The best way to get affordable search engine optimization is by doing it yourself with SEOintelligence, there are a few easy tips to follow. One of the easiest ways to do this is by organizing your Web site folders/structure properly. Of course you want your site to be sophisticated, but that doesn’t mean it should be confusing. Most often, sophistication means simplicity. Take out any unnecessary graphs or charts your site might have because this can confuse the search engines. Another way to do cheap SEO yourself is by updating your domain name. If it is your company name and your company isn’t well known, then select another one that is related to the products you provide.

This connects to the keywords used in your page titles. If there aren’t any in there, then you need some. Don’t overdo it, but make sure there are keywords in each title. This will help better navigate the search engines to your site. Another way to get affordable search engine optimization is with linking. If you are doing it yourself, the best way to do so is simply asking. Put a link of a relevant company’s site on your page and ask them if they will reciprocate the favor. Most often they will.

Doing it yourself is a great way to get affordable search engine optimization. It can be time consuming, but the results are well worth it. If it starts to get too difficult or confusing, just try to keep it simple. You don’t have to do every search engine optimization technique out there because that would take a lifetime. Doing a few of them will get your site noticed more. Just remember that it is the key to getting recognized online, so something is always better than nothing.

This is a very simple yet effective SEO tip for local businesses & regional brick and mortar stores, especially if you’re looking to rebrand or start a business from the ground up.

Make sure to make and brand your business name with your main keywords in it if possible. This is important for communicating what your business does along with achieving organic search results (and making sure your incoming links are using relevant anchor text, so when people link to you, they automatically link using relevant keywords).

Remember the days when every business was naming themselves “AAA Mechanics” or “1st American Modeling” to rank highly in the Yellow Pages’ alphabetical order listings? Well those days are long gone! Now it’s time to rank for organic local search results.

For example, if you have a modeling studio in say Florida. You can name the company Florida Modeling Studios. Rather than something like ABC Inc. that has no keywords. (Hopefully you can get a domain with similar keywords as well, which will assist with ranking.)

The advantage of this is you can easily use keywords in your content while referring to your company name. This will enable you to use keywords for on page optimization without sounding ridiculous or unnaturally forcing keywords into your copy.

Most bloggers are satisfied with the default structure of the blog but if you would like to improve yours a little the easiest way is to do it by optimizing the title tag.

The default title structure in most common blog platforms is “Blog Title – Post Title”. What this means is that your most relevant keywords that are in your post title appears towards the end of your page title, carrying less weightage. Also the Post title or a part of it might get chopped off in the SERP due to the character limit.

The ideal way to solve this problem would be to have the Title structure in “Post Title – Blog Title” format.

Wordpress and Blogger are probably the two most common blogging platforms and for both of these you can do this by simply tweaking the placement of PHP variables.

For WP, you can use it by manually tweaking the code or you can have even more control on your Page titles by using Plugins like Platinum SEO pack or All in One SEO plugin [note Daily SEO Tips uses All in One].

For Blogger item page title, you can use the following code,
<ItemPage><title><Blogger><$BlogItemTitle$></Blogger> – <$BlogTitle$></title></ItemPage>

Play round with your blogger code a little and you should be able to have customized title for each of your blog pages.

If you need even more details on how to optimize your blogs read the following:

• How To SEO for Wordpress Blog;
• SEO for Blogspot Blogs.

Have any other blog seo tips? How do you SEO your blog? Feel free to share them in the comments below.

This fabulous group of Twitter using SEO’s replied back with some excellent tips for us to start up our TGIF Tips, where on Fridays DailySEOTip.com turns over our SEO tip of the day to you, the reader. Today’s goal is to build a grand list of simple and useful SEO Tips, which can be contributed by anyone interested in the project.

All you have to do is comment in the comment field below this blogpost. Our goal is to have over 100 cool tips and replies in the comments by the end of the day! So get Commenting (remember, comments include DoFollow links and can link to your latest blog post!)

So, to get this party with this list of juicy SEO tips as Twittered by our friends! And be sure to follow all of these great people on Twitter.

joehall @lorenbaker SEO TIP: start using microformats, they are going to be important in the future for identifying important content.

weboptimist @lorenbaker When an image and a text link point to the same URL, nofollow the image link to give link credit to the keyword rich text link.

askbillmitchell @lorenbaker use inurl: blog, .gov, edu in Google to find blogs hosted on .edu .gov TLD participate in their discussion to get quality back links

kalena @lorenbaker SEO Rule 1 – ask the client what goal they want to achieve. If unrealistic convince them to change goal. If realistic, exceed it

Burnsie_SEO @lorenbaker: SEO Tip. Always have a site map. Be sure it is in the root directory and has a text link to it from all pages of the site

Burnsie_SEO @lorenbaker SEO Tip. Ne sure your title tag is different for each page. Use you keywords in title tag that are relevant to that page

Burnsie_SEO @lorenbaker:SEO Tip. Use your page focus keywords as your page URL name. Keyword-keyword-keyword. HTML

OneChicBoutique @lorenbaker SEO Tip/websites take a long time to show in Google Search/Make a myspace for your website/Google crawls Myspace with in days!

kristyann @lorenbaker Don’t forget the visitor. You can optimize for the SERP’s all you want, but if the content isn’t there the visitors won’t return

sitemost @lorenbaker Before embarking on any SEO campaign, set clear goals and perform a usability audit. Otherwise all the traffic and exposure you get from your SEO campaign will be wasted

Skitzzo @lorenbaker my tip would be… make it easy for people to link to you the way you want (with optimized anchor tags).

sizzler_chetan @lorenbaker Put keywords or key phrases in Image ALT attributes to make your images rank better in Search engines.

Remember to leave your SEO Tip (or more than one) in the comments below!

Note : If you check out Andrew’s comment below you’ll see that he just summarized one of his blog posts and dropped a link to it. You can do that too!

Search engine optimization (SEO) has turned into a big business, and from what I can tell it’s the modern version of snake oil. The unproven nonsense spewed by so-called “SEO experts” simply doesn’t work. And worse, it’s screwing up the elegance of the Web.

How did John come to these results? Well he changed his URLs based on “free” advice, and he got what he paid for. People who expect the world handed to them for free are always disappointed with the results, and expect a steady paycheck for bitching about and externalizing their own character flaws & ignorance.

A person can claim that SEO is ineffective if they are clueless about it, but if it were actually ineffective snake oil would…

• Many of the media outlets that publicly dismiss SEO have an in house SEO team? (On multiple ocassions I have been called or emailed – the same day – with questions from an in house SEO at a publishing company that just published a piece denouncing SEO)
• I still be writing this blog for over 5 years?
• My income have doubled (or more) every year?
• People have spent over ,000,000 buying my ebook?
• A headhunter working for Microsoft try to offer me a job paying 6 figures a year?
• Google have hired more than 10,000 remote quality raters?
• Google’s Matt Cutts spend so much time going to SEO conferences?
• Yahoo! have a patent for automating SEO based on their proprietary user data?

As I mentioned to Chris Crum from Web Pro News:

“It is not surprising that search engines know the value of SEO. The only thing I find surprising is them openly admitting it,” Aaron Wall of SEOBook tells me. “Google always tries to shape, control, and minimize the scope of the field of SEO. And here Yahoo! is trying to expand it. Exciting stuff!”

Now SEO is constantly changing. Search engine crawlers are getting more sophisticated. Mechanical SEO is practiced by many people, and so it may not offer a sustainable competitive advantage. But SEO is not just a mechanical process as it draws upon market research, psychology, sociology, public relations, branding, advertising, and both online and offline marketing.

Outbound links show up in referral logs and act as a marketing tool. Plus they help establish & develop social relationships, such that when you have important news to share, some of those people might be willing to reference your works. There is a cumulative advantage effect.

Getting just an extra little bit of coverage on a few more channels leads to many additional citations (hey everyone is talking about this, so it must be important). For every publisher that is an original thinker there are dozens (maybe hundreds?) of followers. Many of those followers also write blogs, bookmark resources on Delicious, use Twitter, promote stories on social news sites. Some latent links come from ignorant journalists that are too lazy to do real research and just quote from whatever sources are easily accessible via a Google search.

When you get new links into key parts of your site, they not only pass PageRank, but also pass anchor text. Having inlinks from a variety of trusted domains with targeted anchor text pointing at relevant pages is MUCH more valuable than raw PageRank score.

When people link at you in editorial channels, they not only link, but in many cases leave behind an endorsement. Assuming they are writing to a relevant targeted audience then you just gained a bunch of social proof of value and reached a wider audience in a means that is much cheaper and more effective than traditional advertising.

Unlike John Dvorak, professional SEOs do not need to lie and pull sleazy tricks to get “hits”… we rank for high value keywords and turn that traffic stream into real business. His publishing strategy is so inauthentic and cheesy that he writes by number:

One Youtube comment on the above video says “What a clown. Journalist? Snake oil salesman more like.” Funny, that sounds familiar.

Bolt on Publicity

Some companies give exclusives to people willing to syndicate their misinformation, but that is not without cost. It is getting harder to push stories without merit via public relations because things are becoming more transparent and media outlets are outing each other – a trend that will only increase as the media business models get squeezed.

Consider Daniel Lyons take on the media and Apple’s public relations: “It’s one thing for PR flacks to tell lies. That is, after all, what they get paid to do. But it’s another thing for the media to join in on the action.” He was (at least temporarily) booted of MSNBC for his bluntness.

Blogging as a Tough Business Model

That same Daniel Lyons wrote about how he couldn’t make serious money blogging:

I blogged from cabs, using my BlackBerry. I blogged in the middle of the night, having awakened with an idea. I rationalized this insane behavior by telling myself that at the end of this rainbow I would find a huge pot of gold. But reality kept interfering with this fantasy. My first epiphany occurred in August 2007, when The New York Times ran a story revealing my identity, which until then I’d kept secret. On that day more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I’d ever had—and through Google’s AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks. Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of ,039.81

Making Blogging Work?

The traditional blog ad network model is not doing so well. But some are much better at monetizing blogs. Federated Media’s John Battelle mentioned that brand advertisers using their ad network were mostly interested in their ability to buy ads that influenced the media and were integrated into the media. You can read about how the human network became a Wikipedia page here (or here), and see Federated Media’s renewed focus here:

Over the past year, it became increasingly clear that the majority of our business was in the execution of these more complex media programs. So when the economy began its nose-dive last Fall, we reached out to our marketing and publishing partners to ask what they wanted from us. Most told us that they need us now more than ever. They value above all else our ability to create highly engaging, cost effective media experiences that allow marketers to connect with their customers. It’s high-impact marketing, but it’s also time-intensive and nuanced work. We are realigning much of our staff to support the marketers and content creators who make these programs sing by expanding our Strategic Programs and Major Accounts teams. Unfortunately, it also means that we need to lose some staff in our more traditional advertising support business.

Google Uses Pay Per Post Marketing Strategy

Not only are upstart ad networks focusing on interactive media ad buys, but even Google is using paid blog postings to market their search engine in Japan:

the Japanese blogosphere today is filled with reports about Google hiring Cyberbuzz, a Tokyo-based Internet marketing company to promote the keyword feature (its widget version) with a pay-per-post campaign. And in fact, the search string “Google Hot Keywords Ranking+Blog Widget+CyberBuzz” in Japanese in Google’s own Blog Search leads to a few dozen results, indicating the reports aren’t made up of thin air. This blogger, for example, integrated the keyword widget and praises the list as being very useful to be kept up-to-date on what is going on in the world. This one says the keywords change every 20 minutes and that the new Google feature once quickly helped in obtaining information on a Japanese TV star. All postings end with a disclosure that says: “I am taking part in the Cyberbuzz campaign”.

Apparently Google’s view of organic marketing changes when they are not a market leading monopoly.

The Pollution of the Commons

Companies that realize Google likes reviews have been hard at work encouraging reviews – with Belkin paying 65 cents per fake review.

Advertiser Bias Limits Value

As Seth Godin rightfully notes, when newspapers disappear we won’t miss much. If taken at face value, and compared against historical accuracy, some media is worth less than nothing due to the need for advertiser bias:

The bull-biased business press is financed with advertising by financial services firms that primarily sell equities-based mutual funds and stock index funds products, stock brokerage firms that sell stock brokerage services, and stock trading firms that sell trading platforms and tools. It plays up greed-fear in bull markets with the message that you can’t afford to stay out of the rising market, and never mind the bubble. During bear markets they play down loss-fear with the message that if you stay out of the market you’ll miss the big rally.

The Rise of Disinformation

Worse yet, media does not only have an advertiser bias, but some advertisers push cultural ignorance to mask the flaws of their business models:

“People always assume that if someone doesn’t know something, it’s because they haven’t paid attention or haven’t yet figured it out,” Proctor says. “But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what’s true and what’s not.”

After years of celebrating the information revolution, we need to focus on the countervailing force: The disinformation revolution. The ur-example of what Proctor calls an agnotological campaign is the funding of bogus studies by cigarette companies trying to link lung cancer to baldness, viruses—anything but their product.

Niche magazines in fields ranging from tech to business are see sharp drops in ad revenues. Traditional advertising is not working as well as it once did, forcing traditional media outlets to cater to advertiser interests.

Mass Pollution Erodes Trust

With the web getting polluted with machine generated personalization, slick infomercials, fake information, crowd-sourced recycled incorrect information, spyware, reverse billing fraud, and fake reviews our general trust for the medium will go down. The barrier to conversion will increase…requiring more steps in the conversion process.

The Value of a Known Trustworthy Voice & Bias

When compared with the advertiser bias of most large media outfits, personalized media with a known friendly voice and bias like this and this become more welcoming, more appealing, and easier to trust.

Ad supported journalism will remain possible, but typically only if you focus on a niche, maintain a small editorial team, and/or are advertising your own products and services. It is not likely that you will be able to charge a subscription fee for general news.

Search Engine Land started out with ads for other services on their site, but now they push co-branded ads, their conferences, and subscription area…once a business publishing brand is known well enough, it should be able to get more value out of its traffic than it can get by selling that attention to third parties…giving its offerings premium positions and selling backfill / remnant inventory to the highest bidder.

How to Build Attention

If you want to have a sustained marketing advantage then renting the media is not going to be as easy as it once was. The better strategy is to make content accessible, participate in the conversation, host the conversation, win marketshare through exclusives, ride current news & marketing trends, and give away that which others are selling. That is how you build the mindshare needed to get people seeing you as the market default, and to cultivate linking without thinking.

Sell Yourself

Figure out how to build attention and a brand, and all you need to do is create something that is better than free, and start selling it to your legions of loyal followers.

The best organic links often happen as a result of social interaction, customer recommendation, or just because the site is already findable in the search results. As Mike Grehan long ago said, when it comes to links, the rich get richer. If an idea is only in your head, and you have nothing on the web, then you have no chance for your idea to generate links, subscribers, or word of mouth recommendations. If an idea is only in your head then you have not shown up to the game, and you are falling further behind each day.

If you launch a domain, publish some content on a blog on it, and submit it to some of the major web directories, then you are at least getting the age clock going on your site. Perhaps asking a couple friends for some nepotistic links would help too. In time as you add more content, link to other related sites, and interact within your community, you will start picking up more links and RSS subscribers. As content management systems evolve, it gets easier to just crank out content and hope that some of it gains traction. Plug-ins like the Wasabi related posts Wordpress plug-in make it easy for webmasters to later add structure to a site that started without a solid structure.

Is there value in a strong launch? Yes. But it is easier to launch new ideas after you are already well known. Competition is so fierce that it is hard to launch a new product or service unless you already have some market exposure. Majestic SEO is a great example of this. They have a great product, but did not get anywhere near as much coverage as LinkScape did simply because Majestic SEO was built by an unknown provider new to the SEO market.

Is there value to doing market research ahead of time? Absolutely. It is what can help give you an idea of what business models to consider, and how to organize your website. If you have a small static site then by all means it makes sense to make sure you target important keywords and map them out against your site structure and on page optimization strategy. But if you wait on perfection, then you might never start. And people like to read writing that they can empathize with. If you start creating content when you are new to a field then you build up content that may capture the hearts and minds of people new to your field. Wait too long and people might think you are writing over their heads.

When you think of some of the highest traffic SEO sites, many of them were started before their business models were proven (and in some cases before they even knew what they wanted their business models to be). Build a passionate targeted audience and eventually monetization will follow. Regularly creating content and interacting with people daily ensures that when you try something out you will get quick feedback on if the idea works or not, and how to evolve it. Owning a topical media channel is typically far more powerful then trying to buy exposure within that industry.

Do you have a niche idea in your head right now? If so, what is stopping you from sharing it online today?

I know exactly what she’s talking about and was glad to hear her answer the questions that way, because “it depends” is often the only way you can answer SEO questions. In fact, it’s so common that “it depends” has been said 357 times on various High Rankings Forum threads!

To show you what I mean, here’s a list of SEO questions that I get asked all the time, along with what the answer depends upon, and then a quick answer based on the various factors that might be involved:

Q. How quickly will Google re-index my pages after I’ve SEO’d them?

It depends on: how popular your site is, how often Google’s spiders typically come around, how deep in the site the changes have been made, and more.

The quick answer: Anywhere from 1 day to 6 weeks.

It depends on: how long you had your previous rankings, how competitive they were, if you’ve done anything to purposely deceive the search engines, how long rankings drop has existed, etc.

The quick answer: Do nothing and give it a few weeks to see if your rankings come back. In most cases, they will.

It depends on: who’s doing it, their knowledge and skill levels, as well as the types of keyword phrases you’re targeting.

The quick answer: SEO done correctly by a knowledgeable and skilled SEO consultant can be highly effective in increasing the targeted traffic to your website. But SEO done by someone who’s just read about it…well…not so much!

It depends on: whether your content management system (CMS) does this as the default and it would be difficult to change, or how much time you have to create separate Titles and headlines.

The quick answer: Typically you’d want your Title tag and your main headline to be different because they serve different purposes. But if it’s a major undertaking to ensure this doesn’t happen, it’s not a deal breaker as far as SEO is concerned, assuming you have some control over what they say.

It depends on: whether your current URLs are getting indexed and found, whether you’re currently in the midst of a redesign, how awful your URLs currently look, how easy it is to implement within your CMS, and whether you can easily 301-redirect the old versions to the new ones.

The quick answer: If you have to change all URLs anyway because of a website redesign and CMS change, then sure, make clean, keyword-rich URLs that look nice in the search results. But if there’s nothing really wrong with your current ones other than you don’t like the way they look or you think you need to add keywords to them, it’s probably not worth the hassle that goes with such a major change to the structure of your website.

It depends on: how many keywords phrases people would type into the search engines to seek out what your company provides and how many pages your site has.

The quick answer: If everything else is in place, you can typically target anywhere from 2-5 keyword phrases on any one page of your website. Multiply that by the number of unique, optimizable pages on your site and you should have a rough estimate of how many potential keyword phrases you could target.

It depends on: whether you want to brand the blog as part of your main website or brand it as a separate entity, and whether you want people to be able to easily remember the URL.

The quick answer: Whether it’s in a sub-directory or subdomain doesn’t make too much difference, although if it’s in a subdomain you may have more chance of it showing up in the search results at the same time that your main domain also shows up, than if it’s in a sub-directory. On the other hand, the average person doesn’t think to type in subdomains if they’re trying to go directly to your site and are more likely to remember something like yourdomain.com/blog than blog.yourdomain.com. For SEO purposes, none of these things really matter, so it’s more of a business/branding decision.

It depends on: how many words it takes to say what you need to say.

The quick answer: There is no specific number of words a page should be for SEO purposes.

Looking at article directory stats

Here’s a look at give top tier article directories and their traffic ranking and standings:

Using Compete.com for keyword research, here is a list of some of organic non-brand name keywords
each of these article directories ranks for:

Performing a page level backlink analysis on these pages showed that all but one had a very small number of external links. Instead of external links, these pages ranked on the combination of domain trust, internal anchor text, and on page SEO.

One of the benefits of using article syndication websites used to be the backlinks. However a look through most of these websites now shows that many are using the nofollow tag, negating the effect of any backlinks. The secondary benefit came from the links embedded in the articles that were being syndicated. Again, a page level backlink analysis showed that the majority of these inbound links were no-followed, removed, or on websites of low or questionable quality. However there were a few mid-level quality, straight links that turned up.

So is submitting content to article directories still worth doing? Once you leave the top tier article sites, the drop in quality and traffic is fairly steep. For anything more competitive than long tail 4+ word keywords, it is my opinion it’s not worth the effort. Unless you are targeting extremely uncompetitive phrases, with disposable URLs, mass submission and blaster software, is also not worth the time and expense.

However, that doesn’t mean article directories should be completely ignored. For new and developing websites, article syndication can have some value for self promotion and the occasional mid-level backlink. The danger however is having your article, on a domain with more trust, outranking you in the SERPs. Most article directories have fairly aggressively placed advertising, and the likelihood of someone not clicking a competing advertisement and making it to the bottom and using your link are fairly slim. So I would recommend using  second tier content that’s not quite good enough for your website. Never duplicate content on your website and an article directory. It forces the search engine to choose who is the original and who is the duplicate. Instead opt for a complete rewrite.

One of the more controversial ways to use an article directory is for reputation management. This approach allows you to use the domain trust, internal anchor text and on page SEO factors of the directory to your advantage. The likelyhood of an article directory outranking your main domain for your company name is fairly small. However, in many cases it does have the potential to outrank most user-generated content or review-based websites that might be ranking for your name. A carefully crafted title, combined with a few targeted links from your official website can carry a lot of weight, and usually displace negative listings.

In a previous article “Scalable On-Page SEO Strategies,” I discussed various approaches to optimizing large-scale web sites. In the article I alluded to creating “recipes” or formulas for optimized title tags, and allowing that automation to be overridden by manual optimization. Let’s look at this process in more detail, and applied not just to page titles but other HTML tags as well.

Programmatic formulas

To raise the content optimization of every page on the site to a 60-75% optimal level, first create formulas for the title tag, H1 heading, meta description and (optionally) the meta keywords that correspond to data fields in the database. Each template will have different data fields available to it, so each template needs its own formula. Here is a simple example from Amazon.com:

Subcategory Template: Business & Investing Books (http://www.amazon.com/Business-Investing-Books/b?ie=UTF8&node=3)

Title tag: {subcategory name} {category name} at Amazon.com

H1 Heading: {subcategory name} {category name}

Meta Description: Earth’s Biggest Selection of {subcategory name} {category name}. Amazon.com strives to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find anything they might want to buy online at the lowest possible prices.

Meta Keywords: {subcategory name}, {category name}, amazon.com

Manual Review

Programmatic optimization is the first step to large-scale content optimization. But then a second pass is required.

For pages that drive high traffic and revenue (or that have the potential to be), manual content optimization should be done to target the more competitive keyword terms and phrases in your keyword list.

To make that keyword list actionable, you’ll need keyword to URL pairings. In other words, you’ll need to map your desired keywords to URLs on your site. It’s possible to do this algorithmically (automatically), though a solution that can do this well isn’t going to be cheap. Unless you have an enterprise-sized budget, probably you’ll be going with a manual approach.

Here is a manual approach that works well. Create a spreadsheet that contains every page you want to manually optimize. Paste in the keyword research you’ve already done, terms and popularity data. Then place one keyword next to every page — this is your primary keyword for the page, the keyword that you will target content optimization around to send the strongest signal to the search engines. Highest popularity keywords should be matched with the strongest pages, usually the pages at the highest levels of your site. If you still have keywords left, match the remaining keywords to pages as secondary keywords. These should support the keyword theme for the primary keyword. We refer to the primary keyword as the “declared search term.”

Once the keywords are mapped to the pages you plan to optimize manually, all that’s left is the writing. Easier said than done.

Long tail strategies

For this, consider a “Long Tail” SEO approach that we at Netconcepts call “thin slicing” — a term and concept popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his best selling book Blink. Gladwell uses “thin slicing” in the context of “rapid cognition,” where one makes snap judgments in their field of expertise. Surprisingly, those snap judgments are often times more accurate than considered opinion, i.e. assessments that have been labored over. There’s one important caveat: the phenomenon only holds true for experts, not for amateurs.

Thin slicing in the context of SEO involves touching key elements such as title tags, keyword URLs, H1 headings, and meta descriptions across thousands of pages quickly, monitoring for impact, and refining based on those results. Don’t try to optimize everything on the page, or you’ll get bogged down and lower your productivity.

We believe that thin slicing is as effective for the SEO expert as it is for Gladwell’s art historian. This may sound heretical, but with a daunting number of pages to get through, deciding on synonyms, verb tenses and word order should rely more on your intuition and a less on your keyword research. Make quick decisions; don’t overthink it or overanalyze it. Logically, by agonizing over the very best string of words to use for a title or H1 and continuously consulting keyword research tools, you get caught in the weeds and thus it costs you opportunity. After all, it’s holding you up from getting to the remaining thousands.

The “How” for thin slicing depends very much on your web site’s infrastructure. For example, a WordPress based site can employ the “mass edit” admin capability of our free SEO Title Tag plugin. It supports optimizing title tags and URLs (post “slugs”, more accurately) across many posts and pages quickly, without having to go to each post’s Edit screen individually.

Then there’s the “bulk upload” approach, where you import an updated list of title tags (or H1s or whatever) into your website’s underlying database. You start with a database export in CSV (comma separated values) format of your current title tags — along with the corresponding item ID numbers for each record, of course. Load the CSV file into Microsoft Excel and do your title tag optimization in the spreadsheet. Then upload the optimized title tags back into the database. Note that if your database does not have a field for the title tag, you’ll have to create it and re-code your site to override the programmatic title with the contents of this new field when it is populated with data. Rather than having to maneuver through phpMyAdmin or rely on your database administrator, have a CSV file upload function built into the admin interface of your content management system (CMS). When we added this capability to our GravityStream proxy admin, our optimizers and those at our clients and partner resellers experienced a nice boost in productivity.

If you prefer a forms-based web interface over working in Excel, you could build a “mass edit” view into your content management system’s admin interface, similar to the “mass edit” interface in SEO Title Tag. One feature we found invaluable when using web forms for thin slicing was to make the number of rows displayed per page user-configurable. Some users will want to display hundreds of records per screen, others will want much fewer, as too big of a web page will cause their web browser to crash or time out.

Next time you feel like optimizing 100,000 pages, remember the Two-Step: programmatic optimization first, then manual content optimization second.