… continued from Thursday’s post …
Jill Whalen, one of the original SEOs followed Mike. Jill mentioned a number of well known SEO techniques such as using Alt tags in images, writing proper titles and descriptions, the solid stuff SEO is built on. She then went on to talk about how to link these basic techniques together. For instance, use the same keyword phrase in the alt text and anchor text of links.
An interesting linkage Jill drew involved using navigational bread-crumb links to phrase the title of internal pages. Her advice is to take the last three keyword phrases from the bread-crumb links, reverse their order, add the company name, and use them to construct a page title.
Jennifer Slegg followed Jill to talk about links, link loving and healthy internal link structures. For example, when writing new content pages, always link to them from your homepage. A couple of articles linking to those content pages help as they will give the content credibility in the eyes of the search engine spiders. She also notes content should be kept close to the surface of a site cautioning a maximum of 2 levels deep.l
Keep important content close to the surface.
If or when a site owner buys links, Jen advises to use a variety of keyword phrases and to check out the backlinks of each page links are bought from. She suggested avoiding places links are commonly placed like a page footer or link partners page, obvious link networks, and anything known to be on Matt Cutts’ radar screen.
When linking to others, always use the “_blank” (or “_new”) attribute to prevent users from leaving your page. Link to trusted sites in your niche. It doesn’t matter if they don’t link back, there is still value in you linking to them. (use nofollow if you want to exclude your link-value from their ranking)
Jen then got into the fine and delicate art of link baiting saying that carefully crafted link bait can get a lot of links very quickly. Top 10 lists work well. Other examples include tools, contests, quizzes, free stuff, and awards. Getting a scoop or breaking a story can lead to lots of incoming links as can large exposes and writing about exploits. Then there’s the tabloid method of writing about controversies, going on rants and being as shocking as you can. That works as well but you have to be careful. Link bait is a fine and delicate art that can backfire on you as rapidly as it works for you.
Imagine being the sudden object of everybody’s negative attention. Your target (be it a person or entity) has friends and supporters. Consider what they might do if your link baiting exercise goes south.
Todd Friesen was next up. Todd talked about multi-variant testing, making a number of variants of the same page and testing which ones produced the best conversions. He suggested thinking of buying links as “media placement” and noted that when you buy links, don’t buy them from unrelated sites. He had a warning for link networks that sell links. Google knows about you, don’t think otherwise.
Todd then riffed on Mikkel’s Markov chain technique saying one can’t play games like that on client sites. Suggests a cheap alternative.
He then moved on the the tricks assoicated with moving sites from one domain to another. You have to be careful because if you don’t do it right it could wipe your site out. Build a new XML sitemap as site develops. When the new site is ready to launch, 301 redirect all links on the old site to the corresponding pages on the new one. Submit your old sitemap to Google Webmaster Central. This will prompt the spiders to check out the links again. When they hit the 301s, they will check out the new pages. You can then install the new XML sitemap.
After thanking Danny for being way more flexible about things than that “other” search conference, Greg Boser spoke the praises of 301 redirects. Calling them robots.txt on steroids, Greg noted how he had used 301s to place well in the Dave Pasternack contest. Creative use of 301s can give sites extra link juice by consolidating the values assigned links from 301′ed pages. It can take 45 days or more for Google to notice though the values show up almost immediately.
Greg talked about the benefits of buying and owning sites. Networking smaller sites using 301s can be beneficial. If it doesn’t work you can just shut the redirects down.
The last one up was Danny Sullivan. He gave a couple of gems that make his life as an online journalist easier. To get links to content in the New York Times without requiring the user to register, use the NY Times Link Generator. Goto nytimes.blogspace.com. Another way to get great traffic is be the first or last to link to content found in Google blogs. Blog links are permanent but users won’t click on links in the middle of lists.
That ended the session and the conference. SMX Advanced 07 is going to be remembered as one of the best search marketing conferences for a number of reasons, this “secret” session being high among them.
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