New Rules for SEO Mechanics & Link Building – It’s a Race You’re Probably Not Winning. Last week I attended and presented at the SES conference in London where online marketers from all over Europe and as far away as Australia converged to learn about integrated marketing and paid, earned, and owned media.
With it’s history in search marketing, the conference complemented presentations on digital marketing with sessions on SEO as well. Making sure content is easy to find by the right audience in search is an important part of our consulting at TopRank Marketing, so I am acutely aware of the changes in the search optimization world from Panda to Penguin to Hummingbird. Regardless, as a content and social media focused marketer, it was interesting to hear the shift in current SEO and link building best practices.
In the race to win buyer’s attention through search, I’m pretty sure many social media and content marketers aren’t even aware of, let alone optimizing for, crawling, indexing and combatting against negative SEO and risky links. Mechanics of SEO – Crawling & Indexing. What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization? Educating Children About Money is as Important as Lessons in Math. Webmaster Guidelines - Webmaster Tools Help. Following the General Guidelines below will help Google find, index, and rank your site.
We strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the Quality Guidelines below, which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise affected by an algorithmic or manual spam action. If a site has been affected by a spam action, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites. General Guidelines Ensure that all pages on the site can be reached by a link from another findable page.
The referring link should include either text or, for images, an alt attribute, that is relevant to the target page. Ways to help Google find your site: Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content. Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. Quality guidelines Matt Cutts talks about manual action on webspam. Bill's Most Excellent Top 10 SEO Rules. Somehow, in a Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure crossed with Michael Pollan’s Food Rules moment, I found myself typing out the following.
No patents or whitepapers were involved in the creation of this post. One URL per Page In an ideal world, your site architecture should be set up so that search engine crawlers are only able to visit each page of your site at one web address, and no more. You may be laughing, but when Google sends you the “I give up, your site has too many URLs” message in Google Webmaster Tools, you won’t be then. Seriously. Keep Colors and Sizes Together If you create multiple product pages where the only thing different is offering the product in red or green or blue, or small or medium or large, you are creating too many pages. Meta Describe the Page To Be or Not to Be a Title Do Headless Horsemen Haunt You? Alt Means Alternative If someone can’t see your meaningful picture that adds value to your page, describe it for them with alt text, so that they can get an idea.
What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization? DragonesYMazmorras.