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SEO: The Art of *not* Leaving Traffic on the Table
Lawrence Coburnwww.rateitall.com
www.sexywidget.comtwitter.com/lawrencecoburn
The Two Sides of SEO
On Page (aka, the stuff you can control)Title Tags, Meta Data, Internal Link Structure, Barriers to Spidering, etc.
Off Page (aka, the stuff you need to influence)Inbound Anchor Text, Global Link Popularity, Quality of Sites Linking in, etc.
The Basics: Title Tags
• Keywords first, and if important, brand second• Under 75 characters is ideal• Goal: no duplicates, broaden the net • For big sites: start with templatized formula
o but build the ability to easily overwrite
Goal: Match your pages to user queries
The Basics: Canonical Root
Goal: Don't Dilute Your Rankability Most common slip ups:• http://www.rateitall.com vs. http://rateitall.com• http://www.rateitall.com vs.
http://www.rateitall.com/default.aspx Fixes:• Permament Redirects• Attention to Detail
The Basics: Robots.txt
Goal: don't block search engines from rankable pages Three ways to keep search engines out: Robots.txt, No Follow (links), No Index No Follow (pages) Reasons to Block SEs• Redirects to login pages• Duplicate and/or competing
content• Blank, template pages• Save bandwidth
The Intermediate: The Canonical Tag<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.rateitall.com/t-640-beer.aspx" ></link>
Goal: Don't dilute your rankability
The Intermediates: Widgets and Linkdev
Goal: give other sites a reason to link to you Considerations:• Footer link needs to be
related to content• Try and automate your
anchor text
The Intermediates: Get Listed
RateItAll.com/PromoteBOTW.orgGetlisted.orgYahoo! DirectorySearch for "keyword directory"
Goal: Pick up some easy links
The Expert: SMO and SEOGoal: Generate bursts of links through social media
The Expert: Content Remixing
• Slicing and dicing your own content on multiple pages may result in more rankable pages
• Aggregating content from various sources and remixing may
result in more rankable pages • Example: Search Results Pages
o If your search results pages are getting indexed, try and claim another keyword
Goal: Maximize rankable pages by aggregating content from internal,and external sources
The Expert: APIs and Attribution
Exposing content and functionality via an Application Programming Interface allows you to get greedy in asking for links and specific anchor text.
Goal: Give other sites a reason to link to you
Summary
• A little bit of work can get you 80% there• Unless you have domains to burn, black hat is
unsustainable• Focus on the overlap of what is good for users, and good for
search engines• Give people a good reason to link to you • Big, radical change is bad and will disrupt your rankings
Resources: SEOMoz.com, Stuntdubl.com, WebmasterWorld.com, Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer
