Someone once said (may have been Guy Kawasaki), “Building a website and then not spending the time and money to do SEO is like creating a commercial and then not buying any television or radio airtime.”

I agree. A build it and they will come website strategy is, honestly, folly. Yet, time and again, I see companies build nice websites and then believe they’ve completed their work. Nothing could be further from the truth.

So, if you want to get some mileage out of your website, here are my Top 7 SEO recommendations:

1. Register your website with DMOZ, also known as the Open Directory Project, at www.dmoz.org. The Open Listing Mission is the most important and most complete directory on the Web. It is also the only one Google uses. Since Google tends to have between 60% and 70 of the search engine market share, it’s important that you make sure you’re your website is easily found by Google. DMOZ is also used to feed many of the other web directories as well. Note, DMOZ is an all volunteer organization so it can take months to get your site listed. So register your site today!
2. Manually submit your web site url address to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl. Once accepted, like DMOZ, it can take months, Google’s software will crawl (scan) your site (see bullets 4-6 below), determine what your site is all about, and, in most instances, begin including it in their search results. 
3. Yahoo is a little different. Yahoo asks you to pay $299.00 to be included in their official directory listing ($600.00 if your site includes “adult content).” But Yahoo can still find your site and include without your paying any fee. Yahoo also has a free submission page - http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit - you can use to improve your Yahoo search engine rankings. I’ve read that Yahoo’s Directory also drives results on Bing and AltaVista. But I wouldn’t count on that, so I’d also recommend submitting your website to Bing at http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx. 
4. Make sure you are using the best keywords and keyword phrases in your Metadata and in your website copy. This is a biggee! Having the right keywords is critical in getting your site ranked high in the search engine results. There’s actually a metric, KEI, which stands for Keyword Effectiveness Indicator, you can track. Since almost every site has unique high KEI keywords, we won’t go into how to develop your high KEI terms here but we will encourage you to either take the time to learn how to develop high KEI keywords or outsource the work to a professional.
5. The more links you have to your website, especially if the linking sites have a high Google Page Rank, the more likely it is Google and the other search engines will rank your website high in their search results. Some effective ways to build links to your site are article submission, affiliate programs, sending emails to webmasters at sites you think your target audience visit, or hire someone to build links for you. We do not recommend hiring one of those firms that say they’ll get you 1,000 links in one week for $500.00+/-. The search engines may view that type of instant growth in links as “gaming the system, which it is, and punish you. Links need to be built over time.
6. Install Google’s free Sitemap code in your website. A sitemap is XML code that lists all the URLs (pages) in your site and makes them easy to read and understand for the search engines. Sitemaps enable the search engines to quickly crawl and index your site in an organized manner. They also allow your webmaster to include additional information to help the search engines find your site and keywords, when it was last updated, and other important information. Sitemaps complement the software, or crawl-based tools such as a robot.txt file, they do not replace those tools. Using Sitemap code does not guarantee your site’s search engine rankings will improve.
7. The last tactic is perhaps the most difficult; be patient. SEO is like farming. You plant seeds, nurture them along so they can grow, and then, one day, relax and enjoy the fruits of your labor. Note, conversely, Pay-per-Click, or PPC, is like hunting. Bang! Lunch. In other words, you shoot something (buy ads) and you get leads. Some good; some bad. Here’s another difference between SEO and PPC, once your SEO tactics have you at the top of page one on Google, it’s highly likely you will stay there for some time. With PPC, once the ads (expense) stops, the leads stop.

SEO is the best insurance available to earn a return on your website investment. It is what helps your website be found by existing and new customers and, even if you outsource the work, it’s simply not that expensive. Without SEO you are simply hoping your website is found and that’s not good business practice.

It is also an ongoing effort because the search engines continue to tweak their algorithms. In 2009 it was reported that Google made almost 300 changes. By implementing the tactics outlined in this post your website can become an amazing source of new business. Perhaps the best part about SEO, and digital marketing in general, if done right, is you can measure the return on every tactic.

Steve

Search engines are very good at finding keywords, phrases, images, people and crawling for metadata. What Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and the rest lack is the ability to contextualize their results.

NewsSift (www.newssift.com) is a new search engine from Financial Times that does just that. The new search engine is targeted toward business people and organizes search results by topic, organization, place, person, and theme. The interface looks familiar to those of us that are used to seeing PowerPoint slides.

It’s only in BETA now but I think this is a tool worth watching. To illustrate how it works, if you were searching for "Dakota" you would receive results related to two states, the child actress Dakota Fanning, organizations such as a universities, government agencies, and legislative branches, any organization with "Dakota" in its name.

So instead of getting 100 URL's with a short description of each in response to a search term query, NewsSift lists terms in each of the five categories previously mentioned –topic, organization, place, person, and theme. It provides a (contextual) path instead of a list.

NewsSift uses contextual and relational technology from Endeca that allows it to recognize the difference between Rolling Stone magazine and the Rolling Stones, for example.

Once users have selected their context from the five lists, they can drill-down further by adding related topics, more specific terms, or cross-referencing across multiple categories. For example, a user can search for "Charlotte," which will bring up the Charlotte Bobcats, the City of Charlotte, Charlotte Ross, and the Charlotte Region. If you then add the term "Stimulus," you will be presented with a list articles written about the Stimulus Package and Charlotte. In this regards, the value, if you want to call it that, is the site eliminates long search strings with quotations around some words and phrases but not around others, which is often the most effective way to use Google.

Google is slowly embracing the concept of semantic search -- putting terms in context. However, they have a lot of money invested in their existing architecture and the algorithms necessary for semantic search apparently don't scale to cover Google's billions of indexed pages.

Google did announce recently that queries are going to contain related terms (more than just different spellings or forms of the word searched, as is the case now), which signals that Google is moving toward what NewsSift has done.

NewsSift is hiring technologists while Google is reducing its workforce. NewsSift has a long way to go, but it is this type of innovation and willingness to take on a market leader that will turn this economy around. Will NewsSift take down Google? I doubt it, but it will be interesting to watch.

Update on decline of print media. In an eMarketer sponsored report, Consumer Magazines; Rethinking Paper and Pixels ($695.00) Carol Krol writes: “The numbers are sobering: 525 magazines folded in 2008. As of the publication of this report, so far in 2009, 87 other titles have closed. The bleeding will not be stanched any time soon.”

Steve