Website SEO, the Caesar Way –Farquharson/Tedesco

(A Note from T.J. and Bill: We're off this month. In our absence, please enjoy this column from our good friend, former Roman emperor Julius Caesar. A few thousand years after successfully faking his own death, Caesar has returned to prominence as an SEO guru.)

Friends, Romans, countrymen: lend me your ears! There's but one thing worse than the Ides of March: having a Website that is not properly optimized for search engines. Everyone from the humblest slave to Caesar himself uses search engines to seek out the wares they need. Your print customers are no different.

If your Web pages rank highly on Google and other search engines, my friends and countrymen, you shall receive much site traffic, and thus many sales the live-long day. Websites that are not optimized shall be forced to endure the winter's cold, far from any visitor. Have I captured your attention yet? Good! Let us commence my Seven Pillars of SEO.

Pillar I: Create external links to your Website. I am remembered in history in great part because of my popularity as emperor. Popularity is also important on the Web, my friends. Search engine bots count how many times your site is linked to from other sites. A site with a whole bevy of external links pointing to it shall be deemed significantly more relevant in searches than one with a mere pittance.

Therefore, doth pursue all reciprocal link opportunities with other companies, as long as there be a credible business reason to do so. Also, my countrymen, consider dispersing press releases via an online PR distribution service. When these releases post, a whole squadron of links will be created back to the release's source—your Website. Dozens or even hundreds of external links can be created this way.

Pillar II: Use search engine-friendly page titles. We Romans highly value titles—"Emperor Caesar" commands much more respect and attention than "Sandalmaker Caesar," doth it not? Web page titles hold similar weight in the world of SEO—they're one of four key elements that determine your site's search engine rankings.

Hence, make sure your page titles are relevant to the page itself. Titles shall include specific keywords or phrases and be relatively short, yet descriptive. Doth not, my friends, make the mistake of putting your company name on every page of your site. This will not help people searching for "sheetfed printing" seek you out.

Pillar III: Increase Website traffic. If your Website sees as much traffic as the Coliseum on a Friday night, it shall be deemed highly important by search engines and, therefore, be ranked higher in search results than other sources with lower activity. If your site does not generate many visitors, it shall plummet further into SEO irrelevance, like a stone into the river Tiber.

One way to generate site traffic is to enlist the fine citizens at Google AdWords. When people click on your ad, they will be linked to your Website and recorded as a visitor. Do not fret over onerous costs: Google and other pay-per-click search engine ad services allow advertisers to easily cap daily spending amounts.

Pillar IV: Prioritize fresh content. Ah, those search engine bots have that lean and hungry look. That's because they want content that is fresh—and place a higher value on it when indexing pages. Therefore, I implore you, commit to updating your site weekly or daily, if possible.

If you're usually too busy attending chariot races or invading Britain to invest time into maintaining your site, as I was, you may consider enlisting a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress. CMS's allow virtually anyone in your organization who can use a computer to simply create, edit and place Web content in a slew of forms: a tip-of-the-week box, a blog post, a news release.

With myriad ways to update your site in relatively little time, it is feasible that your business can produce fresh site content daily. This shall make a favorable impression on search engine bots and on those who journey to your site.

Pillar V: Write search engine-friendly Web copy. Cowards die many times before their deaths, and keywords must be repeated many times for optimal search engine performance—or at least, 'tis how it once was. Yet I come to bury "keyword density," not to praise it—'tis no longer an important element of SEO.

Therefore, focus instead on writing Website copy that is clear as a mountain stream, concise and accurately describes your wares. Yet also make sure the copy includes the words users would type to find the services you provide.

Choose just three or four relevant keywords for each page, at the most, and deftly weave them into the content as appropriate. Putting a slew of different keywords into a Web page so it shows up in many different searches can lead Google and other search engines to blacklist your site, much as Ovid was exiled from Rome.

Pillar VI: Thou shall utilize KEI. Contrary to popular belief, "KEI" is not what traitorous Brutus shouted as he stabbed me in the Senate chamber. KEI—Keyword Effectiveness Index—is a tool that lets you compare the number of searches done for a keyword against the number of search results returned.

This helps you identify which keywords relevant to your business shall perform best in searches. I decree: you shall not determine which keywords to include in your Website's copy without first checking their KEI.

Pillar VII: Take advantage of plug–ins for WordPress Websites. Much as the evil that men do lives after them, the various plugins from WordPress will enhance your site's SEO long after you install them. I heartily recommend the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast. It is one of the most popular and versatile SEO plugins available—the "Caesar" of WordPress SEO tools, if you will—and contains a wealth of features that will aid your site's search engine performance with little effort required on your part. Also consider the "SEO Meta Tags" plugin. This can auto-generate meta tags, which are descriptions of your site's pages that search engines use to index your site.

The downside to Pillar VII, of course, is that it can solely be implemented with Websites that were built in WordPress.

If you implement my Seven Pillar strategy, my friends, I can guarantee that your Website will rise to a prominence greater than the Roman Empire itself. One last request: do not share any of these tips with Brutus. I've never quite forgiven him for his transgressions. PI

About the Authors
Bill Farquharson is the president of Aspire For (www.AspireFor.com). His Sales Challenge can help drive your sales momentum. Contact him at (781) 934-7036 or e-mail bill@aspirefor.com. T.J. Tedesco is team leader of Grow Sales, a 15-year-old marketing and PR services company. He is author of "Playbook for Selling Success in the Graphic Arts Industry" and six other books. Contact Tedesco at (301) 294-9900 or e-mail tj@growsales.com.