SEO TrainingNo Country for Old Websites
Presented by Aaron Bramley and David J. Neff@aaronmsb and @daveiam
[email protected]@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.
