The Maine SEO Blog

Last week, Search Engine Roundtable posted an article about GetListed.org, a site that is incredibly helpful for local businesses.  Get Listed truly is a one stop shop, as it pulls your local listings from Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, Best of the Web, and Live.

Here is flyte’s snapshot of listings:

To break things down a little further, Get Listed shows a “To Do” list for you website: showing on which sites your business is claimed, where you have photos, and even citations.

What a great tool for consolidating all of my local listings!

Nicki Hicks
Location, location, location

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speaker: Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster Central, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft

• AJAX/HIJAX – Down-level experience, don’t use javascript for links, use <noscript> tags
• CSS – can improve performance better by separating formatting from content, has been abused by Spammers to hide links and keywords

Speaker: Sharad Verma, Senior Product Manager, Web Search, Yahoo!

• 3 pillars of 2.0: experience (last.fm, youtube.com), participation (tagging, reviews, comments, wiki, blogs, yelp), community (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• 2.0 Tech: RSS, CSS
• External CSS is better than regular CSS – efficient crawling (makes pages light, reduces file size, etc.)
• To do w/ CSS: don’t disallow CSS in robots.txt, don’t hide text using CSS (white on white, display:none, etc.)
• Are you a web site or web application? Search engines have a difficult time crawling javascript, AJAX content (Can’t be linked to, can’t be bookmarked, can have poor link juice and hence poor rankings, can’t be read from screen readers and text-based browsers)
• SEs can index flash
• Problems w/ flash: Most flash rendered with javascript, no deep linking → less link juice, one URL for the entire flash movie → bad user experience
• RSS  – More visibility of your content on the web (users, publishers), more links and traffic to your site → higher rankings
• Best bets: alternative navigation and content in HTML, submit sitemaps, robots.txt (don’t exclude CSS, javascript)

Speaker: Tony Adam, SEO Manager, Yahoo!

• Think about user experience
• Content controlled by javascript is not search engine friendly

Q & A

• Do SEs use h1 tags? (Live and Google: uses h1, Yahoo: doesn’t use h1)
• Submit sitemaps
• Use short, concise URLs
• Keywords in URLS!!!!

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.