If you have had a website for many years but have never really paid much attention to its efficiency in the search engines and you have recently started exploring optimizing your website, here are some areas you can look at prior to audit the current SEO state of your website.

Source Code: By right clicking on a page you will have an option that reads source code. This will show you all you’re coding for that specific page. If you look at the top of the coding you will be able to see your meta title tag, meta description and meta keywords targeted for that specific page. Take a look at your keywords, do they seem generic? Are there more than 5 or 6 keywords in this section? Does your meta tag look like it could use improvement? If you answered yes to any of these questions is might be time to optimizing your website.

Content: Do you have enough content on your website? Typically the pages that are most important should always have 150-200 words of text to make them sticky in the search engines. It is always important to write this content for humans, your visitors and audiences reading your site. DO NOT WRITE CONTENT FOR THE SEARCH ENGINES! Additionally your content should always have a handful of targeted keywords spread tastefully throughout the content in order to be fully efficient and optimized. If you want to be found online you will need to have ample text on your website.

Images: Take a look at the URL of where your image is being hosted. Is it a sloppy URL structure? You always want the URL structure of your image to be describing exactly what your image actually is. Don’t try stuffing it with keywords that don’t apply to your image just keep it natural to what is occurring in the photo. When you hover over your image what does your alt tag show? It should always be a description of what is occurring in your image as well, this way your images will start to rank in the image search section for when people search for images.

URL Structures: Avoiding your URL structures could lead to very poor SEO results for your website. Same principals should apply to your URL structures as they do throughout your website. They should clearly label what is occurring on that page. If you’re URL structures linger with many different characters and numbers you are not maximizing the potential of those URL structures.
For example:
A web page dedicated towards red sneakers should look like www.websitexyz.com/red-sneakers.

These little areas often times get over looked by business website owners. If these areas of your website are not yet fully optimized to their potential, your website is not going to run as optimal and efficient as possible for your audience.

Mike Grehan, VP and Global Content Director of Incisive Media gives his opinion on some of the changes that might be happening in the search industry for 2010. It is pretty clear that the industry is changing and evolving and it is important for all businesses that are eager to get involved with search, that they understand that what they might have been reading from earlier years about search engine optimization might not be the same type of information any more. Social online interaction has changed the way people communicate with almost everyone especially their business audience and community. Things like real time search are slowly creeping into search results and making things even more important than ever to take advantage of.

Here is the video from Mike Grehan taken at SES Last Month:

The search marketing industry moves very quickly and businesses need to harness the power and potential now rather than later. Evidence for this is already here, and as states by Mike Grehan it will become increasingly important for business owners to become visible in all areas of search not just rankings.

I understand in today’s marketplace the need for automation grows and grows as companies seek to cut costs across the board. Streamlining a process down to a science and eliminating as much human interaction seems to be a growing trend but does it work for marketing a website and for SEO? Manufacturing yes, internet marketing to humans? No.

There is not a SEO software program on the planet that can successfully step into the shoes of your audience and try to anticipate what their online behavior or patterns might be at that given moment. There is something that will always require a human touch, search engine optimization and internet marketing equally requires the human marketing touch. When optimizing a website you need to stop and think about each page and really determine what kind of user you want to drive to that specific page. Which keyword you chose to target on that page will deliver a certain type of end user. This thought process is something a computer program is not going to be able to nail down correctly. What if you are torn between two keywords or phrases and both deliver a slightly different end user, do you think a software program would pick that up and pick the right keyword? Most likely not. Software can be used to do many research tasks like keyword research or design but software cannot write a custom crafted meta tag and description like a human could. The human element will always be a factor when communicating with other humans. It would be like asking a program to come up with an award winning design campaign for your brand. What if a software program puts in a keyword that is completely wrong for your business and you don’t catch it. Then you could be wasting the opportunity to build more targeted visitors.

Search engine optimization also requires a certain element of experience. An SEO software product can not by substituted for experience, but experience can play a role to help utilize an SEO software product. The experience of doing certain online efforts and analyzing the results only to tweak and refine to streamline even more. This is only acquired over time. This type of experience is invaluable and SEO software just doesn’t have the capabilities to analyze what works and what doesn’t. If your website generates only a small number of visitors but your conversion margins are very high does the software understand this? Who is to say something works over something that doesn’t? Every business will have their own tools and benchmarks for measuring their own success. If you are thinking about trying to use software to market your business think again, if you have a good amount of SEO and/or internet marketing experience as a business owner, marketer or web master, then there are software products out there that can help automate certain tasks to make you life easier, but it will not do the work for you! For instance, I use several excellent products to do my job, (Keyword Discovery, Compete, Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, etc.) I don’t only rely on these tools alone to make important mission critical SEO and internet marketing decisions for my clients. When you are evaluating SEO software products out there, just think of this: If it was that easy everybody would be doing it. Reaching out to humans and developing and executing a comprehensive strategy requires a human touch and always will.

Please share your stories and thoughts with our readers about what SEO, SEM and internet marketing tools and software products you are currently using, or if you have found better results without using an SEO or internet marketing software product?

If you are in the search engine optimization industry or you are trying to break into this incredibly saturated industry to make a name for yourself you might have a difficult time getting accepted into the circle of friends at the top of the food chain. The “elite” group that has been in the industry since day one and think they are the all mighty of the industry. The SEO industry leaders have become a tough group of individuals to become friendly with and it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier. All the “gurus” at the top that think they know every about everything seem to feel that they run this industry like they own it. The SEO industry is kind of like an open source program that should be treated like a group effort. There is plenty of business to go around. Lots of businesses out there that need help promoting themselves in the online space. People need to participate, communicate and get involved to make it a better place for everyone. One person tries something that works well they write about and things spread leading to better online marketing efforts.

I have been actively working in the internet marketing industry for over 12 years, have built Brick Marketing for 5 years successfully and have helped hundreds of clients in the field of SEO yet my educational comments that I leave on certain search engine marketing blogs get deleted, why do you think this happens? Leaving all names aside a certain someone contacted me not too long ago and asked me to stop commenting on a certain blog. Yes, I left a comment on each blog very frequently but isn’t that the whole purpose of starting a blog. These where all well written comments that where generated with real thought process adding to the overall message the blog post was trying to convey. Isn’t the whole idea of a blog to get the community interacting in your conversation? Since when is it bad to leave an educated comment on someone’s blog? Even if the frequency was high it shouldn’t really matter. I have seen this occur with other websites as well. I have seen the tone of this clique with others trying to make a name for themselves in the industry and I often see a certain nastiness resonating in the tone of a variety of online discussions. Don’t get me wrong I understand this is a tough industry and if you spend some time in it you get beat up a little but that doesn’t mean you have to be nasty to your colleagues and peers around you especially if they own and operate a successful search engine marketing firm. I apologize if I have not visited you at the trade shows and stroked your ego like many people do. Is it that I don’t kiss the asses of every individual in the “cool group”?

There is plenty of room in the school yard for everyone to get along. Is it because I am a threat to them or the industry? Sometimes I feel like this industry is a lot like high school all over again. You got your cool kids that think they are too good for everyone else and you got everyone else trying to shine in front of their eyes. I by no means want to break into the “cool” click and become one of those has to have their ass kissed by everyone else.

Why is it so hard for people in this industry to come together and work as a team? I understand that everyone is trying to grow their own business but there is no reason why so many internet marketing professionals have to have such a cold shoulder towards each other. We are all in the same game and we do the best we can to provide our clients with great service.

If you are an internet marketer or SEO person do you feel like our industry is heading in this direction as well? Please leave your comments and any related experiences or stories below!

Have you ever visited a website and seen the home page meta tag just jammed with keywords that runs the entire length of the top of your computer monitor? If you have that is a great example of how you don’t want to construct your meta tags and descriptions. There is a lot of argument in the industry on the importance of meta tags and how valuable they are. Meta information alone might not increase rankings but once your website has the power to rank well the keywords in your meta information will steer your website towards the right audience you are looking for.

Your meta tags should always be created tastefully. Each page should target 3-5 keywords for your content and your meta information and it should be custom crafted to what is occurring on that specific page. Remember that your meta information needs to offer an explanation to the end user. Your meta information is what appears in the search engine results when you are searching for something specific in the search engines. At the very least you want to keep it clean and to the point so that a person using a search engine will be enticed to click on your meta tag and visit that specific web page. Each meta tag gives a snippet of information for the user to understand what the information on that page is referring to. If you just cram it with keywords the user experience will be horrible and you will end up losing website visitors very quickly. Search engines really don’t like when meta information sections of a website are stuffed with more keywords than they should be. Some websites have been known to generate penalties in Google for over stuffing meta information with keywords and phrases.

When it comes to crafting well written meta tags and descriptions they need to have a very tasteful approach. Website users and traffic are getting much smarter and when they see these types of approaches where information is being jammed into the meta tag information area it deters them from wanting to do business with you. Always keep it clean and relevant and your website will over time find the audience you are looking for.

I saw a funny forum post this morning about a person asking the community in a an online marketing for the best SEO recipe. That person is already dead in the water right from the start. Let’s take a step back and emphasize how important taking a marketing approach really is when conducting a search engine optimization campaign for your business or website. When you start off asking for a recipe for your search engine optimization program, you are really setting yourself up for disaster. Your search engine optimization should never look like a science project.

The search engines have been evolving since their birth many years ago. When they first came on the scene, instantly many highly technical “marketers” started manipulating the algorithm to get web pages to appear high up in search results. Search engines really dislike it when people do this. Over time they have consistently tweaked and changed their algorithm to get these people to stop manipulating the system to get their bogus web pages to rank. Some have disappeared and some have evolved to find new loop holes in the system. Remember that rankings alone do not generate business. Rankings are just one factor out of a basket filled with other marketing factors that should be utilized as well. Online shoppers are changing drastically. Over the last few years during the economic down turn many people have realized that they need to change their shopping behaviors. Many have already made the change in slowing down spending affecting the way people market their businesses. Making many technical sweeping changes to get your website to rank is not the answer you need. Online customers want to bump in your pay per click ad, they want to see you communicating with your audience online, they want to see you branding yourself and making at attempt to be visible in front of them in many different ways before they decide to call you or pull out their credit card to make a purchase on your website.

The evolution of the search engine and the relationship it has with online customers is rapidly evolving. You should not be looking for an SEO “recipe” but rather an SEO internet marketing plan to help grow your business. SEO and marketing together are very powerful. They create many multiple quality pathways and links pointing to your website that can really generate a great deal of targeted traffic to any website.

It seems to me that it doesn’t really matter the size of a business or how many clients they have the consensus across the board for many businesses is that they still have a real hard time understanding the concept of SEO or even its value to a business. This actually blows my mind that in today’s market place you can take a rather large established and robust business and ask them what is search engine marketing? Your answers will probably be devastating.

Why is SEO such a difficult concept to understand? Is it that people just can grasp the whole idea of inbound marketing? The concept is not all that difficult. You have to take a step back and just really dumb things down a bit. People are under the preconceived notion that SEO is really technical and it is all about finding the tricks and secrets to get web pages ranking in the search engines. It seriously couldn’t be further from the truth. The problem is that search engine optimization was a technical approach for many years but not so much anymore. Things are changing in the search engine marketing world. Before MySpace there was no serious online community and conversation aspect. Now it is a part of everyone’s daily life.
Matt McGee is the editor of Search Engine Land and he recently came across a study that shows how a rather large group of Fortune 500 companies are still confused about the whole SEO concept.

Matt McGee States:
“Despite spending millions of dollars on paid search, Fortune 500 companies continue to fail when it comes to natural search visibility. That’s the conclusion of “Natural Search Trends of the Fortune 500: Q4/2009,” the latest study released today by Conductor, a New York-based SEO services/technology firm.”

You can view the rest of the study here. Search engine optimization seems to still be viewed as a dark art. Kind of like the black sheep of the digital marketing age. I think over time this reputation will be seriously cleaned up. Search behavior and shopping patterns are changing and they have been for quite some time. This is a fast moving industry that truly requires having an open mind and the ability to really keep up with the sweeping changes that often times occur in the SEO industry. One day an effort might be perfectly ok to apply to your online marketing approach and the next day it is highly frowned upon by all search engines. Maybe for this reason many big businesses that have been conditioned to conduct business a certain way for so many years are having a hard time adopting this new form of marketing and communication. I think over time as younger generations move up in rankings through a variety of industries we will see an even bigger boom of search engine optimization needs. Right now many businesses are very reluctant to incorporate SEO into their daily business model because I think they just don’t understand its raw power.

With social media hot on the heels of search engine optimization it makes things even trickier. Search engine marketing has been around for almost ten years and many businesses are yet to adopt the practices never mind diving into something even much younger. Social media has only been in full swing for about 3 years and many businesses don’t have any intention to introduce it into their business just yet.

Look at these daunting statistics that Matt McGee laid out on Search Engine Land:
• Only 15% of Fortune 500 companies have “mid to strong presence” in natural search results for the same keywords on which they advertise the most.
• 53% have “no natural search visibility for their most advertised keywords” — meaning they don’t show up in the Top 100 results.
• Collectively, the Fortune 500 spent about $3.4 million per day on more than 97,000 keywords, but they show up in the Top 50 of natural search results for only 25% of those keywords.

Could it be because they are such big entities they feel like they don’t need it? Or is that they are scared of it because they don’t understand it? I think it is a strong combination of both. Like I said as the younger generations move up the rankings through these corporate giants we will see them start to leave a much larger foot print in the search engines. Until then we all have to play our part to let them know that it is important. Is it smart for them to play the business as usual card?