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

-jb