A design professional with strengths in user interface, user experience, website design, search engine optimization, marketing and graphic design.

Benji has been with WebLink International for over 8 years and has designed or directed the development of over 250 association and chamber of commerce websites.  He has helped numerous organizations to maximize their online success with new members sales and non-dues revenue.

As we continue to down the "List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website" breakdown, we're now ready to talk about Keyword Phrases.  Specificly, we're looking at what additional groups of words you could used to be found for the essentially the same thing.

We're going to use the Eau Claire Area Chamber of Commerce as our example.  For the Chamber to maximize its chances to be found in the search engines, they would want to use as many variations of their name as they can:

 - Eau Claire Area Chamber of Commerce
 - Eau Claire Chamber of Commerce
 - Eau Claire Chamber
 - Eau Claire WI Chamber of Commerce
 - Eau Claire Wisconsin Chamber of Commerce
 - Chamber of Commerce in Eau Claire

This wide base of keywords was pulled from the Google Keyword Tool which is a GREAT starting point for keyword research and can help you tap into new phrases to target.  I'll be talking more about the GKT later.

Coming up next:  Secondary Keyword, Stemming and Synonyms

In this post from the "List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website" we're talking about Keyword Proximity.

9.  Keyword Proximity

When we're talking about keyword proximity, we're simply talking about how close your keywords are to each other.  Now this really is only an issue if your target is a multiple-word keyword like this - Chamber Membership Management Software.

The key to this is to get your text as close as you can to each other.  You'll still get some value from having the words even if they're not next to each other, just not as much.

Here is an example of a great example of keyword proximity:

Today’s member-based organizations need far more than chamber membership management software....

Here is an example that is ok:

Today’s chambers need far more than membership management software....

As you can see from the first example, we have all of the target words together and the second line has all of the keywords, but they're separated by other text.

As we'll discuss later, there are other words you'll want to use that are similar (secondary keywords) to your targets so you're not saying the same thing over and over and over!  =)

Up next:  Keyword phrases

I was just recently told meta data has minimal impact on search.  I was a little surprised at that statement.  Yes, according to the "List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website", meta data has lost some of it's power to influence.

8.  Keywords in Meta Tags

According to the guys at Webconf.com:

"Less and less important, especially for Google. Yahoo! and MSN still rely on them, so if you are optimizing for Yahoo! or MSN, fill these tags properly. In any case, filling these tags properly will not hurt, so do it."

Since Google has approximately 60% of the search traffic, you could ignore the other 40%, but I'd not recommend doing that.

From an effort standpoint, meta data is relative easy to add and there is no evidence that it will harm you.  As long as you're relevant to your keywords and not stuffing, you should be in the clear and see some benefits from your work.

Coming up:  Keyword Proximity

So to continue on thy conquest of "List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website", we're entering the land of Keywords in <alt> tags.

7.  Keywords in <alt> tags

Since search engine spiders can't determine what the make up of a image file they use text descriptions to get an idea.  These text descriptions are know as <alt> tags.  This feature is also used for the visually impaired.

So if I wanted to be sneaky, I could say that the image file with this post was about Technology For Member-Based Organizations or Chamber Software, but the search engines won't want to take my word for it.  Since they can't "see" what it is about, I'd have to tag the image with the appropriate text:

<img alt="Alt Tag Knight">

Unfortunately, I'm not trying to get my pages indexed for Alt Tag Knight, so this will do me little good from an SEO perspective.  But you can see that since they are picked up by the spiders, it's best for you to tag your images.  It's helpful to tag all of your photos if you're striving for 100% validation as well.

Coming up:  Keywords in metatags

Next up on the "List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website" is the use of keywords in the beginning of a page.

The beginning of the document can be really important when it comes to what is indexed by the search engines.  According to the guys at WebConfs.com, this might not play as big a role as the other keyword-related topics, but still is important.

Once again, we'll stay home for our example and use the WebLink Case Studies page.

Screen Capture from WebLink Case Studies Page:


Screen Capture from Google Results - WebLink Case Studies:


You'll see that the same text that is on our page is showing up in the indexed results of the Google results from a search on "WebLink Case Studies".

Another small point to make on this topic is when you're in the process of developing a new website for your association or chamber of commerce, be sure that your developer is considering the elements placement from the indexing standpoint.

Next on our list:  Keywords in <alt> tags

The headings are the font tags like this - <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc.  You'll only get the value out of "Keywords in the headings" if you actually use headings.  We see the use of <font size="18px"> in place of the practice of using headings a lot and you'll be losing out on a valuable SEO best practice.

If we take a look at the WebLink International - Website Design page, we'll see that we used the title of the page "Website Design" in the <h1> format and the heading of "Elevate your Website" in the <h2> format.



We've used the word "Website" a couple of times in the headings will will help us out on the SEO factor.

One other thing that can be said here about the topic of keywords in general, no matter where they are used, is that you're working on a common theme.  If you're  writing content on a subject, and addressing the technical aspects as well, you should be able to acquire market share in the search engines.

Up next:  Keywords in the beginning of a document

The next post on the "List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website" is about keywords in the anchor text.

4.  Keywords in anchor text

And no, that's not the type of anchor we're talking about! :)

Anchor text is defined as the visible text component of a hyperlink in a page. For example, here is an anchored text using one of our targets:  membership management software.

The reason anchor text is important is because a link is considered a vote from the site that link comes from.  The quality of the site and the similarity of the phrase used can help boost your SEO rankings.  If you can get a link from Google or the White House that REALLY helps.  If you can get a link from your grandmothers' website on quilting, not so much.  :)

The search engines take into consideration the quality of the site linking to you before it passes along the value to you and your website for that keyword.

Next topic:  Keywords in headings

I have no excuse for not posting sooner - expect my dog ate the list I was using.  Not really, but it worked in 2 grade and it didn't help that I was a cute little guy!  :)  Anyway, I'm back and ready to continue on the "List of Best and Worse practices for designing a high traffic website" list.  Up next:

3.  Keyword density in document text

The term keyword density (KD) is define by the percentage of targeted words that are part of your page content.  For instance if you have a 100 word document and you were targeting the term "Chamber Software" and it was used 10 times in with in the text you'd have a density of 10%.

It's best to have a KD of 3-7% for primary targets and 1-2% for secondary targets.  A great tool for checking your keyword density can be found at SEO Chat.

Up next: Keywords in anchor text

Number 2 on the list of best and worst practices for designing a high traffic website:  Keywords in URL

2.  Keywords in URL

This one is pretty easy.  Simple put if you have the name of the page that corresponds to the content of the page which will fall in line with the keywords of that page, then you'll accomplish by default.  They won't say you can't hit water if you fell out of boat if you can pull this one off!  ;)

Here is an example of a page that is talking about membership at the Lake Champlain Chamber of Commerce website.

http://www.vermont.org/chamber/membership.aspx

As you can see the word "membership" is used in the URL and the subject of the page is about membership with the Chamber.

According to the ranking system used on this site, you'll gain the highest possible return on this best practice.

Coming up:  Keyword density in document text

Here we are at the beginning of a beautiful stretch of SEO highway!  :)  Are you as excited as I am here?  Ok, enough of that...let's rock out!

The first of many posts on SEO to-do list found on the webconf.com website is working keywords into your <title> tag.

Keywords in <title> tag

The <title> tag is found in the head code of your website page.  Here is an example from the Boston Chamber of Commerce website which was just recently launched:


The value of putting your keywords into the <title> tag is for when your site is indexed on the search results, your keywords will help people see what your page(s) are all about.

They recommend a short title of 6-7 words at the most, but this will really vary on the page in the cases you have a name of a program or event that might exceed those numbers.

Ok boys and girls; pull up the boot straps for this one.  I'm going to break down the "List of Best and Worse practices for designing a high traffic website" article found on the webconfs.com website.  Once a week, I'll add a post that gives you a simplified explanation how you can use this information to improve your own website.



Now the page you'll land on talks about "15 minute SEO list" and I'm not sure why.  It might take you 15 minutes to read it, but to implement anything here will take more like 15 minutes a day for the next 77 days (currently 77 items as of today).

This list is pretty cool.  It gives you a break down in positive, negative and neutral factors with mostly Google in mind for SEO.  This list is categorized by the following list:

1. Keywords
2. Links - Internal, inbound, outbound
3. Metatags
4. Content
5. Visual Extras, SEO
6. Domains, URLs, Web Mastery

Tomorrow we'll get started on the first item on the list:  Keywords in <title> tag.

Your website is a membership sales person whether you know it or not and it’s probably the best ‘employee’ you have.  Never calls in sick, never asks for a raise and lets you know everything that is going on.

The first two are simple to understand, but the third point can be confusing.  How does your website tell you anything?  By leveraging the web analytics, or web stats, from your website you can tell a LOT about what is going with your organization and what your users are looking for.

By using a website analytics tool, like Google Analytics, you can tell what is going on with your website and who to target.  By tracking your website page views, users, time on the website and keywords (to only name a few) you can learn the answers to the following questions:

• Page Views – This will allow you to see the total number of pages are being viewed on your website.  This helps you get a sense of size and scope of your website.
• Users – The total number of people on your website allows you to see the reach of your marketing and communications.
• Time on Site – This number tracks the amount of time a user is on the website during a single session.  This data can be helpful to see if the content you’re delivering is what they want to know.
• Keywords – This tracks the type of words that people are finding your site by.  This information is helpful because it will give you a different perspective of what website information you should or could have content around.

The value in this process for you can be found in new member sales from prospects browsing your website, members retention and non-dues revenue from website sponsorship opportunities.