Rock and Roll SEO - Make your site Rock!

So what kind of content writer have I become, as I find myself using wordtracker to justify any and all phrases. Some say that SEO has diluted good content writing as more and more people are just researching their high search volume keywords and justifying using them because they have a high KEI (keyword effectiveness indicator).

I too, am guilty of writing content for my clients with this in mind (not on this post, i must admit this is pure thinking). But I would like to take a stand for my fellow-SEO-minded. The reason these keywords have a high search volume, is because they are what someone is intentionally looking for. Now, of course, I’m speaking on behalf of all my white hat SEO friends out there. But isn’t the content you are making publicly available there for the world to see, put there in fact to be found? I’d say the best way to have your content found is through putting out exactly what the pubic is looking for.

Wordtracker research will give you just that. The exact phrase, the common man will be searching for when looking to get his/her hands on your content or product. So why not? I have no qualms about using Wordtracker as my internet content thesaurus, and you shouldn’t feel bad either.

Day 1 I attended the video search panel hoping to get some insight on what is probably most difficult to optimize site content from an SEO perspective. I was hoping to be annointed with vast amounts of information of how to show the search engines the way, how to deliver the content, how to get your video noticed and viewed. What I mostly learned, was what I already new. Video search is still in it’s infancy among the popular search engines.

The way to drive traffic is still, keyword enriched, well optimized landing pages to promote the video content. Surrounding your virtually invisible video content with well thought content that is outside the player (non-flash, html driven). But, what will really make or break you with video conent, would be to market the videos on your site that will essentially drive initial traffic. Pushing videos that contain content that is not generate high search traffic, is not going to get people initially to your site, no matter how good the video is. Targeting “buzz” worthy videos on your site to get initial visitors is the way to go.

Technology is very much on the rise though. With video search engines that are “smarter” on the rise like Blinkx, which claims to have the technology of voice recognition to properly tag a video. It will be interesting to see in the near future what kind of impact this has on the major impact search engines and their quest to control the video search market. The truth is, it’s not quite there, and it’s just a matter of time before we see a huge impact in video search.

For a full break down of the topics and what was discussed. Visit my colleague Adam Broitman’s A media Circus blog entry on video search SES.

Carrying on forever in URL’s with the hope of adding as many keywords as possible has a better chance of hurting you than helping you. Keyword usage in URL’s hold’s it’s highest weight in domain names (www.keywordshere.com), anything beyond that is not deemed quite as relevant.

There are benefits to having some keywords in the URL though, this can come from the anchor text in inbound links. So the url www.yoursite.com/cameraphone_optical-lens.htm would be beneficial to you if another site, say cnet.com, adds a link to your site with that URL in the name of the link in the anchor text.  Now the search engine’s see this link name and relate those keywords to your site.

So in the case of a super-long url, the chances of another site linking to you using that language are getting slimmer and slimmer.  The longer the url is, the less likely they would be to use this URL in their anchor  text, and simply go with the yoursite.com anchortext.

It has also been theorized that you can be docked by Google for "overoptimization"… putting a large cluster of keywords into a url string together is pushing the "spam" envelope and can potentially hurt you.  The whole technique of populating millions of keywords into a URL string just looks to me like the spam of old, back when you would simply dump a million keywords into your meta tags.  The search engines became savvy to that, why won’t they do the same with this in mind.

Truth be told, if you can’t deliver your keywords with the content on your page itself, and feel that you need to stuff keywords into a long URL, even if it’s not yet considered true spam, you’re obviously not designing your page properly to deliver fresh content.

I personally feel that having logical paths with some keywords involved in a URL can be helpful, and it seems as though other than google this will aid in ranking for keywords.  But overuse can be detrimental, and i feel that not long down the line the algorithms will be even more spiteful of this technique.  Stick to a outbound linking strategy when building your URL’s.  Think of what another site will do when they link to you and build anchor text around that link, because that will more beneficial to you.

Seo Roundtable reports here that Google’s home page has 67 validation errors from the W3C.  This is interesting considering Google is preaching site validation to everyone to make their site more "crawler friendly".

"I did a quick check at W3C validator and returned 66 errors, including a No DOCTYPE found." - rustybrick @ seoroundtable

No DOCTYPE?  That’s the basic fabric of building a website.  It’s kind of funny to look at how dated the coding is if you view source on their homepage.  There are inline styles,   to add spacing, and much much more that makes the site under the hood look very 1996.

I was reading a great analysis of the SEO implemented for the heavy hitters advertising during the superbowl on searchenginewatch.com and read this paragraph which blew my mind… it’s amazing that such a large company would miss such a simple but crucial detail for SEO on their homepage.

"Sierra Mist, another Pepsi product, also ran some ads, and did lead visitors to SierraMist.com. Looks like that site needs one of the very basic SEO deliverables, however: a META description tag. Their #1 listing for the search “Sierra Mist” provides the following description: “Sierra Mist. Oops! Looks like your JavaScript is turned off. You must enable JavaScript to visit our site. Once you have enabled it, click here to refresh …"

Search Engine Land has posted a great article summarizing what the new delete URL feature yahoo recently served up has to offer for SEO and webmasters. Seems as though it’s a fast, friendlier way of dealing with getting a URL off of yahoo’s search engine, especially for people that are not code friendly and don’t understand how to do it the “clean” way with a robots.txt file. I don’t think i’ll be migrating to using this tool since robots.txt does the job the best, and the delete URL feature is no different than adding a quick “no-follow” meta tag for the short solution. After all, the page will still get crawled, but just not indexed with this feature.

This chart sums up the article very well:

RIA’s, or rich internet applications just became the new techy buzzword that has caught my eye recently.  Not since the evolution of "mircroformats" for RSS feeds has something caught my attention quite like this.  With browsers, feedreaders, and email applications controlling our internet lives, and with more and more of what we do moving "online" and less and less  being stored on our own computers, the days of the "desktop" have become numbered.  The computer desktop was long the basis of your computing efficiency, with "desktop applications" ruling the PC and Mac world.  But with the emergence of fast, very efficient web 2.0 technologies, the desktop is getting less and less attention among programmers and developers.

Until now… Enter RIA’s into the picture.  Rich internet applications combines web interface technology (flash, javascript, html) and integrates it with your operating system.  The start of this functionality can be seen in the development of "widgets" on the mac operating system, which ties your desktop into various aspects of the web.  With the emergence of windows vista, the whole OS experience on a windows computer will now be tied to the web again.  This makes developers antsy to create an operating system and application based marriage that can maximize efficiency.  What better way to do this than to use coding structures like actionscript and javascript that were made for web applications and bundle them into a sharp and easy to use GUI (graphical user interface) that can be used on your desktop.

What does this mean?  Don’t be surprised with the launch of Adobe’s Apollo, which allows developers to create RIA’s easily, to start seeing web-friendly apps that look a lot like your interface when visiting a web site, as opposed to the Microsoft office like GUI’s you’re used to seeing.  The web has made for extremely good user experiences (to keep people clicking and coming back), and now the user experiences are being translated into new applications.

I was just reading a post on toprankblog.com by Lee Odden, titled “The Lowdown on Web Designers and SEO”. The article poses the question, why don’t we just have our designers do our SEO for us. Lee’s response to this can be summarized in this one paragraph he wrote:

“We employ web design staff on our SEO team and for the most part, we try to avoid doing web design projects because we’re so busy fixing web sites made by other designers. Most designers do not make web sites that are not search engine friendly on purpose. Rather, they make web sites that focus on the user experience without regarding the search engine experience. In most cases, the designer is not asked to make the site search engine friendly or optimized in the first place. The business owner doesn’t know any better and many times, the web designer doesn’t either.”

This is entirely true. For years I was a web designer and programmer. A designer is heavily focused on the user experience, a coder is heavily focused on clean, semantic, cross browser friendly markup. The programmer, is in fact empoying some best practice SEO strategies without even knowing it, if he/she is a good coder. Much of the web industry today is starting to realize that there should be a separation between designer and coder instead of one being a combination of the two. I completely agree with this as well. This allows a coder to specialize himself with creating standards friendly code, because to a designer, his/her passion is within the user experience and design itself, and when a designer starts to code, as long as the code matches the design, he/she will stop there and be happy.

But, now comes the day and age where we start to separate the coder and SEO. Many coders provide SEO strategy in one way or another (sometimes without realizing it by just creating clean code) but is there time really well spent? When I was a coder I spent endless hours perfecting my trade and cleaning my code to the utmost, but sometimes i was missing the point. Now that i’ve made the transition to SEO strategist, it’s great that i can understand and know clean code and standards practices, but there is really so much more to it, so much more that makes you site “rock” to the search engines.

My favorite part of the paragraph by Lee was “we try to avoid doing web design projects because we’re so busy fixing web sites made by other designers”. Since making the transition to SEO, i’ve found this to be very true. Many times i look at a site, and i want instantly to recode it myself (the programmer side to me longs for it when i see poor coding practices), but i have to restrain myself realizing that there’s so much more work to be done.

So i’ve adopted the approach of employing a defensive strategy (fixing the code) first, and then launching an offensive strategy (SEO marketing strategy) because you really need to work defensively to make everything crawler/search engine friendly before you go after the task at hand, making the site “rock” and getting good search results.

Thus, having worn a few hats in this industry (designer, coder, SEO strategist), I can honestly say that it’s time for a separation. Let the designers design and make a great user experience (after an IA lays it out of course, which is a whole other discussion), let the coder make standards friendly code (so the SEO guy isn’t pulling his hair out making changes), and let the SEO guy develop a great strategy to put your natural rankings to the top.

I found this on Google Blogoscoped. Claims to be the “SEO world championship”. Good way for an organization that is set up for a good cause to get noticed, i’m sure they will get quite a bit of precious SEO work and name recognition, some of the SEO gods out there will probably be involved to try and win and boost their ego. I think i’m going to check out the competition on this one and get under the hood on a lot of the sites that are ranking high, it would be interesting to see how these sites are marketed to the search engines, and find out what kind of content gets top honors within the SERPs.

Here’s the full scoop on the contest.

So, just when I thought the search engine market was completely liquidated and any new engine brings on the “Like we really need another search engine” response, up pops something a bit, well, useful (at least to me that is).  Lately i’ve found myself in heavy “research mode”, constantly looking for answers, and also looking for questions to just know more.

Problem is, there are so many blogs about seemingly everything out there, how do i find a niche of the types of blogs and discussion groups i’m looking for?  Right now i’m really only interested in SEO and SEM related inquiries, and digg and technorati searches will separate considerably.  But now Alister Cameron brings me a shortcut to what i’m looking for.  A search engine that only searches SEM.  It searches an exclusive list of the top 260+ Search Engine marketing blogs as chosen by Lee Odden of TopRank Online Marketing.

Give it a shot, i’ve already found a few fantastic blog entries leading me to add a few more RSS feeds to my collection.  Find it here.