Doorway Pages
People talk about landing pages now, usually in the context of PPC campaigns, but back then people would create what was called doorway pages, which were basically nothing but keyword stuffed pages with little to no real content. They were written purely for the search engines, and usually just had a big ‘Enter’ link somewhere in the middle of the page. Back then you had to manually submit each page to the search engines, so this would give you a shot at getting multiple pages in the first page of search results. Often with a little know how, you could get half or more of the first page results of most of the search engines. Again, most people put no thought into SEO and there was much less competition, even in the sheer number of sites that were around.

Submitting to the engines
XML sitemaps, what are those??? Back then, it was a manual process, one by one, for each engine and each page. There were also a lot more players in the industry. Since then, so much consolidation has occured in the search industry, with many companies swallowing up the smaller players and now we only have to worry about a handful of engines. Back then there were sites like Webcrawler, Altavista (the original Google ), Hotbot, Lycos, Yahoo (when it was free and you got listed fairly quickly…), OpenText, Magellan, Excite, Northern Light, etc. etc.

Eventually there were services like Submit-It! where you could submit your site to multiple engines with one click, but all in all it was a laborious process that needed to be repeated for each page and also repeated periodically to ensure your site was re-indexed.

SEO Elements
As I mentioned earlier, it was all about keyword stuffing. Back then, the META keywords tag was a big factor unlike now when they are largely ignored. Title tags and page names were largely ignored by most webmasters back then. This is why the word ‘home’ began being ignored by search engines because the title tag for most sites read ‘Home Page’ or some variation! It also wasn’t out of the ordinary for pages to be named index, index2, index3, etc.

Newsgroups – the original social networking
Back then, there were no blogs, social networking sites, video marketing, etc. About the closest things there were to that was newsgroups. They were topically focused message boards that required news reader software and you could post and respond to topics. This was a supplemental way to market sites back then, but eventually became so abused that newsgroups became havens for tons and tons of spam. Initially though, it was a nice place to get the message out, and search for topics and messages related to your industry where you could respond with helpful advice.

Site Design
There are still many sites now that are designed on a shoestring budget by people with little to no design abilities, but back then, the Internet was rampant with horrible looking sites that were difficult to use. Remember when many sites adopted the teal background color – was that really an upgrade from the grey??? Sites were also littered with animated GIFs, ‘under construction’ signs, etc. It wasn’t a pretty sight! Things progressed from there to getting ‘plugin crazy’ with technologies like Shockwave that required numerous downloads and long loading times, during an era where broadband Internet access was practically non-existent. This led to Flash which did offer quicker loading times, but to this day is often abused with entire sites designed in Flash, splash pages with long introduction movies (still see these on some sites today), which obviously do nothing for SEO or usability for that matter.

Analytics
Analytics, often referred to as web stats back then, were very basic. Webtrends was the golden child back then, which required downloading the server log files locally where they would be analyzed and the data would be compiled into reports. There were some web based statistics programs back then, but they all worked off the server log files which provided very limited data. Back then everyone would talk about ‘hits’, but they all had their own definitions of what a hit actually was. Some counted every file access (including images), and some used the term hits to refer to visits or visitors. Now we are more worried about ROI than anything else, which involves tracking conversions, conversion rates – quality traffic. This was an impossibility back then.

Times have changed…
As you can see, times were simpler then and top rankings were much easier to achieve. Now, sites are competing with a much larger volume of competitors, and for most industries, the competition is not just large, it’s well educated. Internet marketing agencies have become very successful in the past few years as businesses large and small see the value of the Internet, and the competition for visibility getting fierce. There is definitely a science to Internet Marketing now, and while not an exact science, it requires skilled professionals who can not only market the site, but dissect it to ensure it is easy to use, converts at the highest rate possible, and has a decent design that doesn’t distract from the goals of turning traffic into sales or leads. It’s not easy now, but the war is certainly a lot more interesting!

For each page of your site their should be a primary keyword phrase you are targeting, and then at most 2 other secondary phrases. Depending on how competitive the keyword phrase is, you may need to go down to 1 target keyword phrase per page for higher density.

Take a look at this very page to get an idea of establishing structure to page naming. You will quickly see that the keywords/phrases targeted on this page were SEO, Search engine optimization, and page naming. They are mentioned in the URL, the title tag, meta tags, and the H1, not to mention throughout the copy. Wordpress generated this page and named it the title of the article, but in a perfect world, all of the extraneous words would have been left out.

If you are getting ready to launch a new site, it is a tremendous benefit to have your primary keyword phrase in your domain name. For very competitive terms, this can make all the difference.

Here is an example of an optimal naming scheme at the root level:

http://www.guerillainternetmarketing.com

Title – Internet Marketing | Search Engine Marketing
H1 tag – Guerilla Internet Marketing

Best of luck!

Is there a happy medium between SEO and Aesthetics?
Of course there is! Obviously a site limited to text only is not attractive and can make it difficult to properly market your product/service, but that is not what I am recommending. The extreme example of what you should avoid is one of the Flash sites that were commonly setup a few years back. These sites usually had a long intro animation, and the entire navigation and content of the site was embedded in a Flash application. If your site falls into this category – you need to redesign it immediately.

An eye-pleasing Flash banner or animation can do wonders for promoting your product or service and make more a memorable presentation, but make sure there is plenty of text based content and the navigation of the site should be done using text as well (maybe a DHTML dropdown?).

How do I know what the engines see?
You can do this in the Google search results, but if you haven’t already, you should really
. Although some complain about the PageRank data it supplies as being outdated, I think it is helpful. Among other things, you can view PageRank data, look at cached version of sites, backlinks, etc.

Specifically to the toolbar, click on the PageRank button, then click ‘Cached snapshot of page’, then at the top of the page click the link that says ‘Show cached text only’. To accomplish the same thing in the search results, click the ‘Cached’ link under a listing, then click the ‘Cached text’ link.

The bottom line is, if you don’t see you target keywords/phrases here, then neither do the engines.

• Proper page names – This is very often overlooked, especially with e-commerce sites. Dynamic pages are fine, but you want them to at the very least appear like static pages. What do I meant by this? Compare http://www.guerillainternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing/ to http://www.guerillainternetmarketing.com/?p=123. Notice the difference? The first URL has words in it and the other has the variable p set to 123. What does this all mean? First off, search engines weigh static page names higher than they do dynamic pages. Second, having keywords in the URL is a huge positive. In this case, the phrase ‘Internet Marketing’ is repeated 3 times in the URL alone! This can usually be accomplished using mod_rewrite on Linux servers. You can do something similar on Windows boxes but it’s a little more difficult.
• 301 Redirects – one of the first things you should do is make sure all traffic to yourdomain.com is redirected to www.yourdomain.com, or vice versa. The point of this is that some engines will see those as two different sites, thus dividing the PageRank or other score amongst the two rather than putting all the numbers into one basket. Obviously this is not a good thing! There are many ways to accomplish this, but the key is to verify that it was done correctly as a proper 301 by using a header checker.
• Proper titles, metas, H1s – these are the ‘bones’ of a search engine friendly page. Of course content and links are key, but we’ll dive deeply into that at a later date. Again, for dynamic sites, these key areas often get lost in the shuffle. If you pay attention as you click around smaller e-commerce sites, you will often see that not only are the page names dynamic, but the titles and metas are as well. Many times they are not unique or descriptive of that page, and are not optimized for target keywords. This blog is dynamic, but there are plugins available that let you customize the titles and metas of each and every page created to ensure that they are well optimized.
• Content – Content is King! It is so important that sites have keyword rich content, and lots of it. Many times companies will focus so much on putting products up or call to actions to sign up for a service without putting pages of text up that describe the products/services. If you want to be indexed and indexed well, you need copy on the site, not just images. Spiders love content which is why there is an entire industry out there of companies that will write content to post on web sites.
• Links – Links are King! Hey wait a minute, didn’t I just say that content is king? There is much debate over which is more important right now, content or links. My personal experience shows that they are both very important, but I have seen firsthand that the right links can do wonders for rankings for target keywords. We will get more in depth on link building at a later date.

Now I need to go follow my own advice and create more content. Once I have a few more posts I will also work on my own link building strategy, can’t stay at a PageRank of 0 if I want any success!

So, what is Internet Marketing? Just like any other term thrown around the Internet, it has lots of different meanings but here is the basic definition as I see it: “To use multiple online techniques to drive traffic to a user friendly web site where the desired conversion can be obtained”. That’s the bottom line right, to bring people to a site and get them to take action?

Here are some of the topics I plan to talk about over the coming days/months/years:

• Traffic – various techniques to drive traffic to a web site, whether you are looking for relevant traffic or in some cases, eyeballs alone.
• Conversion – how to analyze and optimize a site’s performance to drive the highest rate of conversion possible (sales, leads, etc.)
• Analysis – what are the definitions of the key metrics, how they can be viewed to get a total picture of a site’s performance, various tools out there like Google Analytics on up to more expensive players like Omniture.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) – the basics of proper SEO- it’s really not rocket science but it is ever changing. I will layout the formula for a ’search engine friendly’ web site.
• Pay-per-click (PPC) / Search engine marketing (SEM) – another one of those names that is in a state of transition. I’m old school, I still call it PPC! I will talk about how to build out and optimize campaigns, techniques on driving the lowest cost per conversion (CPC), what the new Google Quality Score really means, etc.
• Link building – various ways to obtain links, both paid and unpaid, the good ‘ole PageRank and how important it is, etc.
• Social networking/Web 2.0 – how can this be integrated into an Internet Marketing campaign, how effective or ineffective can be…
• General site auditing – how to quickly determine the issues with a site that effect it’s ability to get indexed, it’s ability to convert, etc.
• Ethics of SEO – black hat, white hat… How about grey hat? Learn about some of the grey areas in SEO that are currently up for debate (Text link ads, Blog outreach, etc.)
• News – if you know anything about this industry you know it is constantly changing – I’ll try to post newsworthy items on here as well.

Most of all, I look forward to interacting with people and discussing some of the hot issues in the industry.

All the best,

Brian