Adobe’s recent acquisition of Business Catalyst has put the spotlight on this growing CMS system and excited many Business Catalyst system owners.

So why would I write about this in a blog about Search Engine Optimization?

Simple – I run a company that specializes in designing and developing websites in this system – one of only two companies outside the developed world who do this.

Of course officially, Adobe and Business Catalyst are giving very little detail about any changes, but for what it’s worth, here’s my take on the whole thing:

1. It’s good news for everyone, Adobe has a history of not messing with programs that are working, they just simply improve them. Look at the Macromedia takeover. Many of us thought for instance that Fireworks would be discarded as Photoshop handles so much of that functionality, but Adobe kept the full product range intact.
2. This deal makes sense – Business Catalyst’s target market is Web developers and they all use Adobe products- and Adobe has their contact details. This is the logical next step in Adobe’s expansion into software as a service (SaaS).  It could also make them a major player in web hosting.
3. It is a stamp of approval on the Business Catalyst platform. So Business Catalyst users can be assured of having a system which is about to become the generic CMS. It will have a long shelf life and will be developed into a more feature-rich system, probably more tightly-integrated with other Adobe products.

I’ve told you a lot about what to do in this blog – Here’s what not to do:

1. SEO Mistake number #1 – Make up the keywords you want to get good rankings in without any advice from a good SEO Company or business consultant.  No matter what you do from here on in, it’s going to be all downhill until you go back to the first step and do it properly.
2. SEO Mistake number #2 – Engage in a cloaking technique. Get somebody to make a clever line of code for your graphical header that tries to make search engines think it’s a real <h1>, format your <h1> header to be smaller than your text and stuff it somewhere insignificant, or stuff the bottom of your page with tiny keyword rich text, hidden as much as possible.  If Google is not currently picking up these techniques, it soon will be.
3. SEO Mistake number #3 – Copy pages of content without bothering to rewrite it, either from your website or someone elses.
4. SEO Mistake number #4 – Let your graphic artist replace your ugly old HTML <h1> headers with nice graphic ones or let your new developer replace the <h1> with some css name he likes like <id=header> or <id=page-head>
5. SEO Mistake number #5 – Launch your new site without redirecting the old page names to the new ones.  Even a change in page extension like htm instead of html must be remapped, or they will disappear from Google searches.

These are real mistakes that happen every day with catostrophic results for Google page rank. Don’t let your artists or developers do any of these things to your website. More SEO Tips soon.

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.

We’ve seen a remarkable evolution in search engines through the last decade and a half, with Google dominating the market for so much of that time by simply providing relevance in searches.

I have seen one incredible new development in search engines lately which is truly going to revolutionize your searching experience and perhaps make us re-think our approach to SEO and I have seen one PR exercise for a big back step in relevance in searches.

First, the good – in fact the exciting. Go and have a look at the new Worlfram/Alpha search engine: (http://www73.wolframalpha.com/). A mathematical engine which pulls together information from different sources about any subject you want to type in – information on a town or city, stock comparisons, etc. It is very different and not necessarily a competing engine, but something you can use to pull statistics or data from the resources of the World Wide Web very quickly.

Now this incredible back step. I have to say up-front, I am not a fan of Microsoft and that is due to their web technology rather than their operating systems. But an engine which gives us less matches? Good grief! In the same way Office’s thesaurus religiously makes stupid suggestions for my grammar, Bing is going to decide what search matches I want to see and what I don’t want to see.

Bing looks great, throws up matches that look to be organised nicely, but fails in one area – relevance in results. The very thing that has kept Google at the top for decades.  If my one and a half decades  of  participating in the evolution of the internet have taught me anything, it is that people want relevant information online more than pretty pictures or a nicely structure page.

Perhaps the $100 million advertising budget will give Microsoft a chunk of Google’s market share, but in the cold grey light of dawn, are they really going to stick around?

What are the right keywords for an SEO campaign?

That is the million dollar question and the answer is as much a business strategy as an SEO one.

It would be very ambitious to target top level keywords for your business – for instance if you are a business advisor, you will find the keywords ‘business advisor’ very hard indeed to do well in.  So what keywords do you target? To find that answer, you have to take a look at your business and your expertise – perhaps the type of clients you attract and the type of clients you want.

For instance, if you spent the early part of your working career in the automotive industry and your contacts and clients are in that industry, should you add the keyword automotive to the mix? Or do you think those clients are a pain in the ass and your passion is to help people starting a hairdressing salon – well that is a good starting point, but perhaps you should first do an analysis of the demand in that sector….

Next, you have to research your chosen keywords to discover if anybody is even searching it – It would be an absolute disaster to throw thousands of dollars at this and months of your time only to find you are number 1 in Google and the traffic to your website has not increased at all. This is where you probably should enlist the help of a good SEO company. But beware, there are many around who will be happy to rank you in non-performing keywords, because competition is much lighter there and it is easy to achieve results.

Here it is always better to test your chosen keywords for performance and some others too, with a Pay Per Click campaign with a good Adwords management team. Here you will find some surprises – for instance, who would have thought that the keywords with the highest conversion rate for a fence manufacturer and installation company would be ‘fencing materials’ -It seems that many people searching for fencing materials decide they would rather have an installed fence when they begin to search.

You have no way of knowing that without doing an Adwords or PPC campaign, so if you don’t test the keywords first, but simply launch into a lengthy SEO campaign, you could miss your best business opportunity.

Selecting the right keywords for your SEO campaign is not something you do with an automated program. It is also not something you simply leave to your “SEO guru”. The inquiries and ultimately clients you attract in the future will be largely due to the keywords you choose now.

Choose Carefully