OFFICIAL LIVEBLOG: Business of You - Advanced SEO

Session Description: This session, led by Vanessa Fox,
an expert in understanding customer acquisition from organic search, is for attendees who are familiar with the basic principles and want to dig deeper. There will be a Beginning SEO tutorial in the Geek Lab, so if you don’t know your metatags, get the basics in the Lab. This session is intermediate to advanced only.

Advanced SEO

Vanessa Fox

If you look online SEO can be very overwhelming, but there are a base # of things that are all you really need.

Plan for the session:
Why should we care about SEO?

Mock others.

Tech issues and data

Vanessa Fox – Creator of webmaster central. Also part of sitemaps.org. Ninebyblue.com – online marketing.... (get bio) Book: Marketing in the age of Google.

Not two audiences – search and regular. All the same.

Current Searcher Behaviors
Search used to be a behavior for early adopters. Started as a text box and a couple of words.
Novices don't refine searches the same way early adopters learned to do.

So think about who your searchers are.

Today people do lots of browsing. Searching and browsing are two different things.
Most queries are still short – two or three words.
Half of queries have never been seen before
Searchers ignore vertical options and advanced operators
Most searches start at a major search engine.

Take a look at what people are looking for that is related to your topic. People do looooong searches. Hunt around and see if you can get in on those “longtail” searches.

Search has become autopilot. We don't think about how we do it any more. We even often use search when we know what we're looking for – like a web page – instead of typing in the url.

Since it's an autopilot thing, we don't really read what we're reading. Just looking for something specific.

Heat sensor maps and research show that people look at the top left part of the search screen and then look a bit down. Whatever is the most important thing about your page has to go in the front so that's what people “see.” - Title tag.
Ex: instead of doing “MedlinePlus: Rheumatoid Arthritis do Rheumatoid Arthritis: MedlinePlus.
You can switch the title tag to be something more descriptive than the actual post title.
Plug-ins exist that allow you to change the title tag.
Using the key words in your title also helps catch searcher's eyes.

Everyone is different, just like cats. People search differently.

Online and Offline are starting to integrate more and more. What happens offline causes people to search online.

50% of people watch TV with a laptop on their laps. You can see an instant effect online.

Code on the page? Does it matter? Not really to search engines unless your page is broken and won't load.

Audience: What's the difference between key words and body tags?
Vanessa Fox:  
Webdeveloper toolbar – plugin tool on FF – Shows the meta tags.

Hierarchy of the importance.
Most valuable is what's in the title tag.
Heading is also very valuable.
Then text on the page.

No magic number of keywords, just use them. But no magic density.

Keywords don't really NEED to be in the first paragraph of your post as long as they're in the post. Myth!

Other myths:
Idea that your site should only be about one thing.- FALSE
Linking out. Page rank isn't important in the way that people think.- FALSE
If you link to people on your blogroll and they don't link back - it's a "hole" in your blog - FALSE

Linking within is good.

Linking out helps you. - helps Google understand what your site is about.

You don't want MORE links, you want BETTER links. More relevant to you and obviously the more authoritative the better.

If there are multiple versions of the same post on different sites – will compete with each other in the search space.

Audience analysis, business needs, analytics, understanding of your needs and goals, and a conversion system.

Audience - What to do with comments? Paginate or leave on on page.
Vanessa - for search purposes it's best to leave on one page so you can maintain the keyword value. Do a better job of keeping the language of the audience.

Audience - Nofollow links?
Vanessa - tells search engines to not follow the link. It used to be used to combat the comment spam. They wouldn't leave spam comments. Now you really should only use nofollow for links that you are paid to host.

If you are given the product to review you should probably do nofollow links. Or if you are actually paid to do a review. Other than that don't worry.

Back to the language of your customers: google.com/trends - great way to know what language to use.

If you're interested in the technical side visit: http://www.slideshare.net/janeandrobot/diagnosing-technical-issues-woth-search-engine-optimization. 

With video and images - youTube is the #1 search engine for videos after Google. But generally speaking people still search the major search engines.

Search engines can't "read" videos and photos so make sure to fill out the attributes, images, etc. Alt attribute on the image is most important thing you can do.  For video do a video sitemap.

Jessica Rosenberg (aka kikadesa, kikarose, and sometimes just plain Rose) is an aspiring novelist and freelance writer who blogs daily at It's My Life... and posts frequent reviews and giveaways at The Lemonade Stand.