The Maine SEO Blog

Thanks to Barry Schwartz and Keri Morgret from Search Engine Roundtable for taking the time to live blog many of the SMX West sessions!  Here are a few of my notes from Tuesday, Day 1…

Technical SEO Issues for Developers

(Archived version from SE Roundtable)

• Disallow certain forms from being crawled (like Contact Us page)
• Use Webmaster Tools
• Need both human and XML sitemaps
• Canonicalization (www vs. non-www issues) fix: stay the same throughout the site; the fix when someone links to the wrong version: redirect it
• Meta/title tags: HAVE them, CHANGE them
• Be simple.  Use static HTML, meaningful page titles, clear anchor text, don’t link to spam.
• Brevity is GOOD for URL’s, make them simple, stable, and scream COPY ME!
• Improve crawler discovery by leveraging robots.txt (use only if fully understood, validate with Google), sitemap, and metatags
• Use Yahoo Site Exploreer and Google cache to see what’s indexed
• Use easy-to-crawl and search friendly URLs, keep titles and content close to the top
• iFrames = good for gadgets, bad for homepage
• Eye tracking software results: put your BEST keywords FIRST in the title tag (people read them first, and don’t always read all the way to the right)
• Absolute URLs = BETTER

Up Close with Google Maps & Local

(Archived version from SE Roundtable)

• Google Local data from:
  1. Google Local Business Center
  2. 3rd party providers
  3. General web crawl
• Submit/verify your site at: infoUSA, Localeze, Yahoo, Best of the Web, OpenList, CityVoter, InsiderPages, SuperPages
• Search for “your city and blog” for good blogs in your area
• Factors that influence Local rankings:
  1. Proximity to city
  2. Reviews, number of reviews, positive reviews
  3. Overall SEO health of site
  4. Keyword relevancy
• Make sure your address is on your homepage, contact us page, etc.
• If you have multiple locations, submit them ALL to local sites; you still only need ONE website
• No permanent address? Use a PO Box.
• Claim listings with ALL applicable categories
• Add videos!!
• Track calls for free:
  - Pretend to start a Google AdWords account
  - Go to Audio Campaign page
  - Get free phone number
  - Track calls!
• Large companies with multiple locations: create landing pages for geographic locations
• One speaker encourages customers to follow up with work done with local reviews with Visa coupon incentives for next services
• Remember – you CAN report Google Maps spam! (They welcome it!)

Marketer to Developer Translation

(Archived version from SE Roundtable)

• Marketers need to access the data Engineers have; need to access the website that IT/developers control.
• Every website should have a blog. (Bold statement made by one of the panelists)
• What people are searching for is not always what a company calls its product(s)
• What developers need:
  - Data
  - Timeline
  - Details/Structure
  - To know what YOU need
• “Pre-flight” Checklist
  - Company analysis (Who’s your audience?)
  - What’s your tone?
  - What are your project goals? (Rankings? Social?)
  - Sites you like, sites you don’t like
  - Emerging trends
  - Budget
• Don’t exclude anyone from the brainstorming process!
• Be creative, but don’t overdirect your creative team

Diagnosing Website Architecture Issues

(Archived version from SE Roundtable)

• Steps to diagnose:
  1. Assess where your site is today.
  2. Identify problems.
  - Traffic drops
  - Traffic not expected (wrong search terms)
  - Your SERP is not appealing
  - Customers have bad click thru rate
  3. Root cause analysis.
  4. Make improvements.
• Goal = CONVERSIONS!!!!!!
• If PageRank goes down, does NOT mean there’s an issue
• Number of pages indexed = wrong, MAY be a problem
• Indexation ratio change: as you add new pages, # pages indexed vs. what exists
• Another panelists’ steps to diagnose:
  1. Get data, need data to diagnose problem
  2. Find cause
  - Indexing problem: fewer pages indexed? entire site indexed?
  - Ranking problem: drop for all keywords or just some? same pages ranked or different pages?
  - Look at sitemap(s) with Webmaster Tools: submitted vs. total URLs
• Yahoo: use nocontent tag for duplicate info issues on page

Up Close with YouTube

(Archived version from SE Roundtable)

• YouTube is…
  - largest video site
  - 2nd largest search engine (behind Google)
  - 4th largest web property
• To improve YouTube rankings:
  - have good, descriptive titles
  - descriptions: descriptive, accurate, unique; use complete sentences
  - include tags – DON’T stuff them!!
  - share with members, annotate, embed videos on site, be social and share!
  - get community involved with video
  - use stats (Insights) to get metrics (the “About this Video” button)
• Links in YouTube profile:
  1. Right under profile picture
  2. Website URL
• Links ARE nofollowed, but put them in – Google STILL looks at them!
• YouTube metas:
  - title = (meta-) title tag
  - description = meta-description tag
  - tags = meta-keywords tag
• 100% put watermarks in videos
• YouTube has Google Maps integration – your video can show up in local search!
• Obama & White House have YouTube channel!

Tags: Google Maps, Local Search, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Site Architecture, SMX West, Web Developing, Web Marketing, YouTube

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Expert Advice, Google, Local Search, Search Engine Marketing, Web Developing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.