Advanced SEO Techniques & Tactics with Cindy Turrietta, Brooke Schumacher, Ginette Degner & Jeff Carpenter

  Interview Recorded: Feb 9, 2007 Segment 1; Segment 2; Segment 3; Segment 4

Link Popularity & Relevance
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To make a good assessment of a website in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), two of the very first and most important components that need to be assessed is the link popularity and how easy it would be to optimize.

SEO Best Practices
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There are certain best practices when practicing SEO that should be followed. Client’s need to be aware that some of these practices require hard work and that there are things that can be done to make a site more popular.

Absolute vs. Relative Links and 404 Error Pages
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You have to be very careful when you’re doing absolute and relative link referencing because if either one is incorrect you can end up with broken links, page duplication or inconsistency, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish.

Helpful SEO Tools
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Having the right tool to get the job done is as important when performing search engine optimization as it is when building a house.

Advanced SEO Techniques & Tactics with Cindy Turrietta, Brooke Schumacher, Ginette Degner & Jeff CarpenterSummary

Segment 1: Link Popularity & Relevance

To make a good assessment of a website in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), two of the very first and most important components that need to be assessed is the link popularity and how easy it would be to optimize. Even if you don’t have too many links on your website and even if you just have one link that has been around for a long time i.e. since the internet came into being, you can still do well by having good content on your website and continuing to add good content regularly i.e. updating the material on your website and adding more interesting information.

Sometimes Yahoo site explorer pulls up more links than Google. It seems that Yahoo pulls up some internal links as well. Yahoo also has a “site explorer badge”. This badge tells you how many links there are to that page i.e. it gives you the number of links.

You need to check back links on the website and you would also want to check the non-“www” version of the links as well, meaning http://domainname.com, because you could get a different set of back links. This depends on whether or not you’ve got the 301 setup for your canonical domain name. If you do not have the 301 setup, you could be losing out on some links. Recently, Google started filtering duplicate content and that included indexing your site once with the “www” and once without it. Actually, what brought this to the attention of Google was the abuse that was going on rather than the www and the non-www indexing.

So first of all, you could open up the code of the website and see if they have a title tag i.e. a description tag. Look at the basics i.e. if it’s been built in frames or tables. This is just to make sure if you have a site that you could really work with. After that, you can use the Google site command to see:

• If the title tags and descriptions are all the same
• If they have pages in supplemental
• How many pages does Google actually have indexed for them as opposed to how many pages the site actually has. That’s really important because you can’t be ranked unless you’re indexed.

The more supporting pages that you put out there based on your topic, the better it is for you. If Google does not know about those pages, they’re not going to help you much. All that work will amount to nothing.

You have to keep the download time in mind as well. People tend to forget about that. You have to manage the images and other things on your website in way that your page should not take more than 3 seconds to load- and that depends on your internet speed as well. But you have to balance it so that even if somebody is using slower than a cable, they should be able to live with the amount of time it takes for your page to open. If you have loads of pictures etc. on your homepage, people will have problems. There are also tools available on the internet that can calculate the time and help you in optimization by giving some valuable recommendations.

Some of the recommendations that Ginette gave in this segment were:

• You might also like to slice up the images into smaller pieces which makes it easier to download.
• Putting your java script into a .js file i.e. an external file, helps as well.
• Always check for just server side stuff. You may be sent the DNS stuff, with that you can check for reverse DNS, just to see if they have a dedicated IP address or not.

Jeff Carpenter suggests looking through: www.FaganFinder.com/ "URL" info , which gives her a large range of tools to use. One thing that is really nice about this is that it will give you a Symantec Data Extractor. You can translate it, search it and check out the cash. You can get a lot of information from just one interface. At the bottom of FaganFinder, you will find the validation for CSS and XHTML.

Another tool is www.seo-browser.com. They have some tools in there as well that help give you a good assessment of a website.

Segment 2: SEO Best Practices

There are certain best practices when practicing SEO that should be followed. Client’s need to be aware that some of these practices require hard work and that there are things that can be done to make a site more popular. What happens is that if you get greedy and over do it, you get caught because what your doing (and your site) becomes very prominent. You have to guide your clients and explain to them that they need articles but you cannot take them from everybody else. You actually have to help write them.

For example, some people scrape out information from Wikipedia and post it on their site. Doing that doesn’t really help as much in the ranking as it does in providing stickiness for your site. Wikipedia does provide a legitimate method in which, by agreement, you take content from them and create your own glossaries etc. perfectly legally. But then you have people like the earlier search engine result scrapers who just start pulling in all the data for AdWords, AdSence or as part of a publishing network.

How the publisher networks make money is by going the way of the “valid click”, where they go through a very long screening process. Yahoo has done the same thing to screen out some of the publishers who were advertising things that weren’t real ‘content valuable’ property in terms of Real Estate. In order to combat this problem more effectively, some of the search engines are trying to get rid of duplicated material or excess material.

Wikipedia has now implemented a “no follow” tag in their link so you can’t get the link credit posting in your website. There is debate that it should be called “Not Trusted” because the search engines do follow the link despite the “no Follow” tag and they do actually index the pages but they just don’t attribute quality credit. This means that you may not get some link credit but you can get some referrals and traffic out of it. In a way, this is even better than the link credit because you still get people or users who bookmark your page and you have that social networking going on for you, which proves to be more beneficial.

The Wikipedia “no follow” tag is implemented after the page is edited. This means that some categories have “no follow” tags and some don’t. You would have to check the code and to find out. According to Ginette, it is too early to judge how successful this method, but there are a couple of industry experts who are doing tests on it. Most of these experts feel that since Wikipedia is given such importance and weight by the search engines, the links with “no follow” tags are going to be followed and accredited anyway.

Some of the categories that are not getting tagged are the ones that are not falling victim to content scraping. Those that get visited more often are the ones that are getting a closer look on it. So if you put up some information about a mortgage or auto loan, you can pretty much guarantee that if your link happens to stick, it’s going to have a “no follow” tag on it i.e. if you’re talking about an industry that doesn’t have too many editors reviewing it or if it does not have too much traffic.

Segment 3: Absolute vs. Relative Links and 404 Error Pages

You have to be very careful when you’re doing absolute and relative link referencing because if either one is incorrect you can end up with broken links, page duplication or inconsistency, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. Ginette recommends that you add referencing all the time and be consistent about using either ‘www’ or the non-www while referencing. You can server-side (301) redirect one with the other.

One other thing that people don’t like to do or they don’t pay much attention to is to create a custom 404 error page. If you would like to improvise, you can use your site map page as your 404 error page.

Sometimes people have the link to the site map at the bottom of the page- where you would usually fit the copyright name and date- but instead of this information you have a text link that goes to the site map. This is also done to encourage people to use the site search option so they can also collect data about what they’re searching for at the same time. The site search results can also help you identify if you need to add more content that’s relevant to what’s being searched for i.e. relevant to the information that is in high demand. As a result of this, we figure out how to target.

When you sign up for a Google account and if you don’t uncheck one of the boxes while signing up, they automatically assign you with personalized search and start tracking what you search for. So when you search, Google can serve up results based on your likes and dislikes. This is how ‘personal search’ works. As a result, the merchants will have to think about the things their demographic has an interest in and not just dish out words.

Hence, you won’t be using so many generic terms but very specific long phrases. The whole socialization comes into play as well, as you get popular based on your demographic. Personal search comes from being logged into your Google account and then searching for something. This affects the rankings of websites and it will come to a point where it’s not just about ranking, it’s also about content, relevancy and links.

Segment 4: Helpful SEO Tools

There’s a new external links tool in the webmaster tool kit for Google. This helps you get a more in-depth look at the links that are pointing to particular pages on your site. There’s also a tool by Pierre Far on the biography page and there’s a link on the eMarketing Talk Show page for Pierre Far of eKstreme.com called the ‘Deep Link Calculator’. It gives you a ratio of your deep links and the higher the number, the bigger the percentage, the better that is because it means you’ve got a lot of links going in deep into your pages.

It’s also useful to find out about the links that are linking to you. You have to find out whether or not these links are related to your industry. They should not be out of your target market and unrelated to your industry because, obviously, you would want the ones that are more related to your industry.

One other very interesting tool that needs to be mentioned can be found at www.seomoz.org. It has a tool called the ‘page strength tool’. It gives you a bunch of information right upfront so you could get a feel for someone’s site. You have to look at other things as well but it’s good for early assessment.

Another tool that’s great to have (although it’s not necessarily an SEO tool) is www.netvibes.com. It helps you to aggregate all information on the web in all kinds of different forms. It’s a Web2.0 tool and you can import your RSS feeds into it and download and listen to podcasts without any additional software.

In addition to this, you can use the tool at www.websiteoptimization.com to calculate the download time on your website i.e. how long it takes to load it.

There’s also a website, not an SEO tool, called www.pandora.com. It streams music in for you. All you have to do is put down a couple of artists you like and it’ll find music that’s related.

The reason why SEO can be costly is because, even with all these tools available, it’s a long and tedious process. Actually, rates charged depend on what you’re getting and not all SEO is created equal. SEO is not all that tough to learn, but there are a lot of things you’ve got to know and it does help to know a little bit of the history or how far you can go i.e. what the limitations are. SEO tends to be labor intensive work and that’s why you have to pay quite a bit to get your websites optimized.