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Blog World Expo 2008 - Ten Things You Need to Know About Search Engines & Findability session recap
Wow, sorry about the long title…
The first day of Blog World was truly outstanding. The attendees were diverse, intelligent and engaged and the speakers were honest, authentic and they shared very detailed information. It didn’t seem like they held anything back. And Dave Taylor was as forthcoming as the rest.
This session I was looking forward to since I registered for the conference. I was not all that familiar with Dave Taylor prior, but so many of my affiliate partners request information on this very topic that I was anxious to share the information beyond the blogging community.
If you don’t know Dave Taylor, www.askdavetaylor.com, I recommend you become acquainted with him. His presentation was both informative and entertaining, regardless if some of his jokes went without a communal guffaw, the humor was appreciated.
Dave basically went over four things:
- Your Title Tags
- Keyword Density
- Smart Image File Names
- and “Read More” is less
Most of the information was fairly basic if you have been playing in the SEO world, but he pointed out some very well known sites as examples that fail to follow simple guidelines.
Titles - Are they good enough to grab attention? Do they include the main topics and concepts? How will someone search for this content and can you slip a few of those terms in the title without it looking like garbage?
Keyword Density - No magic percentage here. In fact when asked what the correct percentage was, Dave answered “not too little, but not too much either”. What he did point out was that in our typical conversations, and most of our blogs are written that way, we refer to, for example, our iPod first as the Apple iPod. The second time we mention it we say iPod and after that we say “it”. His suggestion was to remove the word it and words like it and use the name of the item, person, topic, in place of those.
Another tip he pointed out related to overuse of CSS in your pages. CSS can make designing your site easy, but too much CSS removes hard coded HTML items that can help you tell the search engines what your page is about. He stressed the use of H1 tags and gave some examples of how to use html and CSS together.
Smart Image names - Are you uploading all your images with names like DVM0084.jpg? How about giving them a little more of a description.
Alt Tags - Dave’s advice - use them!
“Read More” is Less - When sites show an excerpt of an article with a link titled “Read More”, it isn’t helping them. Dave pointed out that internal linking across your pages is as important as external linking. Using Read More as link text only helps you if you are attempting to rank well for the term “read more”. Use more descriptive link text such as “Read more about the Sony HandyCam”. Get your topical keywords into those links.
Overall, Dave stressed that you need to do as much as you can to help the search engines help their users. Gaming the system doesn’t work, but using the tools and areas of your site correctly will help your site be found for the content it provides. Great content, shown correctly will lead to great results. Anyone else make this session have feedback?
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Hi there! I was sitting in “How to Plan, Build, and Promote a Business Blog for Small Businesses” (also very useful) while this one was going on. I had a hard time deciding which one to go to, so thanks so much for the recap!
I think you captured my session well. Except for the “regardless if some of his jokes went without a communal guffaw” bit. I mean, hey, if people don’t GET my jokes, at least I’m amused by them.
More seriously, thanks. Glad you enjoyed my talk and find it valuable.
Thanks for stopping by Dave. Loved the session and hey, I was the guy on the right side of the room laughing at the jokes. But really, as long as we laugh at our own, that is all that counts sometimes.
One thing I didn’t include in this recap was the linking structure information you shared. Feel free to add some points here if you like.
Hi,
Definitely some great SEO tips there by Dave. However, I would like to voice out a little on the Read More tips.
A while ago, Matt Cutts wrote on his blog that whenever there are two links within a page that points to the same destination, the anchor text contained in the first link (HTML hierarchy) will be considered instead of the second.
Most blogs have their title linked to their blog posts and thus, I don’t think the Read More link will be taken into account.
Wayne
http://www.affboom.com
Hi Wayne,
do you have a link to Matt’s post that talks about this?
Links serve two purposes (for search engines), passing vote and being a descriptor of the destination page.
I’d understand, if a page can only vote once for another page, but why would they ignore additional descriptors, especially if they are different?
Using them would only make results more relevant.. imagine sites, where the first link anchor to a page is always generic like “more…” or “detail” etc. but other links on the same page are really descriptive, but are ignored.
I cannot believe that… are you sure that you don’t mix it up with PR distribution?
Thanks
Carsten
Candis, I’m glad you liked the recap. The session you attended was one I really wish I went to as well. I hope you got as much out of that one as I did in this one.
Carsten, here is a link to all of Matt’s posts that deal with internal linking, not sure which one Wayne was referring to http://www.google.com/search?as_sitesearch=mattcutts.com&as_q=internal+links