8 essential search engine marketing techniques
Yaro Starak has written an in-depth review of The 8 Essential Things You REALLY Need to Know About Search Engine Optimization, a CD where Brad Fallon talks about ways of improving search engine rankings. The review is split into two parts: The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 1, which contains on-page SEO techniques, and The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 2, where off-page techniques are discussed.
The techniques are these:
- Title Tags (which should be document titles or title elements, since it’s the text between the opening and closing title tags that is important, not the actual tags)
- Keyword Density
- Site Structure
- Internal Links
- Links and PageRank
- Page Reputation
- Anchor Text
- Link Popularity
All in all, a good list of techniques to use when working on increasing the number of visitors a site gets from search engines.
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Roger Johansson is a Swedish web professional specialising in web standards, accessibility, and usability. More about me and this site.
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Comments
Wow, http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com is very usefull. Hmm article after article, after 1 week of reading, you can be very experienced SEO personnel.
I like the way he said the 8 ways in order. The most significant to least significant. I never knew SEO should be taken that seriously. Very nice article indeed.
It is always interesting to read about SEO-methods. I don't apply any particular SEO methods on any site I'm working on, so that's not part of it. I am a regular searcher for information though.
The most relevant information tend to be found somewhere amongst the 30 highest ranking, but rarely ever on top - maybe thanks to "over-optimized" SEO? Thus I tend to skip the top ones or leave them till after I have looked around a bit. Optimized use of search engines often saves me lots of time.
Truth be told, SEO can be a tricky thing sometimes. There are many little things (as pointed out in the articles above) that will help you with your search engine optimization.
As with part 1 and part 2, you have to look at the big picture. I think a majority only focus INTERNALLY at what they can do for SEO. These people are missing a BIG chunk of what you can do to enhance your rankings and build page credibility/popularity.
Good read for the morning!
Peace, Nate
He uses the term 'alt tags' in his article. Feh.
I searched the guru's (Brad Fallon's) wedding favors website that Yaro discusses in his piece. It's now ranked number three (and I see that Wedding Favors buys placed ads on Google as well).
The top two spots are occupied by folks repeating Keywords (which isn't supposed to work at all) and of the top two, one site doesn't use anything near well structured semantic markup. All top three SERP sites are table-based layouts. Gah.
I avoid discussing SEO with site owners like I avoid dirty toilets, and this is why.
To me, SEO is representative of everything that is wrong with capitalism. People clamouring over everything and everyone to get to the top of the heap. It's the perfect metaphor for the failings of Western culture.
Sadly, everything I've ever read about clean, sematic markup (which I strive for when building a site) purports it to be a tremendous aid in Search Engine Visibility.
It's getting harder to keep the faith.
Certainly I'm not going to stain my reputation discussing SEO with a client.
So much SEO talk these days! There are a million and one pointers to improve your ranking, but they all pale in comparison to simply writing good content. Look at the actual results on google. There is a ton of empirical evidence right there that half the SEO tips aren't effective over time.
Why does this website (456) appear atop google results? Because of intra-site linking? Or because Roger generates a remarkable amount of high quality content?
If I'm a search engine, my job is to find the best content, to attract the most users. Simple. So shouldn't the goal be to create the best content?
I'm with Ray, clamoring over SEO is a great metaphore for many things cultural...
The second part of point 5, point 6 and point 8 are all outcomes dictated by external factors beyond the site author's control! To say those three points are things that we can make better by just building it in to the site design is a nonsense. Easily-accessible, well-written content is what drives good Search Engine rankings mostly...reputation and popularity can only be decided by others who view the site.
High quality content (combined with hard work and patience ;-) ) is one part of it, and should be the main goal. But you also benefit from thinking about keywords and phrases, document titles and headings etc.
Ray: While most of it is, SEO doesn't have to be aimed at making money.
Intelligent SEO optimizers don't read articles like that. They write useful articles instead.
It's a pity google attaches to much importance on title tags. Writing good titles won't be honored in ranking, but title spamming will.
Wow, such varied opinions - I love it!
You know the best thing that ever happens to my site in terms of traffic is Roger linking to me...Thanks again 456bereastreet...
I was quite interested in the item about site structure but there's no real useful information on this apart from the fact that a sitemap is important. Anyone have any comments on site structure?
Roger, I agree, content is still king.
I just have a love/hate relationship with SEO. While I'm interested in results, I'm disinterested in Crystal Ball gazing.
I believe that Content + Patience = Good Results, better still if the content is properly marked up, but most small business brochure sites are short on content and the owners short on patience.
And like Stephan, I worry about and am witness to Title Tag spamming. Title tags are the next Keyword Tags. Give us an algorythm and we'll pander to it. It's an escalating war. Clients will always demand, and pay ridiculous sums for placement. As the old business adage goes--location, location, location.
Of course, then the SEO guys spring up and are all too happy to take large sums of peoples' money to 'optimize' the site.
Yaro writes a thoughtful article, but I have doubts about his favorite guru. Fallon seems to me as dubious as Sideshow Bob.
Yaro: :-)
Clive: I was going to say he's referring to internal links, but that's the next technique he talks about, so I'm not sure what he means by that either.
Ray: Title text spamming has been around for a long time, and the most annoying thing about it is that it hurts usability and accessibility, which meta keyword spamming doesn't really do.
We go to all this trouble to learn SEO so we can get more people to our websites. Google is currently the search engine of choice so we study to learn what we can do to help improve our performance in Google.
Everyone else does the same and SPAM techniques are developed that abuse the system, putting lower quality content where good content should win.
Unfortunately as long as there is a need for more traffic there will be people that find ways to abuse the system and "cheat" their way to the top.
Regarding Brad Fallon - his information is useful. I can vouch for it because I put into place lots of his techniques for my business BetterEdit.com and enjoy top rankings for almost all my important key phrases. No it's not just because of Brad, but he did give me a handful of improvements that make it worthwhile for the big picture.
However it's SEO, no one can ever claim to know exactly what is going on. If you want to validate or discredit a certain SEO expert's claims go to work and implement their suggestions. If they don't work then you have grounds for complaining, it they do well you benefit in your SE rankings.
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