Search Engine Optimization

How long ago did you last sit down and go through your website with a fine toothed SEO comb and optimize each page? If you’ve been actively engaged in a link building campaign for the last few years, it’s probably been a while, right? On site optimization, in my opinion, should be the first phase in any SEO campaign. After all, what good is an increase in traffic to a site that isn’t prepared to convert? (But that’s an argument for another day!) However, if all your recent SEO efforts have been focused on link building that may mean it’s time to revisit your on site SEO!

First off, take a look at pages you haven’t updated in the last 6 months or so. Is all of the information still accurate and up-to-date? It’s very easy to forget to swap out old whitepapers and other industry resources for the latest versions. Get your site ready for 2012 and make sure all the content is still applicable to your target audience. Have there been any recent developments in your industry that negates your old resources? If you want people to trust your brand as an industry expert, they need to know your site is current and has its finger on the pulse of your industry.

You should also make sure that any offers/specials/deals on the internal pages of your site are still relevant. If it’s almost Christmas and you’re still toting your Labor Day sale, that doesn’t exactly build confidence in your visitors. Make sure you 301 redirect all the links that pointed to those old offer pages to a different page. Better yet, create a new page where you post all your sales/promotions (mycompany.com/sales). That way you can focus on building links to one page and freshen up the content as needed.

You should also look at the conversion rate of your pages, identify which pages are underperforming and try to figure out why. Could that page use a little more content to drive home your messaging? Are the keywords you targeted on that page no longer relevant? Would changing up the call-to-actions have any impact? Remember that each page of your site has the potential to be a landing page. You want to make sure that every page is optimized as best as possible to help your overall conversion rate.

It’s important to remember that SEO is long term process and that it evolves with times. As search behavior changes and the search engines update their algorithms, you want to make sure your site is in the best possible shape so it can succeed. Don’t forget to revisit your on site SEO once in a while and make sure everything is up to par!

For smaller site owners, this isn’t a terrifying prospect. While the entire optimization process (keyword research, rewriting content, creating Meta tags and descriptions, etc) can take a while from start to finish, a website that only has 50-100 pages isn’t going to have to spend the next month implementing changes. That may not be the case for much larger sites and their owners. For a site with 1,000+ pages (most likely an e-commerce site), on-site optimization is going to take much longer and will have to be implemented over time.

Here are a few tips for making sure that every page gets optimized:

1. Check out what pages Google has indexed
You can either use the site operator search (site:YourURL.com) right in the Google search or (for more accurate results) check out your Google Webmaster Tools account. You want to get it from the horse’s mouth and find out exactly what pages of your site Google has indexed*. Every and all pages indexed by Google need to be properly optimized!

*This is also a good time to make sure that your site has been properly indexed by Google. Did you add any new pages recently that aren’t showing up in your reports? Your might need to resubmit a new XML sitemap.

2. Create a spreadsheet
Using an XML sitemap tool (I recommend http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/), you should create a text file of all the pages on your website. It will put your website into a Notepad document, which you can then transfer to an Excel document with each URL in its own line. As you go through your site you can check off each URL when you finish optimizing it. This will help ensure you don’t accidentally skip or miss any pages.

3. Weigh time vs. return
This is for the actual optimization process. When it comes to deciding which pages you are going to optimize first, it’s important to weigh time versus return and identify which pages of your site are the most valuable to your company. For instance, an e-commerce site would need to identify which product pages generate the most revenue for the company. These pages have the highest conversion rate or might be some of the more products on your site. These are the pages you want to optimize first and get live as soon as possible. Then you can roll the rest of your site out in batches.

It’s important to remember when optimizing your site that you don’t just focus on the product pages or homepage. Many companies often forget about their Contact Us page or About Us page and so forth. While these pages may not get the traffic that other pages on your site gets, they are a great place to go after branded keywords.

An ecommerce site could have thousands upon thousands of pages of products. Just look at the online shopping giant Amazon; they probably have millions of product pages. Ecommerce sites that only sell one kind of product (cameras, shoes, furniture, etc) might have fewer pages overall, but by no means is it a small amount. On-site optimization is the process of going through you site, page by page, and tweaking each page so it is more search engine friendly. Many e-commerce sites fail to fully optimize their site mostly because of how large they are, but it still has to be done. It takes a lot of time, but it is almost always worth the effort.

Here are 3 ways you can better optimize your ecommerce site:

Create unique product descriptions
One of the biggest problems with many e-commerce sites is duplicate content. You might sell a lot of products that are very similar (or came from the same manufacturer) so the product descriptions are very formulaic and repetitive. For instance, a clothing retailer might describe one pair of pants as “Our boot cut jeans are designed to flatter your curves without losing their shape!” and the second style of pants as “Our wide legged trouser jeans are designed to flatter your curves without losing their shape!” It’s the same content, just the product changed. Each product page (boot cut jeans vs. wide legged trouser jeans) has its own URL; it needs unique content. Search engines are known to penalize sites they find guilty of duplicating content.

Simplify your internal linking structure
Most traffic doesn’t come to an e-commerce site through the homepage, they arrive via one of the product pages. You have to make it easy for them to navigate your site regardless of how they got there. You want to minimize the amount of clicks it takes your visitor to get from one page of your site to another. A dropdown menu is a great way to help flatten your site structure. That way, if your visitor wants to jump from jeans to blouses, they don’t have to go all the way back to the homepage to do so.

Another way to simplify your linking structure is to recommend product pages to your visitor based on what product they are currently looking at. They might need a new purse to match the dress they are looking at, or maybe a pair of earrings. For instance, Amazon has a “customers who bought this item also bought” section. It’s a good way to keep visitors clicking through your site and filling up their cart.

Include customer reviews
Another major problem with e-commerce sites is that they don’t have a lot of content to begin with. Other than the product description, what else can you say? You need to give the search engines enough content to read so your site will get pulled to match more searches. One way to do this is to include consumer product reviews on the product page. This gives the search engines more content to read and also creates a 3rd party endorsement for your product. People are very social when it comes to shopping online. They want other people’s opinions before they buy. A real consumer review goes a long way in convincing someone to act.