SEO Toolkit – Part 2: On-Site Changes

SEO Has 3 Main Legs: Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Your Site Keywords Inbound Links Today’s Topic: Your Site Your Site Inbound Links Keywords

Today’s Topic: Your Site Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Luckily, you can change your site’s design for better SEO fairly easily. Here are the basics…

Part I: How Search Bots (aka Spiders)“See” Your Site Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved.

Example Paywall Page: Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved.

As Seen by Google Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved.

Yeah, It’s Text-Focused Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Plus, if anything requires a mouse-over to see… the bot won’t see it. - Bots don’t run Javascript. - Bots mostly don’t “see” Flash. Lastly, Bots ONLY follow text links.

Get a Bot-View of Your Site Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved.

Part II: URLs & Title Tags Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved.

URLs (It’s About Words) Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Use keywords in URLs (not page numbers) Keep under: 7-10 words/ 70 characters Hyphens are the best way to separate words Avoid session-specific gobbledygook URLs (bots don’t crawl with cookies) (Bots don’t use cookies)

Title Tags Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. HUGELY Important. Do NOT: -> Use generic words instead of keywords. -> Begin titles with your site/brand name (except for Home) -> Use the same exact title on two or more pages.

Example Good Title Tag Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved.

Part II: Textual Content Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved.

Your Brand’s Tagline Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Worst practice: Search Bots can’t read text rendered as an image. This sub site’s tagline is invisible to bots. Is yours too?

Headlines (aka H1 Tags) Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Get some search bot attention. If a headline doesn’t have a keyword in it – it’s wasted. Often used by blogging platforms to create SEO- friendly page URLs. Bad example ->

Body Copy Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Also very important. Put keywords in the first 100 words. Closer to the start, the better. Use multiple variations of keywords (ie. Bike vs. Bicycle.)

Keyword Density Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. You can have too much of a good thing. Search engines will penalize your site if you overuse keywords in your content. Repeated keywords should make up no more than 3% of each page’s content Easy way to measure it? Use a free keyword density tool like:

Image Captions Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Don’t forget them! Bots look for text close to the image to decide what it’s about.

Image File Names + Alt Tags Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Alt tags are used in HTML code to describe a photo. Be sure to use keywords in the file name of your photo and your Alt tags for maximum SEO value. Example for this report photo: <img width=”500” height=”360” src=”report-cover.jpg” alt=”benchmark report”> Better Example: <img width=”500” height=”360” src=”subscription-membership-site-report.jpg” alt=”subscription membership site benchmark report”>

Part III: Internal Links & Navigation Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved.

Text Wording Matters Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Search Bots read anchor text to figure out what keywords your link is relevant for. Example anchor text Actual link

Click Here = Too Generic Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Don’t use Read more, Continue, or Click here for anchor text alone without other keywords!

Links Per Page Rules Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Rule #1. >100 Google bots typically won’t crawl more than 100 links per page (unless you are really important) Rule #2. Fewer Links = A lot Better Fewer links per page = the bots “value” per link. Rule #3. Nav bars, breadcrumbs, footers, blogrolls, & tagclouds may all count as links! So your typical site page probably has more than you think.

So… Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. You may need to hide or eliminate some links to make your important-for-SEO links more valuable.

Too many links! Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Bots probably aren’t delightedly valuing these. Only use if your human visitors find significant value in them.

Navigation Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Horizontal vs. vertical : Doesn’t matter Search engines rank all nav bars equally … but footers are ranked with less importance.

Site Map Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Great SEO idea Best practice: use an XML auto-generated sitemap that bots like. Free info at:

Breadcrumbs Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Great SEO idea As long as they contain keywords.

Body Copy Links Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Great SEO idea Just keep it well under 100 links (including everything else on the page.) + avoid generically- worded links.

Buttons Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Critical Rule: Use CSS. (Otherwise search bots can’t “click” on buttons) Download the Expert’s Guide to Currency Trading

Part IV: Paywalls Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved.

Bots Don’t See Behind Paywalls Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Old tricks to allow bots, but not people, behind paywalls in are strongly discouraged. Search engines like Google have policies against what's known as “cloaking”: showing one web page to the spider that indexes it but then a different page to a user. But there is a “legal” way to get a bot behind your paywall…

First Click Free Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Google First Click Free allows the Google spider to index content behind their paywall, then allow users who find one of those articles through Google News or Google Search to see the full page without requiring them to register or subscribe. Publishers can allow up to five free clicks per day. More info:

Paywalls = SEO Power Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Bots prefer sites with many, many relevant pages on a particular topic. Bots can’t see barriered pages … but they can see paywalls! So, publish a different, ‘bot-friendly paywall for each piece of content behind the barrier.

Avoid Generic Paywalls Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved.

Keyword-Loaded Paywall Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved.

Paywall Page Titles Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Program your site to show a unique title on each paywall page. Users should land on a paywall page with the title of the page they were searching for…Helps with SEO and with conversions.

Keyword-Rich Teasers Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Besides the article title, the teaser paragraph which is technically “outside” the paywall is your most important element for SEO. Fill it with keywords!

Part V: Other Page Elements Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved.

Social Media Share Buttons Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Search engine experts such as SEOMoz have found a likely correlation between how often a piece of content is shared with social media buttons and higher search engine ranking. Google launched the +1 button to have its own way to measure social popularity. Consider whether your audience would utilize share buttons or test it out.

Social Media Text Links Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Text links can sometimes be more effective than share buttons as a social media call to action. Test them on your site.

Comments Count! Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Google’s recent algorithm change, called Panda or Farmer, gives more weight to reader comments. Be sure to allow comments on Your free content and include a call to action like “What do you think?” at the end of blog posts. MODERATE

Additional Resources from Copyright , Subscription Site Insider a division of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc. All rights reserved. Links to Our Entire SEO Toolkit including: Part 1: Keyword Research Part 2: On-Site Changes Part 3: Building Inbound Links Checklist: SEO for Subscription Sites Can be found at: