Search engine optimization (SEO)
… refers to how well the site content is produced and presented in a way that Google and other search engines know what the site is about so that when a web visitor “Googles” a particular phrase or keyword, Google is able to deliver accurate and relevant results. Hopefully, if you have done your job well, when somebody clicks onto your site it evokes this response, “That’s exactly what I was looking for!”
SEO is kind of like a beacon that produces enough signals to search engines so that they can properly index and categorize sites in a way that deliver accurate results that satisfy people who are seeking the specific information about the products and services that you deliver or present on your website.
I use a number of SEO analysis tools including:
… to determine how well a particular website is optimized for search engines. A perfect score is 100, which means that you have done just about everything you can do to maximize the chance of being found on Google given certain keyword phrase searches.
Search engine friendly web design
As a general rule of thumb, the ugliest sites tend to rank the highest on Google while the most beautiful and interactive web sites tend to be search engine challenged. Think Craigslist, for example.
Craigslist is not pretty but does ranks high on Google
Why is that? And are there any exceptions?
Images and Flash tend to inhibit Google rankings
For one, beautiful sites tend to use a lot of graphic images and photos in order to look good. In addition, interactive and animated sites lean heavily on Flash for their performance. Both Flash and photos (graphics) are typically search engine hostile or SEO killers.
For example, some webmasters want to deploy a fancy font that they found but is not supported by most internet browsers. So, instead of using text and one of the half a dozen supported font families, they will create a JPG of a word, phrase, headline or message.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but unfortunately, Google is blind … you working eyes to see an image.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Google is blind … and so are many of your potential web visitors. So, if you make your site accessible to people with visual disabilities (Section 508 compliant) then not only will you create a search engine friendly site and get ranked high in Google but you will also help all people, regardless of their visual disability, read your web site.
If you name your images properly and use both the title and alt text attributes within your image path then you can actually leverage images to your advantage on the major search engines. In addition, there are techniques and methods that you can use within Flash, XML for example, to help Google and Bing know what is going on inside that Flash movie. It is like Closed Captions (CC) for Flash that enables the search engines to read the conversation.
Web Design and Usability is qualitative and quantitative. It refers to aesthetics, intuitiveness, conformance to conventional navigation standards, efficiency and effectiveness of screen space (including effective use of white space), ease of finding information, balance between images, graphics and text, ability to share your site across social media and how easy it is to identify your social media profiles.
A Great Design that Dominates Google
As part of my preparation to speak at the Social Media Summit produced by the Immunization Action Coalition, I took the initiative to research the web sites of all invited attendees. After finding them on Google, I evaluated each organization’s online presence based on the following factors:
- Web site design and ergonomics
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Social media presence
One organization, the American Medical Association, had an almost perfect score and should be considered the role model or epitome of a well planned and executed online marketing strategy.
The site was built in a search engine friendly (SEF) way. Search engine optimization (SEO) was obviously not an afterthought. It is quite obvious that the architects of the AMA site engineered search engine optimization into the DNA and information architecture of the site from day one of the project.
AMA is a PR8 website. PageRank or PR is a number that Google awards to a site based on its popularity, relevancy, trust and authority. It is a factor of many things including the number of unique domain names or IP addresses that link to a site, the anchor text used to link to a site, the context for which a site is references and the number of unique, relevant and fresh pages of content that exists on a site.
A site’s PageRank (PR) is important for many reasons because the higher the PR, the…
- More frequently Google and other search engines crawl your site
- More quickly news and information can get indexed by the search engines
- Higher you tend to rank on the search engine results pages
- Deeper the search engines tend to crawl your site
- More trust and authority Google grants your site
Trust & Authority
… is a big factor because it doesn’t really matter how beautiful or search engine optimized your site is if Google doesn’t trust your content. Authority, also known as Page Rank or PR, is rated on a scale of 1 to 10, determined by Google and is an indication of how relevant and popular a site is compared to the entire universe of web sites across the Internet. The only site I have ever seen to achieve a PR 10 is Google itself. Yahoo and Wikipedia are PR 9 sites.
This score is determined, in large part, by the number of diverse websites that reference or point to a particular site. In general, the more inbound links you have to your site, the higher your PR rating. The higher your PR, the more often Google comes back to index your site, the deeper it tends to crawl your site and the more quickly you can get ranked on Google for new terms, phrases and articles.
Site owners build and develop these inbound links in a number of ways but the best way to earn inbound links is by producing quality, relevant, timely, unique and fresh content on your website. The more important your website, the more likely other people, webmasters and bloggers will make references to your website and thereby increase your trust and authority rating.
If you want to rank higher on Google…
As I was reminded at the Search Marketing Expo (SMX East) in New York City last week, if you want to rank higher on Google then get more pages on your site. The American Medical Association does exactly that. They have over 35,000 pages of indexed content. In addition, AMA has over 350,000 gross inbound links and over 4,000 links from unique IP addresses.
However, as great as the American Medical Association website is, it is still not 100% perfect in my opinion. I believe that social media share widgets should be on the home page to encourage people to bookmark the site and share links to the site from web visitor’s social media profiles like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and StumbleUpon.
In addition, while the AMA does have its own social media profiles on Facebook, YouTube, Linkedin and Twitter, there are no quick and easy references to these profiles from AMA’s home page. Other than that, the AMA website looks modern, well organized, visually stimulating, current and informative. The calls to action are clear and it is very ergonomic, intuitive and usable. The AMA site is a great role model for excellent web design.
Social Media Branding
I know this is a little off topic, but since I did reference the AMA’s social media profiles, I would like to make an observation…
It’s too bad that the AMA did not, or was not able to, have consistent user names or IDs across these social media sites. If it were me, I would have probably tried to create userIDs or usernames that reflected my domain name. For example, the AMA URL is AMA-assn.org so I would have tried to create usernames and pretty permalinks (vanity URLs) on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Linkedin to reflect AMA-assn … or better yet AMA-assn-org. This way, their domain name would have also been branded.
In addition, while I’m on the subject of social media marketing, I would have liked to have seen a custom background pattern for both of AMA’s YouTube and Twitter sites. In addition, I would like to see a consistent logo and color theme across the sites so that I know that this is the Official site for this organization.
Other than that, I think AMA is doing a bang up job with their online marketing campaign, web site design and search engine optimization. Kudos!
To show how AMA is leading the pack, the following chart shows the top 10 sites that I evaluated in preparation for that particular social media summit:
Design vs Optimization
So, hopefully, you can see and be inspired by the fact that a site can look beautiful, be usable and search engine friendly all at the same time.
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