Advanced SEO: Use Common Sense
Before I got to ad:tech I was really looking forward to hearing truly advanced techniques here. But after sitting though a few panels with experts who were not as expert as billed, my expectations were tempered. Add in that this session was to be mostly audience Q&A and that the audience was not advanced power users, and you get basic search engine optimization advice. Let me first give away the biggest secret of SEO: build your site for the users and the search engines will like it. Anything done for the sole purpose of the search spider is likely to either make no difference or hurt. I’ve known this for years and I’m not a certified expert.
Last year I covered Mike Grehan and this year I had the pleasure to see another luminary in the SEO field, Bruce Clay along with Aaron D’Souza of Google and Sandor Marik of the large publisher CondeNet answer questions on SEO. Bruce set the session up with a few areas to cover before they got into the audience portion, which is good because these were hot topics and important to talk about for many in the audience.
Bruce talked about linking strategies, saying that links can be divided into three groups: similar sites, internal links, and exterior (experts linking to experts) links. Aaron revealed his tech roots by comparing links to signals, saying that the signal varies over time. If it gets corrupted, the signal strength diminishes. He did not talk about signal to noise ratios, but I bet they are part of the algorithm. Sandor gave the example of CondeNet where they have links at the bottom of all their pages to their other sites. This helps with branding and to help users find out about their other sites. Note that he said nothing about doing this for the search engines.
Next they talked about search Spam. Bruce said that most issues come from people learning how to optimize their site from others, likening it to the Telephone Game where one webmaster learns from a Spam site, and the next learns from the copied site, and so on. People end up implementing techniques not knowing that it is considered Spam. Aaron said there can be a fine line between Spam and badly written code comparing Spam to Porn, saying that “when you see it you know it is evil.” Examples he gave were white text on white backgrounds and JavaScript redirects. He noted that poorly done sites would be demoted in the rankings. One great piece of news is that Google is starting to communicate with Webmasters better, saying that information and even emails will be showing up in the Webmaster tools area.
Bruce asked how many in the audience think it is a good thing that Wikipedia outranks them in the results. After nobody raised their hand, Bruce said that it would only be a matter of time before search engines learn behavioral actions and adjust results accordingly. Aaron gave some history by explaining that Yahoo! Directory solved the reputation problem, but could not handle the reach. Page Rank combined reputation with reach and content, but the 3rd piece of the puzzle is satisfied users. Social sites show explicit signals of what users consider important and relevant.
Next came questions from the floor. When asked about multiple sites with duplicate content and the risk of penalties, Aaron said that it was not the way it worked. If the same content is on more than one site, Google would choose which one site was the authority and leave that in the results, saying they “do not penalize people for duplicate content” or else your competitor would just duplicate your site until you were banned from the results.
A question was asked about building a page around a keyword to get ranking for it. Bruce commented that you an do this for many keywords on many pages. He gave the example of one page where he focused on 17 keywords, and not all of them are in the title. Aaron then said almost the same thing Mike Grehan said a year ago. “Look at the results and justify why your site should be above the ones that are there.”
After Bruce refuted a postulation that search results were corrupt in some cases, they fielded questions about link text and linking to a site’s most popular pages (the text should be good for the user, and if those pages are popular, then this is good for users), they talked a bit about internal linking. Aaron gave the obvious advice to make it easy for the users and the crawlers would follow the same links. Bruce advised structuring internal links based on related keywords. Saying that you should take a specific area and focus on it because this is an “opportunity for you to vote on these pages’ importance.” He also added that “home” is not the best word to use to describe the top page for your site, and to choose a keyword or phrase instead.
There was actually disagreement on the subject of Meta tags. Aaron said that there was no point other than the Title and Description tags, but Bruce countered that there is more out there than the top engines and some use the tags. While they can be used for Spam, why not spend some time to make them the best that they can be. After all, the worst case is that they will be ignored.
The final question was one I have seen debated a lot lately. The panel was asked how important W3C valid code is to the search engines. Aaron at first implied that it really does not mater by saying that the bots were created to be very robust interpreters of code. While he said that it might help, browsers and crawlers were written to figure it out. Bruce interjected that he make every page of his site compliant, and Aaron followed up with an example of a blind engineer at Google. Aaron said that unless the code is standards compliant you may be restricting your pages from some users and that valid and clean code should be used. Not having accessible content restricts your site as a product. My take on this is that small errors should not be a big deal, but larger errors can cause demotions. Also, if not now, at some point in the future the engines might look at two similarly ranked pages and they will choose the one with compliant code as the better page to offer in the results.
It has been said that there is no exact science to SEO. There are some key elements that can be added to your site both as content and as tags, however what gets crawled first? Who knows? What is important? Who knows. The best piece of advice that I have been given when optimizing a site is to have relevant and pertinent content. After that, adding meta tags, internal links, etc. is something to build on after the fact. Another good tip, having a page of testimonials. Have clients write your content for you. A good piece of advice is to include what city they are writing from as well. It gives your page relevancy!
- Faisal
By Faisal on 2007 05 14
Great post. I am still new so I am still unfamiliar to advanced SEO techniques. However, common sense is also a must for newbies like me.
By Joem on 2007 05 23
посмотрите!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkjTeN6jGTk
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