SEMNE: Determining the SEO Health of Your Website with Jill Whalen 5/12/09
Speaker: Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings
http://www.highrankings.com/
http://www.semne.org/meetings/determining-the-seo-health-of-your-website#
How search Engines Work
2 components
Crawler: fetch the pages, trouble if can’t see
Algorithm: Relevancy, what others say about you, what you say about yourself
Be sure site doesn’t impede spiders
Google’s text cache: see what’s indexed
Menu links (Java menus can be a problem, not just Flash)
Headlines
Content
Anyone can use this, doesn’t need any technical skill
Site operator
Shows: how many and which URLs indexed
Duplicate content issues
URL problems, not getting indexed
See what title tags look like
Pages indexed that shouldn’t be
Http Header checker
Check bad URLs
Check redirects
Randycullom.com/headerchecker
Keywords & content issues: what to look at
Keywords targeted
Site architecture
Anchor text
Keyword phrases
Only 1 phrase? Biggest waste of SEO, every page should target a bunch
Shouldn’t strictly target 1 keyword for 1 phrase
Use a few related phrases
Only highly competitive phrases
Only works if you’re an established site with a lot of marketing $s
Other, easier phrases to get
Phrases that aren’t relevant
This traffic doesn’t convert
No phrases
Designers who have no SEO clue may haven’t incorporated keywords
Use: adwords.google.come/select/keywordtoolexternal
USE EXACT MATCH, much more accurate
Title tags
Unique to each page: don’t repeat them, should be custom
Focus on main phrases: don’t throw in extra words that don’t matter
Optimize 3 phrases per page
10-12 words make for good title tag
Keyword stuffing: too much is not a good thing
Site architecture
Are important pages in main navigation
Don’t bury things, make sure you have internal links
Anchor text
Are navigation links descriptive
Are there call to action within website: use keywords to describe page pointing to
Content
Unique to each page
Uses main keyword phrases
Stressing the benefits
Not keyword stuffed
Is content indexable, found by search engines
Don’t hide content behind graphics, people want to read content
Be proud of it
Your copy makes sales, not pretty pictures
SEO isn’t about stuffing keywords, it’s about writing naturally
Popularity components
Is the site
Link-worthy? Is there something worth linking to?
What do you have that varies from your competitors?
Linking to/from own properties where it makes sense
Using other forms of marketing and PR
Measuring success
Just looking at rankings?
Don’t look at rankings anymore
No 2 ranking are the same: personalized, geo-focused
Have analytics
More important than rankings
Have Google analytics installed correctly
Measuring conversion
Put thank-you page as a goal in analytics
See which phrases are providing conversions
Firefox keyword extension
Try not to use any one word more than twice in menu and titletags
Use PPC to see what’s converting best and integrate that into web pages
Companies assume people know who you are
Can’t exclude people who don’t know what you do
Who you are, what are you all about, are searchers in the right place?