Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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• Are you unintentionally spamming the search engines? Search for old pages on

your site that are still live and displaying the same content as your new pages.

Check to make sure your pages aren’t doing something silly and spammy, like

displaying text that’s the same color as the background.

• One of our favorite mysteries to investigate: Exactly which page on your site

does Google think is your “official” page? (You learned about a related topic—

canonical URL problems—in the section “Week 5: Site Structure Improvements”

in Chapter 8.) Search for your organization’s name and check the URL that

Google returns for this search. It may be your home page, or it may be an alter-

nate domain, or it may something else deep within your site. Are you surprised?

Dismayed? What’s the reason that this URL is displaying? Is it the number of

pages linking to this page? Is it that the “official” URL is the only listing your

site has in the Open Directory?

• Do you know how to search like an expert? Try using advanced search opera-

tors on your favorite search engine. For example, Yahoo! allows you to build

your own search shortcuts. You can define a shortcut so you can type just

“!pix” into the search box and Yahoo! will automatically search for “pictures of

ethanol vehicles” or whatever you prefer. Or, try one of the numerous built-in

shortcuts, listed here:

http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/

. Are there any

that your target audience might be using?

• Are your competitors tracking their conversions using Google Analytics? Peek

into their source code and look for the Google Analytics tracking tag. (Just

search for the text string “google-analytics” in their code, and you’ll see the

script.)

• Are there any additional domains that your organization should own? For example,

do you own a .org domain name but not the .com? If a searcher had to guess at

your site’s URL, what do you think it would be? And, when is your current domain

set to expire? Make sure you don’t inadvertently let it run out.

• Howz yore spelleng? Search for misspellings of your product or service and see

what comes up.

• Do a little volunteer work for the search engines by helping them clean spam

out of their listings. Every major search engine allows you to report spammers;

Google’s spam reporting tool can be found at

www.google.com/contact/

spamreport.html

• What are people saying about your organization on discussion boards? Look to

Lycos Discussion Search at

http://discussion.lycos.com

to find out. Or, see where

you stand on the blogs at

www.blogpulse.com

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