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!)

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