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Nine lessons in search engine optimization

SEO digest

Out of nearly 1600 query expressions that have brought recent traffic to SEO Theory, I have selected ten to discuss in greater depth. I chose these ten expressions for one or more of several reasons: the visitor counts were high, or the number of pages viewed by the visitors who used these queries were high, or the visitors spent a large amount of time on SEO Theory during their visits. Some people spend hours searching through the old posts (or else they leave their browser windows open on an SEO Theory post, go have a cup of coffee, and then come back and click to another page).

If you spend some time looking at what people like on your site, you can easily develop new content that addresses those popular topics. As your site grows you should gradually see shifts in the popular content, thus providing you with new inspiration as search trends follow a self-exploring path. The process should be never-ending because as you add robust content to a site it becomes relevant to an exponentially expanding set of keywords.

Building large websites help
I have written about large Web site design and optimization several times. Here is a brief guide to those articles:

When you’re building large Web sites, it helps to have a plan that scales. Start out by building one portion of your site — the navigational infrastructure — first, and then begin populating your site section by section. Never let the on-site navigational structures fall behind the scope of the content. If you find yourself NOT updating navigational infrastructure because it takes too much time, you did it wrong.

Google meta tags
With all that has been written about Google and meta tags, I am amazed that people are still searching for information on Google meta tags. This query represents one of the largest query sets that bring traffic to SEO Theory. People want to know, “Does Google ignore meta tags”, or “how to do meta tags seo for Google” or “how does google use meta keywords and meta description”, etc.

You’d think the question would have been settled by now, but of course it hasn’t because too many people in the SEO industry continue to spout meta tag myths about Google. (And why don’t you people care about Ask, Live, and Yahoo!’s use of meta tags?)

In the past I have written that Meta Tags do matter and that Google does not ignore meta tags. Apparently, too many people disagree with me (for lack of SEO knowledge and testing experience).

If you want to know if meta tags work, put some on your pages and see what happens. In MY experience, Google honors the description and robots meta tags; Yahoo! and Ask honor both of those AND the keywords meta tag.

If you’re wondering whether you should use the keywords meta tag, the short answer is YES — but you’re not using it for Google, and you don’t even have to use it for Ask or Yahoo!. If you implement a site search tool (other than Google’s), you may find it actually pays attention to the keywords meta tag. Don’t ignore it just because someone says it doesn’t matter.

Link analysis
I have written about link analysis many times but four articles stand out from the rest:

Bottom line: If you’re just looking at backlinks through Yahoo!, you’re doing it wrong (especially if you think you are doing anything relevant to Google).

List of SEO Tips
The search for SEO tips is never-ending. Most of you have probably read at least one of these articles (guess which one has been read the most). Some people try to compile huge lists of SEO tips. If we assume every tip in those huge lists is good, is that all those people know? It’s a terrible waste of knowledge to pile all your secrets into one hopeful link baity article. If you share everything you know on your blog, you have no advantage to leverage in your business or trade.

I appreciate the desire for concise lists of SEO secrets. Honestly, you’ll never try to use most of them. Trying to do SEO by the numbers is a bit like trying to read the Congressional Record. Everyone has their own idea of how search engine optimization works. No one really knows for sure.

Multiple domains SEO
This one is the money term on some days. People have lots of domains. They want to know how to make money off them all. Here is a quick tip: Put unique, interesting content on each domain.

Here are my other helpful thoughts on multiple domains SEO:

Bottom line: Create a unique brand for each domain in your network and provide that brand with sufficient unique content to support it.

SEO and insite search
All those articles I wrote about site search, and I never realized some people were searching for “SEO and insite search”. That just goes to show that you learn something new every day, if you pay attention to your search referrals. Well, here are my insights to insite search and SEO:

Bottom line: You want to include site search for sites with more than 12-15 pages. You want the site search to be robust. No one really offers a good free site search tool.

SEO checklist for SEO firm
I have to admit I’m not sure about this one. Does someone want a checklist to perform SEO at their job with an SEO firm? Is someone trying to start an SEO firm with little to no prior knowledge of SEO? Is someone trying to hire an SEO firm and they want to know what to ask or how to vet that SEO firm? Theoretical minds want to know so we can better hone our helpful lists of articles.

If that checklist doesn’t satisfy your queries for “SEO checklist for SEO firm” then I’m afraid you’ll have to come up with another query for me to interpret.

SEO nofollow
Don’t do it! Using “rel=’nofollow’” on your own internal links is stupid. It’s bad SEO. Why do I say that? Here is why:

Bottom Line: Attempting to control the flow of PageRank through the use of “rel=’nofollow’” is a waste of time because you have no way of knowing how much PageRank you have for any page.

SEO satellite
There is some overlap between satellite sites SEO and off-site optimization (see List of SEO Tips above). I have purposely refrained from discussing this topic very much because the concept is frequently abused. Of course, it could be argued that the more discussion there is about the use of satellite sites (or a network of micro sites), the better informed people’s decisions to use (or not use) this technique will become.

www.seo-theory.com

published @ September 22, 2008

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