SEO Basics by SEOmoz. This is a wonderful presentation that touches on many of the SEO components. If you plan on hiring an SEO to work for you, try understand the basics and ask lots of questions. This overview gives insight into some of the areas SEO professionals focus much of their time.
This lengthy (150+ slides), but very comprehensive presentation is designed to help experienced SEOs train those new to the practice over a 2-3 hour, interactive session. It covers the search engine landscape, the SEO process, keyword research, link building and the emergence of social media as a ranking signal.
Matt Cutts participates in a white board Friday with Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz. Hear about the hard lesson learned by Disney, and how to use server response codes properly.
Although its not a huge factor,page speed is a factor in Google’s search ranking algorithm accoding to Google’s Matt Cutts. Over the last year Google has introduced the ‘Site Performace’ in the Webmaster Tools user interface and a Firefox plug-in named Page Speed. Page Speed is an Add-on to Firebug in Firefox.
So how do you get it? You can follow the directions below, or If you would like to run a test without a plug-in try zoompf.com. This site will allow you enter in the URL of a site of your choice and run a page speed analysis.
Here are a few additional tools that are very helpful as well
YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
Search Engine Optimization is important for users to find your site, but once they are there usability becomes the most important factor. You want them to return, right? Your site should have a good balance and your SEO strategy should include some type of survey or feedback mechanism in order to determine what exactly the users are looking for and expecting.
The future is technology. This video is very enlightening to the changes that take place daily and creates a great reference point for comparison.
Search Engine Optimization is more important now than ever. Keeping up with technology is difficult as it is, and without a properly positioned website it will be more difficult to catch up in the future.
Understanding and knowing the potential external influences when making a business decision is extremely important. It could be changes in government policy or in this case a change in search engines. Over the last few months Bing has been ferociously marketing their new search engine “BING” with great success. According to comScore, Microsoft has increased it’s share of search each month, while Yahoo has been on a steady decline. In March 2010 Yahoo’s percentage of search was down .06% since November 2009 while Microsoft’s was up 1.4%. Both Microsoft and Yahoo combined still are no match for Google’s Goliath numbers at 65.1%.
Meta tags are labels that are inserted into the top of a web document and explain the content of the web page to the search engines. The meta tags are not seen on the page itself but can be seen from the search engine results page (SERP).
<title>Best Buy</title> <meta name=”keywords”content=”<!– –>”> <meta name=”description” content=”Best Buy’s online source for electronics, televisions, DVD players, home audio, car audio, computers, cameras, music, movies, software, GPS, video games and more. Research, compare and buy securely online; pick it up in a store.”>
In the image above you can see where the meta tags are visible. The <keywords> meta tag is never visible and not as important as the <title> and <description>.
The title tag should be concise and specific to the content of the page. It is recommended that it be no longer than 60-70 characters.
The description tag should be consistent with the title tag and content of the page. It is recommended that this description be no longer than 160-170 characters.
Both the <title> and <description> tags should contain the keywords that the page is targeted for. DO NOT REPEAT THE KEYWORD IN ORDER TO FOOL THE SEARCH ENGINES! This is considered to be “keyword stuffing” and could get your page penalized.
Do not repeat the same title and description across your entire site. This can cause “duplicate content”. Duplicate content is not rewarded and could actually depreciate the value of your page.
How do you change your meta tags?
This can be done in your content mangement system (CMS) or by using an HTML editor. The easiest way to achieve this is by asking your webmaster to do it
If you have any additional questions about online strategies or online consulting send us an email.
How do you know if your website is optimized? What tools can you use? If you don’t already know the answer, then chances are there is room for improvement. There are literally hundreds of ways to optimize a site. For 5 quick SEO steps, you can start by reading an earlier post, but this is only surface level.
Now for even an easier way to check your site, try Website Grader. This tool will give you a quick and simple assessment of your site. The Website Grader will help you identify some of the algorithmic factors that search engines use to determine your sites placement. After your site has been graded, you should have a very topical understanding of the work that needs to be done.
At Sober Intellect, we offer a wide variety of services that help your business achieve its objectives. It doesn’t matter if your just beginning or if you have a well established site. We can help position your site in front of your consumers, or we can use analytics to identify the highest converting consumer behaviors trending on your site.
Our design and consulting team has a vast array of experience and has been trained by the best in the industry. Contact us today!
The robots.txt file is a file that tells spiders and web robots what is acceptable to crawl. When a site if first crawled, it first checks the domain (www. mywebsite.com/robots.txt) to see what is allowed and disallowed.
The robots.txt file looks something like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
The “user-agent:” identifies the who and what is allowed. In this case the “*” represents a wild card. This means it applies to ALL robots.
The “Disallow:” identifies the location that is off limits to the spiders or web robots. In this case, the “/” means the main directory.
The above statement basically tells the spiders to disallow all robots from crawling the main directory.
Now here is the kicker. Just because you have requested that Google crawl certain information on your site, does that mean it wont show up in the search engines? The answer is not necessarily. If you tell Google not to crawl an images file, yet some of those images are linked somewhere else on the internet, Google can still make the association with the links. Matt Cutts from Google does a nice job of explaining this.
The robots.txt file can be used to shape the content that you want the search engines to associate with your site. Here is an example of how New York Times uses it.
