We wanted to share with you a little more about our general and specific processes regarding search engine optimization, particularly because Google says to never trust a search engine optimizer who won’t explain their methods.  (Not that we don’t have a few trade secrets!)

Stage one analysis includes (but isn’t limited to):

Meta Data

• Picking the right keywords for every page, doing a deep dive statistical analysis on search volume, competition, and relevance of a word to your page.
• The same for your pages title, and the uniqueness, within a site, of the title.
• Usage of “alt” tags for all images and “title” tags for anchors
• The length of your meta description, it’s appearance on the search engines, phrasing, and inclusion of keywords and words listed on the same page.

Content Analysis – Some of this does appear during the design phase if you have Jacob Tyler create your site.

• Internal Linking Structure
• Where are links on a page?
• What are they linking to?
• Other pages on your site
• External linking for helpful sites or authority sources
• What is the link text?
• Spelling
• Grammar
• Four clicks or less to get to anything on the site
• Call to action
• Presentation and layout
• Use of heading text, structure, and page placement
• Use of bold, underlined, and italicized text and their placement on a page

Our in depth Search Engine Optimization service is primarily concerned with many other things including (but not exclusively) the following:

Standards:

• Page Doctype specification
• W3C Standards Compliance to newest technologies available
• Error free JavaScript
• Error free CSS
• Error free XHTML

Domain Setup

• URL structure
• Is your URL even right for you?
• Should you use a personalized nameserver

Architecture & Server Setup

• Where JavaScript and CSS files are included in a page
• Various kinds of page and file compression methods
• Apache Configuration
• Use of 404 error pages
• Internal redirection
• Server requests and lookups
• Number of documents on a site
• Number of files on a page
• Page load times
• Use of a Content Delivery Network service to reduce network hops
• A few other tricks up our sleeve…

Machine Informative

• Usage of robots.txt for search engines, dynamic where applicable
• Dynamic (where applicable) XML Sitemaps

Security – Because we’re digging into the nitty gritty anyway…

• Hiding the site’s underlying technology – techniques such as removing the “.html” or the “.php” from the user agent
• Hiding the CMS platform (when one is used) from the user agent

Better SEO Article 3 of 3

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When Jacob Tyler opened it’s downtown San Diego Web Design office in June of 2006, we had ample space that we thought frankly we would not outgrow (who’d a thought we are already busting at the seams) so in order to save some $$, we subleased the loft in our space.

In walks Mike Long, a phenomenal Creative Director that had applied for a job at Jacob Tyler soon after he moved from NYC to San Diego. We had spoken about a year prior but at the time there wasn’t a position at JTCG for him. Since we had a lot in common, we kept in touch and he ended up subleasing our loft to run his creative consulting business (Transit Creative) and work with Jacob Tyler on design projects. It worked great for us because we had the talent on board and in the office to bounce ideas and designs off of without paying a full-time salary.

In early 2008, Mike took on the endeavor of designing a book about the artist Steven Cedre Jr. Steven specializes in creating custom artwork for sneakers that is truly incredible. During some of the photo shoots in our office and meetings with him, we realized his art is truly exceptional and a talent that requires an incredible amount of patience and imagination. The book is FINALLY published and we are proud of what Mike has created. It really came out great and we are happy that we were here to see it happen.

It’s a GREAT read with amazing photography. If you’re into shoes or “vandalism” art from the roots of NYC, it’s a MUST buy. Please check it out and show support for an amazing idea coming to fruition, as well as amazing design work..

Good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practice is as simple as picking the right keywords.

We’ve all already been there and we all know that if it were that basic, we would all have number one search engine result rankings. Meta is important, but I’ve had top ranking sites without inputting any meta data.

If I just have a lot of links to my site from other sites, I’ll rank super high and get lots of traffic and make lots of money!

All links are weighted by importance. Links from directories earn you fewer points with search engines than a link from, for example, www.washingtonpost.com. A few really valuable links are worth more than many garbage links.

Links from an advertising banner may get you fewer points still. These aren’t totally invaluable if they are getting you pertinent traffic, and especially since traffic is calculated as part of your PageRank, but the link itself doesn’t earn you much.

Search Engine Optimization just isn’t for me. (Only if…)

The only viable reasons I can conclude for why search engine optimization isn’t for you include all of the following:

• You would rather pay higher costs for pay-per-click campaigns.
• You would rather by a Yellowpages ad.
• You have no competition for your product, service, or business name online.
• You don’t want more business.
• You don’t want business outside of your geographic target, localized to fifty square miles or whatever is a reasonable area for you or your staff to physically go hand out a business card.

Remember that people searching for you or your product or service are already searching for you, or your product and your service! Why not make it easier?

Better SEO Article 2 of 3

For part three, click here.

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By definition, search engine optimization is the process of making a site optimized for search engines. While this may seem a little bit of a simplified definition, let’s think about concepts of design and the intended audience. Would you choose English as your language for a Chinese website? What font is the right font? What colors should be used? I bet legibility, grammar, and spelling count for something, agreed?

Let’s take the ideas behind the design principles and apply them to a non-human audience, Googlebot. Googlebot, for example as one of the most important web crawlers, isn’t going to look at your photo except to see what alternate text will be provided if the image doesn’t load, and perhaps the file name, file size, and file type, which may or may not give Google any index-able material you care about having indexed.

Googlebot cares about the structure of your page in a similar way that any one of us would read a book, starting with the ISBN, then the number of pages, then by looking at the table of contents, looking up the number of illustrations and where they come from if referenced, and memorizing where all chapter titles are placed on a page. That’s how you read a book, isn’t it? SEO, in simplest terms, is making sure that your website is easy reading for Googlebot to kick back and relax with.

Wikipedia.org:

“As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.”

At Jacob Tyler Creative Group, we’re also able to take a deep dive at how search engines look at your web host server setup, and how to get the most out of your configuration in terms of speed, user experience, and of course being easily found. Note: Currently, we are offering this service for LAMP systems only, but these systems constitute most of the web so, most likely, you’re in luck.

Note: Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) should not be confused with Search Engine Marketing (or SEM) which has the broader scope of bringing in traffic from external sources. To cite Wikipedia.org,

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, SEM methods include: search engine optimization (or SEO), paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion. Other sources, including the New York Times, define SEM as the practice of buying paid search listings.

Most SEM strategies outside of SEO by nature are not concerned with either usability or with the ease of parsing through an electronic document. SEO, specifically, is not focused on external linking strategies, social networking, email campaigning, pay per click, and the many other types of online marketing. Questions like “Are you on Google Local business or not?” are irrelevant to SEO.

Stay tuned for our next Search Engine Optimization posting…

For part two, click here.

Better SEO Article 1 of 3

-jb