Search Engine Optimization: An Interview with Deane Barker

Posted by TimSlavin at September 1, 2003

Awhile back, I posted an item about how realtors use the internet. In response, I got an email from Deane Barker who described his experiences with search engine optimization for NAI Sioux Falls Commercial, a commercial real estate firm in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Since South Dakota is a bit off the map, and commercial real estate can be a very local business, I thought his search engine experience might be helpful to businesses with a local focus and small budget. I asked Deane about their experiences and lessons learned as they optimized their website for search engines.

Question: (Tim) When did you start doing search engine optimization (SEO)? What happened that triggered using SEO?

Answer: (Deane) The beginning was inadvertant. SEO was a no-brainer in my mind -- how could you NOT do it? All the Web development in the world isn't going to help if no one can see your website.

Q: Do you do Google AdWords or AdSense in addition to your SEO? How does that work?

A: No, never had to. We fairly well dominate Google as it is.

Q: What's your SEO process? How do you find keywords? How and where do you place them into your page content?

A: The owner told me once that he named the company based on the best domain name he could find. Hence, he's been quite lucky that the name of the company -- NAI Sioux Falls Commercial -- incorporates the top 3 keywords. Thus the pages were pretty loaded and SEO was well underway (albeit inadvertantly) when I started.

The trick, however, was to find all the alternate phrases that people searched for when they were looking for commercial real estate. I immersed myself in the content of the existing pages, I read trade journals looking for the jargon, I read books trying to figure out what the players called different things and why.

At the same time, I brought a layman's sensibility to the process. You don't want to get so into the industry-speak that you forget the little guy. While Sioux Falls Commercial courts big investment players that know everything about commercial real estate, the company also works with Joe Business Owner that may search for something in ways that would just confuse the big-time investor.

Coming up with a good list of key phrases is really the first step in SEO. List them all on a page, then do a word count to find which one word appears the most in all the strings together. Rank the words from most to least frequent. This will give you a good idea of what keywords are important.

The company is lucky in that its business is tied to geography, so all the key phrases will likely all have "sioux falls" or "south dakota" in them. Consequently, the TITLE tag always has "Sioux Falls Commercial Real Estate" in it. For the sake of usability, I placed the phrase behind the title of the specific page so the actual title displays well in search engine results and the browser title bar. Having five keywords in every TITLE tag helps enormously.

At the same time, I'm a strong belivever that you can't dilute your keywords. I see some sites with dozens of keywords in the title tag, which I think is a mistake (I even saw one the other day with 12 separate TITLE tags, all geared to a different key phrase). I'm quite sure many engines rate keywords as a percentages of total words in the tag, which means these sites are shooting themselves in the foot: if an engine hits on three keywords in a seven word tag, or three keywords in a thirty word tag, which one do you think will come out on top?

Also, I make sure to use the standard HTML heading tags (H1, H2, H3) and have keywords appear in them. These are weighted more heavily than regular text, so if you create your own header by using a DIV with style rules, then you're missing out on that. While it looks like a header in the browser, a search engine can't tell what it is. H1 and its kin impart context, not just formatting. You can just as easily "style up" an H1 tag as you can a DIV tag.

Q: Do you have to constantly maintain your keywords and SEO optimization of pages? Is maintenance a daily, weekly, monthly chore? Is SEO done in-house or outside of the company?

A: I do all SEO work in-house, and we audit our results every month. Maintenacne is an everyday then. When you've put a page together, review it -- make sure the keywords are in the right places, make sure the TITLE tag looks good, make sure the gist of the page is towards the top, etc. It can't be a review process because once a page is indexed, it takes time to change it in the indices -- you have to make sure it's good when it goes out the door.

Q: What skills do you find are required for effective SEO for small to medium sized businesses?

A: My SEO theory is built around three levels:

Level One: This is the basic search engine-optimization stuff and the only thing that could be considered "tricks." These are the standard tactics: identify your keywords, put them in the TITLE tag, put them in header tags, use a good submission service, don't use frames, don't embed content in Flash, etc. You can find this stuff in any of the dozens of books on search engine optimization, but that's only the beginning.

Level Two: Good, usable content. Nothing will help your search engine results like good, well-written, usable content that people want to see. If you have no content of value, then you're pretty much doomed from the start. Good content goes a long way, and you'll find a lot of these sites doing really well in search engines even though they've never had any SEO.

Additionally, good content is a matter of honesty in my mind. If my site was a waste of everyone's time, then I don't know if I'd want to be at the top. Occupying the top spot in an engine imparts a certain reposnsilbiity to make sure you belong there. Based on a search engine's recommendation, people are going to spend their valuable time looking through your site. Make sure you don't waste it.

Level Three: Link cultivation. There's been quite a bit written lately on inbound link cultivation and this is key for really embedding your site at the top of search engine listings. This is an ongoing thing and something that develops over several years. This is what identifies the sites that are perched on top of the search results perpetually. Just like you network in person, make sure to network your site.

Q: What process do you follow to find sites that might link to yours? Do you use any tools? Do you have an approach to these sites that works best?

A: No tools, really. It's all about relationships. Try to find sites that you think you have an overlap of traffic. Be up-front with the owner -- don't couch it in terms other than the fact that there's a legitimate relationship between your two sites and cross-linking would help both of you.

Always make sure there's a relationship -- I got an email from someone running a site that sold Mig welders wanted to cross-link to a site that sold barbeque utensils. It was a blatant attempt at spamming PageRank. This stuff never helps.

Q: What is the most valuable thing you've learned about SEO?

A: Content is king. If you have good, solid content, SEO is so much easier. It's tough to win a race when you have no legs.

Deane works in Marketing and Information Systems for NAI Sioux Falls Commercial. After hours, he also maintains Gadgetopia and is co-founder of The Sling and Rock Design Group, a web design firm.

Resources Mentioned In This Article

http://www.siouxfallscommercial.com
http://www.slingandrock.com
http://www.gadgetopia.com

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