Since this site is brand new, it's a great opportunity to measure our Google PR on a nightly basis and create some time-series analysis graphs as we do SEO.

Having stabilized on PR5 with our parent company site, it's rather disconcerting to start from 0 on i-dialogue.com, but the goal is to organically grow some key i-dialogue pages to PR6 over the next several months.

So, how will we do that? There are a few basic areas we focus on when doing SEO:

Keyword identification: What are customers looking for when they're seeking a solution such as ours? Personalized email marketing, customer portal, and customer segmentation are just a few areas that we specialize in.

On Page Optimizations: Before worrying about inbound links, we first make sure we've done everything we can do to the pages themselves. Each page's META tags (Title, Description, and Keywords) get a couple passes at copy writing. H1 and H2 tags are built into the page template and force the copy writer to develop both pithy and verbose summaries of the page.

The sitemap link in the page footer is actually auto-generated by i-Dialogue Customer Portal. It's important that web crawlers have the ability to access any page within the site in 2 links.

All pages are accessible as top level pages; i.e. no pages are buried in sub-directories. This approach requires a naming convention that embeds any hierarchical or categorical structure into the page name itself.

Frequent Content Updates: Search engine love new content. The assumption being that if you are adding new content, your site is more worthy of being visited relative to one that is not changing.

Google SiteMap Integration: Google now supports XML sitemaps that they claim will not improve your PR, but will give GoogleBot a better understanding of your sites structure and frequency of change.

i-Dialogue portal auto generates a Google SiteMap. They last I checked, it appears GoogleBot is pulling this sitemap down 1-2 times a day.

Inbound Links: This is really the core of Google PR. If a site is authoritative for a particular topic then several other sites will link to it. Unfortunately, too many nefarious folks have attempted to artificially inflate their PR with link farms and a variety of other tricks which Google eventually figures out anyway.

Authoritativeness and the frequency of content changes are closely linked. The objective is to make real information available that others will find immediately useful. The more informative your site is, the more authoritative it becomes.

Brochure-ware web sites are difficult to optimize without at least 1 or 2 free white papers, a top 10 list, or some piece of information that prospects and customers will find useful.

Measure and Optimize: You won't know if you are improving unless you actually measure your page rank and make changes in response to real data.