search engine optimization (seo) training presentation
DESCRIPTION
Aaron Bramley, of Ridgewood : Ingenious Communication Strategies, delivered this search engin optimization workshop for the Web Development Team at Best Friends Animal Society. The astute group quickly grasped how link building, site structure, alt tags, social media, and much more can improve your Google ranking.TRANSCRIPT
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.