Common Sense SEO

I know this and so do most of the folks who've tried to wrap their heads around the task of optimizing a site for search engines, but it  always reassures me when a guy like Matt Cutts (a blogger who also happens to be the head of Google's webspam team ) says it, too:

Truthfully, much of the best SEO is common-sense: making sure that a site’s architecture is crawlable, coming up with useful content or services that has the words that people search for, and looking for smart marketing angles so that people find out about your site (without trying to take shortcuts). Google will keep working to make SEO easier and spamming harder. In my ideal world, a site owner wouldn’t need to think about SEO at all: Google would always find your content with no help. However, things as simple as a site map can improve how well search engines can crawl (and rank) your site.

By way of example, a guy I know just started a vendor financing business called ST Capital Corp. [I haven't asked Steve's  permission to use his site as an example, but I'm hoping he'll forgive me in exchange for the free advice and 'link-love' I am sending his way.]

Steve paid a web designer to give him a professional looking site, and as you can see from this screenshot, he got what he needed from an aesthetic and informational standpoint.
Vendor financing, the business of ST Capital Corp, is very competitive from a search engine standpoint, so Steve did not expect to pop up right away in the search results for his key phrase. But Steve is frustrated, he explained to me a few days ago, because he's not even near the top on a Google search for ST Capital Corp does. What's up with that?

This is an astonishingly common problem for small businesses, which is why I'm writing about it here. The problem is not Google's, it arises from an error in the site design that could easily be corrected. Note that the page title is fine, "ST Capital Corp." The designer probably thought that was enough. But there are lots of other problems that would keep a search engine spider from understanding this site. The killer -- the glitches that will keep Google from knowing that this is in fact the home of ST Capital Corp and showing it at the top of the search results for that name -- comes from the conspicuous absence of that phrase on the page.

The logo is used at the top of the page without any text to give it context, the main section links within the page (The Power of Vendor Financing and Leasing With ST Capital) are also graphical rather than text-based, and the name of the company comes up only once on the page with nothing at all to identify it as a title. The links that are text based and thus intelligible to search engines appear at the bottom of the page and lack title tags.  While the designer did add a site map, he failed to include any link to the 'About ST Capital Corp' from the home page (or, for that matter, to title the 'About' page 'About ST Capital Corp'. What's a search engine spider to do?

My guess is that fixing one or two of these things would probably resolve the problem within a week, but it might also be resolved if a few descriptive backlinks show up.  All of which is just to reinforce Matt Cutts' point about the complimentary relationship between Google and SEO consultants. SEO consultants help businesses avoid mistakes and focus on communicating clearly as they build web sites. Google wants people to build intelligible web sites because the effectiveness of their product -- search -- relies upon them.

With apologies to ST Capital Corp, provider of the ST Capital Advantage in Vendor Financing, a little search advice can go a long way.