johnpfeiffer

SEO Search Engine Optimization by John Pfeiffer

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by John Pfeiffer

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND SEO by John Pfeiffer

updated 2008-08-16

Research, implement, get feedback, tune website, start again...

Please ignore the fact that this particular page is not search engine optimized =p

RESEARCH

Common types of sites that draw traffic:

  • Offer a free service
  • Have valuable info
  • News
  • Humor
  • Feedback and Communication
  • Online Stores

e.g. google.com (free search), wikipedia.org (online encyclopedia), cnn.com (news) icanhascheezburger.com (funny cat pictures), youtube.com (entertainment), myspace.com (communication), amazon.com (online book and everything store)...

Adwords and banners are paid traffic, Organic is when people come to you for free (but most often through search engines).

IDENTIFY KEYWORDS WITH HIGH SEARCH RATES

You want to optimize your pages for what people are looking for...

Things that matter: order of the words, plural(s), synonyms

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Use google.com and yahoo.com and bing.com to test different keywords as well...

dpm8120as has 0 results returned, but dpm8120 has a lot more than 0, so any webpages listing this product should use the more "popular" one...

What is my competition doing? - check out their websites or the websites that come up number one in searches for the keywords you like...

IMPLEMENTING your site is about getting as many of the details correct as you can

  1. Get your site listed in large directories:

Help people and help yourself too!

Directory, Partners, Links-In,

The free dmoz open directory, but NOTE, the category you get listed in is important. (Many search engines use this directory as a core for their own databases.)

If you already have PARTNERS or friendly websites get them to create links, ideally with your keywords in the link,

`&gt a href='https://yourlink.example.com' &lt Your keywords here &gt /a &lt

BLOGS, find blogs on your subject, post to them and link back to your site, every little bit helps.

NEWSLETTERS, If you have a list of email addresses you can try sending a newsletter every month.

There are submission tools for directories out there but many will be a waste of time (and money).

  1. Ensure your site is text friendly (search engines use software to "read" sites) and optimized:

Don't use too much flash, javascript, password protected pages, etc. as any software visitors (e.g. Google Bot) won't be able to read/navigate your site and your pages will be left out...

WHERE TO PUT YOUR KEYWORDS (and synonyms of keywords)

Url: use hyphens instead of spaces...

Title: Unique per page (65 chars at most) Description (no stop/common words - but this is what Google will display so it's like an Ad!) Headers Links alt tags on images should reflect similar or synonym keywords - you don't want to "keyword stuff" text (Add a page a day!)

WHEN ADDING A NEW PAGE, VERIFY THAT IT IS OPTIMIZED FOR KEYWORD DENSITY (sweet spot ~3%)

Consider complementing some of your most important keywords with paid advertising:

*Adwords (keywords), campaigns, regions, langs, variations (no context!)

DON'T HAVE TOO MANY LINKS PER PAGE...

Internal links (from a place in your site to another place in your site) are good for users and good for search engine "bots" as they make it easy to navigate.

BUT every link away from your page could be considered a "vote" that another page is more important... especially avoid links to other sites (without a good reason).

FEEDBACK is a tricky step because it will repeat some of the things from Research

  1. Whatever you've decided as your Metric, sales made, web form enquiries, messages posted, etc. Now's the time to ensure that what you've put in place is getting results

Additionally check some Hard Numbers that may be directly responsible for your KPI's above:

Check your site's traffic https://www.google.com/analytics

Check who's linking to your site

link: blog.john-pfeiffer.com

inbound links to the domain

Find out how your pages rank for the keywords you're interested in....

e.g. my grank.php experiment

Google make it easy to login and check broken links, keywords driving site, sitemap etc. https://www.google.com/webmasters

site: blog.john-pfeiffer.com

shows what google has cached of your site

Tune It Up: Search Engine Optimization Site Maintenance

Google gives slightly more weight for freshness - so if your site and a competitor's site are about equal but you begin updating your content you will appear before your competitor.

Go back and modify some of the content or titles of your pages that aren't getting many hits.

See if you can reduce the number of clicks required for user's to "convert" (e.g. from Landing page to Purchase Page)

RANDOM OTHER STUFF

Specificity in search queries

allinurl: blog.john-pfeiffer.com

[allinurl: google search] will return results that have both "google" and "search" in the url.

-Robots.txt

related: blog.john-pfeiffer.com

similar pages

ext:pdf

results are files that are pdfs

allintext:

terms must all be in page text

rss allows aggregator and sites to link back...

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