SEO 101 For an Award Winning Web Site

Our recent working vacation in California took some unexpected turns.  Jann McCully, Senior VP and CIO of  ABD Insurance and financial,   the 15th largest insurance company in the united states,  asked me to pop in for an SEO basics discussion.

I met with Jann, lead developer on the award winning CyberSure®,  web site and with Marybeth Strack, ABD's Director of eBusiness, to run through the high points of page optimization and the most up to date information on the algorithms used by the major search engines.

When an oppportunity to work with people of this caliber comes around, you ignore the fact that you have no notes, no prep time and none of your own tools at your disposal.  You simply deliver - and it helps if you know your beans.

Knowing your beans - to me at least - means knowing the "why" of a thing. If you know the "why" behind anything from algebra to earthen ramps used in pyramid construction, you'll find that you can speak on that topic with relative eloquence and expertise. So, my approach to SEO is to know WHY things should be one way rather than any other.

 Where Search Engine Optimization is concerned, knowing your beans amounts to understanding the search engine ranking algorithms. Get that and all of the "whys" for optimized web page structure, like which HTML tags to use and the text they should contain, become transparent.

You'll recall that I've often said, "SEO guys don't know the actual search engine algorithms". And that's true. But, we know what works. We build our own algorithms through our own research - a sort of low-tech reverse engineering process. 

It's an ongoing process. Staying on top of what works is how we keep our jobs. And, sometimes, keeping up with the latest provides us the opportunity to meet and work with some of the best minds in business.

So, we took a couple of hours to run through the basics of search engine optimization. Much of that time was spent evaluating cybersure.com and ABD's competition. A comparison, really, of the page structure and site architecture easily seen by examining pages by source and in the browser.

You're asking yourself why they need SEO if they are an award winning site... right? Well, the awards have to do with the available eServices through which ABD's clients are able to manage most of their insurance services. Fast, secure, reliable, accurate. CyberSure is the real deal.

But like many web sites developed with pages generated with server side programming that makes heavy use of templates, CyberSure is about as optimized for search engines as turtles are for flight.