SES 2008 Site Clinic August 22, 2008
Posted by simarprit in Blogging, Internet, Search Engines, SEO, SES 2008, websites.Tags: SEO, SEO Best Practices, SES, SES 2008, websites
1 comment so far
So what is a website clinic? As per Search Engine Strategies 2008, San Jose organizers, a website clinic is a one to tow hour session where a panel of “Website Gurus” evaluate your site publicly.
They allow you to explain what your site does briefly. Each site review takes about 15 minutes, I attended three sessions on this subject today:
My random thoughts:
- Try to stick to one coder or a style of coding
- Ensure your site supports the resolution your customer group generally work on
- Maybe it is a good idea to give relative links from your homepage to internal server
- Seeing what you are looking for in the URL makes sense
- Dynamic Menus can create a problem, they may confuse the spider, robots and whatever
- JS is best avoided in all sorts of navigation.
- JS also adds to overheads
- It may be good idea to tackle multiple coder issue by rewriting the code for your top pages (top pages and not all pages) in one style from time to time.
- Hyphens are better than underscores in the path and on the page.
- Wisely use SEO products and be open to adopting them.
- All upper case usage is not good
- Ensure your sitemap is there and update it regularly
- Define your 20 second elevator pitch and put it prominently
- 404 hurts, avoid Not Found Errors
- Avoid denial of service errors, they hurt
- Bring up Page 2 and Page 3 words
- Try MSN funnel tool
- Use KML
- Provide data dircetly to search engines
- Try layering image over text, but don’t go overboard
More to come..
SES 2008 SEO August 21, 2008
Posted by simarprit in Blogging, Internet, Search Engines, SEO, SES 2008, websites.Tags: Blogging, SEO, SEO Best Practices, SES, SES 2008
3 comments
SEO Through Blogs and Feeds
Continuing on my blogging the SES 2008 at San Jose I must admit I am not the fastest blogger and neither do I do “Live Blogging”, my blogs are aimed to be educative executive summaries for myself and for all those who care. They are focused session on what all I have attended and express my opinion alongside those who are the knowledge givers.
Rebecca Lieb did a good job of moderating the session, her knowledge about the subject and her apt comments made the session lively, Chris Boggs, Lee Odden, Amanda Watlington and Daron Babin formed the speakers panel.
It is important to self qualify your blog and understand your objectives of blogging. The qualifications you must answer be:
- Is your blog official or personal?
- Is your blog residing on a sub-domain or is it a separate domain in itself?
- Does your blog carry your corporate signatures or it has a personal touch about it?
- Are you the lone blogger or there are are multiple bloggers who would work working on the blog?
Choosing your platform is very important. WordPress looked like the preferred platform for most around.
Some quick takeaways (includes my own interpretations and learning)
- When writing a blog remember Steven Covey, begin with the end in mind.
- You should know precisely what you want to write on and what you want to gain by that writing.
- You should make a note of the keywords you want that post/blog to cover and ensure that they find a place in your title.
- The panel also recommended that you should do some research on the tags you would like your post to be covered under.
- Socializing and creating community around the log helps
- Customize and optimize your blog and feeds
- Use blog widgets or bligets wisely, don’t be obsessed
- Acknowledge and link to others liberally, develop credibility for your blog
- Links are currency, work towards them
- Try to become a top referrer on the topic of your choice
- Twitter, Flickr, Stumbleupon you need all of them at some stage or another
- Goals should drive your content on the blog
- Refine your blog
- Use Auto Discovery Tag of blog feeds
- Use trust rank inside your blog to increase credibility
More to come
SEO Best Practices August 20, 2008
Posted by simarprit in Blogging, Internet, Search Engines, SEO, websites.Tags: Search Engines, SEO, SEO Best Practices, SES, SES 2008
1 comment so far
The most important takeaway for me from the SES 2008, San Jose is that I have come to accept SEO as an integral part of doing business on the net. I must put a quick rejoinder, Ethical SEO is good and it must center around the concept that Search Engines need you more than you eed the search engines. Search engines main stay is good content and high degree of relevant top quality results.
This post is going to be an ever evolving post on SEO Best Practices, this would be an extension of my own own learning and growth as an SEO practitioner.
Search Engine Optimization is good and is here to stay, it all depends on you as an SEO practitioner on how strongly you define your best practices and how religiously you follow them and live the guidelines.
So what is the rule of thumb, and the most critical best practice:
Make your site in a form that it enhances the search engines usage experience. In other words, Search Engines should need you at the least as much as you need them, preferably they should need you more than you need them.
Much more to come, it has just begun…
