Sweat the SEO Details!

April 20th, 2008 Bernie

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Sweat the SEO Details

Target Audience: SEO for marketers with websites with less than 100 pages of content. 
Content is still king
The more content the better
Search engines crawl your website to learn what your site is about
Commit to writing more content
Google measures who is linking to your content
A foundation of content is needed to get the full value of external links
Add sections to your website dedicated to content for search engines, e.g., Resources

Add “how to,” “faq,” “tips”, “best practices,’ “things to avoid.” Etc.

Links are important but content is the foundation of a good SEO plan
Great content will attract links
Add video with a text summary of the video

Home page is very important!

Has the greatest PageRank (PR)
Share home page content with other pages selectively
Don’t give away all your Google PR
Use Anchor text to link to other pages
Think SEF
Search engine friendly architecture
Good URL structure using keywords in the URL string
Use dashes to separate words in the URL
Clean, light and fast loading code
Put javascript files into a separate file and make a call to it
Meta data
3 components: Title, Description and keywords
Description very important: it’s what people read in the search engines
Test to see how your rankings are displayed.
Header tags (H Tags)
Tells the search engines which headings are intended to be noticed by them
Sitemap
Give the search engines something to crawl with links to every page in your website
Google sitemap
Give Google an XML based sitemap so they can score your site’s pages, links and other valuable statistics
Also lets you see how Google sees your website
You can fix problems like broken URLs you didn’t know existed
Google penalizes sites with technical problems
Think local
Set up a local listing in Google and Yahoo even if it’s only for your home office
Use a Google map on your contact page
Think multi media
Google and other search engines index images, videos and maps.
This outside the box
Outside links from authority sites, e.g., directories, blogs, syndication sites
Final thought
Remember that organic traffic is the most valuable traffic
More time spent, more pages viewed, lower bounce rates
Content is still king!
Links are important but must be supported by good content
Use SEF URLs
 

Tags: Google sitemap, links, meta tags, pagerank, SEF URLs, SEO plan

Posted in SEO | 1 Comment »

Content is Still King

April 3rd, 2008 Bernie

I talk every day with clients and write often in this blog about the importance of links in any SEO strategy. Anyone who has spent more than ten minutes reading about SEO knows that back links are critical ingredient for organic search engine rankings.

One point I make often is that a good link strategy will yield limited results or no material results without a strong foundation of content. In fact, we say that (in round numbers) 30% of a website’s SEO success is based on “on page” factors. On-page factors refer to well-optimized content with good use of keywords, meta tags, header tags, search engine friendly URLs and optimized source code.

The math is obvious. We like to say that about 70% of a website’s SEO is based on off-page factors. Primarily, this refers to the extent to which others think your content is good. At first, this sounds very strange. How can others determine how good my content is? And, how can Google (and other engines) determine what others think?

Consider a comment made by a Google engineer at the Online Marketing Summit conference I attended last October. He said this: “Google doesn’t care about your content. Google cares about who cares about your content.” What he means, is when other content (on other websites) link to your content, they are “casting a vote.” for your content.

The Google technology explanation describes how this works.  Essentially, other web pages link to your content and Google considers that a “vote” for your content.

To accentuate this point consider how Google’s origin as Backrub, is based on this concept of keeping score of the popularity of your content.

So, if creating links to content is so critical to SEO success then why don’t we just go out and buy a g-zillion links to our content?  Well, some do.  First, consider that if you pay a site to link to you, that is frowned upon by Google and the other major engines.  We don’t condone it.

Let’s go back to the comment by the Google engineer.  In fact, Google does care about your content.  He went on to say that the more relevant, keyword-rich content you have (along with a search engine friendly architecture), the more links your content will naturally attract.

Then, if you pay someone to build legitimate links to your website (not pay the website to link to you), those links will be well supported by your content and provide good SEO value.

Now, let’s go back to the 30/70 ratio although, this is admittedly hearsay, not a statistic backed up by Google.  The point to this ratio is this.  If you build a strong foundation in your SEO plan with great, relevant content, then the links you get will carry weight in SEO value. 

Of course, the Google PR value of the source of the links counts as well.  The point here is that links without content are not effective.

So, it comes back to this - content is king! 

Tags: Google PR, link strategy, links, organic search engine rankings, SEO, SEO plan, SEO strategy

Posted in Link Building, SEO | 1 Comment »