We’ve met some great Search Engine Optimization milestones for our Denver and National clients in 2008 through various Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing strategies.  But, we do not intend to rest on our laurels!!

In our never ending quest to improve our strategies and tactics to help our clients climb the Search Engine Result Page (SERP), we are heading out to California to attend Search Engine Marketing Expo West!

Now, before you just assume we will be on a sun-filled vacation, know that we’ll be stuck (hapilly) in the Santa Clara Convention Center pretty much every day this week from 8am to 10pm.  We are glad to do this as it helps us stay ahead of our competition and keep our Search Engine Marketing tactics sharp and effective.

A few of the companies that we will be meeting with and listening to are:

It should be a great conference and we are already excited about some of the new things we can try out as soon as we get back!

Make sure you contact us to see how we can help your business scale the Search Engine Ladder.

This may be obvious but it’s usually missed when developing content or putting together your initial website framework.  Here are 5 Elements to Optimizing your Global Navigation links:

1. Every link on your site holds some weight.

Think about it this way:

- If you link to an external site, you are casting a “vote” for that site….stating to the Search Engine that you value this site you are linking to.

- If you are linking internally, you are telling the Search Engines what your site is about.  The link itself adds to the relativity of your site.

Here is an example:

If you own a company that sells dress shoes or a company that sells horse shoes – you have 2 very different businesses. Hopefully

Now, on your Global navigation that shows up on every single page, if both businesses linked to their product page and the link in the Global navigation said, “Shoes”…well, Google and Yahoo would have to use different methods to figure out what type of shoes you were talking about.

But, if your links said, “Dress Shoes” or “Horse Shoes”, respectively.  That gives Google a much better idea of what your site is about and the link relevancy goes up because you provided better details about what you are selling.

Don’t make it any harder for the Search Engines to figure out what your site is about!

2. Make sure to include all of your important pages in your Global navigation.

Let’s pretend that in your Global Navigation you have a link called “About Us”, and that link is on every single page because it’s in the Global Navigation.  Now, after some time, you’ve posted enough articles that your indexed pages hits 200 pages.  You now have 200 pages each with a link to the About Us page.

In your Global Navigation you didn’t link to your main products, instead you put up some banner image that links to the individual product pages – you have 10 or so products.  And for the sake of the example, let’s say that you split up the links to your products evenly.  So, each page links to one of your products and they rotate…page 1 links to product 1, page 2 links to product 2, etc.  200 pages, 10 products…split evenly gives each product 20 pages linking to it.

By that example…with the same 200 pages indexed, you now have 20 pages pointing to each product.  Yet, you have 200 pointing to your About Us page.

What’s more important?  Unless you are a non-profit, the product is important!

3. Using dropdown menus?  Use a hybrid script…

Some dropdown scripts hide the actual navigation links in a Javascript file or a Flash file.  Search engines can’t read those and if that’s the only way you are linking to your important pages, you’ve just blinded the search engine from crawling through your site using links.

Look for hybrid scripts that use CSS with Javascript so that the links are coded in CSS.  Those can be read and followed by Search Engines.  You can do the same thing with Flash.

Tip: Use a text browser or turn OFF Javascript and Flash in your browser, then browse your site…if your links do not show up, you have a problem!

4. Using Images for your navigation?

Make sure you use Alt Attributes (Alt Tags) so that the search engine knows what your link is about.  Even though a search engine can follow the link, it won’t know what you feel is relevant about the link.  Therefore, if using images in your navigation, use some of your keywords to help guide the Search Engine to know where you are sending it.

Again, let’s make it easier for the engines as well as for people…usually content built for people works well for engines too.

5. Architecture is good but a yarn ball is bad.

When creating Global Navigation links, it’s good to plan out what’s really important.  And in most cases it’s good to interconnect your pages, BUT…there is an exception, isnt there always?  Don’t just link everything together for the sake of linking everything together.  You should have a method for the madness.

Example:

if you have a site that sells car parts and the first thing the user does is searches by Make and Model, say it’s an Audi A6…if you were to show all parts available for the A6, that’s great!  But if you created links on the same page to parts for a BMW M3, you are now diluting your relevancy.  That page may have ranked great for Audi parts, but you just messed it up by diluting your relevancy and adding BMW parts listed on the same page, that page is no longer as relevant for “Audi parts”, but it may be for “Audi and BMW parts”.

Keep that in mind and best of luck with your rank!

Note: This article was first posted on 10/20/2008 and updated on 11/10/2008.

Most of us know about Google Analytics, it’s a piece of code you put into your site and then you can use Google’s free tool to track visitors, time on site, where the visitors are coming from, e-commerce funnels, etc.

It’s a great tool, it’s free, and it’s widely used.

Well, it seems like Yahoo! is putting together an offering as well…it’s a rebrand of IndexTools.

Here are a few screenshots, since it’s not publicly available yet: