• My Client’s Site Uses An Image For The Entire Navigation Bar •
• Let’s Understand Why This Is An SEO No-No •

Dear oh dear.  I am currently working with a client who wants to gain a stronger online presence and to begin to get top organic rankings. As it normally is with the clients who engage my professional SEO services, her site is invisible in the SERPs.

The web designer she hired to design what is visually a very attractive site, did the search engine optimization for her.  Let’s just say that his SEO blunders are a great post for another day!

I’d like to touch upon one SEO mistake that is adversely affecting her website, and affects many other unsuspecting people’s sites.  It’s the issue of her navigation bar and navigation links. It’s an image! A big no-no for SEO purposes.

The spiders have nothing to follow with her current image linking structure.  Yes, the use of alt attributes can be used to get around a situation like this. It’s not a best-case way to solve it, but if you assign your keyword rich information into the alt attributes for each image being used for a clickable link, the spiders will then understand what is going on.

But my client’s problem cannot be improved via the fix I just mentioned.

Her entire navigation bar (which includes 16 links) is one image!  There is a pretty background with sixteen words superimposed upon the image. I am not an html coding expert by any means, but when I looked at the coding that makes that image clickable for those sixteen unique “links” … well I scratched my head in amazement!  I guess I could say it was very “creative”! lol 

The coding to make each of the sixteen words “work” as clickable links is set up in the most archaic formatting. It’s just plain bad. Obviously that “web designer” my client had hired wasn’t very adept at clean, SEO friendly coding.

My recommendation will be for her to utilize a CSS menu (I’d like to see her whole website recoded using a CSS format). For a short term fix, I’ll advise her to get rid of the entire image and use a table structure.

Navigation links need to be crawlable by the spiders. As do all the other links on your pages. Take a look at your website. Are you utilizing images in ways that can hinder the search engines from crawling your website ?

• Think Of Each Page On Your Site As A Landing Page •
• Provide Your Visitors With The Information They Were Hoping To Find •

In a previous post about how to write compelling copy I talk about keeping it foremost in your mind that whatever you are writing needs to provide the information the visitor was hoping to find.

In other words, they typed in a search term; your SERP listing caught their eye; and click … they were carried onto the page showing up on the SERP.   Now, that content should be of great interest to your new visitor. The content should provide the information they were hoping to find about your services or products.

Side note: Because I know your content is always keyword focused (you have been following what I teach, right? ), and because you always do a great job optimizing your Title tag and Description meta tag, that is why the visitor found you via their search efforts.

Today I just want to drum home the thought that we all should strive to write quality, informative content that sticks to the keyword phrase we have targeted to that specific page.

The Only Thing Separating Your SERP Listing From Your Competitors’ Is …

… a compelling Title tag and Description meta tag!  The SERP listing is your first stab at attempting to attract the attention of your ideal buying audience! If you’ve taken your time to write an interesting and to-the-point SERP listing you’ve got a very good chance you’ll get the click.

Once you’ve gotten that visitor’s trust (you got the click), then you have got to make darn sure the content on the page that visitor lands on is FOCUSED to the information the SERP listing provided them.

That visitor should immediately recognize upon landing on your page that “Yup! this is exactly the information I was looking for!”  If this is the case, then it’s a win-win for everyone.

Remember … in almost all instances, treat each and every page on your website as a landing page.  Make sure your well written SERP listing is in total agreement with the information the visitor will find on the corresponding page.

If you do this with every new page you write, you will be miles ahead from almost all of your online competition.

• Let’s Take Another Look At My Keyword Rankings •
• Is Search Engine Optimization Working? •

Time flies by and I realized I need to write an update to my rankings. In an effort to honestly show you that ethical SEO techniques really do make a difference, I have promised to actually expose one of my websites and some of the keywords that are responsible for bringing me quality targeted traffic.

So, in the last post of March 26th I was holding down the #1 and #2 positions for the keyword phrase: hypertufa recipes

Good News! One month has gone by and I am still  holding those same top spots.

But I have mentioned before that you can’t sit back after finally attaining top search engine positions, expecting your web pages to remain at the top. No siree! Depending upon the niche you are in, you may find your rankings slipping over time, due to the competition (and other factors as well).

Even if you experience a long stretch of stable top rankings, I still suggest you write a new new page of content every now and then to help add value for your site’s visitors and to help reinforce your ranking position(s). 

To that end, I DO practice what I preach, and I wrote another good solid page of information the other day, utilizing this keyword phrase. I don’t want to get nudged out of my great ranking positions by those other people down below me.

Hey … have you signed up yet for my bi-weekly SEO newsletter?  Learn how to implement ethical SEO techniques on your website or blog! If you’ve not yet done so, click here and you’ll be taken right to the sign-up page!  Plus, you’ll get a FREE copy of my informative eBook “The SEO Edge”.

Not a bad deal if I say so myself!