GaryTheScubaGuy's Top 12 SEO Tips for 2008

I (finally) finished my first version of 2008 Top Tips and I'm getting vamped up for a 12 conference tour in the next 6 months so I thought I would publish this here...first...and maybe get it sense-checked by all the kick-*** members of SEO Chat.

I was a little bothered when I had a chat with Adam Lasnik at SES London this week and asked him what he thought about the "issue" a couple years ago with this forum and the "nofollow" incident.

I was thrown aback when he said, "SEO Chat??? Never heard of it".

So I'm going to make it my personal mission to be sure that Adam and the rest of the quality control team at Google, as well as anyone else missing out on this great resource, to add this to your SEO RSS Feeds.

SO, that being said, here we go!


It drives me nuts when I come across an article, or even worse spend good money on going to a conference and someone spends an hour of my time telling me about their company or what their company can do to make me #1, when what I came for was some in-depth knowledge or recommendations, or even just an idea or two that I hadn't thought of to improve my SEO knowledge. I'll bet you have been there too, eh?

Even worse is spending time in the wrong forum and getting bad advice or propaganda-led guesses.

I have made it a mission (much to the dislike of my employer, Stickyeyes), to give away the great information that you can actually take away, implement, and see almost immediate results. Do a search for 'GaryTheScubaGuy' or take a look over at the Stickyeyes training feedback page and have a read through the comments. I give it away because I know next week there will be something else.

SEO is a marathon, not a sprint, but these tips will give you a definite advantage over your competition.

1.Get your page titles 100% optimised for search. Page titles are the single best element of overall on-site optimisation that you can control, and one of the top things that a search engine, with its almighty power, uses to decide the destiny of the page. Will it rank your page or send it to the depths of the supplemental results where a bloodhound would find it difficult to sniff out?

Theories vary on how best to format the title for 100% optimisation. Long tail titles, key word stuffing, commas, density, bars and dashes have been tested and debated for many years.

I have found the best performance using the following method; First, I sit down and pick my top keyword, then I run it through one of many keyword tools out there that will show me the number of queries, demographic and geographic data, annual search trends, competition stats and so on. I take these results and start classifying them by this information to establish the pages that I will build. I continue to do this until I get down to 4 or even 5-word phrases.

From here I'll start to diagram the navigation of the new section using themed-based threads from the top to the bottom. In some cases I also use buffer words to control keyword weighting. So if I had a "blue widgets" page the next might be "Find Blue Widgets" and below that "Find Blue Widgets in Akron" and maybe even one more "Where Can I find Blue Widgets in Akron Ohio?" if it's been searched to some degree.

This is called going after the longtail and some friends of mine over at a company called HitTail made a cool little tool that I put on all my clients’ websites. It gives you real time results for the keywords that people are typing to find your site, as well as the search engine they are using.

Traditional logfile analysis can be expensive and difficult for the inexperienced and many times if you have a site getting 10,000 unique visitors a day or even a week you lose many of the prime longtail key word strings in the piles of data. It’s also a good way to monitor related buzz on your product/service/offering. It is perfectly okay to have the following title: Buy Widgets | Blue Widgets in Akron. I try not to stuff the title tags at all, but I always make sure I use it twice and I don't duplicate the page titles. Then when you are building content in the next steps you will have unique but relevant text to use in the link.

Next: 2. Optimise your content

2008 tips excellent Gary!

Look forward to seeing the complete set

Thnks for the tips man.....

2. Optimise your content

There are many on-page elements that can enhance the way the search engines rank your website. Assuming you have completed #1 above, the next step is to optimise the content based on the title that you have used for the page. In some cases where dynamic insertion is used, or an application like Wordpress is installed, you can optimise the way these elements are pulled into the on and off-page fields such as alt tags for images. If you don't use anything like this or you wrote it with Dreamweaver, there are other plugins and ways to make this process less painful, but I assure you it's worth the TLC. Here is a general list of the on-page and off-page SEO elements that I concentrate on;

In the URL - they become highlighted in results and increase click through rate.

In meta keywords (2-3 max.) - doesn't hurt to use so why not.

In the first and last sentence of the body content, and in bold as well.

In several places throughout the content but in a different form(I.e. plural )

In header tags. If it makes sense using h1, h2, h3 and then h4 in the hierarchy of a page then use them.

In alt tags for the images.

In the title tags for the images.

In html comment tags.

In meta description - see #5 for more more details

In an external link on the page - see #4 for more details

In a variation of the key word (i.e. plural) pointed to another internal relevant page (I.e. Concert Tickets page with Concert Tickets in Akron as the linking text linked to a page optimised for concert tickets in Akron)

Generally speaking I like to try and keep the pages with at least 250 words of relevant and themed content. This is a very important element to invest your time in because search engine robots parse, or remember your template if its static, which most are. Any optimisation that you have within the template won't have a significant factor on the SERP's (Search Engine Ranking Positions)so optimising your content is the best way to make sure your pages are not dropped into what in essence is the dreaded "sandbox" or supplemental results on Google.

It's also worth mentioning that even if you have an existing site, there are still many different bolt-ons you may find useful. Add a community section, a "widget" news area, or anything similar you can drop these new pages into.

Hot Tip#1 - Do a search for the name of your website and copy the URL string and use it as the link for your logo. It is a popular belief that the number of searches for your brand and the number of end-users that navigate through to your website influences Google results, and I have to believe that it is a ranking factor that all the search engines use. I can't say exactly how much, but I think long-term this is a good strategy and have seen it work with no reduction in any of my traffic stats other than reducing the bounce rates throughout.

looking promising Gary, we are watching this thread with a great deal of interest as we are starting to put into place some of your consulting report tips, and anything further you want to add on SEOCHAT is always a bonus.

regs

A

Thanks so much for helping the community like this. I remember your old tips very vividly.

Thanks lynxie, that's what keeps ME coming back...Cheers.

3. Optimise internal linking

Internal link structure is a lot about getting the end-user to the conversion point. It can also be used for search engine optimisation in several ways. If you are using a content management system (CMS) that has a keyword tagging feature you can have it search for keywords within the content and link to other pages. This will increase conversions and increase the time the end-user spends on your website. Robots also like internal links within content that point to other, unique relevant content and they follow these links. Wordpress and other applications like VBulletin with the SEO upgrade can also accomplish this.

This is where the use of a "nofollow" attribute comes in handy. According to Wikipedia, the nofollow was intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place. Matt Cutts of Google and Jason Shellen from Blogger created it around 2005.

What it does is tell the search engines that you do not endorse the page you have linked to. Using this on internal links like your About, Contact or other pages will increase the "linkjuice" that is passed on to the important pages. A good example of this is if your template navigation is always the same; add nofollow attributes to all of the links beyond the front page so that the key word links I talk about in #1 and #2 that you place in your content will get all of the benefit of the "linkjuice".

Just be sure not to confuse the search engines by using the same keyword anchor text as the key word you are optimising the page for (don't link "buy blue widgets" in anchor text on your "buy blue widgets" page and link out to the "blue widgets" page.

Hot Tip#2 - Another great way to use this tip is when you are creating new pages based on the keyword selection I mentioned above, you can link to them from the front page or an internal doorway page built for 'closer-to-the-root-file' navigation. Put nofollows on everything except your anchor text that points to these new pages. If your homepage carries a good Page Rank (PR) it will pass it down to the new page and will give you a boost in the SERP's. The goal is that you want to find a niche or longtail keyword phrase, build an optimised page for it, add a link to it from a well ranking page and suddenly your ranking at the top for the term.

Next: 4. Use external linking wisely

Very nice! Keep closing the gap. I can see this thread becoming quite popular.

4. Use external linking wisely

Whilst people who link to you can't affect your website’s credibility or SERP's, who you link to does. For good measure I try to add one outbound link using relevant anchor text on each page. I don't use the nofollow attribute on this as I want to be associated with it. I do a Google search and use the allinurl function and my keyword to search for .edu or .gov websites related to my page and start there (although the strength of an edu or org has recently come into question). You would be surprised what you'll find. If that fails I'll do one of two things; I do a search for the keyword I am optimising for and find a non-competitor that ranks well and link to them; or I'll link to the definition page in Wikipedia.

Another thing; While a bad neighbor (Spammer/blackhat/porn/etc.)that links to you will not affect your SERP's, who you link to will. I tested this 3 years ago and again at the end of 2007 and the impact hasn't changed.

What is more important to know, and more disturbing considering the amount of work it could potentially cause, is that its not just who you link to, its who the website you link to links to as well.

We are working on a tool to track this but imagine the bandwidth usage if your client has 10k links?

This is a task that you should add to your monthly SEO health check. It takes awhile, but I tested 3 websites and my conclusion was that even having as many as 100 outbound links to reputable websites, that benefit can be dampered by an unsavory outbound link...which is pretty scary.

Send me an email and I'll keep you updated on the status of this tool, but I'll tell you right now, it won't be a free tool. Even using EC2 via Amazon will get pricey but this is a pretty critical when considering the different algorithmic parameters used to assign trust and authority. This is another granular detail that you should monitor if you are striving for the coveted "Top Spot".

If you have the top spot in your sights for your kw/kw phrase, you'll need to do this just after paying your mortgage...once a month.

Considering the implications, the top spot is even more scrutinized and the minute details such as this one are (IMHO) being used to micro-analyse top ranking sites.

Next: 5. Write your meta descriptions

GaryTheScubaGuy

Good points Gary...thanks!


err...I hear someone coming...can you??

Yep..Meta descriptions has always been useful