rank for. Don’t be concerned with this as much. These are meant to be keywords which support your content and linking strategy going forward.

Now it’s time to get cranking. Content is perhaps the single most important element to your search strategy. The more content on your site, the more search engines have in their index, and the greater your chance of ranking for something. If this content is themed correctly, linking correctly and targeting keywords correctly you’ll do even better.

What do you think? What tools are you using? Have you found another way to leverage ranking or traffic information? Let me know.