Posts on State of Search about ‘SEO 101’

What Baby Books Can Teach Us About SEO

8 months ago by Agnete Tøien Pedersen 4 Comments
baby-books

Being a new mom, just finishing off my maternity leave, I have done my fair share of baby book reading over the last months. Baby books are made to organize the world`s things for brand new people with no pre-knowledge. Babies and search engines are on the same level of naivety, experiencing things for the very first time every time they crawl, and therefore they can remind us of the most important basics of SEO.

As a website owner, it is not unusual to lose the perspective of your own content. Maybe you have worked for years to create unique, great content to rank better in the search engines. You have read about SEO and you have done everything by the book. And somewhere along the way, you lost your focus. The website is now about everything and nothing, and the rankings are not improving. Why? You have lost sight of the most basic element of SEO.

I see this many times every week when meeting (potential) clients. People over-complicate things in their desperation to rank better. And somewhere along the way, they lose both the rankings and the usability of their site. This is where the baby books can help us; to go back to the absolute basics of communication, and therefore also the very core of SEO. (more…)

Political SEO – Can it be done?

Obama-on-SEO

Here in the States it’s election season. I recently had a conversation with a campaign worker that said there is “no way” to SEO for a political election. Well my friends, we’re going to spend our day putting together a SEO strategy guide for those with political dreams.

I am going to cover the three most influential search optimization strategies out there for political SEO. The only thing I ask, if you have an idea for something to add – post a comment! (more…)

The Benefit of A Sitemap According to Googles John Mueller

directions-police

So many SEO’s talk about sitemaps. But there are many marketers out there who have no idea what a sitemap is, let alone what the use of having one is.

This week Google’s John Mueller decided to answer on a question about this specific topic on the Stackexchange forum. Here is his answer.

“A Sitemap file helps search engines to discover new and updated URLs on your website. In particular, if your website is fairly large, then this can help them to be able to focus on the new & updated content, instead of having to blindly crawl through everything to see if anything has changed. That can result in new content being found much faster, which can be quite noticeable especially if the site is larger or more complex.

 

With Google in particular (I work at Google; I don’t know how other search engines handle these), it also does the following:

 

  • Find the number of indexed URLs for your website: These statistics are recalculated daily and very accurate. You can find these in the Sitemaps detail page.
  • Discover canonicalization issues: If the numbers there don’t match up, that’s frequently a sign that you’re specifying URLs in the Sitemap file that don’t match what we find during our crawling. That’s usually a sign that you need to work on canonicalization.
  • Help with canonicalization: When we find multiple URLs on your site that show identical content, we will give any URL that’s listed in a Sitemap an extra edge, even if you don’t use other canonicalization methods.
  • Find badly-indexed parts of your site: These counts are supplied per Sitemap file, so you can create separate Sitemap files for logical sections of your site, to discover areas where Google isn’t indexing as much as you’d like.
  • Prioritize crawl errors: In the crawl errors section, URLs that were specified in Sitemaps files are listed separately. Since you specifically supplied these URLs, we assume that you want them indexed, and that any crawl errors there are important.

 

Additionally, you can use several extensions in Sitemaps files (eg for images, video, News, or internationalization), should you choose to do that. These extensions are all optional.

 

For most websites, the most visible element of Sitemaps files is that you can see the indexed URL count. It can take a day or so to appear, so if you just submitted a Sitemap for the first time, you may need to be a bit patient. While other ways (eg a site:-query) are very, very rough approximations, this count is extremely acccurate.”

Our question now is: is he missing anything? What would you add to this answer?

Does Linking to “Bad” Sites Hurt You? Cutts Says No to an Extent

Bad links, there is a lot of discussion going around them at the moment with Panda and Penguin fresh in our memories. And with all the ‘outing’ going on, you better watch your steps right?

The question asked to Matt Cutts in his latest Webmasterhelp videos “What happens if I link to a good page that later becomes spammy?” therefore is one where the answer is listened to carefully by many SEOs.

The question is whether or not a site you link to, which used to have good content before, now turns ‘spumy’, will have a bad influence on your rankings. The answer? Cutts says ‘not to worry’, at least as long its not too many of these kind of links.

Checklist For Launching New Websites

checklist

If you are developing a new website then you must recognize that in the last fase of building there are always a lot of small things that have to be taken care of. Because several points are critical and may not be forgotten when a site goes live I’ve made a small checklist to see if everything on a site or a shop is working correctly before launch.

The original checklist is in Dutch and can be found here with additional information.

If you have any points that aren’t on the list but should be, please share it in the comments or on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or via email. So without further ado, the checklist: (more…)

Google’s Maile Ohye Talks About “SEO Mistakes”, But Are They SEO?

Maile-Ohye-Google

Google’s Maile Ohye is a smart woman who knows her stuff. She decided it was time to address some SEO matters and ‘teach’ the world about SEO. So she made a video called “5 common mistakes in SEO (and 6 good ideas!)”.

The video, which you can see below, is a quick 101 lesson in how to think about SEO, or even better, how to think about sites in general. The title suggests you will get actual SEO mistakes and tips. In fact it is about how to think strategically. Still, its a message we all should be aware off, but why the “SEO Mistakes” title? (more…)

Meta Description Tags – Billboarding Your Site on SERPS

Billboard-buy-product

So you are now ranking where you want to be, but you simply are not seeing the results that your research tells you to expect. It could be that you suffer from having weak meta description tags. Don’t listen to the “experts” that say it doesn’t matter – let’s billboard your page!

A lot of search marketers now believe that the meta description is meaningless. They say that since because it is not a part of the algorithm in determining rankings that they will shift their focus from it. I ask why, they give reasons, and we both end up feeling unfulfilled from that conversation. So during my drive from Michigan to Florida, I got some motivation for this months article. (more…)

Google’s Latest Panda Roll-Out: April 2012: The Basics

Panda-Antivirus-Pro-2012

Still remember the first Google Panda roll-out a year ago? A lot has happened since its first update, the search giant is keeping digital marketers on their toes with its latest algorithm changes.

It requires a mastery of how Google’s algorithms work, keeping in mind that this is hardly static as they are constantly changing. It’s without a doubt a dynamic and ever-shifting entity. SEO strategies therefore have to be adapted accordingly on a constant basis as processes are being modified. The search giant’s objective is to encourage webmasters to create relevant, dynamic and compelling content for their readership. The war against poor-quality websites has just entered its next stage aiming to target pages appealing to search engines rather than its human readership.

It’s core aim is to target over-optimized sites, in other words hunting down black hat practices: creating low-quality content and spammy backlink profiles focusing on gaming the search giant. (more…)

Hype and Hyperbole in SEO: It’s Not Helping Our Cause

No, this is not going to happen to SEO

It seems that at least once a year I need to write a post like this one, just to make sure everyone still has both legs firmly planted on the ground.

Because, yes, once again hype has taken hold of the SEO industry and we’re all running around screaming that everything we do has to radically change because Google farted and the SERPs have been turned on its head and SEO will never be the same and ohmygodwereallgoingtodie!!

Calm down, dear.

Some people seem to forget that this thing of ours is in a continuous state of flux. The specific tactics of how we get more relevant search traffic to a website have always changed. Everything from how we tackle on-site optimisation to the nature of linkbuilding has undergone change from one year to the next, and often quicker than that.

But what we actually do as SEOs, the core essence of our remit in the wider digital marketing mix, that really hasn’t changed at all. It’s still about getting relevant traffic to a site via organic search. That was true 15 years ago and it’s still true now. (more…)

Open Source Ecommerce Platforms – No Such Thing as A Free Dinner

dinner-check

This is my first post here at State of Search, so I’ll start by saying how pleased I am to be part of the clan!

I thought I’d take the opportunity to write about something that’s been on my mind for some time; open source ecommerce platforms and what you need to consider from an SEO point of view. Getting ecommerce SEO right is no mean feat; there are so many challenges involved that can quickly spiral out of control and become the thing of nightmares. So how come there are so many open source platforms available for very little investment that claim to be ‘SEO friendly’ to the point where you won’t need outside help?

This post really isn’t supposed to be a rant, it’s more about laying out some practical advice for anyone considering using a free or low cost ecommerce platform as an alternative to paying a developer to build a bespoke site to your specifications. There are plenty of people that choose to run ecommerce sites as a part time business perhaps grown from a hobby, and as such the start up budget often won’t be enough for a bespoke build teamed up with advice from a top SEO agency. You can bet your bottom dollar that the successful ‘cottage industry’ style ecommerce businesses are the ones where the owners had the foresight to make some SEO considerations at the very start of their projects. (more…)

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