The age old axiom of, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink” has had so much meaning for me over the last few weeks with the latest “algorithm update”. In actuality, Google makes so many updates a year, that this isn’t really an “update”, just a reinforcement of SEO philosophies that I and other SEOs have been preaching for years: “low quality websites will be penalized in the long-run!” Don’t believe me? Read this blog post by SISTRIX: http://www.sistrix.com/blog/985-google-farmer-update-quest-for-quality.html.

Data aside, while I do feel a little sorry for some webmasters, I can see Google’s point of view. Google is a search engine that wants to serve pages in their results that are relevant and provide a favorable user experience. Good user experience can mean a multitude of things: interesting and relevant content, fast page load times etc. For Google to stay the number one search engine in the world, they need to ensure that their search results are the best search results you can find, anywhere. While other search engines like Bing and Ask may be a little less stringent in their webmaster guidelines, their algorithms just aren’t as sophisticated as Google’s in that they can be a little “naïve” with the results they serve.

Google’s algorithm was built on the foundation that the amount and quality of the inbound links pointing to a web document should be a major signal when ranking pages. Google also want to present the most relevant, topical (if need be) and compelling data that they can. With the plethora of Google algorithmic updates per year, it’s possible that Bing may fall by the wayside. The only real way to detect any obvious differences between the algorithms of both search engines is to simply compare search results for the same keyphrase.

With that being said, it’s safe to say that all search engines are always looking to serve pages in their SERPs that adhere to all of the same basic SEO best practice doctrines: well structured websites with good content, created for users and not just for the search engines, will always garner better rankings than ones that don’t.

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.