The Top 7 Overlooked SEO Strategies (Part 1)

We often refer to SEO in terms of White Hat and Black Hat.  It’s not uncommon, and most people don’t consider other gray areas in between.  It’s one of those things that are, to many people, black and white.  The distinction really isn’t as clear as we often make it out to be however.  There are a lot of ways to mingle between the two and weave patterns of intricate marketing between black hat and white hat.

You need to understand how to maintain a delicate balance between White and Black – The gray areas in SEO are the tactics that really separate the truly great marketing campaigns from the rest.  Through the next series I’ll be looking over several different strategies that are commonly overlooked.  Strategies that fall somewhere in that mysterious ethereal void between the Boogeyman and Gooogle’s Trophy Case.

Combining Pages to Conserve Page Rank – The Algorithm that Google uses is designed to funnel the page rank evenly through each of the links it finds on any given page.  Therefore, if you have a page with 10 separate links to other URL’s placed throughout it, each of those individual links will receive one-tenth of the total link juice the page has to offer.  This is obviously a simplified version of how the algorithm actually functions, and I’m certain Google is a little more complex, but in general that’s the best way to calculate it using an example.  The more links that exist on a page, the more diluted the link juice is that each one can pass.

With this being the case the smartest thing to do is to reduce the number of links on a page.  This can be done easily by consolidating information on primary pages such as your About Us, Contact, Customer Service, Privacy and others.

You can avoid a jumbled mess of content on one page and difficulty searching through it with the use of Fragment Identifiers, also known as HTML anchors or hastags.  This simplifies the navigation in that each link on your primary page can remain in its location.  The context of the link changes as it points the specific region of the single page where the information is contained.

We’ll consolidate all our info into “corporateinfo.html”  If you use hashtags, this is what the URL link would look like in your HTML.

http://www.exampledomain.com/corporateinfo.html#privacy

http://www.exampledomain.com/corporateinfo.html#directions

You won’t have to worry about any issues with duplicate content, as the search engines ignore everything after hash tags.  In order for this process to work, you’ll need to place an anchor before each section that you want the links to land on.  You can use either a name attribute or an ID attribute.

Name attribute – <a name=”privacy”>Privacy Policy</a>

ID attribute – <h3>Privacy Policy</a>

Yahoo and Google recognize URL’s using hash tags (#) for the sitelink feature in search results.  Those are the breakdown of interior links within a site that you see when you get search results (company info, about us, contact, download, etc).  This method will not hinder these locations being listed in Google search results.

Optimizing images for better search rank – It’s a less effective way to drive traffic to your site, but if you can generate leads and traffic from any source then that’s a viable source. You should take the time to describe your images in order to make them rank well in image searches with Google, Yahoo and Bing.  Make your images work for you by doing the following

• The img tag you use should include the width, height and alt text on each of the images you want indexed. An example would look like this:

<IMG SRC=”keywordphrase.jpg” HEIGHT=”380″ WIDTH=”400″ ALT=”small description that includes keyword” TITLE=”text for title centered around keyword”>

• Include relevant text, primary keywords and synonyms around your image tag.  This carries a lot of weight and will positively affect the rank of your images.

• With advances in how browsers read script and coding, it’s important to use the img title attribute.  This attribute is starting to carry more weight, as Google Chrome will not show mouseover text on images unless those images are using the img title attribute.  You lose your alt titles on mouseover without it.

• If you’re linking a thumbnail to a larger image, avoid using common tags like “click here to see the full picture”.  You should use descriptions in the photo with keywords in the anchor text.  Users are smart enough to figure out that clicking on a picture will show a larger picture.  If not, well… that’s the kind of special head-gear wearing visitor that probably found you by accident while doing a search for edible Legos.  Not a good lead.

• As Google image search becomes more popular, they’re starting to develop systems for ranking that make the results more relevant to the search.  Google is gearing up their ranking of images to be based more on quality.  This includes things like image exposure, number of clicks/visits, and the size (bigger is better…  why is always about size?)

You can run a fantastic SEO campaign using standard practices, but if you use cookie cutter strategies you’ll probably end up with cookie cutter results.  That’s not necessarily bad, any rank is better than doing nothing.  If you want to get your site on the first page and duke it out with the gladiators in your market then you’ve gotta use every (legit) strategy you can get your hands on.

We’ll be covering more strategies in this series over the next few days.



Related posts:

1. SEO Consultants – Homework Pays Off
2. Marketing Predictions for 2010
3. Link-Building Strategies for Online Marketing
4. Staying off the Google Radar
5. Overcoming the Burden of SEO

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