Real, organic SEO is not a plug-in

Tips & Tricks
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Well, where do we start? SEO is a long, deep subject and there is no easy fix, no magic software, no plug-in that really creates true organic SEO. Good SEO is not created by someone working for cheap in a different nation than the client’s business.

First a foundation of SEO must be made before you can build a website on top of it. SEO is the first and foremost consideration of any business website (or just about any website, really) and only after you get a true grasp of what the client/business/entity’s website needs are can one design a look and feel for it.

So first the true SEO master will study the client’s business as it it was their own and learn it, then learn what and who their customers are, who should/could be their prospective customers and what their competition is and is not doing.

Then once you have all of that information gathered, you analyze it and try to figure out what is needed to put your client’s website above their competition in as many different search queries as possible.

What I just wrote above is no doubt the most important part of SEO, the knowledge of the subject at hand. Each and every business/client has their own needs, have their knish and it is the SEO expert that has to bring that out in the client’s website.

You can make an absolutely killer looking, feeling, performing website BUT if it is never found when the masses are making their search queries, how good of a website is it really?

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On this thread I will not be talking about what might be and not be good “web design”, I will be talking about what I know works when it is implemented as far as getting back in return good hits with the search engines.

There are several main “rules of thumb” for SEO and I will cover those first. SEO is like a challenge, a sport, where you can do hundreds, if not thousands of little things that equal “SEO brownie points” and for any search query, the website that has the most brownie points for that particular query comes up first, theoretically at least.

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## The Big Three:

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Title: The title of the webpage can be depending on the web browser something the viewer might not even see, however it is something that ranks importantly with the search engines! As far as SEO goes, many web people do not use the title field correctly.

If your company name does not directly fit within the normal search queries being made for that page, then the company name ought not be there. Same for any other words that do not directly describe that page plus most likely add a city/state/area and maybe a phone number

URL: URLs can be one of your best bang for the buck in whitehat SEO ‘trickery’ and I will go into this more when posting on just URLs and domains.

Though there seems to be a limit on the characters read and post by the search engines for the titles (most like the number is 57), there does not seem to be a limit within the URL string. So I like placing all my “sub” pages, which is anything that is not the index page usually and putting them in folders nested within another. Why do this? Because the folders can be named appropriately for city, phone numbers, specialties, on and on. With Freeway Pro the limit was/is 127. From what I am learning tonight is that with PG I would create a file and folder structure on my Mac and import it into PG. And that I guess means there is no set limit.

The actual webpages made with Freeway also had the 127 character limit.

Usually no one sees the long URL links because it is a button, menu or the like they are clicking and if it is see on the search engines, the size of it attracts the prospective customers because they see the words they are looking for.

Body: Yeah, like this is gonna be the first time you’ve ever heard it! Right here and now…

Content is KING!

Your “content” represents what you have learned about the client’s business and their needs. Images do a lot for the viewer, but not much for the search engines and NOTHING if you do not use the image alt tags. So for all the images, somewhere on that page should be the words that describe or say what the images says.

One mistake that you will see often on the web is the header being important keywords, along with a phone number and they are images and not HTML text. Again, those keywords and phone number need to be in text somewhere up close to the top. (If there is a way to turn ON the option to have any text phone number be touchable on a mobile in Pinegrow, please let me know.)

Less is more! I am not saying use less words, what I am saying is when the subject is changed, the thought goes to another place, make it another webpage. Don’t be afraid to make good descriptive webpages, each of its own subject. Then you make the title and URL match that page somewhat.

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Once you have made a website, or even if you know you are getting close to finishing it (if you are bold) you need to register that website into both Bing and Google’s Webmaster Tools. Each are separate entities and are two separate accounts.

You will need to make a nice little XML sitemap and submit it through their process to see if you’re legit. Once you do this you’re that much closer of them crawling and indexing your site for the first time. Each time that you add, delete, change pages in that website, make an updated XML sitemap and submit that to both the Webmaster Tools. If you do not have one, this is a commonly used free one: https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

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URLs and Domains

URLs talk to the search engines. I sort of learned this by watching how the media like newspapers were talking to the search engines. Many times the entire news article title and more is included in the URL, each word separated by a “-” and not a “_”.

It works, so be sure to put in your best keywords, your location, even your phone number

Domains: I know there are pros and cons with GoDaddy, but I have been using them since before their first TV ad and I can get around their panels well enough. At one time they had an option that no other registrar company offered and that was masked forwarding. Though I do not know what other registrars do this now, there are probably some available by now.

What this does is pretty cool. As everyone ought to know by now, it was more than 15 years ago now that Google stopped reading/ranking the meta tags/data for keywords and descriptions were lowered in value. This is because of right from the start of blackhat SEO people were cheating what those tags were meant for and it got to the point that the main search engines did not consider them valid anymore.

The only time that this data is read and ranked by the search engines is when a domain remains parked at lets say at GoDaddy and they can go to that domain, leave it on the server it is parked on, go to Forwarding and use the masked option and you will find that you can give that domain a “title” a “description” and “keywords”.

You can not see this work in Google as well as you do in Bing, but it certainly does work. I have a domain buyer club deal with GoDaddy, so my total price for a .com is $8.47 and since I buy and transfer all my clients domains, as well as mine with this account, it pays for itself.

But to have that sort of SEO power with a parked domain is a good buy and you just need to know the domains you really need to buy. Make them long and descriptive to forward to a website with a domain name that needs SEO help.

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@Rgator All interesting and valid points but I’d probably disagree with you when it comes to the length of the url. I believe it should be kept fairly short because not every user will be on your site to click the button or link and there’s a number of possible times when somebody will need to be able to remember the url and something like www.mysite.com/how-do-i-remember-the-url-for-that-webpage-that-i-wanted-to-share-with-my-friend-the-next-time-im-talking-to-them-or-how-do-i-find-it-easily-to-pass-it-on-to-them/ just doesn’t make sense. Other than that some good information in these posts and should be very useful to those who don’t know a lot about SEO. Thanks for sharing.

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No one would ever have to remember the link you mentioned. It would just be mysite.com . You might disagree but the search engines aren’t and it is working for the clients. Keep the domain name short and sweet for the main site and then you can add long names domains as satellite websites and masked forwarders.

And once away from the index page, be long and descriptive with the URLs as for the most part those URLs won’t be seen and if things are working for you, far more hits will be from people either finding it on the search engines to someone passing the link via a phone or computer, rather than the webpage being passed along verbally.

So one must decide whether it is to the clients’ value to include all the SEO you can, or limit the SEO to vanity. Some of my clients are in very, very competitive businesses and they want all the whitehat SEO they can get for their money.

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Well everything I’ve every read and have done in the past would be different I’ll give it a try and maybe learn something new/unlearn something old and reap the benefits of it. That’s one of the great things about a forum… exchanging ideas! I’ll find a project and test.

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You use the longdesc tag? How have you seen SEO results using that tag, if you do?
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How do anchor links work in SEO, do SE’s pay attention to them? The #SomethingHere link that references a location in the current page.

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SEO to me is short said:

“Be friendly to google and google will be friendly to you!”

In doing so, my first three tools are:

User-friendly (in google terms having media-queries), semantic HTML-structure (especially since HTML5) and a thing we basically never take into account: Page speed. The latter is indeed a bit tricky yet - but matters more and more.

Keywords aren’t important anymore, I’m still using them though. Sweet memories - but if, just three or four (more is abusing them in the best sense).

The URL could match the page-title and therefor the H1 tag. And my headlines are pretty short - they don’t tell the entire story. This endless URL scares me, but am looking forward what Rob figures out.

Cheers

Thomas

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It’s all on you @Rob it’s all on you. LMAO
The entire forum is waiting for your results. No pressure or anything.

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The search engines like good, clean data to read.

And imagine the example I first gave, I learned this from the big media companies. Imagine trying to store away millions of news articles with a short URL. So why not use that to your advantage and have the URL talk to the search engines.

If the search engines and the internet will use the descriptive words within an URL to identify it, then that ought to be used as part of your SEO strategy.

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If it works, if the search engines use the data, then it should be the client that decides whether to use it or not. This decision should not be made by the web editor/designer. Most business owners want all the SEO they can get. Vanity is not even a secondary consideration, it should be the last factor to consider when SEO is involved. There’s only one top spot of the search engine’s results on the first page of the results posted and that is the very spot the SEO masters are trying to reach for their clients.

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I think you are way off here! Keywords are hugely important, but they must be used properly within the body of the webpages. You don’t just use “keywords” but you build a very descriptive paragraph or three around the main keyword/s. That is called “CONTENT” and indeed content is still the very KING of SEO.

Each keyword needs at least a sentence or three to describe it. If you don’t do that, you’re missing the very idea of what content is for. SEO is NOT a plug-in!

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Could you do me a favor and post one example of your “clean code”?

Cheers

Thomas

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What I was saying is that the search engines love to see and rank valid information that relates to the search query. So a long string URL has lots of great data for the search engines to use and this has nothing to do with “clean code”. SEO is not coding per se.

I just tried to add the page of source code to one web page that does very well on the search engines, but it is three time longer than the forum’s limit for a post. Just go to http://coloradopressurewashing.com/ and look at its source code.

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This is what I expected, so no further questions!

Cheers

Thomas

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The results are that my client’s websites are listed above their competition in numerous different search queries and that is what counts first and foremost when considering the “design” of any business website. As I said from the beginning, this thread is all about organic SEO and not web design as far as a look and feel goes.

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There are somethings on the pages of your site that in olden days would be considered spamming the search engines and filling the results with junk content. For instance the keywords at the bottom of the page from what I have seen and heard from people that get their sites banned or delisted though it is not always the case I personally dislike sites like that because it really provides little value to a customer looking for a service. I would never buy anything from a site like that.

Though I do understand the SEO and the tactics you have used which fall more into a grey area I think than specifically white hat. I appreciate your sharing and hope you continue, I think that it will open up peoples minds to possibilities of how to use these tactics in their own work in their own way.

These examples are not about the look of the designs or the visual aspect but the keywords and way content is written as well as tags in the page to target specifically Search Engines. There are MANY ways to use SEO and this is definitely one way that has been used since the beginning of search and is interesting that it continues to work to this day.

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I think that was more so when people would put in such text, but hide it with text colored the same as the background, or it being micro small. But when it is put into plain sight and it is relevant, then it is not gray. And this is something that the client actually asked me to do! He wanted every zip code, every town listed that they will go to and perform the services. And this is a little different than “loading up keywords” on the bottom of the page. They are actual locations and zip codes of the service area of the client and can be weighed more heavily than your average “keyowrds”.

And when someone within Colorado, but far enough away from Denver plugs their own town, county or zip code into the search query, the search engines will find these listed on the website. And when someone is looking for commercial property maintenance, like pressure washing, are they going to be looking for the best looking/performing website, or will they be looking for the one that shows they have the most knowledge and experience of the prospective customer’s needs?