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SEO 101 2011 and beyond.

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 11:07 am
by KBleivik
First of all, look at a search engine index like a book index, where key words are categorized in alphabetic order with subcategories. A search engine finds elements on and off the page and lists them in one or more relational database table. In total these tables have a lot of rows (signals). Think of the different signals as having different weight. The better the content is organized on your site, the easier it is for the search index to produce a good index for your site / pages. Take a specific (quoted "") query like "financial stability". Let us say that there are 10 million relevant pages (hits) for this query. List them in a gigantic combined result table with signals as rows and 10 million pages as columns. The cells that are filled vertically in the column(s) for your page(s) in this table will determine your position on the search engine result pages (SERPS). Your final score may be thought of as a weighted average where the page with the highest average gets the top position on the SERPs.

We list, the in our view most important factors in two groups, on page and of page factors.

Onpage factors.
  1. Your domain name.
  2. Your title tag. Ideally no more than 65 characters ( http://www.lettercount.com/ - http://www.wordcountertool.com/ ).
  3. Title tag key word prominence. The left word has highest weight decreasing to the right).
  4. Title tag key word overlap. Some key word overlap can be good.
  5. It is so easy to rank for your company name that it should not be used in the title tag. The pipe | can be used to separate terms in your title tag. So if it is used, do it like this:

    Code: Select all

    <title>KW's | copany or site name </title>
    
  6. Don't overoptimize. That is the same term repeated too often in different contexts is not good if it is insemantic.
  7. Local otimization. Words related to your localication.
  8. Long tail versus short tail. Long tail implies more words in the term you are ranking for.
  9. Long tail and local optimization can be great.
  10. Heading tags. Divide your articles into sections with KW headings.
  11. Folder and file name. Semantic folder and file names are ranking factors comparable to tags.
  12. Write for the web: http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/
  13. SEO book - a movable target that is constantly updated: http://www.youtube.com/user/seobook
  14. Fine tune your link love with link attributes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
  15. Semantic navigational menus are great. Internal link structure should be semantic.
  16. Be aware of the power in new tagging technologies like HTML5 and styling technologies like CSS.
Offpage factors.
  1. Linkbuilding. Great content that are pinged, twittered etc will bring you inbound links. Content will hopefully always be King.
  2. Reputation management. A blog is important for reputation management. Talk to you visistor.
  3. Network building. Participate on forums, social networks and other social media platforms. Social Media Optimization (SMO) is strongly related to SEO.
  4. Brand your logo on your car, pens and other effects that you distribute in various contexts. Give aways with your brand and domain can be profitable.
  5. Paid advertising can bring you inbound links. Some will call this SEM Search Engine Marketing and not organic SEO. Nevertheless, we list it here as part of an indirect link building strategy.
  6. Time is money, so the time you use on SEO has an elternative in PPC campaigns that may be cheaper. There is an tradeoff between SEO and PPC. Find the optimal combination.
Things to avoid
  1. Overoptimization like insemantic duplicate content is mentioned above.
  2. Link manipulation like buying or selling links withou the rel="nofollow" attribute on the link. Searchengine Bots are becoming more and more advanced.
  3. Constantly update yourself on SEO that is a moving target. A white hat technique today, can be regarded as grey or black hat tomorrow.
Related link: http://www.surftoolbar.com/#search-evol ... and-trends (Look at the litterature).

SEO tools and related.
As a member of the WebProWorld forum http://www.webproworld.com/ for more than 6 years, I think that I know a lot of the more or less accurate tools that are offered. Most often you can make these and new tools yourself if you can use a spreadsheet like that offered via http://www.openoffice.org/ Many of them will not stand a scientific test if they were tested by a statistician. The worst tools are on the internet for a period of time and then the site changes content with the aim of manipulating the search engines. This can be worse than broken links. You are who you link to. That can be critical for your reputation, even if you can not control the content of all the pages and sites you link to: http://www.webproworld.com/webmaster-fo ... -eBusiness.

One obvious is the free and paid Word Tracker service. Google has competitive tools and services where you can get the data you need for your own tools. A master degree in statistics is no disadvantage if you intend to make your own tools. Word tracker also offers unique data that may be more important (valuable) than the service if you have some statistical knowledge. Everybody today can use a spreadsheet. You can make nonlinear statistical analysis in a spread sheet. There is also more or less advanced statistical software packages http://www.galaxy.gmu.edu/papers/astr1.html where you can dig yoursel into a hole that you will never escape unlees you prioritize. Key word serch "statistical software"). In the opposite end there are simple free tools like: And did you know about http://labs.google.com/sets from http://www.googlelabs.com/ that should be constantly monitored for new methods and widgets. Even Google operators http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html like the tilde (synonym) operator http://www.googleguide.com/synonym_operator.html can be used to find valuable key words to rank for globally or locally. There are no lacl of SEO tools and new ones constantly pop up on the horizon. As always, it is best to be at the right place (read confeferences, seminars, social networks, forums etc) at the right time to find the newest tools that can give your company or blog the competitive edge it needs.

CMS Platforms, SEO and new tehcnologies
As blogs are mentioned in our last sentence above and as WordPress http://www.oopschool.com/phpBB3/viewfor ... f3800bb546 is becoming a more and more important platform, you should find good content in the WordPress sub forum. Finally, lets see if my WPW thread still ranks #1 on Google for advanced the term advanced semantic linking

Yes, it does http://www.webproworld.com/webmaster-fo ... ansclusion.

But that is another story. Small companies may never need anything else than WordPress or any other CMS system http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ that more and more organize the content for you in a semantic way. What we on this forum call X-techologies is most relevant for big companies (e.g. XMLschema http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema as part of a strategy to organize the companys internalt documents in a structured way). HTML5 and CSS3 more and more offer the services of XHTML and XSLT that is most often not needed for a small company web site.

Blog platforms like WordPress developes fast and new themes and plugins for on and off page optimization are created daily, indeed so fast that it is difficult to keep up with the evolution. Issue the term

WordPress SEO

on the WordPress plugin page http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ and you will find that there are soon 1000 hits.

There are about 140 000 hits (some free PDF downloads that we have not studied) for the exact (quoted) search query: "wordpress SEO book"

We found value in the following: http://www.packtpub.com/wordpress-3-sea ... ation/book

The first thing to do after installing WordPress
We only have experience with WordPresd 3.1.2 and later so we can not talk for older versions. The first thing we do after a (re)installation is go to the settings menu in the DashBoard and:
  1. In the general category change the title etc.
  2. In the discussion category require that a moderator must always accept a comment.
  3. In the perma link category choose day or month + name or user defined (then you should know how that last option functions).
  4. Install the database backup plugin, the all in one SEO plugin and the broken links plugin.
  5. Install the WpTouch plugin if you want your pages to be visible on mobile platforms.