Top 10 SEO Tips
Joe Dysart
September 21, 2009
While optimizing your museum store’s Web site for search engines can seem tougher than launching the space shuttle, the fact is, there are a number of fairly easy tactics you can use to quickly climb ahead of the competition. Here are the top 10:
1) Sign up for a free Google webmasters account. This is probably the greatest favor any online museum store can do to boost itself in the search engine rankings. Google’s free account is packed with insights, tips and tricks for ensuring your site is SEO-optimized for Google, which currently directs about 65% of all search traffic on the Web. Plus, once you’re optimized for Google, your site will be optimized for most other major search engines as well.
2) Link ‘til you drop. This is one of the oldest ways of getting noticed by the search engines, and still one of the very best. Essentially, the more links on the Web that lead to your Web site, the higher up your store will rank on search engine returns. The reason: Generally, search engines interpret sites with a healthy number of incoming links as valuable Web resources, and so reward those properties accordingly. The quickest way to get those incoming links is to offer to exchange links with non-competitive sites. It’s tedious. It’s time-consuming. And it’s worth it.
3) Continually update content. Search engines love Web sites that are forever evolving and adding new content. Adding new product listings, or new descriptions for products, helps. But long term, you’ll want to regularly add content to your store site via a blog, podcasts, webcasts, or ideally all three. Even if you’re not the exhibitionist type, there are plenty of ghost bloggers you can hire who will do the job for you.
4) Engage the social Web. Every post you author on Facebook (www.facebook.com), MySpace (www.myspace.com) and the thousands of other social networks on the Web, offers you the opportunity to raise the profile of your museum store site. In the best case scenario, you might post a comment, podcast or video that goes viral and brings untold numbers of Web cruisers to your site. But even without flash-in-the-pan fame, steady, ongoing posting will naturally lead to better ratings on the search engines.
5) Encourage visitors to share and bookmark your site. There are legions of Web users who regularly tip off their respective communities to cool Web sites, products and content they come across while Web surfing. These social bookmarkers use a number of tools to quickly send these messages along, and most of these tools are aggregated by free services like AddThis (www.addthis.com) and ShareThis (www.sharethis.com). Embed either one of these aggregate bookmarking tools on your store site, and you’ll make it a snap for visitors to spread information about your offerings via “word-of-mouse.”
6) Create a sitemap for your Web site. This is a technical way of listing the pages of your site for search engines like Google, and providing other key technical information the search engines need to process your Web site as efficiently as possible. Google offers an excellent tutorial on how to create a sitemap (www.google.com/webmasters).
7) Optimize your Web site’s images. Since many Web sites overlook this simple tactic, your museum store may be able to rocket past many competitors by simply making sure your product images can be easily searched and categorized by the search engines. Do this by ensuring each image has a name to describe it, rather than an inscrutable number. Save images in the .jpg format if at all possible. And store your images on the folder level – such as www.yourmuseumstore.com/images, instead of burying images in a less accessible folder.
8) Get hip to cool SEO tools. There are a number of free SEO tools you can use to get a second opinion on how well your site is optimized. These include: - Website Grader and Builtwith, which both give you an overall score on your Web site’s SEO, as well as tips for improvement.
- Content Duplication Finder: Go to the SEO tools tab at www.virante.com, which ferrets out the duplicate content, that can decrease your rankings in the search engines.
- SEO Browser, which enables you to see your Web site the way a search engine sees it.
- Image Analyzer, which helps you optimize images for the search engines.
- Popuri, which enables you to check your site’s link popularity on the social bookmarking sites, and more.
9) Be wary when hiring an SEO consultant. If you’d rather farm out your SEO to an expert, be extremely wary. The market is riddled with posers and con artists. Your best bet is to go with an SEO firm that has numerous and verifiable client testimonials on its site. Also, look for a firm that is going to be specific and open about how it plans to optimize your site. Most pro-level SEO firms are ready to tightly weave their services into your press relations domain, if you have one.
Conversely, run, don’t walk, away from an SEO firm that promises a number one ranking on Google for you. Do the same from a firm that recommends a “free-for-all” link scheme, a kind of mad dash for links in which huge numbers of unrelated companies attempt to quickly link to one another. Also show the door to any SEO consultant who seems overly secretive about his / her methods, or refuses to work with other departments within your organization.
10) Stay current on SEO. Fortunately, there are scores of sites on the Web offering valuable insights on the continuing evolution of SEO. These include SearchEngineLand which is run by Danny Sullivan, who is considered a world authority on search. Other excellent sources include SearchEngineWatch and Pick’s WebMarketCentral. Key blogs include Bruce Clay Inc. Blog; Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google and SEO; Search Engine Roundtable and SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog. Top SEO Books include:
Joe Dysart is an Internet speaker and business consultant based in Manhattan. He can be reached at (646) 233-4089 or at www.joedysart.com.
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