So many articles and other blog posts are starting to focus on what will be new in 2010 and how search will change.  While it is good to focus on the future, let’s not forget that there is still time in 2009 to work on optimizing your website.  While search is always changing and 2010 will be a year of change and new tactics, you need to crawl before you can walk and then ultimately run.  In the next few weeks, focus on some basic items that can help your site now and well into the future.  Below are some things you can focus on right now.

• Keyword research in my opinion is one of the most important aspects to SEO.  If you are focusing your content on the wrong words and themes, people may be finding your site for the wrong reasons and then they will leave because your content is not what they expected.  Now is a great time to conduct some keyword research and make sure that your content is focusing on the right keywords and ultimately the right themes that will attract and engage new visitors.  Use Google’s free keyword tool to get an idea of what people are searching for related to your business.  Please find it here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.  

• Do you have a blog?  Are you posting to it every week like you said you would?  If not, this is a perfect opportunity to add content and more keyword relevance to your site.  As many know, blogs are inherently search engine friendly because of their structure.  Implementing a blog can also add more pages to your website which will give the search engines and ultimately your visitors more content to consume.  If you are already posting to your blog every week, are you creating content that your users want to consume?  Now is a great time to mix up the type of content you offer.  Blogs are effective because you can incorporate photos, embed videos, podcasts and more.  The greater the effort that you put into your blog, the more you will get out of it.  Before the year end, try to do something different with your blog to make it stand out from the pack by using a photo or podcast.  Shoot a video, upload it to YouTube, embed it into your blog and then write about it.  Have fun with it and you will see the rewards.  

• Another very important aspect of SEO is link building.  While link building is hard work and often is a long and strenuous process, there are some simple things you can do to at least ensure that the links you have are working for you.  If you don’t have the time to research and find new links, at least conduct a link audit of your site.  Begin by looking through your own site to make sure you don’t have any internal links that are broken.  Next you can use Yahoo’s Site Explorer, http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/, to get a good idea of what links you already have.  This tool allows you to download an excel spreadsheet of these links.  Make a schedule for the next few weeks to check out 10-15 links a day and make sure the information is still accurate and the links are still working.  If any information is incorrect, or the link is pointing to the wrong page, see if you can contact the webmaster of that site, or update your listing in a directory to ensure that you are getting the most relevance out of that link.

Fundamentals are the basis for good SEO and good website marketing.  Make sure you have these basics down before you move on to the advanced steps.  Once you have accomplished these steps, you will be positioned to take more advanced tactics.

Focusing on just one aspect of SEO can hinder more than help your optimization efforts. For instance, only taking care of your keyword research can prove a futile effort if search engines are unable to crawl your site. Having too much code on the page can increase the code to content ratio, thus reducing the density of the targeted keyword for that page.

Also, if you set up your robots.txt file incorrectly by not writing the correct instruction to not index certain pages, ones optimization efforts can be thwarted. If a large website with thousands of pages only wants the most important pages indexed, the search engine spiders may only index a certain portion of the site and may not be able to include the more important pages in its index. Another factor that may hinder a website’s performance if not included in optimization is the lack of quality inbound links to the site. You could have the best web content in the world, but if people are not linking to it, the lack of traffic to the site could make the rest of the optimization worthless.

It’s also important to ensure that all of the meta data on the site is as unique as possible. To increase the reach in the search engines for multiple search terms, keeping your titles, descriptions and keywords as unique as possible can make the world of difference in search engine indexing.

To conclude, it is intelligent to have a holistic approach to SEO as opposed to only utilizing one aspect. To truly give your website the best chance to rank well in the search engine results pages, fixing multiple SEO issues can only serve to give you that extra edge.

Page load time is an important factor in website optimization if only for the fact that if the pages of your site take too long to appear, users can become impatient, stop the load and go to another website. In fact, this is one of the big reasons I was so fond of Google right from the start – their nice clean homepage design had one big advantage over their competitors at the time – it came up quickly and gave me what I wanted right away without making me wait for pictures and other Flashy stuff to load. So we know that fast load time is good for users but what effect does load time have on search engine rankings? This is a question that comes up quite often. Matt Cutts of Google recently asked for topic suggestions for his latest video and this was the number one question.

So, can a delay in page load time affect your search engine rankings? The short answer is yes. Even if load time is not directly a factor in the search engine algorithms, slow load time could lead to a loss of rankings for a website – particularly a very large website. The reason is that in order for your pages to rank to their full potential in the search engine results, search engines need to have accurate information about them. Both the content on the page and the linking structure of the page are important factors in the search engine algorithm.

To illustrate further, consider this diagram to be a rough model of a site’s linking structure. If the page represented by the node highlighted in yellow isn’t crawled by the search engine spider, all the other links that originate from it may not be found either, and that can affect not only the ranking of the top page but also the ranking of all the other pages beneath it, even if the search engine spiders can find those pages another way. This is because they won’t have the full information about how these pages are linked together.

If search engines do not see the full linking structure of a page because it takes too long to crawl the links on your site, linking structure information is not included in the index and the page will rank lower in the search results than it deserves. This is why including an xml sitemap on your site is not good enough to get individual pages indexed and ranked. Search engines have to see how the pages fit together as well.

Search engines cannot give you any credit for something they don’t see. The spiders have a limited amount of time to crawl a site and if page load time is too long, they are less likely to fully crawl your site and that can affect your rankings. Recently, Live.com’s Webmaster Blog did a special four-part series describing special optimization issues for large websites that featured some excellent advice for webmasters with tips for optimizing content, site structure and server configurations. Helping spiders get at your content as quickly and efficiently as possible is an important aspect of search engine optimization so load time should always be given a high priority in any large-scale website optimization project.