Q: I just hired a developer for my small-budget site development project. Is there a Top 10 list of things I should insist on SEO-wise to be built into the site?

A: As we all know by now, SEO consists of several different endeavors:

• Technical SEO: ensuring a search-friendly and social-friendly site from a structural/technical standpoint
• Content/Editorial SEO: creating content that aligns with your target audience’s search behavior and keywords
• Link appeal and link-building

It’s obvious that your web developer’s work influences the technical side of SEO.  But structural issues and CMS capabilities will also have long-term effects on your ability to maximize your content/editorial SEO and link power.   Here are my top 10 developer requirements for SEO:

• Each page on the site must exist on a separate, unique, permanent URL that is indexable by search engine robots
• All pages on the site must be accessible by clicking standard HTML links, preferably no more than 3 clicks from the home page
• Text content on the site must be search-engine-indexable, standard, visible HTML text
• Search engine robots are like site visitors that do not accept cookies, do not fill out forms, do not log-in, and have limited javascript and CSS capabilities.  These robots should be able to read versions of each page that match as closely as possible what a human visitor would see.
• Every page on the site must have a unique, descriptive HTML title.   The CMS should allow the site owner to edit the HTML title separately from editing other elements of the page, such as the page heading.
• We recommend that every page on the site include a Facebook Like, Google +, and Tweet button.
• The CMS should allow the site owner to edit OG tags on each page.
• If there is any chance that identical pages will be seen via more than one URL (creating potential duplicate content in search engines), the CMS should allow the site owner to include/edit a canonical tag on each page.
• URLs should be meaningful, human-readable and include the page title or relevant keywords
• Images that are clickable should have ALT and TITLE tags that provide a text description of the destination page being clicked to.

Granted, every one of these won’t apply to every project, but for the majority of small budget jobs, this list will form a strong foundation on which you can build your SEO efforts.

And one last piece of advice: communicate like crazy and stay on ‘em.  If you don’t have an outside SEO vendor involved in the project, you will need to serve the role of SEO watchdog during development.

Q: I have an ecommerce site containing a useful library of product information that the manufacturer allows me to use on my site.  My site was hammered in Google’s Panda update, and I think it was because of this “duplicate” content.  What should I do now?  I don’t want to remove this library because it is useful for my customers.

A: Even though this library of content is genuinely helpful for your site visitors, it could be similar to the low-quality, “stub”, or content farm materials that were punished in Google’s Panda update.  To make matters worse, the product information library you’re describing is probably also present on many other sites as well.  These two factors are both likely to be viewed negatively in Google’s eyes.

To play it safe, the easiest thing you can do is to deindex all these pages using either the robots.txt file or a robots meta tag on the concerning pages.  This way, the materials can still help your website visitors, without putting your site at any risk for Panda issues.

If deindexing the content is not an option, then you should work on improving the content, with an eye toward improving the user engagement on these pages.  What can you do to make these pages more unique, more interesting, and more likely to be a satisfying experience for searchers who land on these pages?

Not interested in rewriting hundreds or thousands of pages? Here’s a hybrid approach you might try:

• Deindex any pages that have a 90% or higher bounce rate
• For pages that have better (lower) than 90% bounce rate, work on improving content.  Possible ways to improve content:
• manually add your own links to related materials elsewhere on your site.  Make them intriguing or attractive enough to encourage visitors to click on them; remember your goal is to engage visitors and prevent bounces.
• manually add commentary/analysis that makes these materials more useful.  Be sure this is unique and well written.
• Proofread.
• add a prominent Google +1, Facebook Like, and Tweet button
• In addition to these steps, you should also pursue other SEO efforts, especially link-building, in order to gain stature in the Post-Panda search world.

Like any SEO effort, approach your Panda recovery with an iterative mindset.  Make some changes, watch for results over a several-week period, and repeat.  And a final word of wisdom: Keep the user experience a priority, and you can’t go wrong.

Q: We have tons of great videos on our website. How can we get those little video thumbnails that sometimes show up in Google search results?

A: When Google understands that there is a video presented on a web page, it will often display a thumbnail as part of the search result for that page, as shown here:

(The exact layout of your results may vary, since Google is constantly tweaking its video result display.)

For the best chance at getting video thumbnails for your pages, you should embed videos on your site in a way that Google can easily recognize AND send Google as many signals as possible indicating that you have a video on the page. Here are some tips that can help:

• Include each video on a separate URL
• Embed your video in Quicktime or a standard Flash video player.  Google can’t crawl through a complicated Flash file, so if you use Flash, so we suggest using the built-in Flash video component for FLV playback using a hard coded URL path to the FLV streaming source (it’s OK if this is an off-domain location).
• Create a Google Video Sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools: click here for Google’s video sitemap instructions.
• To add even more signals that Google can read, tag the videos using RDFa: click here for Google’s video RDFa instructions.
• Use Video OG tags.  These are intended for social media, but Google sees them too, and we’ve seen clear evidence that Google will recognize video information in OG tags. See more about how to use Facebook OG tags.
• It is OK to host your videos on streaming service such as Brightcove.  However, you will probably be on your own when it comes to generating a video sitemap or well-formatted OG tags.

Video SEO is changing fast! About two years ago, video thumbnails were dominated by YouTube and Metacafe.  These days, YouTube still has a dominant role, but other domains are presented among the featured thumbnails more and more.  Watch this blog for updates in this quick-moving space.

Q: Hi! I’m very confused about outbound links. I was told by a SEO firm that outbound links were A Bad Thing as they canceled out your inbound links. But it seems this is not the case.

A: Outbound links are not A Bad Thing and they don’t cancel out your inbound links.  In fact, a “natural” linking profile for a quality website would normally include outbound links, as it is natural for  most quality sites to provide links to other resources.

Outbound links are only bad if they are done as a part of a link exchange or if you’re being paid for providing links that are not tagged with “nofollow.”  In that case, your site could be penalized by search engines.  I would certainly get rid of any outbound links that you may have created as a part of a link exchange scheme of any sort.

You should also check your outbound links periodically to make sure that they aren’t pointing to “bad neighborhoods.”  Sometimes good sites go under, and the domains are taken over by squatters, spammers, malware, porn, etc.  Your site’s status on search engines could be damaged if you link to these – not to mention your credibility with your human audience!

Lastly, it’s reasonable to link to your own website pages as a priority, rather than other sites.  For example, if you have a page on your site that features “tea cozies” it certainly makes more sense from an SEO perspective for your home page text to link to your own “tea cozies” page rather than pointing to some other site’s “tea cozies” page.

My advice is to link out to sites if you think they will benefit your human visitors.  This might include sites that offer related, but not necessarily competing services or products. For example, if you market tea cozies, you might link out to your favorite brands of tea. Outbound links  are also important as part of an overall strategy of social marketing and participatory blogging.  Outbound links can also be linkbait – for example, let’s say you link to a travel blog while criticizing it for missing the mark on the most charming high tea destinations. People in your target audience might be drawn into a conversation.

Naturally, if providing links to other resources feels forced or unnatural on your website, or if you don’t think it will benefit your human visitors, then you shouldn’t do it.

Q: Does Google care if I update my site frequently? Will doing so improve my ranks?

A:  “Yes” to the first question, and “maybe” to the second.

At this moment, the SEOs of the world are still getting used to the new Google landscape of real-time results, as well as searching options that include “Past 24 hours” and “Latest.”

Google now can, and often does, notice and react to new or newly modified text on your site within hours of when you made the changes.

It makes a lot of sense that Google would favor freshness, as delivering fresh results is a big bragging point for Google these days. (And Google does have significantly fresher search results than slowpoke competitors Bing and Yahoo!.)

In our recent client work, we’ve experienced a repeated pattern: Optimize a page properly, rank better pretty darn quickly…in hours, not days or weeks as it used to be.

On the flip side, we’ve also noticed another pattern: The original ranking boost tends to be offset by a subsequent “correction” period, when ranks drop down. This drop is anywhere from a tiny slide to something more significant, but, at least in our experience, not back to baseline.

Why would Google first boost ranks for fresher pages and then kick them downward? It’s not necessarily to allow fresher content from competing sites to take over the top ranks. (That may be the case in high-chatter-level industries on the web, but it’s not the case in some of the sleepier industries in which we’ve seen this happen.) This phenomenon could be for a couple of reasons:

With the increased importance of real-time search, Google may be sacrificing quality assurance in favor of freshness. Google may have a “rank first, vet later” approach, and the downward correction may occur after Google takes the time to fully process the page relative to competing pages.

Just like a new text ad placed into rotation in AdWords, Google may be giving updated pages a little extra exposure, to get a chance to gain clicks and inlinks. In other words, Google may be temporarily increasing exposure to updated pages to quickly gauge their “performance.”  This puts additional pressure on you, the site owner, to publish useful, compelling, meaningful content that’s properly targeted to your audience.

What does this mean for your site?

• Consider optimizing your site or launching new content in phases, not all at once, to keep a “rolling inventory” of your pages in play in Google’s search results, and to send a signal to Google that your site is frequently updated.
• When you find that pages with fresh content have gained higher ranks, don’t be upset by a subsequent drop. (But DO be upset if you drop below your baseline!)
• Don’t modify a page randomly (Change “the” to “a” in the page title, for example) and expect rank improvements. Google may be a lot of things, but it isn’t dumb enough to reward you for that. Make real improvements or real updates, or expect poor results.

We’d love to hear from you about your experiences with fresh content. Have you experienced this up-then-down scenario before? Tell us about it in the comments!

Q: I am a small photography business with no technical expertise. I started building my photo portfolio website in iWeb, but someone told me that an iWeb site would never have any ranks in Google. Is this true?

A: iWeb sites in their default format can have huge flaws that could severely hamper the search engines’ ability to index and rank them nicely. For example, the program might put blocks of text into graphics rather than search-engine-readable text, or it may not give each individual page a unique HTML page title. These flaws can be at least partly overcome with an SEO add-on called Rage’s iWeb SEO tool.

If you’re not wed to the iWeb idea, we suggest using a blog authoring tool instead. WordPress is great for non-technical folks and there are many free templates (called “themes”) available. Visit WordPress to choose a template that will meet your design needs and also set the site up with good search engine optimization without a lot of heavy lifting.

Q: We have a successful website in Australia, but we are thinking of moving to a US-based host in order to take advantage of lower rates. I’ve heard that this might affect our Google ranks in Australia – is this true?

A: Google (whether Google.com.au or Google.com in Australia) will typically do its best to match the country of origin on a website to the location of the searcher.

There are many ways that Google might try to figure out where a site’s home country is, and these include:

* the domain country (.fr, .au, .uk etc.)
* geotargeting as set in your Google Webmaster Tools account
* hosting server location.

If your target audience is located in Australia, we suggest that you try to match all of the above with your target audience. However, our guess is that as long as the first two bullet points are matched to your home country, the hosting location won’t be an issue.

Read more about this on Google’s blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/10/better-geographic-choices-for.html

Q: Etsy users are all abuzz about this article: “Etsy is Lowering Your Google Search Rating by Messing with Your Meta Tags” Just wanted your expert opinion as to whether this is accurate.

A: In the article, an Etsy member complains vehemently about Etsy adding text at the front of the crafter’s HTML Title. So, for example, if the crafter’s title was: “Yellow Fuzzy Bumpy Hat” the Etsy title would read: “Handmade Accessories on Etsy – Yellow Fuzzy Bumpy Hat”.

Technically, it’s correct that Etsy’s additions to people’s titles might be messing with ranks. We always keep our HTML titles at 66 characters or fewer because that’s how Google truncates the first line of the search listing. In addition, we have reason to think that the first part of the title is the most important. That is, we think it is weighted more heavily by Google and has a bigger influence on ranks.

HOWEVER, let’s look at the big picture: Etsy.com is a very high-authority site on the web. It has over 600,000 links pointing to it from other sites, which is very impressive and difficult to get. It has a Google PageRank value of 7 out of 10, which is, again, very impressive and difficult to get. In addition, Etsy appears to be keyword-optimizing its page titles in a strategic manner, so it’s adding good keyword-optimized text like “Handmade clothing on Etsy” and “Vintage on Etsy.” It’s not like they’re adding irrelevant text like “cheap mortgages die crafters die” – they’re trying to be found for what their crafters are selling!

Etsy is an internet heavyweight and, if you want your product to benefit from Etsy’s visiblity and traffic, then co-branding seems like a reasonable tradeoff to us. In fact, co-branding a search listing as “Etsy” is likely to increase click-throughs in the search engine because the name lends a level of familliarity and trust. Displaying products on the Etsy.com domain is giving the average crafter a shot at good rankings that they wouldn’t likely get otherwise.

And, one last point: It’s Etsy’s site, and Etsy has every right to brand its site the way it wants to.

Our suggestion to crafters: Check the HTML titles that Etsy is generating for your products, and tighten up your product titles with the foreknowledge that you are losing some characters to work with.

Q: I’m a newbie reading your “Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day” book, and I had a question. On one hand I’d like my target keywords to be general and broad. However, these are highly competitive terms, and the big boys already have a leg up on them, so I was considering going after more specific keywords, [names of individual products] that I carry. Problem is that I have over 6,000 [individual products].

Should I be going for more general terms? Should I go after specific product names? Do I choose my 10 most popular products to optimize for? What if those products change in popularity over the months, and I just spent months trying to optimize for them?

A: Your situation is well-suited to a “long tail” approach to keyword optimization. This means that rather than selecting a short list of 10 or so keywords, you will dedicate your site to ranking well for a wide range of keywords, with all pages following site-wide general optimization guidelines. Each of the many thousands of product names may not get much of search volume, but in aggregate, this “long tail” provides a large amount of traffic.

For example, let’s say you have a shoe store and you decide that optimizing for specific shoe model names is the way to go. Do some keyword research on a sample set of product names (perhaps 5) to determine how people are searching. Are they searching for just the name, or something like “buy XXX online,” or any other variations? Do they include a brand name too? (as an aside, these patterns might change seasonally, so be sure to look at year-round numbers rather than just current numbers). Once you know what word patterns you’re targeting, you work on optimization for a TYPICAL product landing page. For this page, you make up general rules such as:

• HTML Page Title always follows the formula “Joe’s Discount Shoes: Buy [shoe name] Online” (or whatever your chosen formula is)
• Product Name always follows the formula: “[brand: shoe model]” (or whatever your chosen formula is).
• Description always includes “buy [brand: shoe model] online…”
• URL is always /brand-shoe-name.html
• Product photo always includes an ALT Tag: “Shoes: [Brand]: [Shoe Model]“
• Navigation text always includes shoe model name

(Note these are all examples and you should develop your own list).

In addition to the above, you may wish to choose a small number of generic, highly popular terms and to target these on your home page, or even include them sitewide, by incorporating them into your formulas. This combination of “queen bee” keywords (popular terms that get royal treatment on your site) with “long tail” keywords (lower volume keywords with a large number of different landing page possibilities) is often a powerful SEO strategy.

The basic principals in the book don’t change, but you’ll be applying them to ALL your pages rather than just a set number of landing pages.

Q: The listings for my website don’t look very good. The titles and descriptions are weak in the summaries captured by these search engines. I have tried everything: writing new descriptive text on the page, correcting the meta description and page title, but the SERPS are not responding to the changes. The titles and summaries always stay the same.

A: Here are two possible explanations for the problem you’re having:

(1) Your listings may be showing titles & descriptions culled from directory listings rather than your page HTML Title & Meta Description. To find out your site has a listing on Yahoo! and Open Directory, try searching within those directories. Open Directory can be found at www.dmoz.org, and Yahoo! directory can be found at http://search.yahoo.com/dir . If the listings you see in those directories match the titles & descriptions that have been bothering you, then you’re in luck – this is an easy fix. In order to stop Google & Yahoo! from showing directory titles & descriptions in search results, you simply add a tag to the <head> section of the page instructing them not to do so. The format of the tag is this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noydir, noodp”>

The next time the robot visits your page, this change should go into effect and you’ll see your own titles & descriptions (or snippets from page content). For a full list of tags that you can use in the “robots” meta tag, see our page: How to Use the Robots Meta Tag.

(2) Another possibility is that the robots are coming to your site so rarely that you aren’t seeing your changes in place in a timely manner. This is possible if your site has no – or few – links pointing to it. To find out if this is your problem, you can do two things: look at the cached version of the page listing, by clicking on the small “cached” link that shows up in your Google listings. Here, you will see a date when Google last gathered the page. You can also find this information by signing up for Google Webmaster Tools and looking at the indexing statistics from inside the tool. If it turns out that your problem is a lack of visits, your best bet is to increase the number of links pointing to your site.