As most of us know, the quantity and quality of inbound links has a pretty significant impact on search engine optimization. All other things being equal, if I have 10 inbound links to my site, from places like MIT, The New York Times and Apple and you have 10 inbound links from places like Joe's toothpick collectors blog, I'll be ahead of you in the search engine results pages.

So it is no surprise that people strive to attain those links—either by themselves or by hiring SEO firms who specialize in such things. Aside from the SEO value, inbound links also bring in referral traffic from sites that appeal to similar audiences.

Assuming you are producing great content—that people find valuable—there are a variety of ways to gain inbound links. Today I'd like to focus on the most basic approach, the direct ask.

Link requests are often ignored.

Webmasters and bloggers ignore the majority of link requests simply because the requesters don't give us a logical reason to follow through. For example, this request came in a few days ago.

"I visited your website and found it to be pretty useful content. I invite you to a link exchange (3-way link*) with our website (s)."

This was the extent of the message. The sender didn't include the link to the site, so I had no way of telling whether the site would be useful or not. The person also mentioned that this would be a link exchange. That's a common request, but I'm not going to give away a link just to get a link in return. If I link to a site, I do so only because it has information that I think you, my readers, will find useful.

* A 3-way link exchange is a gray/black hat trick meant to disguise a reciprocal link exchange from search engines. Since we only link to relevant sites we need not play such games.

Link requests that aren't ignored.

Visiting Case was redesigned earlier this year. It no longer includes this page, so I'm showing this screen capture of the old version for reference.

When I was Webmaster at Case Western Reserve University I received oodles of link requests because .edu sites are in high demand and we had enough content to appeal to a broad array of topical niches. People wanted me to link to everything from hotels and limousine services to other colleges and "get rich quick" blogs. But every once in awhile someone would suggest a link that was right on target.

One such person was the Webmaster for the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (RTA). He first contacted me to suggest some additional bus routes I might link to on the transportation page for our Visiting Case site. When he e-mailed me he sent me the recommended links to his site AND sent me the url of the page on my site where he thought the links should go. Knowing that these routes would be of interest to visitors, I immediately added them to the page in question. Over the years he would send me new links as routes were changed so that I was able to easily keep the information current.

I really appreciated his efforts because they helped me better serve my audience while also making sure that traffic directed to his site went to the right place. Adding the links was beneficial to all involved.

If you don't want your link request to be ignored, then it helps to follow in RTA's footsteps by initiating a link request that benefits both parties.

Choosing your victim Targeting sites that could link to you.

These cool vinyl critters are produced by Ducobi. I haven't done any package design since the late 1990's, but Lovely Package is a great source for design inspiration.

Let's pretend that you write a lovely little blog about package design.* If you were to embark on a link-building campaign you would probably start by identifying the top blogs and sites geared towards designers—people who would also be interested in your site. In particular you might look for sites specifically aimed at packaging.

After identifying a few plausible candidates such as Package Design Magazine and The dieline package design blog, you should then read through the sites to judge the caliber of the information, and to see if they are drawing in the same sort of readers that you seek.

Next you should ask yourself how your site, or a specific page on your site, would benefit their readers. If you can't come up with a clear and specific benefit then you are better off looking for other candidates.

If you do have a good benefit then you should also identify a place on their site where it would be logical for them to add your link. If no such place exists, it will be hard for them to fulfill your request.

* The folks at Lovely Package have never asked me for a link, nor do they need to. Their site has an Alexa Traffic Rank of 47,211 with 852 inbound links—which means it is already quite popular.

Asking for the link

Once you've made it this far, asking for the link is relatively simple.

The first step is to identify the person at the site who has the power to grant your request. This may be the Webmaster, content manager, an editor or someone else.

Then send that person a politely worded email in which you clearly yet briefly:

• introduce yourself
• describe the content and audience of your site
• explain why linking to your site would be beneficial to their audience
• specify the link you would like them to use
• suggest (not specify) keywords they might use for the link
• recommend a page on their site where you think the link would make sense, and
• thank them for considering your request

If they agree with your reasoning then you may very well get that link. If not then at least you'll know you made a sincere effort—rather than spamming them with a nonsensical request.

LInk Building and Related SEO Resources

I regularly add links such as these at the end of blog posts for two reasons. 1) They help guide you to additional information on the topic. 2) It helps me show appreciation to sites that provide helpful information. They didn't have to ask, they just produced worthwhile content.

• 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity
• 131 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies
• Link building and SEO
• Link Building Pet Peeves That Drive Me Bananas
• Need a Link Building Strategy? Create Content!

Fan Like me on Facebook—Follow me on Twitter

We all know these blog posts don't get written as frequently as I'd like. But that doesn't mean you need to go weeks without hearing me babble. Over on http://www.facebook.com/heidicool, I'm using content curation to share one link per day. At one tip per week day it won't clog your Facebook stream, but hopefully you'll find something useful.

And for more links (and ramblings that may not always be related to the Web) I usually Tweet and reTweet a few (or several) times per day at @hacool.

Content is the core of on-site search engine optimization.

• You must provide useful information that people will seek.
• This information should incorporate words and phrases that people will actually use when searching for what you offer.
• Such words or phrases must be specific enough to distinguish your content from others.
• But…these words should also be generally used and understood by your target audience.

Word choice and SEO: striking the right balance

The above guidelines seem rather obvious, but it's often hard to find that sweet spot between a phrase like auto racing—which is so broad it will generate 32,300,000 search results—and a phrase such as "subaqueous auto racing" which generated 0 results at the time I wrote this. (Note: because I've used this phrase repeatedly, this page will probably soon become the 1 result for the term...unless some of you go out and create competing content.)

Here on the Web Development Blog, as you know, I write about topics related to Web development. In an ideal world I'd rank well for the phrase Web development but it's too common. It can also mean different things to different people. I'm a long-time blogger, but I only make a few posts per month so I can't compete with Wikipedia and other major players on such a frequently used term. But if I get more specific, I can do well. Today this blog came in 4th out of 231,000,000 results for web development blog. My old blog (which links to this one) comes in 7th, so for now at least I'm getting two good results for that phrase.

Write first for readers, then for SEO

While robots crawl the Web, they do so to help people.

I didn't get these search results by analyzing my site and stuffing the phrase "Web development blog" every place I could find. I just used the term in the most obvious places: in the section title, the primary menu, and anywhere it naturally fit in the text. If you write for humans (rather than robots) you'll naturally include many of the relevant words and phrases in your text, but you may still need to do a bit of fine-tuning to match your vocabulary to your readers.

When we're writing for the Web, we're usually writing about subjects with which we are very familiar. We may use specialized vocabulary that makes sense to us, but isn't used by our readers. This could include technical terms pertinent to the field, regional terms specific to where we live or even phrases specific to our organization.

In order to make sure that our copy is both easily understood and easily found via search, we need to take a step back and read/edit the content with our readers in mind.

Choosing reader-friendly phrases for SEO—an example from higher education

Colleges, universities and other non-profit organizations all depend on fund-raising to serve their missions. Some organizations call their fundraising departments "Advancement." Others use "Development" or "Philanthropy." Alas those outside the non-profit world, including many potential donors, don't see those terms in the same way as insiders. Someone involved in manufacturing may think of "Development" in terms of product development. A recent graduate may consider "Philanthropy" to be the realm of the rich—and not realize it also includes his/her $25 donation to the annual fund.

Schools that use simpler phrases such as "make a gift for XYZ" or "give to XYZ" make it easier for donors to find their giving pages. For example, if I Google give to Dartmouth, the first result takes me to their Why Give page which also includes a direct link to their online giving page.

Why worry about SEO when we link to Giving (or whatever) from the home page?

If I know that I want to find something on a particular site, I'll just type the address in the url, then use the navigation or on-site search to find what I seek. I'm not everyone. I know many people who will use the Google search bar even when they know a site's address. Dartmouth alumni and friends may very well Google "Give to Dartmouth" rather than going to http://www.dartmouth.edu to look for the Giving link. Thus it's helpful that Dartmouth ranks #1 on that phrase. Organizations that have large sites—common in academia, Dartmouth has more than 300,000 publicly indexed pages—rely heavily on on-site search because they offer so much information.

Taking advantage of long tail search terms

Horses have long tails, so can you.

While a phrase like give to Dartmouth is both specific and direct, we can also get good results from phrases that are more unique. Awhile back, in SEO - keywords do the darndest things I asked if you were getting traffic from unusual words or phrases you didn't expect. My friend Wayne mentioned, via Twitter, that he gets traffic on phrases we might not want to repeat. David commented that he is getting good results for "Long haired guinea pigs."

I just looked at my analytics again and am now getting results on click here, have you tried jargon and rt hacool. These actually appear in my top 10 which surprised me, but these are still logical. I've written posts advising against using click here and against business jargon, and hacool is my Twitter ID. (rt stands for reTweet which means to forward someone's message on Twitter.)

While these and more general phrases such as "Web development blog" or "blog website tutorial" appear among the top 10 phrases bringing traffic to my site, niche-specific phrases make a significant impact. The phrase quantify and visualize twitter search results produced 5 visits from people who spent an average of 16:50 minutes on the site and visited an average of 7.6 pages.

Admittedly, 5 visits isn't many. But when you also get 2 for how to start redesigning your web site, 3 for cool html blog, etc. they start to add up. People visit this site via almost 2,000 keyword combinations (many of which may be variations on a theme). The top phrases may bring hundreds of visits each, but when added together it's the little niche terms that bring in the majority of traffic. The collective success of these individually smaller elements is what is meant by the long tail.

Woohoo! My site has the #1 spot for "subaqueous auto racing"

While niche phrases produce traffic, they still need to be relevant to our content. When Google indexes this page, it may get the #1 spot for "subaqueous auto racing." But placing high in search results is only half the battle. Such results only matter if people are searching on that term AND if I provide useful information on the topic. You and I both know that this article is about word choice and SEO. So if anyone searches that phrase hoping to learn about underwater car racing, they will be sorely disappointed and leave the site. Some marketers like to brag about making the first page of search results, but if the phrase doesn't bring visitors it isn't helping.

When editing copy for SEO it's easy to get wound up worrying about what phrases you should rank for, but if you write for your readers and apply common sense, you'll start to see meaningful results.

SEO Keywords and Phrases Resources

• Fast keyword Research With Google's Wonder Wheel
• Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• Google Webmaster Tools: SEO
• How to Find and Target Long Tail Keywords for More Search Engine Traffic
• Researching Longtail Keywords with Google Adwords
• SEO Advice for Bloggers, Straight from the Horse’s Mouth

heidicool.com is also on Facebook

Need more Web tips? Fan the heidicool.com Facebook page. I'm posting 1 tip/link there per day to offer ongoing advice on Web design, marketing and social media—without overwhelming your Facebook stream.

Postscript: Google works fast!

As of 3:50 p.m. e.d.t today, September 10, 2009, this page did come in at #1 for subaqueous auto racing. Here's the screencapture of the Google results page. I have a Greasemonkey script installed on Firefox that also includes Twitter results. As a result of looking this up I'm now also finding reTweets and links I didn't yet know about.

Sample page using semantic mark-up as viewed in Firefox.

Sample page using non-semantic mark-up as viewed in Firefox. Give or take a few pixels these look pretty much the same.

Sample page using semantic mark-up as viewed in Internet Explorer 6. As you can see, the banner breaks in IE 6 but everything else looks pretty much as expected. The page also breaks in IE 7 and IE 8 though the IE 8 version looks different. I've included these samples as a reminder to always check sites in multiple browsers.

Sample page using non-semantic mark-up as viewed in Internet Explorer 6. Again it looks almost the same at the semantic version, even breaking in the same manner.

The other day, Aaron Rester posed this question on Twitter: Webbies: any advice on explaining semantic HTML to non-webbies?

I wrote back that I usually show them some source code and walk them through things like using h1 and so forth for headers. That is what I usually do. In fact I'd just done that the other day when I was showing someone the changes I would recommend for search engine optimization (SEO).

But the question made me wonder if my explanations were adequate. If someone doesn't know anything about HTML or other mark-up languages, will such an explanation make sense? Or is there a better way to explain the differences between structural and presentational mark-up to clients and new Web designers?

Why do clients and other non-webbies need to know about semantic HTML?

Typically this topic comes up most often when one is discussing issues related to search optimization and accessibility. If a client needs to enhance their site for SEO, I may be recommending changes to the code that they won't even see when looking at the page in their browser. Understandably they will want to know why they should pay me to do things to their site that they won't notice. The changes we make may not be visually apparent, but they will convey additional information to Web browsers and search engines that can aid accessibility, usability and searchability.

What is semantic HTML?

Semantics is the study of meaning. Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary provides us with a definition that relates closely to how the term is applied to HTML "3 a : the meaning or relationship of meanings of a sign or set of signs; especially : connotative meaning." HTML uses elements that convey structural meaning to Web browsers and other user agents such as search engine crawlers.

Writing a page in semantic HTML simply means that you are applying the appropriate structural elements to the various bits of content on a page. Huh? Code elements act like labels that tell the Web browser what each section of content is. HTML gives us structural elements to indicate headers, paragraphs, lists, tables and so forth. If I want to tell the browser to start a new paragraph, I'll type <p>. If I want to start a new subhead, I'll type <h5>.

Then isn't all HTML semantic?

You would think so, but no. Web browsers can be both fussy and forgiving. I can code the same content in multiple ways that will each look very similar when viewed, but will actually convey differing amounts of information to user agents.

Instead of using an <h5> I could use <p><strong>in front of my subhead and make it look the same as it would using <h5>. Such usage would be considered presentational mark-up. It can affect how the header looks, but it is not semantically correct because it doesn't let user agents know that this is a subhead. If a Web designer applies the incorrect elements to page content, the site may look perfectly acceptable. But it is not passing on vital information that user agents may need to:

• Help a visually impaired visitor navigate the page using screen reading software.
• Tell Google and other search engines what topics are the most important ones on the page.
• Show that you are citing a reference document such as a book.
• Indicate that you are presenting computer code, etc.

Same content, different mark-up

To illustrate this point I've created 2 very simple Web pages, one uses semantic mark-up and one using non-semantic mark-up. Basically the non-semantic version uses <p> for just about everything. When you view the pages through a regular browser you'll see that the semantic and non-semantic versions look pretty similar. They both look normal in Firefox, Safari and Opera, and they both break in various versions of Internet Explorer. You don't see the difference visually until you look at the pages in the text browser, Lynx.

When viewing the semantic page on Lynx, we can see that there is order to the page; it looks a bit like an outline. The menu looks like a menu and the headers standout to provide an introduction to the other text.

HTML elements in action, offering added information to user agents

Text readers for the visually impaired and search engine spiders are getting even more information than we can see in the Lynx semantic html example. They know that each menu link should be distinguished from the next. The use of an unordered list for the menu tells user agents to separate these links in a way that use of <p> does not, and allows users of screen readers to jump through or skip these elements to proceed to the main text. In the non-semantic version this is not clear, a text reader may speak all of those links together, making it more difficult for the user to navigate.

These user agents can also tell that the first header is more important than the second because it has been coded as an <h3> while the second header is an <h4>. Headers are ranked in order of importance from 1-6. Here we're using an <h1> for the site name, the most important header on the page. Search engine crawlers will see words in an <h1> as being more descriptive of the page as a whole. This is useful for search engine optimization, because we can include our keywords and phrases in our various headers to let the search engines know that core topics we are covering on the page. Thus on this page you'll notice that I've used the phrase "semantic HTML" in both the text and subheads (which in this case are <h5>'s.) That said I've not used it in every subhead because having these headers make sense to you, the reader, is still more important than SEO. People come first, then robots.

In this example I've focused on just a few a few of the many HTML elements that are important to semantic mark-up, but hopefully these will give you a clearer sense of how such usage can help SEO and accessibility. Other elements such as address, cite and blockquote can add additional meaning to a page's code. You can learn more about other elements and related issues in the reference links below.

Semantic mark-up, validation and content

It's always a good practice to validate your code to check for errors and potential problems, but site validation doesn't guarantee that you've used the best mark-up for the site. While the validator can make sure you've used allowed elements, it has no way of knowing if you've them in the most appropriate manner. Both the semantic and non-semantic page samples used in this post were produced using valid W3C standards compliant XHTML and CSS. One is clearly better formed than the other, but both also break in Internet Explorer.

Thus it's also important to check sites in multiple browsers and to simply think carefully about how visitors will read the site. If my samples were for real sites, I'd fix the IE problem, but I used it here to remind us that using valid semantic code is just the beginning. There will always be additional details we must consider.

It's also worth noting that, when it comes to SEO, a semantically well-formed site is not a substitute for good content. Search engines such as Google are designed to help users, like you and me, find the most relevant pages for the information we seek. With that goal in mind they have to accommodate a wide variety of coding differences. If your competitor has great content and plenty of good inbound links, while yours does not, then his/her site will still win out, even if the code is atrocious. But if you can produce great content and present it in the appropriate format you will be off to a good start.

Semantic HTML Resources

• The Elements of Meaningful XHTML (presentation showing examples)
• Fangs Screen Reader Emulator
• Guide to Semantic Use of HTML Elements
• Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act Implementation Guidelines for Web-Based Information and Applications 1.0
• More than one H1 on a page: good or bad? (Video by Google's Matt Cutts)
• Semantics in HTML 5
• W3C Semantic Data Extractor
• W3C: G115: Using semantic elements to mark up structure

Rather than leaving you with a file not found error, I'll turn this into an experiment. The note I left to myself was:

"keywords must rank high, but also be used by real people to find your stuff. intro to longtail, etc."

My plan is to dig into the idea that you can rank well for a phrase that seems useful and have it not bring traffic. Or you can rank well on a longtail phrase that seems so bizarre you wouldn't expect it to bring any traffic at all. For example try Googling Bill is Braising Shrimp. I used this phrase in a recent blog entry. It's an odd combination of words, so I'm not surprised that I rank high on it. But it's also brought 43 visitors this month. That is not something I would have expected.

What about you? Have you found SEO success through phrases you might not expect? Do you have tips you'd like to share with people trying to hone in on keywords as they develop their content? Is there anything you would like me to discuss as I elaborate on the topic?

I look forward to hearing from you!

The above Flash animation file is a mini-Web site used for demonstration purposes. Were it standing on its own a user would see it as a multi-page site with an introductory animation and a menu used to navigate to interior pages.

For those of you who don't have, or cannot see Flash content, the introductory page has a circle that morphs into a square, triangle and back again. The shapes careen up to the menu offering a choice of a circle, triangle and square to click on. When clicked each page takes you to a page with a bit of motion and simple definitions for the shapes.

Flash is a powerful tool. As designers we can use it to create motion, control typography, animate objects, create scalable graphics, embed videos, create slideshows, etc. Some find it so useful that they design entire sites using Flash.

I don't.*

Flash offers great control for designers but it also poses obstacles for users and hinders our Web marketing strategies. Adobe has made great strides in terms of making Flash files both more accessible and searchable, but there is still more progress to be made. Today I'd like to discuss why I advise against using Flash for overall site architecture.

Remember the problems with frames?

Years ago, before we had better tools available, designers flocked to frames because they made it easy to include constant headers and menus. Once you built those fixed unchanging files, all you had to do was create extra files for the content. This seemed cool until we noticed that frames broke the user experience. Individual pages couldn't be bookmarked because the address never changed. While the content would change within the page, the visitor technically remained on the same page of the site.

This was bad from a marketing standpoint, because it inconvenienced visitors and made it difficult for them to link to specific pages on our sites from their own sites. As site owners we rely on incoming links to drive traffic directly to our pages and to enhance our search results. Google and the other search engines consider these links in their algorithms, so more links mean higher placement in search engine results pages. While some may still debate the issue, it didn't take long for most of the design world to conclude that frames caused more problems than they solved.

Flash is like frames— on a Flash based site the address never changes

When we create Flash based-sites, we do so by embedding a Flash file within a regularly constructed HTML file. When we include a Flash file, such as the animation on this page or a YouTube video, it's easy to see that it's just one element within a page. On a Flash-based site, the Flash element is the only thing the visitor sees.

All the navigation and interaction happens within the Flash animation itself. Visitors may click on menu links to visit new pages, just as they would on a regular site, but they don't actually go to a different page. The content changes so the page appears to be a new page but as was true with frames, the page address doesn't change. (One could build a Flash site using separate .swf and .html files for each page, but it's not common practice.)

Shapes - Taking a closer look at a Flash-based site.

I've published the Shapes Flash file from this page separately as a stand-alone site, so you can get a better sense of how this works. If you visit http://www.heidicool.com/flash/shapes.html you will see that it acts like a typical 5 page Web site with a home page and internal content pages. It begins with a simple animation of shapes then you are presented with a menu of a circle, triangle and square. If you click on a shape you go to a page with a short definition of the shape you clicked.

But if you watch the address bar you'll see that the address never changes. If you blog about squares and want to link to the page about squares you can't. Instead you'd have to link to the main page and include a note for users to follow the square link. If including such a description is inconvenient, you probably won't bother to link at all.

The Flash SEO conundrum

If you look at the analytics for your own site you will quickly realize that your incoming links do not all go to your home page. Instead site owners link directly to the page that will be of interest to their readers.

Thus, each page on your site gives you a new opportunity for search engine optimization. If I'd built the Shapes site in HTML, I could be sure to use the keyword "square" in a header element as well as the text on the square page, focus on triangles on the triangle page, etc. Doing so would make it easier for the search engines to find these pages and would also make it possible for other site owners to link to individual pages. This is one aspect of SEO that is a numbers game. A site with more pages creates more opportunities for links and keyword searches—thus resulting in more traffic.

A one-page Flash site has a distinct disadvantage for SEO.

As with any site, I built the Shapes site with SEO in mind. The site validates as XHTML 1.0 strict, and I included a page description and keywords (which Google ignores but others may use) and gave it a unique title. I know that Google has improved how it indexes Flash content, so it will index the text within the pages (since I didn't break apart the text), but it won't know which text elements are most important—since Flash doesn't use semantic mark-up such as headers and paragraphs. I could have included a header element in the HTML, but like the title and page description it would remain the same on each page and wouldn't help me optimize for the individual page topics. These details may help my SEO but they aren't enough to compensate for the sites key weakness. It is still only one page.

Flash and accessibility

Adobe provides an accessibility resource center for Flash and other Adobe products. It provides a number of useful tips and guidelines for making Flash more accessible to those with visual and hearing impairments. If a designer follows the guidelines, and the site visitor has the right browser or screen reader, this can greatly enhance the Flash experience. But some of these guidelines are complicated—there's far more to it than providing alternative text for audio and visual elements— and I suspect there are many of us who don't understand them fully. I don't know how many users have the appropriate screen readers to take advantage of Adobe's accessibility features, so I also have to assume that some do not.

When I use Flash, I try to stick to the basics and offer some sort of alternative content. In my photo gallery pages, I use Flash, javascript and xml to display my photos as a navigable slide show. Each slide show includes alternative text describing the types of photos I've included. That seems the most direct way to handle purely visual elements such as photographs.

On the Shapes site I wrote a description of the site as my alternative content. Users who can't use Flash will see the description instead. This is adequate for this project as it conveys enough information to let visitors know what the example includes. But it would not be sufficient for a larger site. My alternative description applies to the whole site, because the whole site is contained within one page. If I had more content to describe I'd be better served by providing an alternative HTML version of the site, so that I could provide each pages text content individually. By building sites in HTML instead of Flash I can avoid this problem and just build one version of the site.

Conclusion

Flash is great when used in the right context. Whether we're embedding slideshows or making animated cartoons, Flash lets us add some very useful features to our sites. But if you want to attract visitors and increase readership, building the entire site in Flash can be more trouble than it's worth. I'll discuss Flash further in my follow-up article pertaining to Flash and the user experience.

Flash SEO and Accessibility resources

• Accessibility and Usability of Flash for Users with Disabilities
• Adobe Flash Accessibility: Best Practices for Design (Added Aug. 28, 2009 - nice walk through of accessibility issues)
• Adobe Flash CS4 Professional accessibility
• Adobe Search Engine Optimization Technology Center
• Flash and SEO - Compelling Reasons Why Search Engines & Flash Still Don't Mix
• Flash as a choice, not a default
• Search-Friendly Flash?

* There are of course limited exceptions. I built the Commencement March animation in Flash because the project required movement to convey what was happening. The site was built primarily for use as a training presentation and was linked to from the commencement site so it didn't have the usual marketing requirements.

At some point in the past you revamped your site for search engine optimization (SEO). Now it's time to measure your results, and share them with your client or development team. These people come from a variety of backgrounds. Some of the marketers will be perfectly happy to look at your Google Analytics page or stare at your graphs and spreadsheets. Others will quietly gaze at your numbers and wonder (to themselves) what any of this means—and they might not ask you for clarification.

This provides us with a teaching moment that we can use to enhance our SEO in the future. Rather than sending out a dry report or giving a presentation that falls on deaf ears, use this as an opportunity to remind people of what it is you are trying to achieve.

What are we trying to accomplish with SEO?

All we're trying to do with SEO is to make our sites more findable through search engines. The point is to optimize our site content and code in a manner that allows people with some interest in our organization, product, content or services to easily find our site, and the information they seek, when using search engines such as Google or Yahoo.

It's important to remind your team that SEO is not an end goal. It will not get students to apply to your program, buy your widgets or drink your Kool-Aid. But it will bring more traffic—from those with an interest in your stuff—to your site so that your content can encourage them to do those things.

How do we measure SEO?

If our SEO strategy is working we should see an increase in

• traffic from search engines
• time spent on site by search engine visitors
• conversions (search engine visitors attending your events, signing up for your classes, buying your rhinestone studded earmuffs, etc.)

These are the core things to review. To learn more, visit the sites listed at the bottom of this entry.

What's working and what's not

Swim with Sea Turtles while studying marine biology

You've looked at those numbers and everything's gone up. Yay! Or perhaps it hasn't. Boo! How can you tell what's performing well and what needs to be improved? This is where your keywords come into play. If our point is to bring in qualified traffic—people more likely to enroll in our marine ecology program or donate to our new cosmology research center—then that traffic will come from people who have searched on words and phrases related to marine ecology or cosmology.

If what they find on our site matches what they were seeking they are more likely to enroll, donate, etc.

Google analytics, and other such programs provide quantifiable data on key words and phrases used, the number of visits per word or phrase, average time spent on site by those visitors, average number of pages visited, etc. The top 10 phrases for my blog for the past month were:

• tone in writing
• writing tone
• browser testing
• web development blog
• logo
• tone of writing
• social media networking
• add caption to photo in css
• writers tone
• converting word doc to html

I can learn a lot from this (and the rest of the report listing 3,007 words or phrases.) In reviewing this data I'll consider:

Does my site offer the content described in these phrases?

Yes, although my entries about a logo are outdated, the other topics continue to be relevant and I know from past experience that my articles on tone and writing are my most popular pages.

Does my content provide the information users seek?

Yes, they are spending enough time on the pages to read them. If visitors came for 10 seconds and left I would know that they were looking for something different, and that I should reword some things to draw in more relevant traffic and to not waste the time of visitors who clearly want something else.

Are expected terms missing from the list?

No. But if I'd written the definitive post on the eating habits of owls and didn't find any listings for bird, eating, diet, owl, etc. then I'd know I have to edit that article and do some research to determine the most effective key words to include.

Using Wordle word clouds to visualize the results.

I'm the kind of nerd that is perfectly content to spend time poking about in spreadsheets. But 3,007 phrases are still a lot to swallow, and those are just for my little blog. If you have a large university or corporate site your list could be exponentially larger.

Also, people don't all search the same way. They use variations on the same terms. In my list we have 4 variations on writing and tone. If I want to quantify those properly it means merging terms together adding up the combined results etc. How much data you need to quantify depends on your needs, but in many cases you just need to get a sense of which terms are prominent and which are not. This will help your content producers so they can edit their copy to enhance the results in the future.

To get a quicker sense of what's working, I like to copy my results into http://www.wordle.net which let's me create a word cloud of the terms, as shown in the two examples below. Terms showing up more frequently are larger while infrequent terms are smaller. Word clouds can be especially helpful in presentations and reports because they make it easy for readers with varying skill sets to get the point.

In this first example, I copied all phrases that generated 20 or more visits to the site so I could focus on the most frequently used phrases. (This narrowed the list to just a bit over 100). I also removed terms like "of" or "and" so that I could focus on keywords only.

As you can see, "tone" and "writing" show up prominently, as we'd expect from our list. The other words that are easily read are also things I've written about, and it would be easy to notice if a topic I was trying to promote was missing.

Watch for irrelevant results

While it's most important to make sure that our topics show up, it's also important to watch for words we're not trying to promote. If, for example, I saw "Beluga whales" in large letters, and I'd only mentioned them casually in passing it would mean that I was bringing in a lot of people who wanted to learn more about whales. While traffic is good, misguided traffic is not. The people who want to know about whales could care less about my thoughts on Web development so there is no reason for me to waste their time. If that term showed up here I would want to rewrite my article to reduce the number of times I mention Beluga whales.

Fine tuning your word cloud

While this first Wordle word cloud is helpful, it's not overly precise. Some terms, such as "development," are smaller than I might expect. That's because my content wasn't weighted. My analytics report gave me both a list of phrases and the number of times they were used. I pasted in the phrases but not proportionally to their frequency of use. The words that are larger are showing up that way only because they were used in a variety of search phrases. Huh?

"Tone in writing" generated 949 visits in a given time period. "Flash embed script" generated 20. For my Wordle to more accurately reflect the frequency in which these terms were used, I'd need to paste the phrases in as many times as they were used, or in a smaller, but proportional, amount.

To determine how many times to paste in each phrase, I put all the phrases and their frequencies in a spreadsheet similar to the following table. I was only using phrases that brought 20 or more visits so my lowest frequency is 20. If I divide each of my frequencies by a factor of 20, then round the results to a whole number, I come up with a manageable number of phrases to paste.

Phrase Frequency Table

To make my improved Wordle, I pasted "tone writing" in 47 times, "writing tone" 21 times, etc. as indicated by the chart. This rendered an accurate cloud, but "writing" and "tone" were so enormous that you could barely read anything else. To improve readability, I deleted several copies of those phrases so they were still dominant but not so much that you'd need a magnifying glass to read the other words.

This word cloud provides a more accurate representation of the frequency in which these words and phrases bring traffic to the site. When reporting to your client or team you can use such a word cloud to easily show which words are pulling in traffic and which are missing. This visual representation makes it easy for everyone to see what's going on, even those not fond of graphs and spreadsheets.

If you find that it takes too much time to generate the second version of the cloud, the first version is still helpful. You just have to remember that it's not as precise.

An educated Web team is an effective Web team

SEO can be confusing to both clients and other members of your team. A client may have overly optimistic expectations. A writer may not fully understand why you keep pushing them to use key words and phrases. But if you can teach them about SEO basics and give examples of what you are trying to accomplish, you can set realistic goals and ensure that all members of the team contribute to the success of the project.

More articles on measuring SEO

• Are You Measuring SEO Success Correctly?
• How to Measure SEO Success
• Measuring SEO Success: Solve Personalized Search Misperceptions
• Measuring SEO Success With Web Analytics (Good intro for those new to Web analytics)
• Measuring SEO: why rankings are worthless
• What Google's Matt Cutts Sees In 2009

Looking for more educational resources? Check out Learning for fun and adventure: online education comes in many flavors for sites that will entertain your brain.

Over the past weeks, I've been getting a lot of questions and comments about URLs and naming conventions. Here are a few typical queries:

• Department X has the address http://departmentx.case.edu. Our address is http://www.case.edu/school/foobar/
  foobar.html. Can you change our address to http://foobar.case.edu?
• How can we get a shorter address for our page? Our long URL is wreaking havoc with our marketing.
• Our site has a long address that we've been printing in our mailings. We're not getting as much traffic as we hoped because the name is too long to type. How can we shorten it?

Today I'll address the first question, relating to subdomains, then continue the discussion on naming conventions in an upcoming article.

Subdomains: http://yourname.case.edu vs. http://www.case.edu/yourname vs. http://www.case.edu/your division/yourname

Here at Case we use a a hierarchical naming structure, featuring addresses such as http://www.case.edu/your division/yourname, on the main Case Web server. Subdomains, addresses such as http://yourname.case.edu, are used by Web sites housed on other servers because this is the most efficient way to include such sites within the case.edu domain. Subdomains aren't by nature special or better, they simply provide a technical solution to a technical problem. Sites housed on the main Case server cannot be changed to have subdomain addresses, but that's okay, there is no advantage to doing so. My former colleague, Kevin Adams, explains this in detail in his article Subdomains vs. Accounts - Case's Naming Conventions.

On personal and business sites subdomains are typically used when content resides on a different server or when content is topically distinctive from the main site—but not so distinct that it would benefit from a unique domain. For example, http://maps.google.com offers a distinctly different service than the search engine found at http://www.google.com/, but the common use of the google.com domain let's users know that both services are produced by the same entity and reinforces the Google brand. Google Analytics however uses http://www.google.com/analytics/ (a subfolder instead of a subdomain) as the analytics service is more closely tied to the search engine service.

Webmasters at Case and other universities could argue that their sites are topically distinctive—after all we house sites on topics ranging from Art History and Art to Darwin and Evolution—but collectively such subjects tie together in furtherance of our educational mission. There's no compelling reason to distinguish them through the use of subdomains.

Can't subdomains enhance search engine optimization (SEO)?

From what I've read the answer is no, although people have tried to use subdomains to cheat the system. When someone searches for a particular word or phrase most search engines will limit the number of results it shows from any given domain. Thus if you search for "Web Development Blog" on Google, you'll see that this blog shows up twice (Google's limit is normally 2 results). The main page shows up in the results as does one of the individual entry pages. The entry page is indented below to show that it is coming from the same site.

It used to be that subdomains were treated as separate sites, so marketers might distribute related content across subdomains so additional listings would show up on search engine results pages (SERPs). While this was helpful to marketers it wasn't so helpful to users, so Google has refined their algorithms, so that subdomains aren't given an automatic advantage. Relevance comes first, so this doesn't mean you will never see more than 2 subdomains appear on the same SERP. (A search for "Case Western Reserve" shows several subdomains.) It simply means that with all content being equal the subdomain won't have an advantage over a subfolder when it comes to issues of SEO.

If I can use a subdomain I'll have a shorter address than I have now.

While a subdomain may result in a slightly shorter file name, that will probably have very little impact on your marketing strategies. I'll discuss URL length and naming conventions further in an upcoming entry.

Learn more about the use of subdomains and subfolder in URLs

• How Changes To The Way Google Handles Subdomains Impact SEO
• Subdomains and subdirectories
• Subdomains, Subfolders and Top-Level Domains
• Subdomains vs. Accounts - Case's Naming Conventions

Last week, while catching up on podcasts, I listened to Can Social Networking Build Your Brand?, Jason Schwartz's presentation from SXSW Interactive 2007 (View his slideshow). Jason crammed a lot of interesting ideas into his 25 minute presentation (to which you should listen), but his references to de.licio.us, similicio.us and Technorati got me thinking about what a tremendous resource de.licio.us can be.

In addition to being a good place to share bookmarks and find sites in your areas of interest, de.licio.us can also provide some interesting information about your own site(s), specifically:

• Who has bookmarked your site?
• When did they bookmark the site?
• What tags have been used for your site?
• What other sites share those tags?
• What tags are related to those tags?

This information intrigues me because it offers new opportunities for networking and search engine optimization.

Networking through de.licio.us

Given that de.licio.us includes a networking component, it's pretty obvious that we should look at the pages of those who bookmark our sites to see what else we have in common. If one of these people has bookmarked sites related to our topic, then we may want to add that person to our network.

Additionally, their bookmarks can lead us to sites that compete with our own (that we should follow) as well as sites that complement our own. If some of these sites are blogs, we can comment on them and begin to network with their authors and readers to share knowledge and draw traffic to our own sites. We may also want to follow/friend such people on social media services such as Pownce, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and the place where we began, de.licio.us.

de.licio.us tags can inform key word choices for SEO

If we've thought carefully about our topic and pay attention to our analytics we should have a good idea regarding the key words and phrases users choose when searching for our content.

When people search for a topic, they usually search for word combinations they expect to find on the type of site they are seeking. If they're detail oriented they'll try to fine tune these in such a way that they can narrow the results to very specific types of sites.

But when people tag a site they've bookmarked, they tag it with the word combinations they associate with the content—the words they'll be most likely to remember 6 months from now when they're trying to find the site they bookmarked on polymers that can change from hard to soft. They might search for the site using "hard soft polymer change" and tag it the same way, but they may also tag it under: polymerresearch, neuroscience, seacucumber, science, chemoresponsive, mechanicadaptability, casewesternreserveuniversity, macromolecular and so forth.

Some of these tags might be obvious or redundant, but others might give us some ideas for more key words we should include on our site.

Example: Putting the Web Development Blog under the de.licio.us microscope

If we look at the de.licio.us results for the Web Development blog, we'll see that 20 people have bookmarked it. That won't give us as much data as we'd find for a higher profile site, but it will still give us some interesting information.

The first thing we'll notice is that the most popular tags are: CSS, blog, development, web, webdesign, webdevelopment. That's not a big surprise; we know those terms already occur multiple times throughout the blog.

If we look below that we'll see the posting history. This lists, in reverse chronological order, the users who have bookmarked the page, the year and month they bookmarked it and the tags they used.

User Tags

Looking at these tags I see a few that vary from the Web focus, including: highered, uni_blogs, uni_webdev, ublog and academiccomputing. This is useful because while I may think of the Web as the primary theme of this blog, others are associating it with higher education and academia. Since they are classifying it in this manner, it may mean that others might be looking for blogs on such topics. Thus it might behoove me to include phrases like "college blog," "university blog," "academic computing," and "blogging in education" somewhere relevant within the site. If I add such terms this month I can check back over the coming months to see if they start appearing in my site analytics. While my writing on the topic automatically includes them in this blog entry, I'll also consider whether some are appropriate to my About Us page.

Bookmarking dates

Having pondered my keywords, I'm now curious about the dates the site was bookmarked. The dates could be meaningless—just random times when visitors found the site—but they could also indicate that certain entries sparked enough interest (at the time they were published) that someone felt it worthwhile to bookmark them for future reference. Nothing particularly exciting stands out for November 2005, but November 2006 includes the article, A writer's obligations: ethics, law and pragmatism, Part 3: Pragmatism, which my stats have shown to be one of the more popular entries on the blog. This may just be coincidental, but if you have a larger site that has been bookmarked more often than mine you may be able to find some more obvious patterns.

Bookmarking users

Finally let's look at the people who have bookmarked the page. Some of the names are familiar, they're people I either know in person or online. But others are unfamiliar. If I know them, I don't know them by their usernames. I don't recognize sandpetra, but he/she's tagged the blog as "clink." I'm not quite sure what that means, but when I go to his/her page I see that he/she has a lot of sites tagged under accessibility, accessiblewebsitedesign, webdesign, seo and other topics that interest me. Seeing this I've added sandpetra to my de.licio.us network. A Google search on the name tells me that sandpetra is the Web Marketing Director for Hobo-Web Ltd UK an SEO and design firm near Glasgow in Scotland. Hobo-Web also produces a well-written blog called Hobo News, to which I will now subscribe. (Check out their post, Why You Should Nofollow Your Blog Comments?) See, this connection has already proved useful—it provides content I think you would enjoy reading.

Conclusion: de.licio.us is useful in many ways.

If you're not already using de.licio.us as a bookmarking tool, I hope I've given you a few more reasons to do so. And if you're not sure what to bookmark first, feel free to start with this blog as well as this entry!

de.licio.us (and related) resources

• Common Craft’s Plain English Video Series
• similicio.us
• Social Survey: Del.icio.us
• The Del.icio.us Lesson
• Wikipedia: del.icio.us

While the medium is different, blogs have much in common with magazines. They're published periodically, can accept subscriptions (via RSS feeds), may (or may not) accept advertising and typically focus on a particular topic or niche. If you blog, you have some notion of your topical area in your head, but have you defined it for your readers? If not, it may be time to take a page from the magazines and define a clear editorial policy for your blog. Just as setting clear goals aids in the development of a regular Web page, defining a clear editorial policy for your blog will aid you in authoring future articles and attracting new readers.

What is an editorial policy?

An editorial policy is simply a short document that defines what subjects will (or will not be) covered in your blog. It may also include information on why you are covering X and not Y as well as some background information on the authors. Magazines typically publish their policies in their advertising media kits and/or their guidelines for writers. For a blog you may wish to include your policy on the "About Us" page and also provide a quick summary in the meta description element in the head of your pages. If you edit a multi-author blog, you may also find it helpful to maintain a more detailed policy for your writers that you do not publish online. This could include style guidelines and other rules that are useful to your staff but not of particular interest to the public.

Here are my top 5 reasons to define your editorial policy.

1. Establishing clear parameters for the scope of your topic helps you determine what to write and lets readers (and search engines) know what to expect.

How much or how little you write about makes a great difference. If your topic is too broad, you may confuse readers who don't know what to expect. If it is too narrow you may run out of things to say. In For ‘bloggers, diversification avoids stagnation, Wayne Smallman addresses how the breadth of your subject area can keep your blog interesting while also supporting your Internet marketing efforts.

For example, imagine you are blogging about baking. This is a huge subject. If your expertise lies more towards bread than pastries you may limit it to that. But what if you don't discuss quick breads but do cover beignets? Perhaps your focus is yeast-leavened baking and not merely bread. Somewhere between recipes for oatmeal bread and anything cooked in an oven you will find, and define, the scope of your subject.

If your scope includes puff pastries and you have a yen to write about Beef Wellington, then feel free. Both you and your readers will know that it fits within your policy and you won't have spent hours wondering whether or not it's on topic.

2. Defining your scope reduces off-topic submissions

Some blogs accept suggestions and/or articles from readers and other writers. While this can be a great way to get new ideas and material, you probably don't have the time to sort through ideas that aren't relevant to the topic. In terms of our baking blog, it may be that our policy includes some desserts but does not include pies and tarts.

If we make this clear up front we can spend more time writing articles and less time writing rejection letters. Doing so also provides a service to your submitters. If Peter Piemaker knows your policy, he'll be able to focus his time more appropriately and find a different blog—one whose editors and readers would love to know more about making a kiwi tart with tamarind crème anglaise.

3. A clear editorial focus matches advertisers with your audience

This blog doesn't accept advertising, but yours might. When magazines sell advertising they create a media kit with information about the topic of the magazine and the demographics of their readership. Advertisers use this information in order to target readers who are most likely to buy their products. If your blog accepts advertising, you also want your ads to be appropriate to your subject matter and audience. Readers of your baking blog will be more likely to click on ads related to bread pans and mixers, than on fishing lures or hair-care products, and will thus generate more revenue for you and your advertisers. Having a clearly defined editorial policy helps advertisers choose between your blog and someone else's.

4. Publishing your editorial policy supports your Search Engine Optimization strategies

As we know from An Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), including topically relevant keywords within your content helps search engines to identify the topics discussed on your site. While individual entries will feature keywords appropriate to those entries, where should you put the keywords that describe the the blog as a whole? Your editorial policy is the perfect place to include these because it defines the topics included in your site overall.

By publishing your policy on an "About Us" or other page, you can draw readers searching for the overall themes of your blog in addition to those searching topics covered in more specific entries.

If you already have an "About " page this is a good time to review it to determine if your editorial policy is clearly defined and if that policy includes the appropriate keywords. As your blog evolves, it is also a good idea to review this once a year. I just re-read mine and found it unsuitably vague so I've now rewritten it to be more specific.

5. Including an editorial policy or content description promotes a professional image and can demonstrate your expertise.

One of the first things I do after discovering a new blog is to look for the "About" page. I want to know more about the blog's overall theme and its author(s). If that information isn't available I'll have to skim through the entries to see if an identifiable theme emerges and if I can learn anything about the writer's expertise. If I've found an interesting entry—and I'm thinking of subscribing to the blog—I need this information to decide if I'll be interested in future entries and if the author should be considered a reliable source. If I don't have time to do this research myself I probably won't subscribe. I'm already subscribed to more blogs than I can keep up with, so if I can't quickly determine a blog's relevance to my life, I probably won't bother.

If you want repeat readers, especially subscribers, take a few minutes to provide this information. They'll respect you for it.

Conclusion: Establishing an editorial policy helps you set the tone of your blog

Whether you want a better way to determine what to write, wish to increase readership or want to fine-tune your advertising, a clearly defined editorial policy can guide the way. Whether you call it "Editorial Policy," "About Us" or something else doesn't matter. If the policy is clear to you and your readers it will enhance the blogging experience for all involved.

Examples of Editorial and Advertising Policies in Magazines and Blogs

The following policies vary from short descriptions to more in-depth policy statements. If your blog accepts advertising you may be interested in The Nation's advertising policy which is very detailed and says, among others things, "Although the relationship of the First Amendment to commercial advertising is complex, we start with strong presumption against banning advertisers because we disapprove of, or even abhor, their political or social views. But we reserve (and exercise) the right to attack them in our editorial columns." I thought that was rather thought-provoking, though such a statement is obviously more necessary to "The Nation" than it would be to many blogs.

• About Ars Technica
• .eduGuru About Page
• The Nation's Advertising Policy
• The Nation's Editorial Profile
• The New Yorker Mission Statement
• Time Magazine
• Science Daily - About this site

This is the fourth in a series of posts that discuss Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and other Web marketing strategies.

What is linkbait?

It sounds nefarious doesn't it? Makes one think of "bait and switch" or that run-down old bait store by the lake—the one where they store the containers of nightcrawlers in the same cooler as the egg salad sandwiches. Blech.

In reality linkbait is simply online content designed to attract an audience who will link to your site. But isn't all content supposed to do that? In theory yes, but linkbait goes one step further. Instead of supplying the usual insight that your readers have come to depend upon, linkbait reaches out beyond your core audience, offering content that is topical, controversial or in some manner more exciting than the usual fare.

Linkbait is like your favorite birthday present. While you appreciated and needed the new sweater, books and CD's, the Wii/Xbox/bicycle/train set/new puppy/or other object of desire was the one you told your friends about. Linkbait is the content that people tell others about through their blogs, Web site, Facebook pages, Twitters, Pownces, StumbleUpons, etc.

Examples of linkbait

Linkbait is more than supercharged content. It's content with an edge, this edge could be something like a Top 10 list on a popular topic, a controversial opinion such as a vilification of Firefox (who would do such a thing?!), or a contest offering a popular prize. For example, Fetch Softworks has just announced their Take Fetch Back to School, Win a MacBook Contest (4 runners-up win new iPod Nanos). This contest should be great linkbait because it is geared to students, staff and faculty just beginning the academic year; offers great prizes; and is happening at a time when some of those prizes, the new iPods, are making a lot of news. As a user of their product I've already started pondering what to write, and as a blogger I've already linked to them. So I think it's working!

When to use linkbait?

Like your birthday present, linkbait is for special occasions, meant to add to your content rather than replace it. The bait is only part of the overall mix. If you tried to use linkbait in every blog post you would soon end up with a site lacking in continuity. That wouldn't really serve your goals. But on occasion, if you come up with a clever idea that is related to your goals, adds value to your regular content, and attracts attention, then go for it. Strategic bits of linkbait can help you expand your readership, acquire more incoming links and raise your rankings while adding a bit of excitement for your regular readers.

I could proceed to bore you with more details, caveats, pros and cons, but plenty of others have already written on the topic. If you are considering adding linkbait to your marketing toolkit, the following resources should give you much of what you need to know.

Linkbait Resources

• Wikipedia: Link bait
• Matt Cutts: SEO Advice: linkbait and linkbaiting
• An Introduction to Linkbaiting
• Golden Rules of Linkbaiting
• Andy Hagans’ Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and SMM
• The Art of Linkbaiting
• 2007 Guide To Linkbaiting: The Year Of Widgetbait?
• Leveraging Linkbait
• 5 Link Baiting Methods