Best Practices

What most clients want to hear about search engine optimization is that a few hours adding some keywords to their site will rocket them to the number one result on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN for any and all searches that contain their product or service. In some industries that was possible 10 years ago. I doubt it’s possible in any industry today, and if you offer SEO services, it’s likely you’re going to be the one breaking the bad news to your customers.

Let’s start by making sure we’re all on the same page as to what SEO is all about. Most people only look at the first 10 or so results when they do a search. A few people will occasionally go as high as 20 or 30 if they are truly passionate about the topic. Above that, your page may as well not show up in the search results at all. So the goal of SEO is to optimize a page to appear as high in the search results as possible.

Now I’m going to outline some of the unpleasant truths you get to share with your clients.

Note the following list is based on the assumption that you are pursuing optimization strategies that you wouldn’t be embarrassed to explain in full to a representative from the major search engines. If you engage in black hat SEO, then you don’t need to tell your clients anything other than, “I’ll get you a top 10 ranking, but your site may be permanently banned sometime in the next few months.”

1.) Search engines hide the exact algorithms they use to calculate search results.
Depending on the sophistication of your customer, you may or may not be able to get away with using the word algorithm. The point here is search engine marketers as a community can compare notes and get a rough idea of the factors affecting result placement (title tags, link popularity, inbound link text, keyword density, et al) but you won’t be able to find a formula that lets you accurately predict what page modifications will produce an exact result.

Sugar Coating: Short of spelling out their algorithm, you can find recommendations straight from the mouth of Google on optimizing your site.

2.) Search engines are constantly tweaking the algorithms they use to calculate search results.
You are definitely trying to hit a moving target. Discounting the fact that new pages are being created and indexed all the time (I’ll get to that below) search engines are continually refining their methods. If not a single new page was created during the next year, you would still see your ranking bounce down and (hopefully) up as the months rolled by.

Sugar Coating: The changes are geared towards moving useful pages to the top of the rankings. Design your pages to provide value to people searching for that term, and you’ll benefit from search engine tweaks in the long run.

3.) New web sites that compete for your search traffic are being created all the time.
This item is pretty obvious to everyone, although your customer may not have considered the ramifications. What it means is that search engine optimization is an ongoing process. By all means spend a week tweaking your HTML, adding some original content, and landing inbound links from relevant sites. Realize, though, that the benefit of those action is going to fade over time as thousands of other website owners are tweaking their HTML, writing content, and acquiring links. A truly effective SEO strategy requires your regular attention.

Sugar Coating: At least Google, and likely the other major search engines, give some extra weighting to a site based on how long it has been around. Time is on your side.

4.) Ideally you should create a separate page for each search term you want to target.
On any competitive search terms, don’t expect great results unless you optimize the page for that exact term. Imagine a bed manufacturer with a “Kid’s Beds” page that includes the various styles of beds they create for kids. Knowing very little about how search engines work, the owner would like this page to appear at the top of the results for “kid’s beds”, “children’s beds”, “bunk beds”, “trundle beds”, “captains beds”, …

With a lot of work, this page may rank decently for several of these terms, but almost every optimization technique (except arguably inbound linking) is going to be easier with a separate page for each search term.

Sugar Coating: For some clients, this idea will be very unpleasant to swallow, but highly targeted pages can make your site appear more professional and (in theory at least) could have higher conversion rates.

5.) Changes that you make today may not affecting rankings for weeks or even months.
It takes a little time for the search engines to index the changes that you’ve made to your site and to any sites that link to you. Unfortunately you won’t be receiving an email from Yahoo! letting you know your optimization edits are now being accounted for in search results.

Sugar Coating: You can move the process along as much as possible by using Google’s Sitemaps to reflect when pages were added or modified. As of this posting, the other major engines have not come up with similar features. UPDATE: Yahoo and Microsoft have adopted Google’s standard for sitemaps. (via TechCrunch)

6.) Guaranteeing a page will appear at a certain ranking for an extended period of time is unrealistic.
As described in some of the above items, search engine results are not static. The ongoing changes made by competitors and the engines themselves mean that rankings are in a constant state of flux.

Sugar Coating: There is no way to sugar coat this one. It is what it is.

It may come as a surprise after all of that, but you can also share some positive news with your SEO clients. Many of the same changes you make to your HTML to make it friendly to search engines, also make it friendly to anyone visiting your site using a screen reader. The logic behind that is you are crafting the page with consideration towards anyone (or any bot) who only “sees” the text.