How To SEO - ‘How to …’ queries people actually use

SEO digest

These “how to” SEO questions are drawn from October’s search referrals for SEO Theory. Every month, people use thousands of queries to find specific types of content and they arrive here at this blog. Some people stay and browse the site; some people scan one article and leave; some people decide they want something else and bounce away.

It’s impossible to adequately answer every question people ask in the search engines, but they do ask some interesting questions. And, to be honest, I usually do these search-referral articles when I’m stumped for good ideas. Scanning your search referral data is a quick way to develop some ideas for content. But you should see how well you rank for the referrals on the various search engines before writing new content. For some queries, SEO Theory is already dominating the top search positions.

How To Add A Blog To Your Website For SEO - If you want to know “how to add a blog to your site”, well, that’s a bit technical. First of all, what kind of site are you running? Is it a Virtual Domain, a leased server, a hosted site with limited access? If we assume for the sake of brevity that you cannot install software on your service, you can still set up a blog on a third party service like Blogger, Wordpress, and iBlog (to name just three of many, many services). You can interlink your sub-domain based blog with your hosted Web site.

Some Web site hosting services offer to install blogs for you through your user interface. Poke around and see if you have the option (although you probably don’t get to choose what kind of blog software you’ll use).

If you want to know how to leverage your new blog to help with your search engine optimization, that’s a little more complicated. You could put the blog on a sub-domain of your site (many people do) and use that to deep link to content on your site. But if you don’t write an interesting blog other people won’t link to it. In my opinion, any blog you create should be updated often (at least twice a week) and it should include as much content as you can create, as well as links to other sites you don’t control.

Show people you’re willing to link out and they’ll be more willing to link to you — without your even asking for links.

How To Analyse Website Navigation - Learning how to analyze Web site navigation is a bit tedious. To help you get started, create a checklist of things you know should be included in a good navigation system:

1. Descriptive anchor text
2. HTML links (as opposed to Flash, Image, or Javascript links)
3. Links to all sections on your site
4. A link to the HTML sitemap

There are other things to look require as well. Once you have a list of things you want in Web site navigation, you can compare every other site’s navigation to that list. From time to time you’ll want to update the list.

You can break the list up into functionality, accessibility, and usability. Functional navigation means you get from every page to every page. Accessible navigation means the user interface doesn’t matter — it could be a cell phone, a text-to-speech program, a character-based browser, or a common graphical browser. Usability means the navigation is easy-to-use, easy-to-understand, and it can easily be found.

How To Build A SEO Network For Linking - It doesn’t take much to do this right. First, you need to make each site UNIQUE and USEFUL. That means you cannot just reproduce content. It also means your content should be reasonably helpful in some way.

Second, resist the temptation to interlink all the sites. You can acquire a fair number of links for any site without trying hard. Once you have a network of sites indexed and ranking in the search results for various queries, you can use those sites to link to whatever content you feel deserves links.

If you’re wanting to know how to create a network of hundreds of sites quickly so that you can propel one site to the top of a competitive query, this is the wrong place for that kind of information.

How To Build Links When Your Site Sucks - Fix your site. Then go get the links.

How To Create Html Sitemaps For Larger Website? - Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that your site has thousands or millions of pages. The rule of thumb is that the larger your site becomes, the less helpful HTML sitemaps become. Think of how impractical it is for people to look at every document in a 1,000,000-page index.

That said, as your site grows you’ll need to divide your HTML sitemap across multiple pages. You can arbitrarily limit yourself to putting no more than 100 internal links on an HTML sitemap page (Google recommends this) or you can divide your HTML sitemap into logical sections, each section getting its own little hierarchy of pages. Be sure you have your HTML sitemap pages link to each other.

When you have several dozen sections on your site, you’ll need to create an HTML guide just to your sections. Each section can have its own HTML guide page. You can interlink the HTML guide pages to each other within the section and between sections (or at least link back to the root sitemap page).

You can also create alternative sitemaps, ordered by alphabetical listings (assuming all your pages have unique titles), publication dates, authors, topics, etc. I would not count too much on HTML sitemaps, however, if you don’t have your content pages linking to them. HTML sitemaps work best when every page on the site links to at least the root HTML sitemap page.

How To Create Related Posts - I have seen plugins to do this for popular blogging and content management system software. If you want to do it manually, I would recommend you create a spreadsheet that lists your URLs, page titles, and includes a brief description of what the pages are about (the meta descriptions would be appropriate). I don’t recommend doing this by hand.

How To Decide Better Links In SEO - The best way to judge links is to stop thinking about search engines and think about other types of value the links can create for you, such as visibility, traffic, credibility, etc.

How To Design A Large Website? - The question as asked is too simplistic because designing large sites is a very complex process (unless you’re just adding content to blogs or forums). We always start out with a brainstorming session, creating an ordered list (a table in outline format) of the content sections we want to include.

You can easily create a blueprint for a large site by designing its HTML sitemap first. You’ll probably find you have to update the sitemap from time to time as you populate the site with content.

How To Find One Way Links - I’m not sure if someone wants to do a competitive link analysis (which is not useful for SEO) or if they want to find places to get one-way links. If it’s the former, I don’t know of any resources I would trust for that kind of analysis. If it’s the latter, check out SEO Theory’s One Way Links guide.

How To Improve Microsoft Search - Also “How to Improve MSN Live Search”. We find that starting with sites that are already indexed by Microsoft’s Live Search speeds up the process quickly. Using links on those sites to help get new sites indexed reduces the amount of time we have to wait.

Of course, you also want to emphasize your keywprds in onpage factors. Repetition helps with every major search engine.

How To Make Trusted Domain - Obtain your links only from trusted domains. Do nothing deceptive.

How To SEO On Large Website - Basically the same way you optimize smaller sites, but there is less room for error, as your errors can quickly replicate across thousands of pages. You need to be meticulous and stick to the fundamentals: unique content, unique meta tags, unique and original design. You’ll need some links, too.

www.seo-theory.com

published @ November 4, 2008