Search Engine Optimization Scorecard

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Search Engine Optimization Scorecard

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Search Engine Optimization Scorecard

Build It So They Will Come

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a strategic component of your marketing mix, yet all too often it is approached as an afterthought once your website is developed. Even then, SEO is treated as a one-time thing, not as a process of ongoing revision and analysis needed to keep on top of the ever-changing algorithms search engines use to thwart “black hat” search engine practices and search engine spammers.

The Search Engine Optimization Scorecard is designed to help you assess your website's current SEO

performance and to best leverage Canterris Marketing Suite’s built in search engine optimization capabilities. Our goal is to make you an SEO expert so your websites are easily found, you can engage more customers and so you look like a hero in the eyes of your boss.

Each of the sections listed in this document outline recommended best practices and provide the ability to rank your current performance.

Keyword Content Rating

Identify Keyword

Content Optimizing your website for the most appropriate keywords and key phrases is a critical step in your road to Search Engine Optimization success.

Recommended Steps

1. Identify important keyword / keyword phrases and rank from most important to least important 2. Assign one keyword / key phrase to each page

within your site. If you have more keywords or key phrases than pages, consider developing new content for populating new pages

Best Practice Tips

 Choose keywords / key phrases that are important for your business and test identified keywords using a tool such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool to make sure web visitors actually search for your identified keywords

 Only plan to optimize one keyword / key phrase per page. Attempting to optimize for more than one keyword per page will often result in lower than expected performance

 Ensure that keyword content is prevalent

throughout your webpage copy. Details on how to make keyword content more prevalent is identified below.

Poor Fair Good

Keywords in <title> tag

This is one of the most important places to have a keyword because what content is placed within the <title> tag shows in search results as your page title. The title tag must be short (6 or 7 words) and the keyword must be near the beginning.

Utilize keyword rich content in Page Title

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Place {PAGETITLE} tag in your templates within the <title>

tag.

Example: <title>{PAGETITLE} – {SITENAME}</title> Keywords in URL Keywords in URLs are important. For example,

http://domainname.com/used_cars where “Used Cars” is the keyword phrase you attempt to rank well for. It is important to have keywords within the web page as well; don’t rely on having them in the URL only.

Canterris Marketing Suite utilizes search engine friendly urls. When creating a new page the content you insert into the Unique Page Title field will be published in the url. If your keyword rich Unique Page Title is Used Cars the url will be http://domainname.com/used_cars

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Keyword density

in page text Another very important factor. 3-7% of keyword content within your page content is best. Keyword density over 10% is suspicious and appears as keyword stuffing rather than naturally written web site content.

Avoid having more than 10% of page content using keywords

Placing keyword content within unordered lists has historically not negatively impacted search engine performance.

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Keywords in

anchor text Very important for general website optimization, especially for inbound links. Having a keyword in the anchor text in a link from another site is akin to getting a vote for your site and the keyword content.

A third party link to your site such as Chicago Used Cars will outperform a link such as Al’s Auto

If your company logo is on a third party website, make sure that keyword content is within the image alt tags eg. alt="Chicago Used Cars"

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Keywords in heading <h1>, <h2> tags.

Another area where keywords are an important factor. As with page titles, keyword content should also exist within the content of your page. Use of <h1> tags more than once on each page is not recommended. Multiple instances of <h2> or <h3> tags etc is OK.

Place your keyword rich Subtitle within <h1> tags in your template. Example:<h1>{TPL:SUBTITLE}</h1>

Place h1 tags around your logo (assuming logo is in header)

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and {SUBTITLE} tags within image alt tags

Example: <h1><img src="/templates/default/landing_logo.gif" alt="{TPL:SUBTITLE}" /></h1> Keywords in the beginning of a document

Also impacts search performance, but not as critical as anchor text, title tags, or headings. It is important to note that the first paragraph of content on your page, may not necessarily be the first paragraph of text a search engine reads.

Optimize you page template layout so that keyword content is in the top half of your page code. For interior page templates where a two column design is used, placing the page title and page content in the left hand column would be beneficial.

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Keywords in

<alt> tags Search engine spiders don’t read images but they do read their textual descriptions in the <alt> tag. If your web page contains images, ensure keyword rich content is used to describe them.

For images in your page templates placing the

{TPL:SUBTITLE} tag in image alt tags will dynamically rewrite alt content of each image with the keywords you have identified for that page.

Example: alt="{TPL:SUBTITLE}"

For page content controlled by page editors, ensure keyword content is placed in alt text field within link properties dialog box.

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Keywords in

meta tags Becoming less and less important, especially for Google. Many other search engines rely on them to varying degrees. It is good practice to ensure meta tags contain keywords with the most relevant keywords near the beginning. Best Practice Tips

In the page description input area, ensure keyword content is used to describe each page. Keyword content at the beginning of the description has a higher value than keyword content at the end.

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Keyword

proximity Keyword proximity measures how close in the text the keywords are. It is best if they are immediately one after the other (e.g. “used cars”), with no words between them. Keyword proximity is applicable for keyword phrases that consist of 2 or more keywords.

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Keyword phrases In addition to individual keywords, it is recommended that web pages are optimized for popular keyword phrases. If your keyword phrase is not popular, it is recommended that individual keywords within your keyword phrase are

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optimized individually.

Secondary

keywords Optimizing a web page for secondary keywords can have very positive results, especially in circumstances where there is a lot of competition for broad keywords or keyword phrases. Optimizing your site for “Used Cars Chicago” will likely result in less, but considerable better targeted traffic. Best Practice Tips

In identifying the important keywords you want to optimize for, also identify secondary keywords. Common secondary keywords often include geography or industry sector. Example: Used Cars Chicago or Financial Advisory Services

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Links Rating

Anchor text of

inbound links As discussed in the Keywords section, this is one of the most important factors for good rankings. It is best if you have a keyword or keyword phrase in the anchor text.

Example: a link containing the text more used cars is significantly better than learn more

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Origin of

inbound links It is important that the site that links to you is reputable. Generally sites with a high Google Page Rank are considered reputable.

Inbound links from .edu and .gov sites have a higher importance than .com or .ca TLD’s.

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Links from

similar sites Having inbound links on similar sites is very advantageous. It indicates that the competition has given you a vote of confidence and that you are popular within your topical community. Having an inbound link from a “Used Cars” blog would be a good example of this.

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Links from .edu

and .gov sites These links are precious because .edu and .gov sites are considered to be more reputable than .com, .biz, .ca, .info, etc domains.

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Anchor text in

internal links Not as important as anchor text in inbound links, but still matters Poor Fair Good Associated

Anchor text content

The content or text that immediately precedes and follows the anchor text matters because it indicates relevance of the link.

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Age of inbound

links The older the links the better. Accumulating many inbound links within a short period of time suggest purchasing links or a link exchange.

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Links from

directories Can be very beneficial, if the directories are reputable. Directories such as DMOZ, Yahoo Directory and similar directories can be very beneficial. Links from directories with low Google Page Rank values can have detrimental effects,

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and can be regarded as link spamming.

Named anchors Names anchors (the target of internal links) are useful for site navigation but are also useful for SEO because you stress importance of a particular area of a particular page.

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IP Address of

inbound links Less important for Google, however search engines such as MSN and Yahoo may discard any inbound links from the same IP address or C class of addresses.

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Many outgoing

links Google does not like pages that consist of a large number of outbound links. It is recommended that you keep the number of outbound to under 100.

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Cross linking Cross linking occurs when site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links back to site A. This is a simple

example, but more complex schemes are possible. Google penalizes sites that appear to be part of a cross link or link trading scheme.

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Outbound links to suspicious sites

No one likes bad neighbors. Outbound links to suspicious sites or sites with low Google Page Rank values can negatively affect your search engine ranking performance.

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Single pixel links Links that are a pixel wide are invisible to humans and is

seen as an attempt to manipulate search engine results. Poor Fair Good

Content Rating

Unique content Having more relevant content that differs from content on other sites in both wording and topics can have a positive effect on your rankings.

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Frequency of content change

Frequent changes to site content are favored. Consistently adding new content is more favorable than making small content changes.

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Keyword font

size When keywords in the site have a larger font size in comparison to the other on-page text, it is considered to have greater importance.

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Keyword

formatting Bold and italic are another way to emphasize important keywords or key phrases. It is important to use keyword font size and formatting in moderation or it could have the opposite effect.

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Poor coding and

design Search engines prefer sites that are well coded. When sites are not coded effectively, the site itself may not be indexable at all.

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Illegal content Use of other organization’s copyright content without permission or use of content that promotes illegal activities can get you banned from search engines.

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Invisible text A common practice in the old days is a recipe for disaster today. A site found to have content with the same or similar color as a the page or page element background in which they are located can result in penalties.

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Duplicate

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Doorway Pages Doorway pages that attempt to trick search engine spiders

into thinking your site content is relevant when it is not is another way to get penalized by the search engines.

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Visual Extras and SEO Rating

JavaScript If wisely used, JavaScript will not affect search engine rankings. Badly coded JavaScript will prohibit spiders from indexing your site’s content and will result in poor rankings.

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Images instead

of text links A common SEO mistake made by “creative focused” web designers. Using images instead of text links is bad, especially when you don’t fill in the <alt> tag. Images should only be used if they are vital to graphic layout of the site.

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Frames Frames are very bad for SEO. Avoid using frames unless it is

absolutely necessary. Poor Fair Good

Flash or image home pages

Having a flash or image home page or whole sections of your site in flash or images results in low SEO performance.

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Domain, URLs and Web Mastery Rating

Keyword rich URLs and filenames

A very important consideration, especially for Yahoo and MSN. Ensure your site URLs and filenames contain important keywords.

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Site Accessibility If the site or pages are inaccessible because of broken links, password protected areas and other similar reasons, they simply can’t be indexed.

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Sitemap Having an up to date sitemap is important for SEO purposes, whether it is a traditional HTML sitemap or a Google XML sitemap.

Canterris Marketing Suite auto generates up to date sitemaps every time you make a page edit.

Submitting your xml site map to Google through Google Webmaster Tools

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Site size Search engines love big sites, so generally the bigger the better

Poor Fair Good Site age Older sites tend to be respected more, as they are seen as

being more trustworthy. Poor Fair Good

Domains vs. subdomains, separate domains

Whenever possible having a separate domain is better. e.g. smartblog.com is better than smartblog.company.com or company.com/smartblog

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Top level

domains (TLDs) Not all TLDs are equal. The most popular TLD - .com is much better than .biz or .info. Nothing is better than .org or .edu domains.

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Hyphens is URLs Hyphens or underscores between the words in an URL

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Canterris Marketing Suite automatically places underscores between works in urls.

URL length Doesn’t typically matter unless the URL gets very long. A

URL should not contain more than 10 words. Poor Fair Good Dynamic URLs Spiders prefer static URLs, however for most organizations

static URLs are not feasible. Sites using dynamic URLs should utilize tools to rewrite dynamic URLs to something more human and SEP friendly.

Canterris Marketing Suite automatically places rewrites urls to be search engine friendly

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