search engine optimization (seo) training presentation

SEO TrainingNo Country for Old Websites

Presented by Aaron Bramley and David J. Neff@aaronmsb and @daveiam

aaron@ridgewoodpr.comdavid@ridgewoodpr.com

It's all about Google

Title Tags

Unique for each page on the site.

Title Tags

• Accurately describe the page's content

• Create unique title tags for each page

• Use brief, but descriptive titles

“Description” Meta Tag

“Description” Meta Tag

Not desirable:

<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="[domain name redacted]

: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7): Books: J. K. Rowling, Mary GrandPré by J. K. Rowling,Mary GrandPré">

“Description” Meta TagMuch nicer:

<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Author: J. K. Rowling, Illustrator: Mary GrandPré, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, Length: 784 pages">

• No duplication

• More information

• Everything is clearly tagged and separated.

Improve URL Structure

Bad URL

Improve URL Structure

Bad URL

Good URL

Improve URL Structure

• Use words in URLs

• Create a simple directory structure

• Provide one version of a URL to reach a document

Site Navigation

• Create a naturally flowing hierarchy

• Use mostly text for navigation

• Use “breadcrumb” navigation

Site Navigation

• HTML sitemaphttp://www.bestfriends.org/allthegoodnews/map.cfm

• XML sitemap uploaded to:https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

• Have useful 404 pages

Write Good Anchor Text

• Choose descriptive text

• Write concise text

• Format links so they're easy to spot

• Apply all of this to internal links also

Use Heading Tags Correctly

• Imagine you're writing an outline• Use headings sparingly

Optimize Use of Images

• Use brief but descriptive file names and alt text

• Use alt text when using images as links

• Store images in a directory of their own

Use robots.txt fileshttp://www.bestfriends.org/robots.txt

Avoid:

• allowing search result-like pages to be crawled (users dislike leaving one search result page and landing on another search result page that doesn't add significant value for them)

• allowing a large number of auto-generated pages with the same or only slightly different content to be crawled: "Should these 100,000 near-duplicate pages really be in a search engine's index?"

• allowing URLs created as a result of proxy services to

be crawled

Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links

To keep spammers from sucking your reputation in comments or other public

forums on your site.