Click here to view the embedded video.

Clients ask me all the time about “doing SEO” on their blogs, but honestly, when you have a blog, you have to learn to do your own SEO. This video will show you EXACTLY how. If you want to follow along using the powerpoint he references, you can find it here.

Enjoy!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I love Aaron Wall’s blog on SEO, and today I was catching up on some of his recent posts and found this gem entitled “Why Web Design Matters”.  This is an excellent article for web designers certainly, but I think it’s most crucial for people who are about to get a new website, or a website redesign, or who are considering hiring a web designer in the future.

Most people rely heavily on their website designer or developer to structure their site and steer the course on visual appearance and navigation (content). I totally understand this, since more people find it intimating, and also realize that their time is best spent on their business. That’s why they hire an expert, right?

Yes…

or maybe no.

You see, if the expert they hire makes good decisions, the answer is YES.

If their chosen website builder only focuses on one or two aspects of building websites, NO.

To have a terrific website that really and truly meets your business’ needs, all angles need to be considered. The most important core questions a client should consider about a new site or redesigned site are:

• Does it look good/professional?
• Does it look appropriate to my market?
• Is it easy to use for site visitors?
• Is it easy for me to use, maintain, add content, etc.?
• Can Google get to every page of the site we want it to?

Well, there are other questions also, but these are critical to get right. Designers tend to over-emphasis the look, while developers tend to overdo the programming/technology, and many times in ways that make the site hard to use and possible impossible for Google to crawl.

Having a business background primarily when I started building sites professionally in 1999, my primary concern was the practical matters, like the ones above. Then, overlay great looking graphics that support the site’s message and programming where it is called for to support the site’s intentions.

So I heartily agree with Aaron’s article and encourage you to read it. Here’s that link again.

My answer to him was the same as it had been the first time we spoke on the phone, the day I drove over to his office to meet with him, and pretty much every time I have been in contact with him since. His site (which we did not build) was absolutely NOT built to get conversions, meaning getting the site visitor to TAKE ACTION, to contact this business.

It’s not enough to get traffic, you’ve gotta get that traffic to DO SOMETHING that will give you the lead!

Despite the fact that our client specifically did not hire us to perform the revamp of his website that would help his conversion, I’m a nice person. And I truly want him to see – and GET – the great value we’re providing. So, I added some simple contact forms to his site.

BOOM! Overnight, leads started pouring into his inbox, and in the two weeks since we added the forms, he’s trending up. We have already reached his goal of how many leads he wanted from his site daily, but we still have a few weeks to go on our retainer, and will be seeing more and more as we continue to bring in more traffic.

What did we do? Simply found great, highly targeted keywords, optimized his site extremely well on page, started building links, and added a few forms. He went from a “useless” website to one that delivers very high quality leads right to his inbox. That’s fun!

(In case you’re wondering, I’m not going to reveal this site because of the competition that we are battling for search placement. I don’t want my good marketing techniques getting ripped off by the other sites in this space!)

–Lisa’s Answers–

I think there are other SEO issues that are more critical to bloggers than these, in terms of title and meta tags and avoiding duplicate content primarily. I actually don’t use plugins for these issues, as I’ve never found any that were totally satisfactory. We do some code adjustments that work much better.

1. My opinion is that URL structure is a non-issue. Google will waif about on this type of thing. One thing is best, then another. Filenames containing keywords used to be very helpful. Now not so much, in blogs or otherwise. It’s not worth spinning around on. All other factors being 100% the same, it will help. But that really never happens. And if all else where the indeed the same, I wouldn’t try to beat them on URLs…2. Shorter URLs are best. Back in the day with Alta Vista and then Yahoo, now with Google. Closer to root has always been best. But bots are smarter now, so you can have a reasonable 3+ level site if the architecture is good and see no detriment. IF the architecture is good….

3. Tags… ah…. tags. They’re wonderful in the blogosphere, not that important out of it. They’re a “blogosphere” child and will help bring traffic through Technorati and other such sites, but not all that valuable elsewhere. I know many will disagree on this, but it’s the cold data of dozens of sites we work on speaking here. We add on such an easy way to tag (that actually also helps client clarify their key phrases per post to help with other ‘layman’ SEO) that it’s totally worth doing for what benefit it brings.

4. He He, pagerank and nofollow – well, this is a BROAD and quite technical topic indeed! FIRST, you do need to be quite certain of what you’re doing in the overall sense of your site before trying to use “nofollow” in your site to push PR. Using nofollow can certain help a site with well thought out SEO architecture. As for blogs, there are loads of considerations with the way that content is dynamically generated that have to be addressed. Honestly, on a blog, I believe it’s more trouble than it’s worth to try to do extensive IA (information architecture) on them. I believe their power is in the ‘common man’ of the posts. And I think that’s part of why they are currently in favor with the engines.

You can certainly ‘nofollow’ certain blog pages, and even write the php to ‘nofollow’ more extensively, but my question is, why do that in the age of the long tail? I like to take a “traditional” website and do extensive IA on it with ‘nofollow’ and such, and then set up a blog for the “free for all long tail” factor and do traffic pushing.

Anyhoo, today we established a new relationship with a local modular home builder. We’ll be taking over their website maintenance and search engine optimization. Heck of a great guy, the owner, and I look forward to a long and mutually rewarding relationship.

His current site is terrific, his previous webmaster did a fantastic job of building a great site. Good usability, great on page seo, nice clean design. Just wonderful.

Except… the previous guy built a directory site “on his client’s behalf” – “to optimize the client’s site.” Except, the webmaster owns that site himself. And it outranks the client’s site. And it’s monitized.

Sorry, but I smell a rat.

Rebekah and I have daily conversations about our “high bar” approach in one way or another. I’ve been told plently of times that I leave money on the table by not running with stuff other web developers would.

But I have to sleep at night.

I’m sorry, but using the knowledge you gain in an industry, while being paid by a client, developing traffic network sites for fee… You just DON’T turn around and take that to outdo your client. Maybe the laws haven’t caught up with technology for now, but to me it’s fraudulant.

High bar or not. I sleep well.

This person who they had been paying actually built and manages multiple sites in the same niche, and is being paid to optimize them all. The original site ranks #1 for the top keyword phrase.

It is a BIG MISTAKE to hire someone that’s already working for all of your main competitors, who has longer relationships and more loyalty to those competitors. Really, that should be common sense. Our client told me they were paying over twice as much as the others, and that while the others were bunched up in the top 10, they were way below that. He was flabbergasted as to why that could be. Really, so was I.

I knew that the fella doing their optimization had to be up to something, and boy was he. Despite the hundreds of dollars a month being paid to him, I have found no evidence he did anything good. And worse, I found evidence he was doing BAD stuff. No, uh uh, not black hat even. I mean he appears to have been actively sabotaging the client!

1st – the most basic onpage optimization was not fully executed on the client’s website. Strike one.

2nd – there were very few links to the site. Actually around 50, and the other sites had hundreds. Strike two.

3rd – funny business in the .htaccess file. This server file was set up to redirect traffic AWAY from the client’s website if it were coming from any number of sources, including some small search engines, directories, and even myspace.com. We seriously think that any time the “SEO service provider” found a backlink into the site, he must have gone into the .htaccess file to discount it.

This whole thing made me feel sick to my stomach. On the other hand, we now have even more of a burning desire to blow the others away in the SERPs (search engine rankings). And the jerk who was ripping off our client, we can’t wait to KICK HIS A$$!