SEO is about attracting non-paid search traffic to your website. The idea is that a person searches the Web using Bing or Google, etc. and your site comes up in the non-paid search results. To that end, it’s important to make sure your website is easily understood by both people and machines.

• People = your target market, your ideal website visitors.
• Machines = search engines like Google and Bing.

It’s a problem if your website confuses people and they can’t easily find what they’re looking for. Or they can’t smoothly accomplish the tasks they want to complete (or you want them to complete).

But did you know it’s also a problem if your website confounds machines? It’s common for websites to have technical roadblocks that create problems for machines trying to understand or even find pages on your website.

Does your site need a makeover? Find out using…

The Portent 2014 SEO Website Makeover Checklist

Compare your website to this checklist. It’s not in any particular order so you can jump in and start your makeover pretty much anywhere on this list. You’ll be able to figure out if a checklist item is meant to make it easy for machines or for people. If not, just hit me up in the comments section at the end.

• Does your home page instantly and clearly communicate what you offer? Are you sure?
• Does each page have a page-relevant unique title tag?
• Does each page have a page-relevant unique meta description?
• Does each page have a clear and concise headline?
• Do your page URLs convey an indication as to the topic or content of the page?
• Do your pages use interesting unique images and make use of a relevant image ALT attribute?
• Does your page content truly inform or engage?

Don’t just answer “yes!” to the above questions, be objective and honest. The above list could keep you busy for quite a while… but here’s more:

• Are any pages on your website duplicates of any other page on your website (either by accident or on purpose)?
• Are any pages on your website duplicates of any other page on other websites you have (either by accident or on purpose)?
• Do any pages on your website contain text that is duplicated on any other website on the Internet (either by accident or on purpose)?
• Are topically related pages of content logically linked together in a way that’s useful to site visitors?
• Are any of the links on your site leading to “404 page not found” error pages?

Your content should be 100% unique on the Internet. Not 50% or even 99% unique, 100%. Broken links frustrate visitors and provide dead ends for machines so be sure to fix those. Got all that done? Let’s keep going…

• Is your site navigation easy to find, understand, and use?
• If someone landed on any page of the site, would they be able to instantly figure out where they were in the site hierarchy?
• Does your site have clear calls to action?
• Is your site rife with jargon and technical terms you use all the time but your target market does not use or understand?
• Do your site visitors get a clear indication of what will happen if they fill out a form, click a link, or take some recommended action?
• Do you provide a sitemap of pages in case someone wanted to see a complete “menu” of your website?

Here’s more stuff you need to attend to:

• Do your site pages load in a browser in less than 3 seconds?
• Do you have an XML sitemap?
• Are you making proper use of a robots.txt file?
• Are you making appropriate use of structured markup? (See schema.org for more info.)
• Have you set up Google+ authorship and/or publisher cross links?
• Is your site displaying well and is it usable on a smart phone?
• Are you putting content in technology that machines can’t understand like Flash or iFrames?

Got all that done already? Now check the following:

• Does your site code have huge blocks of JavaScript that could be moved to an external file?
• Does your site code have blocks of CSS that could be moved to an external file?
• Are you 100% sure that you have your analytics tracking tags deployed properly on each and every page of your site?
• Are you providing site search functionality to your visitors? Does it provide frustratingly irrelevant results?
• Does http://www. display in front of your domain name and also http://?
• Are all of your site’s links hyperlinking directly to the target URL, or do any of them pass through redirects?

Don’t stop now, you’re on a roll!

• Does Google Webmaster Tools report crawl errors you need to fix?
• Does Google Webmaster Tools report HTML improvements you need to make?
• Are images compressed?
• Are images properly scaled?
• Is your navigation still visible and usable if you turn off JavaScript in your browser?

Wrap up & TL;DR

This is not meant to be an “all-inclusive SEO checklist.” There is no such thing because every site has specific needs, problems, target markets, and technology stacks. When it comes to making your site better for both humans and machines, you want your distance from perfect to be as close to zero as possible.

I guarantee that by using this website makeover checklist you will find at least 3 things you need to fix or otherwise attend to with your team.

You’re welcome.

The post SEO Makeover for 2014: A Practical Guide for Businesses appeared first on Portent.

State of App Search: Needle in a Haystack

Have you ever tried to meet someone at Grand Central Station or some other incredibly crowded venue? It sounds so doable and yet it is so not. There are too many people, too many distractions and too much stuff in the way.

App (tablet and phone applications) stores, both iTunes and Google Play Store have the same problem. Both have in excess of 750,000 files to paw through, download, try, remove and lather, rinse and repeat. It is likely true that for any problem “there’s an app for that,” but not an app to find the app.

Now I know what you’re thinking. App stores are online and I can use the handy search feature to find the app of my dreams or needs. Well….maybe.  I ran a search using keyword productivity on both sites. In the search department, Google gets extra credit for a more pleasing search results display with icons, star ratings and a nifty description. However, points off for egregious self-promotion by soaking up 3 of the top 10 slots for Google Keep, Google Calendar (a productivity app?) and Google Drive.

Apple dispenses with search entirely and favors the top-down directory approach similar to that phone book you’re using to prop open the garage door (and equally as useful). An iTunes app category landing page is as easy to navigate as airport flight information boards. I am uncertain what the organization scheme might be, although it bears a striking resemblance to the one I use for my home office. I guess that Steve Jobs never had to use iTunes search or he certainly would have done something about that display.

So, if you want customers to find your app for either location, you will have to “make it so” yourself and here’s how:

On the page app optimization

As with traditional SEO, both app stores start with traditional information retrieval systems that emphasize the presence of the query terms in the body content and the placement on the page to put together a search results page. Position on this results page is based on magical thinking (for Apple) and a variety of algorithms (for Google).

Keywords

Apple encourages the assignment of keywords to your application and makes it as difficult as possible. They must be using some sort of Stone Age search in Cupertino, or they all know where everything is and do not need any sort of search functionality at all.

There is a 100 character limit to the keyword field that includes the required comma separators. There is no phrase matching. If you want your app to appear for a phrase like “business news,” the keywords would appear together, e.g. business, news. Google stopped paying attention to keyword metadata a long time ago and Google Play Store is no exception.

Name

For both the Google Play Store and iTunes, the presence of keywords in the app name is rewarded. The keyword-rich name should also include terms that reference the app’s functionality e.g. Weather+ International Travel Weather Calculator.

Apple limits the app name to 255 characters with full display on that page-o-links that serves as search results. For its Staff Picks on the Google Play homepage, app name display is limited to 17-21 (I have seen more at 17 than 21) characters (including spaces) with anything that follows represented by an ellipsis.

App icon

Icons are a very good idea and eye candy is the purpose. The icon appears on the download page as well as in the Google Play search results.

Details page

In iTunes, the details page is limited to 4,000 characters with 700 cited as a best practice. One screen shot is required with the ability to include four additional screen captures. The description of the application and functionality should be keyword-rich with a compelling call to action as customer interaction is a significant indicator of relevance. Additional components that can be included: an instructional video, customer ratings and reviews.

Categories

In iTunes the app will be listed under a primary category with the opportunity to select a second category for additional customer query option. The best practice recommendation is to use the customer pain point resolved as a guide for the second category.

Off the page factors that influence ranking

There are influences outside of download page text that can influence ranking in iTunes application search results. The primary off the page ranking factors are:

Downloads: the number and rate of downloads are key drivers of results placement.

Installation base: how many customers actually install the app.

Removals: whether customers dislike the app enough to shake off their lethargy to remove it entirely. Both Google Play and iTunes take note of uninstalls as an indicator of relevance.

Customer reviews and ratings: whether customers give you stars or actually write something down on the page. It is very important that you pay attention to the feedback from your users and respond in some way.

Recommendations

Optimize the application itself.

• Make sure that the performance speed is smokin’ fast
• Reduce the file usage weights
• Keep the application fresh with updates and enhancements

Build and sustain support from external assets.

• Website support: placement of a permanent download icon or graphic on your website
• Social media support: schedule tweets with a tiny URL, post to Facebook, pin on Pinterest and don’t forget regular updates on Google+ to sustain momentum

Reach out to key influencers.

• Contact app blogs and promotion networks to get them excited and talking about your swell new app!
• Encourage customer reviews and ratings

Gotchas for both

You will want to submit the app to both iTunes and Google Play Store at least two weeks before release as it takes time for the files to make their way through the Apple and Google processes. To do this, Google requires that you set up yet another account with the Google Play Developers Console to upload apps. The fee for doing so is $25. At least Apple lets you play without having to pay.

Is it just me or does this sound like the early days of SEO, the way it used to be 10 years ago with keyword sort-of-stuffing, key influencer outreach, and review “acquisition”? We might as well enjoy the waning days of this Luddite approach to SEO. No doubt Google is working on Panda-app as I write this post. Look for the icon below at the Google Play store. Or, more likely, it will come looking for you.

The post Get Found, Make Money: Optimizing Apps for Search appeared first on Portent.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the original bad boys of rock and roll have endured for a half century despite drug and alcohol problems, several changes to the band’s line-up, and occasional rumors of impending retirement or break-up. (I’m sure all of those “this is the final tour” rumors must have sold a lot of concert tickets over the years).

The first time I completely “got” the Stones was when I saw the movie “The Rolling Stones Rock And Roll Circus”, a film of performances by the Stones, The Who, and others, which was shot in 1968 but not released until 1996. Frontman Mick Jagger’s stage performance is fabulous – nothing like the manic, arena-strutting rooster impersonations most of us know him for, with the rest of the band solidly delivering.

You may or may not be a fan or even “get” the Stones, but one thing is undeniable: SEO is like the Rolling Stones. Sound far-fetched to you? Read on and become converted!

Mick Jagger

Once called “one of the most popular and influential frontmen in the history of rock & roll” with a performance style said to have “opened up definitions of gendered masculinity and so laid the foundations for self-invention and sexual plasticity which are now an integral part of contemporary youth culture”, Jagger has certainly garnered a ton of attention over the years both professionally and personally.

Every band needs a dynamic & engaging frontman as the primary focal point to captivate an audience’s attention. In SEO, a website’s search engine rankings are just like Jagger. People are captivated by Jagger’s movements onstage, and they’re similarly captivated by movements in their rankings. But just as Mick is not the only focal point the Stones present, rankings are not the only focal point in SEO either. In fact, many SEOs suggest focusing more on site traffic and conversions than rankings.

But when all is said and done, for better or worse, Mick gets the lion’s share of the attention and it’s the same with rankings in SEO.

Keith Richards

Expelled from college for truancy as a youth, tried on drug-related charges five times as an adult, and once called “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” Richards is the undisputed bad boy of the band.

Urban legends circulated that Richards routinely traveled to Switzerland to have his drug-riddled “dirty” blood replaced with fresh plasma. There were even unsubstantiated rumors that Richards was so jealous of the better-looking, hard-partying Stones guitar player Brian Jones that he contributed to or even somehow caused Jones’ drowning death in his own swimming pool in 1969.

Like Richards, SEO has a bit of a reputation problem. Our email in-boxes flood with promises that our site can rank #1 for any keyword we want starting tomorrow by hiring such-and-such SEO company. SEO is perceived by some to be on the same level as snake oil salesmen. Some see SEO as a profession dedicated to manipulating Google’s search results with our “evil SEO practices” (cue the evil laughter soundtrack).

All professions have good and bad actors and SEO is no different.  While Richards is probably laughing all the way to the bank about his bad-boy image, the SEO community struggles with a somewhat-tarnished reputation.

Ronnie Wood

A former member of well-known bands like The Jeff Beck Group, Faces, and The Birds, Wood  joined the Stones in 1975 to replace guitarist Mick Taylor. Wood plays rhythm, lead, bass and slide guitar. He also writes and co-writes songs, sings, and has released solo albums. On top of all of that, Wood is a well-known visual artist, hosts his own radio show, and has his own record company, “Wooden Records”. Clearly Ronnie wears a lot of hats.

SEOs have a lot in common with Ronnie because we have to wear a lot of hats too. We have to know how search engines crawl and index websites, as well as how HTML, CSS and JavaScript work. We have to know our way around analytics and paid search. We have to be conversant in user experience (UX) and conversion rate optimization. We have to be wizards with Excel, know how to read log files, and have a working knowledge of how various content management systems operate.

And that’s just scratching the surface of what an SEO needs to know and be able to do; there’s much more. Ronnie, I think, would dig being an SEO.

Charlie Watts

An accomplished jazz drummer, Watts joined the Stones in 1963. Watts’ demeanor on- and off-stage is much more subdued and calm, especially when compared with his highly flamboyant bandmates. Steadily drumming away on recordings and live tours over the past 49 years, Watts has done his thing with little limelight or personal controversy. Quietly and ceaselessly, Watts has contributed to the success of the Stones without much fanfare.

SEO is not as hip and trendy as social media marketing. SEO is not as immediately measurable as paid search – it takes longer to see results. But SEO quietly and ceaselessly drives traffic, and often the majority of it.

SEO is the steady drum beat that provides the solid backbone of traffic and conversions to websites. Social networking sites may come and go, and paid campaign budgets my shrink or dry up, but SEO just keeps on banging away with little fanfare or limelight. Just like Charlie.

England’s Newest Hit Makers – The Rolling Stones

That was the title of their debut album in May 1964. In the ensuing 50 years they’ve released more than two dozen studio albums and had numerous hits. But from time to time, rumors swirled that the Stones were going to stop rolling – that they were breaking up or retiring. Those rumors continue.

The term “SEO” was coined in 1995 and in the 19 years since, it’s cranked out ‘hits’ too. And of course anyone involved in SEO has heard the rumors and assertions that SEO is dying or even already dead. Yet, despite the many proclamations of SEO’s demise, it seems to just keep on rolling along… Just like the Rolling Stones.

What other ways do you think that SEO is like the Rolling Stones? I can hardly wait to hear your ideas – share them in the comments below.

The post 5 Ways SEO is Like the Rolling Stones appeared first on Portent.

Keyword research used to be so easy. You picked terms that the client wanted to rank high for, stuffed them onto the page, shake, bake and voila, the site is ranking in the top 3 search results for query.

Bad SEOs stuffed keywords in all of the wrong places, all over the page, and in same font color as the page background so that only the search spiders saw them. Good SEOs stuffed them into anchor text, heading and subheadings, and <title> tags.

And then things began to change: first in a good way, then in a not-so-good-way, and now maybe in a good way again.

A Brief History of Search Engines

Keyword research was easy because search engines were so dumb – I mean “fleece your little brother for his paper route money” dumb.

All they had going for them was the flimsy Term Frequency/Inverse Document Frequency formula that rewarded documents that had the most instances of the query terms in body text, along with some lightweight suppression clause so that long boring documents did not always get the top spots.  Yay early information retrieval.

The good days of gaming search engines came to a screeching halt with Google’s buzzkill PageRank algorithm. PageRank was based on the academic model that stipulated papers cited by other papers had to be better than those not so cited. Applied to the decidedly non-academic public Web, pages that had a lot of links pointing to them had to be more relevant than the others, right?

Peace and relevant search results lasted until the SEO community was able to figure out how to game this system with begging, borrowing and buying links. Google was shocked! Evidently, this did not happen in the hallowed halls of academia, at least not in the Stanford Graduate Computer Science program of the 1990s.

Waaaaaahlll Pilgrim, Google was not going to take that sitting down. (I have it on good authority that they take nothing sitting down because those stand-up treadmill desks are standard issue at the Googleplex.) They fire off the Hilltop Algorithm. Hilltop was one of the first algorithms to introduce the concept of machine-mediated “authority” to combat the human manipulation of results for commercial gain.

With Hilltop:

• Pages are ranked according to the number of non-affiliated “experts” that point to it, i.e. not in the same site or directory
• Authorities have lots of unaffiliated expert document on the same subject pointing to them
• Affiliation is transitive [if A=B and B=C then A=C]

The beauty of Hilltop is that unlike PageRank, it is query-specific and reinforces the relationship between the page and the user’s query. You don’t have to be big or have a thousand links from auto parts sites to be an “authority” and float to the top. And, to the rejoicing of searchers, it was soon adopted by the other search engines across the land.

Giddy with the success of contextual mapping, the search engines followed up with Topic-Sensitive PageRank.  This involved the geekiest of information retrieval methods, use of predictive analytics, and vector space modeling on a subset of the Web to analyze the context of query phrase term use in a document, in the history of all queries, and in the history of the user who submits the query.

As if Christmas in July was not enough for searchers, the search engines also laid down ontology (an organized schema of subject categories) supposedly derived from the Open Source Directory.  I don’t know about you but that looks a lot like the Semantic Web to me.

Ironically, as search engines got smarter, searchers got dumber. Most of them started to construct poor queries (56%), select irrelevant results (55%), and become disoriented and overwhelmed by the amount of information in search results (38%). Hmmm…maybe it is time to start taking a user-centered approach to optimizing websites for users?

User-Centered Keyword Research

User-centered keyword research lives up to its name by starting with what prospective customers would likely use to find the site. And the best place to find that information is your client.  Familiarize yourself with the client’s product space and vocabulary, ask questions, and look at their competitors.

Then, turn to Google Analytics to find out what is sending traffic and how it is performing. I look at what page they land on, whether they engage or bounce, and if they convert. If there is one tail, long or short, in SEO that is supported by data, “longer query = more likely to convert” is it.

Finally, swing by Google Webmaster tools and see how the search engine currently views site relevance by studying queries, impressions, AVERAGE (important distinction there) position, and click-through rate.

Next, compare actual site behavior with general search behavior using any one or all of my favorite tools:

Google Trends is not nearly a big enough return for the egregious and persistent invasion of our privacy, but it comes pretty close. Google Trends is a view into the long, dark, deep Google data mine of search behavior with the capacity to filter by geography or time.

The true delight lies in seeing Top and Rising search queries to the term phrases in comparison. It provides actual user search behavior. In the comparison below, the phrase “user experience” is more popular than “information architecture.” Note that a significant portion of the search around the general phrase is job-related based on the Top Searches information.

Google Trends

Yahoo! Clues offers many of the same data points as Google Trends with demographic information (age, gender) thrown in for good measure. The data is extracted from Yahoo! Search and is aggregated and anonymized. A Yahoo! Clues-specific feature is the Search Flow data that reveals what the user searched for before the term phase comparison and what they searched for after.

Yahoo Clues

We’ve all experienced the mostly annoying yet occasionally helpful search suggest, the list of query suggestions that appears as you start typing, and changes to meet the changes in your query.

Ubersuggest provides an easy to navigate, much less annoying, more useful aggregation of search suggestions from Google and other “suggest services.” In looking at the Ubersuggest results for query keyword research, I’d say that most folks want someone or something else to do the work for them.

Ubersuggest

As you can see from Ubersuggest, if you are looking for a keyword research tool, you are not alone in your quest. Which you choose, however, will be up to you. Some perennial sites in the top search results for “keyword tool” are:

• Google Adwords tool
• Bing Keyword Research tool (requires login as part of Bing Webmasters account)
• Wordstream
• SEM Rush
• Wordtracker
• Keyword Spy

Magical Thinking with Psychographics

At a search conference in July 2012, Marty Weintraub from aimClear delivered a groundbreaking presentation on using Facebook psychographics to develop a new type of user persona that can assist with remarketing.

On the aimClear blog, psychographics are defined as: “…a means of identifying users by interests, occupations, roles in life, predilections, and other personal characteristics” This involves mining social outlets for personal preference data, e.g. a political reporting website that targets individuals who listen to Rachel Maddow, Stephen Colbert and Al Jareeza, like the Muppets, and work for a middle of the road or left-leaning online or print publication.

These preferences are often articulated with term phrases developed by users and potentially reveal what they would use when looking for the client product while facing a search box.

In his book “How Buildings Learn”, architect Stewart Brand recommends waiting a few weeks after a building is finished before putting in the walkways. His reasoning? The footprints in the grass will tell you where people are walking to get in and out. So it is with smarter keyword research. Before stuffing a bunch of term phrases on a page, start with what searchers are using to find your client’s product or service. Then keyword research will be as smart as the search engines, or even smarter.

What keyword research tool do you find most helpful?  Let us know in the comments below.

The post The Evolution of Advanced Keyword Research appeared first on Portent.