The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article: November 2008, Volume 7, Issue 11
Winning Big with SEO Fundamentals
by Josh Nannen, Director, Search Marketing, iProspect
Beyond the crisp weather, the brilliant foliage, and the pumpkins that dot our New England landscape, one thing is for sure: It’s football season! And today the game offers search marketers an important lesson.
Fundamental Value
For nearly a decade now, I have seen countless companies undertake search engine optimization (SEO). And from that experience, I remain convinced that most SEO success results from sound execution of the fundamentals. Just like in football.
In fact, most football games are won by consistently moving the ball up the field for modest gains, rather than by fancy and unexpected trick plays. And while it’s good to occasionally catch your opponents off guard with a flashier effort - like a hook and lateral - such plays should not comprise the foundation of a team’s efforts. It’s the fundamentals that help teams win big.
The same can be said for SEO.
But today’s search marketers have a hell of a playbook to choose from. Given that, it’s easy to get distracted - or even lured - by other opportunities like Twitter strategies, or podcast optimization, or even audience micro-segmentation. But while these other initiatives are worthwhile, they shouldn’t trump the fundamentals.
Back to Basics
Before you start exploring other SEO strategies, first make sure you’ve got the basics covered:
Crawability: Ensure that you have as few technical impediments to spider-based search engines as possible. To do so, perform a site:yourdomain.com in Google, Yahoo! and MSN to see how many pages of your site are indexed. What percentage of your pages do the engines know about? Is your site under-represented? If so, it could indicate “spiderability” issues? And if your site is over-represented, it could indicate duplicate content issues.
Content: Verify that your critical keywords actually show up in the content of your site. To do so, perform a site:yourdomain “my critical keyword” command in Google to see how many pages of your site actually contain that keyword phrase. Many a marketer has been surprised to learn that the reason they don’t rank on a certain phrase is because it doesn’t appear on their site!
Credibility: Capitalize on relevant link building where appropriate to build credibility in the engines. First, think of all of the companies or sites with whom you have a direct relationship – sister companies, partners, investors, other websites operated by different business units within your company – and ask yourself if they’d be a feasible (and sufficiently thematically relevant) source for an inbound link. Then perform a link:yourdomain.com command in Google to look at all those sites currently linking to yours (recognized by Google, at least publicly), and examine the context of those links. Are they semantically worthless links that read “click here,” or could they be enhanced if the webmaster used keyword-rich link text instead?
As you gear up for the next big game (by laying claim to the couch and the TV remote), first take inventory of your SEO program to see if you have the fundamentals covered. Executing on them could help you win big.
