Lately a lot of my friends are starting businesses in my small town of Sioux Falls, SD. Then today I see that Sioux Falls is ranked #45 on a list by the CNN Money as one of the 100 best places to live and launch a new business.

What makes Sioux Falls so popular? First is the wonderfully low taxes. There are no state corporate or personal income taxes, and no personal property, inheritance or inventory taxes. Sales tax is just under 6%, and the total of taxes residents pay is among the lowest in the country.

The second reason is the low cost of startup. It costs an estimated 45% less to open a business here than in New York.

Having launched a business in London, I realize just how powerful this can be for competitive pricing. It’s far more cost effective to hire someone in Sioux Falls than it is on one of the coasts.

The greatest drawback listed was that Sioux Falls is “a long drive from major cities.” And with the airport dropping flights, it’s getting harder to get around. So winning those top clients outside of the region is a lot trickier.

No. 1 on the list was Bellevue, Wash. Sioux Falls ranked between Oro Valley, Ariz. and Madison, Wis.

A little bit of inspiration for your Monday morning. I came across this photo in Smashing Magazine. They has a collection of (really) stunning pictures and photos. The collection of images is a great start to the week.

Part four of our SEO for Beginners Guide is all about your visitor and making them happy. This is a topic that is very near and dear to my heart. By focusing on your users, you can create a usable design, a sensible architecture and outstanding content that will make your site stand out from the rest. I promise.

Usability

You can incorporate the SEO tricks around, but your site will still have to justify that it’s “deserving” of top rankings. Search engines’ goals are to rank the best, most usable, functional and informative sites first.

You have only a few seconds to make that initial first impression great and stop visitors from hitting that back button. How do you do this? Don’t make your users think.

1. Test your site on real users. Define a set of optimal task you’d like your visitors to achieve at your site and test them out on people who actually use your site. If the goal of your site is to sell kites, sit down a user and ask them to try to purchase a certain type of kite & see how successful they are.
2. Stick to design standards. Underlined links, top and side menu bars, logos in the top left corner should be adhered to. Make use of white space and keep your style consistent through out the site. Don’t try to be clever because it will only confuse your visitors and they will go away quickly.
3. Organize and label your site as your users would expect. Use an language that is understood by your visitors and categorize topics as they would expect them to be, not how they are categorized inside your organization. The architecture is strongly effects usability.
4. Navigate easily from top levels to deeper pages. Navigation is one of the sites primary functions so provide users with obvious navigation systems such as breadcrumbs, image alt tags, and well written anchor text on your links. Be sure to use visual clues that indicate the user will be leaving the site. Users want to know where they’re going and how to easily return to a page.
5. Provide quality content. This is where all web development should start. Too often they begin with a design and how the site will look. But content should drive the design. Copyblogger is a site that has everything you need to know about writing excellent copy.
6. Create pages that load fast and function as intended. Nothing will ruin a site faster than one that doesn’t even load. Just as bad is a site that loads, but doesn’t work. It’s filled with broken links, forms that don’t function, or missing images.
7. Make your site accessible to everyone. Run tests to validate your site is accessible to disabled or impaired users. Not only does it widen your market, if your content is accessible to them it’s also accessible to spiders and bots.
8. Invest in a professional user-centered-design. If you hire a web agency to create a site for you, make sure they design it using user-centered-design practice. How do you know? They’ll do some research upfront before showing you and designs. Research includes:
   • create personas about your target market
   • test your existing site on real users
   • create prototypes & to test on users
   • developing a site architecture and wire-frames
   • complete a content audit
   • do a card sort activity

   All this is done upfront before they show you pretty colors and exciting fonts and pictures. If they start with a pretty design, beware. And if you can’t invest in a design agency, then get yourself a copy of Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.

9. Offer goodies and make it worth their time. In SEO terms, this is called Link Bait. A single exciting piece of content that gets picked up en masse across the internet is worth a small fortune in public relations and exposure. And can sty with your site for a long time, providing search visibility long after the event itself has been forgotten. Below are a few ideas. you can also find a few more on Carla Kay White’s blog How to Create Link Love.
   • Create Freebies like Wordpress themes, Desktop wallpaper, icons, images, tools. Whatever matches your product base or service offering.
   • Guest Blog on other sites. Or get someone from your industry to blog on your site.
   • Create a contest. Sites do well with this. The prize doesn’t need to be big but it will spread rapidly.
   • Interview Well-known Insiders. Even just a short interview or an email is great.

In today’s market, the trend is word-of-mouth over pushing advertising. You want people to link to your site because it’s worth the visitors time and they want to pass it along to friends and colleagues. If you don’t invest in a design that works for the user, they won’t invest more than 7 seconds on your site. They have billions to choose from and will go somewhere else.

What Next?

Next: Growing Link Love & Your Site’s Popularity (coming soon)

Lesson One: Search Engine 101 and How they Work

Lesson Two: Six Steps to Effective Keyword Search

Lesson Three: 10 Questions for Site Optimization

Back to SEO for Beginners.

This is an amazing talk by Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor. It's well worth 20 minute of your life.

"One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened — as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another."

Let's start connecting in la-la-land. :) 

In spirit of celebrating our planet Earth for just one day, here are a few great photos from Flickr. If you're ever in need of some good images, Flickr is an excellent source. Just type in your keyword and select "most interesting". I'm always amazed what I get. Enjoy and love the planet!!

 View more great Earth Day photos on Flickr.

In part three of our SEO for Beginners Guide, we’ll talk about the construction on your site. Spiders and Bots don’t like sites that are not optimized for users. To see if your site passes the test, you can take this simple quiz.

10 Questions for Site Optimization

1. Does your site have any broken links? It’s been said that search engines degrade site rankings if there are broken links. Get rid of any broken links.
2. Have you validated your HTML & CSS? Your code should meet minimum requirements of functionality and properly display to be spidered and cached be the engines. Guidelines have been laid out by WC3 and they provide a number of great validation tools.
3. Do you have web pages greater than 150K? Search engines generally do not cache pages greater than 150K. In addition, smaller file size also mean faster download speed and happier users.
4. Do you have Javascript & CSS in your header? To improve their speed and efficiency search engines program their spiders to give up easily if they have problems with a page or if they have to wade through too much code to find the relevant content. This also pushes your keywords down the page. Move JavaScript and CSS out of the header and into external files.
5. Are your keywords in your title tags? Keywords should be in your page title and in the first paragraph of your web page. Key words in title tags helps rankings and drives click-through-rates from the search results page.
6. Are you making the most of your meta description tag? Although search engines don’t use met tags, including the meta keywords tag, in their page rankings, the meta description tag still plays an important role. Several search engines use this tag as the site’s description displayed just below the clickable title link. Although meta description tag may have little of no impact on the page rank, it can impact the number of visitors th page receives if it’s well written.



7. Are your keywords in your content? Make the primary terms and phrases prominent in the document but don’t stuff it. Also, be sure to keep text flow together rather than break it up with coding by using tables instead of CSS.
8. Have you checked your writing quality? Great writing helps rankings as well as makes happy visitors. Make sure the content is quality because search engines use sophisticated lexical analysis to help find quality writing. Copyblogger has great articles about how to use a journalistic format to improve your copy.
9. Have you created a sitemap? Create a sitemap page and have it link from all major pages on your site. The sitemap should list links to all pages 2 clicks from the homepage.
10. Are you using human friendly URL’s? The URL should be descriptive and brief as possible as well as include keywords if possible. URL’s shouldn’t contain more than 2 dynamic parameters.

What Next?

Next: How to Make Your Site Standout (coming soon)

Lesson One: Search Engine 101 and How they Work

Lesson Two: Six Steps to Effective Keyword Search

Back to SEO for Beginners.

The second installment of Stickyseed’s SEO for Beginners Guide, we’ll show you how to find and use the best keywords for your site. Keywords are how people find your site. If you don’t invest time into researching the best keywords for your site, the wrong terms and phrases will hurt you in lost rankings and no one even finding you.

To give you the best ROI on your site, here’s some simple steps to take.

Six Steps to Effective Keyword Research

1. Brainstorming. Think of all the words you think a customer would type into their search box when trying to find you. Come up with any words that describe all the services your site offers but avoid overly generic terms like ’shoes’ or ‘clothes’. Be sure to include alternate spellings, wordings and synonyms too.
2. Survey Your Target Audience. Get in touch with past or present customers and ask them for input. This is an excellent way to expand your list.
3. Take advantage of keyword tools. Now that you have your list, your next step is to determine the activity for each of your proposed keywords. You want to narrow your list to only include highly attainable, sought-after phrases that will bring the most qualified traffic to your site. There are a number of great tools that offer concrete data about a keyword trend. Here’s a few, starting with the freebies:
   • Google Adword Keyword Tool
   • Google Suggest
   • Thesaurus.com
   • Check Traffic Tool
   • Trellian Keyword Discovery Tool
   • SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
   • Wordtracker
   • Yahoo! Search Marketing
4. Finalize your list. You should have a lot of data now about all your keywords. Put it into a spreadsheet or some other visual that will allow you to easily see each word’s conversion rate, search volume and competition rate (as given to you by the tools mentioned above). These three figures will allow you to calculate how viable that term is for your site and help you narrow down your focus to 10-20 highly successful keywords.
5. Use Your Keyword List. Include three to five related keywords per page. Any more and you run the risk of diluting your page and ruin your rankings. Make sure to naturally work the keywords into your content and avoid over-repetition that may be interpreted as spamming.
   Your on-page content isn’t the only place where you can insert keywords. Keywords should also be used in several other elements on your site:
   • Title Tag
   • Meta Description Tags
   • Meta Keywords Tag
   • Headings
   • Alt text
   • Anchor Text/ Navigational Links
6. Monitor Results and analytics. After a few weeks of giving the bots a chance to pick up your keywords, use your analytics tool to monitor results. Google Analytics is an excellent freebie. It will give you hard data about how your keywords are performing in regards to increasing traffic, activity and conversation rates. Pull out the words that aren’t doing much, and put in new ones as your site grows. This is an ongoing process that needs plenty of weeding and watering.

What to Measure

• Conversion Rate. This is the percentage of users searching with a keyword that convert by clicking on an ad, but a product or complete a transaction. They were converted to another level other than looky-loo.
• Predicted Traffic. This is an estimate of how many users will be searching on a given keyword or phrase.
• Value per Customer. This is the average amount of revenue earned per customer using a keyword or phrase.
• Keyword Competition. This is a rough measurement of the competitive environment and level of difficulty for a given term/phrase.

Next: 10 Questions for Site Optimization

Lesson One: Search Engine 101 and How they Work

Back to SEO for Beginners.

There are only a handful of search engines you truly need to focus on and those are Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, and AOL. All of these search engines have the same critical features that allow them to provide relevant web results:

How Search Engines Operate

1. Crawl the web. Using automated programs called “bots” or “spiders” search engines crawl through 8 - 10 billion web pages.
2. Index Pages. Once a page is crawled, it’s contents are stored in a gigantic database which make up the search engine’s “index”.
3. Process Queries. When the search engine receives a request for information, it pulls all the documents that match that request from it’s index. It does this in tow parts:
   • Findall Mode - Google returns all the documents that match a term
   • Second Search - only those pages with the exact phrase are returned
4. Ranking Results. It read the query and processed some results, now the search engine uses special algorithms to determine which are most relevant.

Things Search Engines Don’t Like

There are certain pages that search engine spiders and bots don’t find. As they crawl the web, they will skip sites that:

1. Complex URLs. Spiders may be reluctant to crawl complex URLs because humans can’t read them the same way so can result in errors.
2. Pages with more than 100 unique links. Spiders may only follow a few of the links.
3. Pages more than 3 clicks from home page. Unless there are many other external links pointing to the site, spiders will often ignore deep pages.
4. Pages with a Session ID or Cookies for navigation. Spiders may not be able to hold these elements in the same manor as a browser.
5. Pages with frames. Confuses the spider as to which page to rank.

Things Search Engines Won’t Find

Spiders and bots won’t find pages that need the following to access the page:

1. Select form or submit button
2. Drop-down-menu
3. Search box
4. Blocked purposefully (using robots.txt file - more on this later)
5. Login required
6. Re-directs before showing content

In a nutshell, if a page cannot be access from the home page, it most likely won’t be indexed. The best way around this is sitemaps which we’ll talk about later. They’re the best way to help search engines find their way around your site.

Relevance & Popularity

Search engines care about two things. Is the content relevant and is it credible?

• Relevance - the site’s content match the user’s query
• Popularity - how many other credible sources are linking to the content?

Search engines first look to see if the user’s search terms are found in important areas of the sites such as the title, meta data, heading tags, or body text.

Search engines also measure who is looking at a site or page. As well as what they are say about the site or page. Clever as they are, they also keep track of who is affiliated with whom and how credible all the sites are.

All of these factors go into an algorithm that tells the engine how much importance to assign to each of these elements. This then determines a core for the page and lists the results in order of importance.

The Value of a Trustworthy Site

If hundreds of thousands of websites link to you, your site must be popular and therefor have high value. Now if those links come from very credible sites (such as .gov or BBC news), their power is multiplied.

On the other hand, search engines place a lower value on links from link farms (automated links or interlinked sites).

How to Increase the Link Value

1. Quality anchor text. The words in the hyperlink account for a lot. Search engine use this text to help them determine the subject matter of the link text. “Click Here” should be replaced with your key words.
2. Site Popularity. This accounts not only for the number of links to your sites, but the quality of the source. Highly credible sources linking to your site is extremely valuable.
3. Text Directly Surrounding the Link. A link from inside a paragraph may carry greater weight than a link in the sidebar or footer.
4. Links from Sites with Like Subject Mater. It’s more valuable to have links from pages that are related to the site’s subject matter.

These are only a few of the very many factors search engines us to measure and weigh evaluating links. Remember, search engines are there to provide quality and usable results to the user. That’s their first concern.

What next?

Next: Six Steps to Effective Keyword Research

Back to SEO for Beginners.

A Comprehensive Guide

What good is a website if it can’t be found by search engines or your content cannot be put into their databases? Search engine optimization is a methodical approach to increase your site’s traffic by understanding what makes search engines tick.

Why do you need SEO?

If your site cannot be found by search engines, you miss out on incredible opportunities. People wan to find your site but can’t because it is not optimized. No matter what your site provides, search engines are the primary source of traffic for almost all Internet users.

Search engine traffic can make or break a site’s success. Investing in SEO can have an exceptional rate of return and those who invest in SEO will have a decided advantage in vistors and customers.

A Six-Part Guide to SEO and its Best Practices

SEO for Beginners is for those who are serious about improving their Internet traffic but don’t know where to begin. It walks you through everything you need to know for the best known and most effective practices of search engine optimization.

Ready to get started? First, a word of warning… this guide is bit lengthy, so make sure you have time for a bit of serious (but fun) reading.

If you need to return, bookmark this page at del.icio.us for handy reference.

1. Search Engine 101 & How They Operate
2. Six Steps to Effective Keyword Research
3. 10 Questions for Site Optimization
4. How to Make Your Site Standout
5. Growing Link Love & Your Site’s Popularity
6. Putting Together your SEO Strategy

What Now?

Now all you have to do is create a usable, content rich site that your customers can find and love. Need help with that?

Subscribe to Stickyseeds for tips on web design and SEO techniques that work.

What’s the use of having a website if no one can find you? Winning the convented top ten spots displayed on a Google search is key. These are a few of the basics you will need to get there.

1. Pick Your Target Keywords - Your target keywords should always be at least two or more words long. Too many sites will be relevant for a single word, such as “stamps.” This “competition” means your odds of success are lower. Don’t waste your time fighting the odds. Pick phrases of two or more words, and you’ll have a better shot at success.
2. Position Your Keywords - Make sure your target keywords appear in the crucial locations on your web pages. The page’s HTML title tag is most important. Failure to put target keywords in the title tag is the main reason why perfectly relevant web pages may be poorly ranked.
3. Have Relevant Content - In particular, that means you need HTML text on your page. Sometimes sites present large sections of copy via graphics. It looks pretty, but search engines can’t read those graphics. That means they miss out on text that might make your site more relevant.
4. Build Links - The backbone to SEO is what I call “Link Love”. By building links, you improve how well your pages do in link analysis systems. The key is realizing that link analysis is not about “popularity.” In other words, it’s not an issue of getting lots of links from anywhere. Instead, you want links from good web pages that are related to the topics you want to be found for. Here’s some “link love” inspiration.
5. Just Say No To Search Engine Spamming - For one thing, spamming doesn’t always work with search engines. It can also backfire. Search engines may detect your spamming attempt and penalize or ban your page from their listings.
6. Submit Your Key Pages - Most search engines will index the other pages from your web site by following links from a page you submit to them. But sometimes they miss, so it’s good to submit the top two or three pages that best summarize your web site.
7. Verify And Maintain Your Listing - Check on your pages and ensure they get listed. Once your pages are listed in a search engine, monitor your listing every week or two. Strange things happen. Pages disappear from catalogs. Links go screwy. Watch for trouble, and resubmit if you spot it.