SEO Secrets from Ben Finklea

If you want the secrets of how to get the best search engine optimization from your Drupal site, who best to learn from than Ben Finklea, author of Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization and CEO of Volacci, a Drupal SEO company. He was the featured speaker at a recent Acquia webinar titled "Ten Tips to Improve Traffic and Conversions on a Drupal Site." I'll summarize the talk here.

In the tradition of other top ten countdowns, Ben started at the end.

11. Give them More Than What They Ask For

Ben gave the example of Zappo shoes, that if you order a pair, you may be surprised that they have upgraded your shipping to overnight and you get them the next day. This customer service attitude should touch everything you do for customers. It will differentiate you from your competitors. This tip was Ben's plus one.

10. Engage Socially

The social part of social media assumes that you engage in a conversation with your customers in an active listening way. This means the conversation should results in improvements to what you do using a feedback loop. You tweet and post and blog and the customers respond. You also respond to the customers and you listen carefully to their feedback. You integrate changes in your product and services based on the feedback. Repeat. Yes, customers want to feel engaged. They also want to feel heard.

Ben suggest going to The Conversation Prism and understanding where your customers are. Then spend some time there. You can't cover everything, but you can maximize your effort by understanding the needs and conversation channels for your target demographic.

9. Offer a Significant Call to Action

Ben offered a couple of suggestions for how to place your call to action. First, consider putting your phone number at the top right corner of your website screen. Make it a link that can work with smart phones easily. Second, whether your call to action is a "Sign up for our newsletter" or "Call for a quote" or "Register for our free service" make sure there is a button (that looks like a button) that has a significant contrasting color with the dominant color of your website. It should stand out and be easily found.

8.Get More Links

Who wants to link with me? you may ask. Well take a look at your competitors to start. SEOMoz has a nice (paid) tool that allows you to check the links of your competitors. [Ed. note: you can also try using the free SiteGrader.com by HubSpot. Simply enter your competitor's website address to understand how they are winning against you.]

Getting a link, however, may require some effort on your part. Perhaps you need to write an article, or you may only need to respond to already published articles.

7. Fix the Links You Have

If other sites are trying to link to you but those links are broken, they don't exactly help you and they could hurt. There are two ways to approach solving this problem: solve the source or solve the destination. To look at the source issue (who links to you) use Google's Webmaster Tools to find crawl errors, that is, someone tried connecting to you, but the link failed. Go to your Webmaster dashboard and select the site to review. In the left pane menu under Diagnostics, select Crawl Errors. This report shows links to you that have failed.

One strategy is to contact these folks and offer to help them fix these links. The upside is it gives you an opportunity to better connect with them. The downside is they won't be interested. Also, if there are many sites, it could take you a lot of time. The second strategy is to have those incorrect links point to a 301 redirect page on your site. To set up your own redirects you can do some coding or, for the less ambitious, you can use the Drupal Path Redirect module.

6. Use Multivariate Testing

What , what, who? It sounds like an MIT course, but really it just means you can try two (A/B) different designs for visitors coming to your website. If visitors have more success with one design than the other, then your test shows you may want to go with the one design. Multivariate can mean two or many, but most folks stick with two. You can test design look and feel, visual elements, or workflows (the steps the user takes) to help improve your conversion rates. The Drupal Multivariate module is currently only available for Drupal 6, but you can also use some usability testing to help.

5. Put the Keyword and Key Phrases on the Webpage

This one seems obvious, but Ben noted that many websites they test don't use the keyword the owners have targeted anywhere on the website. The keyword can go in key places (pun intended): the title tag, the path URL, the header 1 (or really any of the headers), and the content itself. You don't want to overdo it, but do make the most of this easy way to insert keywords in your site to help with search results.

4. Secrets of Awesome Headlines

"If you want to see examples of master headline formulas, pick up a Cosmo next time you're standing in line at the grocery store," says Ben. "Those folks really know how to create headlines that grab attention and make you want to read the article--or buy the magazine to read the article." There are lots of formulas for creating a headline, but Ben shared three to get us started:

• Who Else Wants [blank]?
• Build a [blank] You Can Be Proud Of
• The Secret of [blank]

. Note that he used the third option for his bullet title, and I'm giving it a shot for the blog title. I could also try a different formula and get some A/B testing in there as well. One warning though, you still need to make the headline relevant to your target audience.

3. Don't Make Me Think (Steve Krug)

While there are many fine points in this book by Steve Krug, Ben talked about one: Design for the Power Skimmer. Typically we lay out a page thinking it will be fully read from left to right (in Western languages) and from top down. The power skimmer, however, looks for vaguely related, clickable items on the webpage when searching or "reading" your page. Make those things easy to find by having them stand out in importance in some way (size, color, button-esque.)

2. Know Your Google Analytics

Or whatever analytics your site uses. New in Google are page and event goals as well as page loading times. This last one is a new differentiating variable Google uses to rank your page. Also, faster loading pages beget more conversions. Google advanced segments lets you better understand high value web connection channels for your site. Remember, these reports are just feedback. The results happen when you take action on this information.

1. Begin With an SEO Audit

This step gives you a baseline against which you can measure your progress. Volacci and Acquia offer an evaluation that will cost $150--a small price for lots of valuable information. At GreenFerret, we also like to use SiteGrader from HubSpot. In fact, for our own website, we've been using SiteGrader to steadily improve our SEO and increased our score by more than 50 points. Our next step is to focus on some key words and phrases.

This was an awesome, practical talk by Ben Finklea. Thanks to Acquia for setting up this and other free webinars.