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Friday, March 23

COWPU - SEO with Andre Jensen

My notes and scratchings from Andre's great talk on SEO at this month's COWPU meeting. Nothing is in a particular order!

Slides are not currently available; if they are posted then I will link them!

Google's algorithm for indexing and weighting results... complex is an understatement. :)

Meta tags
  • Google does not index keywords and description, but sometimes displays information from the description in search results.

  • Yahoo! does index description.


It is very important to have a block of text links to your main pages somewhere on all pages (i.e. a common footer).

Use words that plainly describe the information contained on the target page, and that you want to have indexed (i.e. "eFile" for tax company).

New version of Google Toolbar has "keyword insight" function - how and where the hints are generated is currently not known.

You can use tools like SEO Elite to determine link popularity; information about inbound links, anchor text, keywords.

The redirect type 301 is preferred by search engines. Any time you set up a redirect use type 301 (including URL misspellings). Always redirect to the same URL.

Google sees the following URL's as completely different pages:
  • http://www.foo.com

  • http://www.foo.com/

  • http://www.foo.com/index.html

  • http://foo.com

  • http://foo.com/

  • http://foo.com/index.html

So always link consistently to avoid diluting link popularity. Updated 3/27: more information about this was posted on Matt Cutts' blog today!

Javascript navigation and cookies stop search engine spiders in their tracks.

Duplicate content can create a scoring penalty, so instead of having 2 pages with the same content setup a 301 redirect on one of the pages, that points to the other page with the content.

If using session management screen the client type and don't manage spider sessions.

Put disclaimers and long text in images.

Put javascript and CSS into include files.

Search engines prefer hyphens to underscores (will treat this-is-a-string as 4 words to index, for example).

Create custom 404 pages that contain links to your main sections.

Recommended keyword research tools: Wordtracker & KeywordDiscovery

Mini Google dances occur from time to time - for example at the first of the year it was optimized for tax season.

6 comments:

Elise Michaels Media said...

Isn't Andre the best? I took his SEO class at COCC last spring and was hoping to take it again soon. A handful of weeks is just not enough to learn it all. There's so much to know!!

Anonymous said...

Yeah that guy is awesome, and sexy! Everyone should book Andre for any speaking engagement! I hear he'll even do Bachelorette Parties for pennies on the dollar. Great deal ladies!!

Jennifer (ponderosa) said...

I completely forgot about this month's meeting. This was the one I really wanted to attend, too. Pttth. Hope you get the slides up, I would love to see them.

Elise Michaels Media said...

Yeah, Andre, you're a stud. Which you liked to remind us during class...

Anonymous said...

Andre is average at best. But he is handsome, that is for sure.

Anonymous said...

You can also give keywordspy a try. KeywordSpy.com is a Keyword Research Tool that helps identify what keywords competitors use, with results actually reflecting what advertisers are using at the current time.- http://www.keywordspy.com