Perhaps the session that most intrigued / educated me at evo ’11 was the one I attended on SEO. By the way, SEO stands for search engine optimization. In case anyone is still learning lingo…like me. 🙂 Dennis from The Next Corner did an excellent job of sharing how to improve SEO for your website.
this is about how i’ve felt as i’ve tried to absorb all this info!
These were the points that stood out to me…
- What’s above the fold in newspapers? Be mindful of this in constructing the layout of your posts.
- Editorial links are like gold. Write excellent content for guest posts, do interviews. Linking within the content of your post is much more valuable than sidebar linking.
- The URL structure of your permalink is important. The URL should include your post name. Take out common words to make it more user friendly and take out the date. If a URL has a date to it, the older posts often get pushed to the back of search engine results.
- Set up a Google Alert in your Google Reader. This allows you to see who is linking to your content.
- Don’t buy or sell links on your site. This was really helpful for me because right before the conference I received an email regarding paying me to embed a relevant link within a post. Doing this can cause your site to be flagged as spam thus damaging your optimization.
- Construct your post title well. Don’t have too long a title that it will get truncated. I will be talking more about writing a good title or headline in another post.
- Solve a problem that people are looking for on the internet.
- Take advantage of image optimization. Use the right keywords in your filename. Avoid putting the actual place in your description because this can be flagged as spam. Instead just describe the picture.
- Beware of no follow links. Although it’s great for a big website to link to your site, if it’s a no follow link, then you won’t get the impression credit for it which helps your optimization. You have to decide what you’re willing to compromise.
These are a few snippets of a great session. He mentioned Google Webmaster Tools as a great resource for SEO. Also, all of his notes are on his website for easy reference.
