(AllBusiness.com’s Chris Bjorklund interviews Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing and David Saries, Director of Marketing for AllBusiness.com.)

Chris Bjorklund: You’re listening to the AllBusiness podcast. I’m Chris Bjorklund. If you’re getting this through iTunes and RSS feed or an on-line streaming media player, you have the opportunity to hear more valuable advice from top business experts right here on AllBusiness.com. We’ll be right back after this brief message from our sponsor, Comcast.

Bjorklund: Search engine optimization is the process of making your company’s website friendly to different search engines. If users can find you easily in an online search, you will most likely attract more business to your site. In this AllBusiness podcast, you’ll get strategic advice from a leading search engine marketing expert, Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing. We are also joined by David Saries, director of marketing for AllBusiness, who will tell you how to improve your company’s ranking on search engines like Yahoo and Google. Just about anyone who has tried to set up a website recently and has done research on how to attract more customers has probably come across the term “search engine optimization.” But I would imagine that many business owners probably have little understanding of what the term means and how to do it? Lee, is that your experience?

Lee Odden: Well, I think a lot of companies or business owners have an idea that there is a way to improve the opportunity for their visibility to increase online with standard search engines. The challenge is the fact that the rules change often. So they may have achieved a certain grasp of what it takes to do that sort of thing at a certain point in time but not keep up with the information and it can get outdated.

Bjorklund: Quickly.

Odden: Yes.

Bjorklund: Very quickly. David, can you give us a simple and working definition of SEO as we can refer to it throughout this show?

David Saries: Well, I think it’s just keeping in mind that as you architect your website and put content on your website that you make sure that you’re following best practices to make sure that search engines index that content and you’re taking advantage of things you can do to help it rank.

Bjorklund: Lee, you said in one of your blogs I was reading that, in a way, search engine optimization is sort of a misnomer. What would you rather call it?

Odden: Well, the issue is that what we know today as search engine optimization and what David mentioned--that in making it easy for a search engine box to find, scroll, index and categorize content and then get links--it’s going to be increasingly outdated as search engines find other signals to determine what’s the best answer for a query. For example, things like universal search bringing in different data sources into the standard search results will displace the text results that people are accustomed to having rankings on. Personalized search is another issue where one person searching on Mustang, let’s say, that’s interested in horses will get horse-related search results over someone interested in Mustang the car as a result of their previous search history influencing their search results. So there’s a little more to it than what we know today and the definition is going to change just like the industry changes.

Bjorklund: How does SEO really differ from paid advertising? Can we kind of talk about that for a minute, David?

Saries: Well, with paid advertising when you’re running campaigns on search engines, you have a greater ability for the, for example, the copy that you use, e-words where your listings might appear, and then the LAN page that you’re sending people to, and organic search engine optimization although it’s “free,” your ability to control those things is less and so you may end up having traffic come in on maybe keywords that maybe don’t convert quite as well, things like that.

Bjorklund: Is there any evidence that there is some kind of correlation between higher rankings in a search engine for a company and greater sales? I know the idea is to generate greater traffic but there can be problems even after getting people to your website, can’t there be, Lee?

Odden: Well, the idea is to get qualified traffic, right? And by optimizing and executing proper linking, you can increase the likelihood of qualified traffic arriving on the site organically. But it’s not just getting traffic to the site that’s the goal of an SEO or proper search marketing program. It’s also providing the kind of engaging content that will turn that visitor into a conversion or some other desired outcome.

Saries: One of the things that you can do actually is to look at things like your analytics, your website log and find out, say, what keywords are converting better for you and then make a concerted effort to do organic search optimization around those key phrases to take advantage of the higher conversion rates from particular things people are searching on and then ultimately buying or becoming a lead for your business.

Bjorklund: This is making me as a user of search engines a little more, I don’t know, cynical or skeptical about what turns up. In fact, sometimes I’m tempted to not choose the first few companies because I know some are paid and those are separate but I don’t like the feeling as a user of being so manipulated.

Odden: Well the job of a good search engine optimization is to first make it easier for search engines to do their job and give the best answer for a query. But their job is also to provide information that’s the best match for the user because disillusioning or creating distrust with users does not equate to increased sales.

Bjorklund: So this is supposed to make my life better, easier, make me happier as a user of search engines?

Odden: Proper SEO will do that, yes.

Bjorklund: Now let’s talk about how all this works for a business that’s thinking about getting more involved with search engine marketing and optimization, and I’m wondering what are some of the, let’s say, I know there’s standard search engines and there’s lesser known search engines. Let’s begin with the standard search engines. Who are the biggies?

Saries: Well obviously Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search are the main ones obviously. Ask is there as well. One of the things, while Google maintains the largest market share, there may be instances where different companies have better results from other search engines. For example, your particular set of products may sell better among Yahoo users so you want to kind of pay extra attention to them.

Bjorklund: What about lesser-known search engines? Lee, do you have some that you could talk about?

Odden: No, because we want to go where the fish are and to be honest, Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask are really the only algorithmic engines that we ever focus on.

Bjorklund: Well let’s say I own a construction firm and I’m thinking about finding out what the criteria for the search engines for ranking. How easy or difficult is that to find?

Odden: Most of what you need to know is published in Google’s webmaster guidelines and the guidelines on the other search engine pages. It’s very basic. The fundamentals are very basic, which I guess makes sense. Having keywords on the pages, having links to the website from other related sites, that signals a credibility that’s fundamentally what is needed. The details can be researched online and obviously you can always hire a consultant to help out either short term or long term.

Bjorklund: But I don’t have to have a consultant if I’m willing to set aside some time.

Odden: No, I don’t think so. For those small businesses or medium-size businesses that have the time to invest in learning about this stuff, they can certainly, absolutely do this on their own.

Saries: And there’s lots of resources. I mean, you mentioned Lee’s blogs, for example. There’s many other leading SEO professionals who maintain blogs, there are websites that have basic information and that’s in addition to what you find, as Lee mentioned, at the search engines themselves, their guidelines about what are the best practices.

Bjorklund: Now in reading some of these articles and blogs, I was learning that the words on my website, the content is important. Can you go over this and give us some examples of what you’re talking about here. Lee, do you want to kick this one off?

Odden: Sure, there’s keyword research tools that can be leveraged, while not perfect, can give the inside as to demand for certain keyword concepts. So maybe a company has decided to name its products or categories in a certain way and referencing a keyword research tool might give them some idea about what people are actually searching on to find that kind of information. A very simplistic example would be, let’s say, maybe the singular versus the plural version of a certain word or, you know, that example may be muskmelon and flesh melon. I mean, they’re the same thing, right? Or types of fish or, you know, I mean, or different references of products that are regionally distinct can be revealed with using a keyword research tool.

Saries: One example of that is even if you just go to Google and search for a, I think, the Google keyword tool, there’s a free tool that they offer that you can actually type in a couple of phrases and then it tells you which one’s the more popular, and there are paid services that you can actually subscribe to for a reasonable fee. This will do a lot more for your research, where you can do more extensive queries on, as Lee mentioned, you know, plurals but different variations, synonyms, things like that.

Bjorklund: Well, what if you have, let’s say, a candle store and the candles are inexpensive. Would you maybe name your domain name would be something like Cheapcandles.com? And then, you would go to the thesaurus, I mean, it’s a good time to use the thesaurus, maybe?

Saries: Sure.

Bjorklund: And come up with inexpensive votives or does it get that? I mean, should you get that creative?

Saries: I don’t know that you need to include keywords in your domain name. If you have a brand, then that’s what’s important to use than a domain name. You can make up for the any possible or fictional advantage of having keywords in your domain name by doing many other things on the page. And by using a keyword research tool you can get an idea of what it is, what type of reference or what syntax people are using to look up this kind of information. Do they look for cheap or do they look for low cost? How do they think of this sort of thing and then you can use that insight when creating content within the website itself.

Bjorklund: I think in one of your blogs you talked about developing a glossary.

Odden: Yes.

Bjorklund: And then that’s something maybe you should distribute companywide so that people can, anyone working on material that ends up on the site should be using those words?

Odden: Absolutely. If the keyword messaging that’s been decided on is the best representation of the content the company has to offer, that information can be shared across the corporation with anyone responsible for generating content, whether it’s public relations or folks updating the website through a content-management system. They would all benefit from seeing what kinds of phrases as well as additional metrics like popularity, competitiveness and relevance of each phrase to make some smart choices about what language to use on those pages. Subsequently, the organization has a process in place for generating search-engine-friendly content.

Saries: That’s certainly something that we have to do at AllBusiness, where we have a number of editors who are writing. Obviously you can’t just have a single search engine marketer write all of our content. We have a number of editors or writers who are consistently updating content on our website and so they have to be familiar with these kinds of doing keyword research and understanding that as part of the content generation process.

Bjorklund: You’re listening to an AllBusiness podcast with search engine marketing experts Lee Odden and David Saries. We’ll continue now with more on site maps and site structure and how they play into SEO. Lee, site structure, site maps. I kept reading about that. That that’s such a key thing.

Odden: Yes, definitely. It has to do with making it easy for the search engine spiders or bugs to crawl the content of your site. A logical structure will make it easier for a search engine to understand what’s important about the site itself. If there are barriers, let’s say, technical barriers to crawling the site or if it’s difficult to find all of your content, situations might happen where you have a 10,000-page website but only 8,000 pages are included in the index, that’s like going to a baseball game with only two-thirds of your team. So you want to make sure that, from a structural standpoint, the site is logically organized and that will help with determining meaning but also that the site’s URL structure is something that search engines can interact with properly.

Bjorklund: David, is that something AllBusiness thinks about a lot?

Saries: Absolutely. It also plays into usability for people. We’re not, certainly, in the business of designing websites for search engines. We’re designing them for people and having a good, logical architecture helps users find that content as well. As we’ve touched upon and as we’ll talk about more, links are very important and if people find your website of eye-quality that’s quality information that they can navigate easily, they may link to it in their own blog or their own, you know, writing. And so, having an architecture that is easily used is going to make sense and help with links.

Bjorklund: Lee?

Odden: Yes.

Bjorklund: Can you explain a little bit about tag lines or title tags. I don’t know if I have the term right exactly? Is it one and the same?

Odden: Well, no. So a title tag is an html element that it gives the user, if you look at the top of your browser, in the blue line at the very top, that’s usually where the title tag of a particular webpage is indicated and that gives both the user and maybe even a search engine some insight into what the page is about. And that’s really one of the most important places for keywords to exist. One of the common mistakes a lot of large websites make is to hard-code the exact same title tag on every page of the website because the web developers don’t want to have to go through and manually update them all. Or maybe they haven’t thought about dynamically populating those title tags with unique content from the page itself. Search engines look at title tags very strongly and the most important keywords should be to the left in that title tag and the rest of the page then would be an elaboration of what’s been summarized in the title tag.

Bjorklund: David, anything to add there?

Saries: The other key element that you may want to use, as well is an H1, which is a header for the page or a title, where it can reiterate that same name concept that you’re using in the title. It really is a cue about what is this page about. So in your example of inexpensive candles or whatever the product or service or content is on the page, it’s reiterating the same kind of keywords that might have appeared in the title.

Bjorklund: How important is it to refresh your content? I mean, in some websites, it seems so static. You go there, it’s always the same. Why is refreshing or is refreshing the content really important to search engines?

Odden: I’m not sure I’d characterize it as refreshing content but adding new content is a signal that search engines will reward a website with. The more content being produced, certainly the more webpages are out in the index, meaning you’re increasing your footprint out on the web. The other thing is that authoritative websites do then too add content on a regular basis, whereas less authoritative websites with, you know, less or lower-quality information, tend to be static. So, you’re giving signals to the search engines that hey, not only do we update often, the more often a website adds new content, the more frequently search engine spiders will come and visit. As an example, if I make a post on our blog, which we update often, within two hours that post will rank in Google standard search results.

Bjorklund: Within two hours?

Odden: Yes.

Bjorklund: So that’s amazing!

Odden: And it’s important if the website is in the business of publishing information, then think about it, if every time you publish new content, it makes more sense to get that content out into Google and of course, Google, for example, wants to do this because the more pages it has in its index, then the more inventory it can run ads against.

Bjorklund: That’s like breaking news then to the spider.

Odden: Exactly.

Bjorklund: Now, can we get into blogs a little bit and user-generated content so let’s move into that arena for a minute. Why is user-generated content an important factor in rankings?

Saries: Well, it’s just another element that adds content to the page. I mean, if you’re writing a blog, for example, it uses the opportunity to comment and it just increases the amount of content on a particular subject that maybe you need or have an interesting kind of dialogue that people may find interesting and want to come back to and also may want to link to. And so for that purpose, not only does it increase the content on the page but it also can attract interest from people who are out there passing links to your website.

Odden: That’s a good point. The best linking strategy is one that involves creating the kind of content that’s worth linking to and certainly when users are able to engage websites and add their own content, oftentimes they’re a bit more enthusiastic about pointing others to that content that they’ve had published. The neat thing about user-generated content is that not only can it help satisfy SEO requirements by creating, seeing the content, but it also gives enthusiasts in a community a platform for engaging in further evangelizing those topics of interest. So it creates a higher level of user satisfaction within the community that actually consumes information on that website. And the single most effective type of user-generated content on small business or e-commerce site could probably add is the ability to review, add reviews.

Bjorklund: Well, we have something like that. I don’t know if it’s national but we have Yelp and so if you are a physical therapist or you own a restaurant or you’re a general contractor or you’re a carpet cleaner or you’re a masseuse, you might end up in some of those reviews.

Odden: Exactly.

Bjorklund: So that’s a real advantage for, let’s say, a small-business owner in a local area who’s trying to improve the ranking in the local search engine. What about linking now? You touched on that. I know we can probably do a whole show on linking. How do search engines use links to measure a site’s popularity?

Saries: Since Google has kind of stepped into the searching, what they’ve really done is the importance of links probably being the most important factor for a ranking. And basically the crudest way of thinking about it, basically, they’re taking the links that point to an individual page or website and using those as votes, if you will, for the quality of that website and content. Now, within that, there is a huge degree of nuance that’s and--very technically--and there’s a lot of technicalities and how they do so that they’re going to reward a site that has links from other high-quality sites on a relevant topic. So that’s why we always talk, as people involved in SEO, about how important it is to get links to your content but also not just any link but a quality link, a link from a relevant site and a link that includes linker text, that, you know, the little blue text that actually is clickable. That is going to be relevant to the content that it’s pointing to.

Bjorklund: Are there some sources that reference you in a link, then they’re more valuable than others? Let’s say a third-party source might be more valuable than a customer talking about user-generated content?

Odden: Well, it has to do with, as David said, the relevancy of sites. So let’s say I have a site about red widgets. I’m focused on red widgets. And let’s say there’s another website that reviews widgets of all different types and it’s updated very often and lots of other people link to it. As much as they do a review of my red-widget site, getting a link from that widget-review site to my red-widget site would be very valuable because it’s an authoritative site and it’s relevant. And if it hopefully has red widgets in the blue underlined text, that would be great. And if it links to a very specific page on my red-widget website that gets really in-depth about red widgets, then everybody’s happy, both search engines and users.

Bjorklund: What is the fastest way for my company to get recognized by a search engine? David or Lee?

Odden: Get links from other sites that are already in that engine.

Bjorklund: OK. Anything to add there, David?

Saries: No, absolutely, that’s the case. You know, at one time you used to be in the situation where you’d submit your website in to the search engines and that’s really not necessary anymore. They’re going to find your website, be a link that is absolutely necessary for your site to rank.

Bjorklund: Do I need--and we talked on this a bit--but if I hire an outside consultant to help me with my SEO or let’s say, I teach myself how to do it, how do I monitor the progress? Isn’t that important to monitor? And also, how long will it take to produce some results?

Odden: I think if a company wants a competitive advantage or if they want to speed up the time it takes to get results then it certainly warrants outside advice. If they don’t have the internal resources on an ongoing basis then it might make sense. It might be actually cheaper for them to use an outside consultant than to have other people who are tasked to doing many other things also do their SEO. On the other hand, if an organization does have people internally that they can dedicate toward the search engine optimization effort, then by all means they can do it on their own. And in terms of time to seeing results, it really does vary. If a website adds a blog to itself and they’ll start to see themselves appear far more quickly than if they only have the standard html web pages. It could be weeks as opposed to six months.

Bjorklund: David, how does AllBusiness monitor the progress there of different rankings of the search engines?

Saries: Well, we look at the web analytics that a lot of website owners use and they report that we get on the amount of organic traffic coming in for our website. And we can also look at not only by which search engines but by keywords, find out where we’re getting the organic traffic from, so that we can say, you know, oh we just launched a new area, say, in our human resources section and we’re seeing a lot of organic traffic for that. So that’s how we tend to watch this. You know, depending on the business, they may be having a narrow focus. In Lee’s example, he was talking about red widgets or, you know, you may only provide plumbing services within a very small area of a certain city, so you’d have a very narrow number of keywords and so it would be fairly easy for you to monitor if you’ve improved for the keywords, you know, Dallas Plumbing or something like that.

Bjorklund: I want to give you both the shot at the last question that I have, which is, what are some of the most common SEO mistakes? Lee, do you want to kick it off?

Odden: Sure. I think getting too committed to any one tactic. There is really no silver-bullet tactic with optimizing webpages and it really boils down to creating content that’s good for users, good for search engines and constantly promoting the website. Promoting the website will not only attract new visitors but it’ll also have a byproduct of attracting links, which of itself can influence rankings and send even more visitors. So focusing on the core fundamentals that work and not chasing after some secret tactic or some mysterious promise that some snake-oil salesperson is promoting out there in the search blogosphere.

Bjorklund: David?

Saries: I’d say is something we touched on before, which is to spread the knowledge across your organization. I mean, there is not any one single person that is going to be able to affect this. It really depends on your developers, who are working, building your website, your marketing people, everybody in the kind of process of helping your business succeed. If they have a role in SEO and are kept still in the back of their minds, then they can bring the resources and the things that they control for your business into play from an SEO perspective.

Bjorklund: Good. Well, thank you so much for talking to us today. Great information, great show. Our search engine marketing experts are Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing and a blogger for AllBusiness, and director of marketing for AllBusiness, David Saries. If you would like to comment on this particular show or send suggestions for future guest experts, send your emails to podcasts@allbusiness.com. I’m Chris Bjorklund and thank you for listening today.