Archive: July, 2007

The most important tool used by search engine optimizers is their brains. There is a tremendous amount of requisite knowledge and ongoing education involved in being a good SEO. Finding and absorbing that amount of information takes years. A typical SEO needs to have a better than working proficiency in areas ranging from web design and hosting to writing and marketing.

A strong vocabulary and extraordinary keyword research skills are important compliments to truly awesome technical abilities. Finding the balance between both is sort of a left brain vs. right brain challenge. The working life of a good SEO is one dedicated to constant and consistent learning, a task made more important by constant and consistent changes in the nature of the search marketing environment.

There is a massive general knowledge base SEOs pull from, a very public library of sorts. The problem is, that library scattered across the Internet in thousands of unique places. Though dozens have tried over the years, nobody has managed to properly sort it yet. There is no mega-repository of SEO secrets, knowledge, tips, tricks or common sense. There are however, several excellent starting points for exploration and tutorial.

… 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.

The final session at SMX Advanced Seattle came with an information embargo attached. Attendees were asked to respect a one-month silence period, to refrain from blogging information from the session. Though the conference-space was packed with a standing room only crowd, the embargo has been universally observed. Today marks the one month point. The embargo has expired and “Give it Up” posts are starting to appear on SEO/SEM blogs.

This was supposed to be the session at which leading edge SEOs released their deepest and most effective search marketing secrets. Rumour had it the major search engines were to be banished from the room. Any blogger known to post info from the session before the embargo ended would be considered persona morte by others in the industry. No kidding around.

The speakers list, which was not posted to the SMX website, featured; Stephan Spencer, Sheri Thurow, Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Bruce Clay, Mike Grehan, Jill Whalen, Jennifer (JenSense) Slegg, Todd Friesen, Greg Boser, Danny Sullivan, and Matt Cutts (yes… that Matt Cutts).

Last entry, I wrote a little about using Google search as a tool for digging into the background of a website or document. Given Google is the #1 place to seek placements SEOs need to know how Google views, ranks and co-relates unique documents.

Joost de Valk, a Dutch webmaster (and avid WebmasterRadio listener) posted an Acrobat document (PDF) listing 31 specific Google websearch parameters.

Open a new window and perform a search using Google. I used the phrase, SEO News and Opinion. Check out the URL string the search produced:

http://www.google.com/search

?hl=en&safe=off&q=seo+news
+and+opinion&btnG=Search

The bolded letters represent parameters Google uses to know a bit about me or the webdocument I am looking at. In this instance, hl=en indicates I am an English language user. The safe=off indicates I do not have any content restrictions in my search preferences and btnG indicates a general search.

Fooling around with URL strings can teach SEOs a lot about a site or about how Google ranks documents. Next time you perform a search using Google, try altering the URL string to see what you can learn about the index, a document or related content.