Sean McMahon from EngineWorks just gave a great introduction! This session is packed! [People are literally standing.]
Aaron Kahlow is up first of Business Online.
How do we get SEO ingrained in your company? Need to be able to sell this internally. People don’t think exactly like us. They are thinking about how to get money. But when people talk to people about SEO they scratch their heads. [This slide had a picture of an adorable monkey scratching his head!] We need to wake up to the alarm.
Top 10 Technology (On site) from the “Catfish”
- Duplicate Content Destroyer.
- Domain Choice: Decide about www or not so you aren’t splitting links.
- Code it
- No old school Jave script. Not searchable.
- Flash and Java Upgrades.
- Page Has importance
- 301 Please
- Site Map two ways: xml and html
- 5 or Less: Try to limit the number of parameters in your URL strings
- Check it twice
Educate your stake holds first. We need to take a different approach.
New Education blog
http://blog.onlinemaketingconnect.com/
Online Marketing Institute
Sean has promised that Susan from Google is going to give away complete information about their algorythm. [Me thinks he is joking...if not, don't you wish you were here?!]
Susan Moskwa from Google is up.
Why do you care? Talking about Goolge crawling the web, they can’t get to everything or index everything. So how do they deal with infinate content and limited resources? They prioritize crawling: new content, refresh old content, crawl fewer duplicates. They keep the good stuff in the index and return relevant search results.
Tips
- Funnel to your most important information on your site.
- Avoid maverick coding practices. Discourage alternative encodings.
- Eliminate positional encoding.
- Remove user-specific details from URLs
- Keywords in namevalue pairs are just as good as in the path
Optimizing dynamic URLs
- Dynamic URLs contain namevalue pairs
- Create patterns for crawlers to understand
- Use cookies to hide user-specific details
Rein in infinete spaces, uncover problems with CMS. Disallow actions Googlebot can’t perform. Googles bot is too cheap to “add to cart.” Googlebot is too shy to fill out the “content form.” Googlebot is not going to log-in to your site.
Get your preferred URLs indexed:
Set your preferred domain in Webmaster tools (www or no)
Check out Webmaster Tools! www.google.com/webmaters. Help center, blog and help forum.
Up next is Vanessa Fox of Nine by Blue talking about Diagnosing Search Issues.
Path to Improvement:
- Asses where your site is today
- Identify problems
- Root-cause analysis
Problems:
- Sudden traffic drops
- Not getting traffic where you expect
- Content in SERPs does not look appealing
- Customers have bad click-through experience
Make sure it’s really a problem. If your Toolbar PageRank drops doesn’t matter unless your traffic has dropped. It’s just a fun little thing, don’t get hung up on it. Number of indexed pages drop, has your competitors? Have you been buying links…then maybe you should be affraid. Could be a good thing because of duplication. It isn’t always the goal to have the most pages indexed. “Index ratio to created pages - don’t pay attention to.
Find the Cause:
Understand the search engines is important. If there is a traffic drop, make sure it is from search not that a site dropped a link. Are the pages not indexed or not ranking? Does the same page rank that ranked before? There could be a technical issue - you could have been ranking twice and the search engine dropped the top ranked one from some reason and kept the lower ranked one.
Diagnostic Checklists and Resources
www.janeandrobot.com - you can get search accessiblity checklist, search discovery list, etc…
Traffic Drop:
Crawl Time Issues - Google Webmaster Tools [Vanessa is so pleased with this tool she created!]
Indexing Issues - submit all of your property pages (break up your content) That way you can see if the problem is site wide or just a section.
SERP Display Issues
Findability Issues - [SuperBowl exampel - Vanessa wrote a couple of atricle about this at Search Engine Land] Hundae advertized edityourown. So people went to Google and searched edit your own. www.edityourown.com does a 302 redirect to another site so it is never going to come up on the SERP.
For More:
www.janeandrobot.com
ww.ninebyblue.com
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