What you do off-site with SEO, such as Directory linking, link exchange or even web 2.0 linking will have absolutely no impact on your Search Engine ranking  if your website is not optimized for the keywords you are trying to rank in.

Sounds absurd, but this is a common scenario:  A great set of keywords is identified for a client to rank in. Of course it is a generic phrase that gets some searches, let’s say it is ‘mountain bike accessories’ and the client’s site is about one particular mountain bike accessory called the ‘Warburton testicle protector’ which stops you falling forward on to the frame when you hit a bump. Now the url is testicleprotector.com and the <h1> header is “Warburton Testicle Protector” and so is the page title.

So our SEO guns go out and do a truckload of linking etc. without effect. Because Google wants to rank pages about Mountain Bike Accessories under the keywords ‘mountain bike accessories’ and the Google bot has no idea that the Warburton Testicle Protector is a mountain bike accessory. You need to let it know.

Opinions will vary throughout the SEO community about what Google likes or doesn’t like with on-site SEO, but what I have personally seen work best is URL,  <h1> Title and document title in that order. I have seen a site disappear from Google results simply because a company artist decided graphical headings would look better than ugly HTML <h1> headings.

OK, so does Warburton go out and register mountainbikeaccessories.com? and change his whole website? That would be better, but as a second best option, he could make a page called mountain-bike-accessories.html and optimize that one. The rest is easier, <title> tag or document title should be ‘keywords – company’ or ‘keywords – product’ always keywords first, as should the <h1> header.

And it’s amazing the number of developers who don’t use the <h1> tags, given their importance in the process. They create their own css style called “heading” or “pagehead” – If they have done this to your website, point out to them politely that they could take that same styling and apply it to the <H1> tag, allowing you to do some on-site SEO.

So again, good SEO starts with

1. keyword research and if you are not sure how to go about this, find a good SEO company to help you.
2. Next test these keywords with a PPC campaign to see if they really produce inquiries. Here, I would really suggest you have an experienced Adwords management consultant involved to minimize your click costs.
3. On-site SEO. Tell Google (and the others) what your site is about – especially in terms of what people are searching for.
4. Tell the world about it – directories, link exchanges, web 2.0

If you’re ever in doubt about whether to do something or not, ask yourself  ”is this easy to cheat?” and  ”if Google is trying to find the most relevant sites, would this be important?” and be guided by the answer. Remember, Google’s survival depends on returning the most relevant results for searches and catching out the cheats.

I really worry about having standard one-size-fits-all “SEO Packs” for clients – because Search Engine Optimization is not a product, it’s a competition and the results you get depend on so many factors, it’s not funny. There is no real deliverable in SEO – the result you want is to beat some other people and get to the front page of the search engines at their expense.

The best analogy I can think of is competitive running. Not every runner can come in the top ten in any competition – of the thousands who compete, there are just ten – and in fact with SEO it’s even worse, one competitor can have five of those ten spots, or all ten.

You could think of generic keywords as being the Olympics – score the gold in ‘websites’ or ‘SEO’ or ‘business advisor’ or whatever is the main generic keyword in your business. And like the Olympics, the competition is tough and it takes some real commitment to get to the top or even in the top ten.

But then there are a whole bunch of regional championships, more specific keyword phrases “SEO company in California”, “Web design, Sydney”, “How to choose the right web design company” and so on. You have far more chance of making it in these competitions – often they are dominated by last years winners who are resting on their laurels and sometimes you’ll find winners who didn’t even know they were in the race – They just stumbled onto the field and were running to get away from the stampede.

And often the more targeted keywords bring good quality traffic with a much higher proportion of buyers than generic keywords.

So having a one-size-fits-all SEO pack is like assigning the same caliber trainers and giving the same training program to olympic competitors as you are to regional ones and allowing them to expect good results. The SEO work that clients need really depends on the race they are in and the competition they are up against.

So the best thing clients can get, is a good assessment from an SEO company followed by a pay per click campaign with good adwords management by an experienced campaign manager to identify the best performing keywords for a long term investment in time.

What’s in a name? Opinions vary wildly in the SEO community, but from what I can see, the answer is “Everything”. I have seen websites rocket to the top of search results on a keyword-rich domain name alone and recently I saw something else that really confirmed the importance of a domain name for SEO rankings.

I was asked by a client to do an assessment on the website of a prominent business that is probably the leader in it’s field. Clients include the Duchess of York and Deepak Chopra among others. There were 16,000 websites linking to this site and if you searched in the name of the business, it was certainly number one. But in the keywords they would like to appear – those that will bring them new business, they were nowhere to be found.

The problem is that most people do not use HTML keyword links when linking to your site – they just use the URL. So if your URL is www.warburton-smith.com and your business is dog grooming, unless you hire a whole lot of clever guys to generate backlinks like Dog Grooming then don’t expect to rank too highly in those keywords. If however you happened to register “www.dog-grooming.com” it would be a different story.

You see, the search engines don’t really know what keywords to count the link against if it does not contain any keywords and peer endorsement – which is really what back linking is supposed to be about – and genuine peer endorsement is really always going to be a description and your URL. And what about back-linking in HTML with keywords? I think that is being cheated to the point that it is about to lose relevance very quickly.

This is one of the most common questions asked, but it is probably as vague as asking “what is the best kind of horse?” The answer is of course, it depends what you want to do with it.

There are a multitude of different systems available now and all have some good points and some areas that they are less than perfect in, but often, despite having so many systems available that can just be modified, we have to build the website from scratch.

This is because a website which is purpose-built is built to do only the functionality required and so it runs faster, compared to an off-the-shelf system that has a multitude of features that you don’t want and some you have to modify to use.

But often an off-the-shelf solution is best. This website for instance is a WordPress blog. It literally took 30 minutes to set up and another hour to do the custom logo on the header and replace the standard file. It uses a standard template called ‘iNove’ which can be easily loaded from the back end – and it is literally the best solution for my requirements:

I want a blogging engine I can post information on and get it out to the online community. I want something which is SEO friendly (and WordPress has some good SEO plugins), has a Google site map and is easy to customise for my basic requirements.

Now if I wanted to sell a whole lot of products, or have an integrated forum, or have a membership area or have a back end where I could see subscribers and communicate with them, it would be a different story. I could probably find enough plug ins and modify them with code and front end script and do pretty well anything, but the basic system was not designed for that and it would not be the best solution.

Something like Business Catalyst (Good Barry) might be better. If I wanted to catalog thousands of products and have them appear in different ways in different parts of the site, I might be better to use MySource Matrix. If I wanted a sophisticated shopping cart with all the features: upsell, shipping options etc. and just a few static pages, then I would probably be better to use a shopping cart engine like X-cart and so on.

You don’t put a Thoroughbred in the gym to strengthen it so it can pull carts and you don’t try and make a Clydesdale run faster to put it on the racetrack – they could never be as good as the horse that is bred for the job.