15 January 2010
SEO From Scratch: Part 1
One of the services we provide here at BKWLD is producing brand new sites for our clients. One of the difficult things about a brand new site is getting the word out about it. I’m mainly a developer here, so I thought it might be a cool exercise to research more about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and put it into practice on a new site we’ve built for our new product, Elastic.
About Elastic
Many of our clients are in the “Outdoor Sports” category. Elastic is a software tool that ties together retail dealers to the sales representatives of our clients so dealers can easily order product for their stores directly from our clients. Currently, the market consists of paper based order forms, catalogs, and phone calls for inventory checking. Some of the bigger players in the industry have their own custom software solutions for this, like Trek or Burton, but they can be a little unwieldy and they only work for the one brand. Other competitors in this space force clients to adhere to their limitations and conventions. We recognized an opportunity here, so Elastic was created.
Elastic is based on Adobe Air technology, so the software runs on the desktop (Mac or PC), but can also run in an offline mode. We designed it this way because typically sales reps would have the software loaded up on their laptop and bring it to the dealers directly. WiFi isn’t exactly pervasive yet in these environments, so always having an Internet connection is not an option. Sales Reps also travel a lot, so not relying on the Internet directly keeps them productive on the ground or in the air. Once the sales rep reconnects their laptop to the Internet, orders are placed and inventory totals are synced.
After the break we’ll get into it!
First Steps
One of the main problems I’m trying to figure out in this exercise is how effective “SEO” practices really are. I’m a standards-based developer, so I want to focus on things I can control, so we’ll just be dealing with optimizing the site with code-based solutions. I feel that other practices in SEO like “link farming” and referral Ponzi schemes are super shady and make it tougher to find the real information you’re looking for (try searching for credible SEO information without getting inundated by “SEO experts” with a service to sell). Given these restrictions, there is a lot we can do to a newly-minted site to help increase page rank.
Keyword Analysis
Finding a target for your product or service is always difficult. Elastic’s audience seems to be particularly finite: Sales Managers at mid-size retail companies. Elastic is a customized suite of software, half product and half service, so putting a hard definition on “What is Elastic?” is tough to conclude upon. Another major problem is the myriad of terms used by different groups. Our clients might use the term “B2B Sales Order Management” but a sales rep might call it a “Digital Catalog.” Since the site we’re optimizing is targeted towards the folks with the purse-strings, its best to focus on the terms they would use. In this situation, it is best to rely on your sales staff. They talk to these folks every day. Talk to them (it’s not that difficult). See what terms and keywords the potential clients use when describing your software. These are the same keywords they’ll plug in to Google or Yahoo when it comes time to look for the a new sales platform.
After talking to the Elastic Sales Team, we decided the best keywords to test were:
- “sales order management”
- “inventory control”
- “digital catalog”
- “product merchandising”
- “ERP system”
Google Tools
Google provides many tools to help get you started with website optimization, so I decided to check those out first. I’m going to talk about Google Trends, Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.
Google Trends
Google Trends is a great way to tell if the keywords you’ve selected get enough traffic to warrant trying to target. We plugged in the above keywords sets into Google and the results are below. The goal here is to figure out which keywords are more important than others. So we’ll compare each keyword to each other. I did this test by firing up Google Trends and comparing each keyword against each other. I set it up to filter only US queries in the last year, and then decided which keyword “wins” as seen below. The Chart below has the results of my analysis.
Some insight can be found here. I found that “Product Merchandising” didn’t return enough data, so I used “merchandising” instead. I also noticed that these keywords all have a high collection of results, but not very much traffic. “Sales order management” has 83 million results, but in Google Trends it didn’t turn up enough search trend data. This tells me that while there’s a lot of data out there about “sales order management,” there aren’t a whole lot of people searching for it directly (they likely are using some other keywords I have yet to discover).
Google Analytics
For now I’m just going to insert Google Analytics tracking Javascript into the bottom of my template, and I’ll check back later to see how we’re improving our traffic to the site.
Google Webmaster Tools
Google’s Webmaster Tools are a nice sanity check after you’ve built a site. It helps you to remember all the things you might have forgotten, but are important to SEO like sitemap files, favicons, robots.txt, meta tags, etc. For example, I forgot all of these things on this site, so I went ahead and added them until Google’s scanners were happy with the results.
Initial Changes To The Site
- added sitemap.txt
- added robots.txt
- modified title tags on each page to reflect its content
- added keyword and description meta tags
Next Steps
Now, we wait. Let some time pass, Google now has to re-index your site, and let people find it. In the next post in this series, I’ll analyze Google Analytics and see how we can improve long tail search results. Thanks for reading!
Comments
Great setup for a series of articles on “SEO From Scratch”. I’m excited to see the future posts. Also, I had not heard of Google Trends… I’m ready to go do my own case study :)
Nice writeup, Aaron!
Nice post sir. I’m glad I work with you. ;)
Nice post sir. I’m glad I work with you. ;)
This is great, I’ve been doing a lot of research in this area, but your article was the first I’ve seen that tackles the the specific steps in implementing SEO for a site. Thanks Aaron.
Great stuff my man!
A pro webdesigner/developer jumping into SEO for the first time? I must have misunderstood the first part of your article… or you guys need someone like me! (hint-hint)
Anyway, here are my 2 cents (and 1 cent extra as a gift)…
Cent N° 1:
———–
To “get the word out” for a new site and doing “search engine optimising” is something that not really goes hand-in-hand. This is due to the fact that all major search engines rank websites due to popularity… checking for so called “quality links” and co.
In simpler words: search engines will push sites to the front when internet users show some love and link to it. You can try to rank for keywords alone, but that ranking will never, ever help you in getting “the word out”. Trust me, I’ve tried and failed years ago.
From my experience (for what 15 years of pro web designing counts), it’s best to target a single keyword, framing it with keywords that support the main keyword.
Sounds crazy? It isn’t.
Think of keywords in a H1-H6-P relationship. Meaning: one keyword is the most important, the others “push” that one keyword narrowing down it’s specific meaning. The same keyword strategy should (of course) also be used in teh website’s body itself. This way, you enable search engines to put the website in the corner they think is most fitting by letting them parse “word relationships” rather than “word lists”.
Think of it as driving in a car to a town you’ve never been before. You ask the first person you meet where the town-center is and he gives you 5 streetnames that seem to have no relationship with each other. You’ll be lost or darn lucky if you get there.
But if that person gives you a hint what street comes first etc., you just have to follow that description and you’ll get there in no time.
But hey, who am I to tell you all this? You probably knew that, didn’t you? ;)
Cent N° 2:
———–
I would be carefull relying on Google tools only. I know most people think Google is the mean and lean searching machine that replaced the God concept years ago… but Google itself also feeds from other engines and vice-versa. These factors are not accounted within any Google apps; at least not the public ones.
Cent N° 3:
———–
To finish it of by really getting on your nerves: is there any reason you didn’t use “geo” meta tags to enable search engines to geo-position the website’s target audience? It’s as important as the “lang” tag… and since you’re a Google fan anyway – Google actually has been picking these geo-position tags up for almost 2 years now; making some of the websites I designed and coded jump straight to position numero uno (read: nr. 1) in their individual target countries.
But hey, that’s probably just me… and you were going to talk about that in Part 2 of your series, weren’t you? ;)
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If not, that “hint-hint” up there wasn’t a joke. I’m currently located in Germany, but I’m willing to move if the job fits! And even when I’m a plain caucasian, I do roll my own sushi for friend and co-workers occasionally.
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