Search Engine Optimisation

I need to learn about this and was wondering if anyone had any recommendations of books or online resources I could use? I basically want to know how I would optimise search results for blogs/websites. I probably know some of the basics from my own informal blogging but I was hoping to get a better grounding.

Anyone got any tips? As I say a book or a site that gave me some really good tips to get me started would be great.

1 - links from highly-ranked sites
2 - descriptive URLs
3 - use last AND first names in headers
4 - in your source code, content should come first, navigation and other links after
5 - no duplicate pages

For a really comprehensive and accessible summary of the factors that affect natural search ranking I recommend you check this out. Found it when I was interviewing for SEO jobs last summer although didn't actually get one.

Thanks a lot, really useful info. It's for a much more formal job rather than my own blogging...so really good to get a grounding that isn't "um I always title my posts very specifically"

tracers advice is v good - fyi #1 is way more important than everything else - so trading links is a good use of time

and if i can say this in as diplomatic a manner as possible: spam yr shit bro - on message boards in blog comments etc - important to do it in way that looks like a normal post tho - ie make it unique and sensical every time - google really cares abt that and will totally neg u if they think yr spamming

so instead of "lol check out this awesome music hip hop rap indie world itunes blog billboard top 40 blog" say "hey dudes i have some thoughts on the important whats the deal w/the new animal collective album merriweather post pavilion controversy http://blogblogblog.com/animal_collective_album_merriweather_post_pavilion.php"; - and then on the next site say the same thing using different wording

or you could also go the "wow i read these incredibly deep insights on the important whats the deal w/the new animal collective album merriweather post pavilion controversy http://blogblogblog.com/animal_collective_album_merriweather_post_pavilion.php"; - but thats pretty lame and u will get caught

Yeah it's a pretty big and well known company but I figure if I was open about it that approach would be fine.

o lol i thought this was for yr personal blog

no I prob should do it more on that but I like giving things dumb titles. I just have a chance of a job where the guy seems really big on SEO and he was all "so you've written online a lot, you must have a good understanding of SEO" and I was all "yes indeed I do".

You've watched a lot of television. You must enjoy the Shamwow.

seo is easy to understand difficult to master - so u should hav no problem bullshitting yr way into a job

lol

am i right in thinking that META tags have come to help jack approximately shit in the SEO game?

yah basically - its funny tho people still like to pretend they do

it doesnt make much sense from their pov for the search engines to let you tell them what yr sites abt when they can figure out what its really abt themselves

"SEO" is a combination of common-sense techniques and smoke blown up skirts by people who think that they are smarter than the 5 zillion very, very smart people who work at Google.

people who think that they are smarter than the 5 zillion very, very smart people who work at Google.

Yep. "SEO specialist" is not a job, it's a con game. Not a bad con, either, since there's a sucker born every minute -- a sucker who thinks that getting to the top of Google results is some kind of skill that people have and that they should pay top dollar for. A good "SEO" man will take piles and piles of your money and never let you know that all he did was change some <h> tags and put ads on Google (which you also paid for).

If you want good search engine results, all you need is a good front-end web designer. (ahem.)

Oh, and content. That kinda matters.

I think if you're *really* good, you can get all Prof. Harold Hill and sell the instruments and uniforms and nobody will care that the band sucks. I'm terrible at that. I tend to level with people. "Look, metatags are not magic." Etc. But it's difficult sometimes, because they are hearing from "SEO" people that metatags ARE magic. Which puts the client in this weird he-said she-said.

I fucking hate SEO. It's the ruin of many a day.

If you want good search engine results, all you need is a good front-end web designer. (ahem.)

― mose def (kenan), Monday, January 26, 2009 11:13 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

snake oil salesman^

We got Trouble! Right here in River City!

btw i am the guy who took not one but TWO sites to the top of googles highly competitive adam schefter results - so if anyone wants to pay me lol hueg $$$ to work my magic i am open to the concept

i have more than one good buddy whose contribution to the new economy is creating "content" for companies who provide high quality Internet maketing solutions professionals, primarily through Custom Website Creation, Search Engine Opimization, Pay Per Click Advertising and Exclusive Directories. We seek separation from our competitors by providing true exclusivity, quantifiable results, and by going above and beyond for our clients

should say "for professionals" ... basically dudes are writing the equivalent of like 10-12 wikipedia articles per day on stuff like carpal tunnel syndrome, mold-related disease and other conditions you might want to sue your boss or landlord over

the fact that i have not one but several friends doing this for a living makes me worry more about our future than any stock news or anything like that.

dude on the phone said "the big buzzword for us here lately is seach engine optimisation"

kinda fits in with what people say on this thread. their content is good tho! it's the bbc...

there are tons of "content" jobs at the moment yeah...it's kind of weird.

In answer to the question:

http://www.highrankings.com/tentips

Key quote: "Optimize your site for your target audience, not for the search engines. This may sound counterintuitive, but hear me out. The search engines are looking for pages that best fit the keyword phrase someone types into their little search box. If those "someones" are typing in search words that relate to what your site offers, then they are most likely members of your target audience. You need to optimize your site to meet *their* needs."

http://www.highrankings.com/art-of-seo

Key quote: "If you’ve done it right, an everyday user should not have any idea that a page has been SEO’d. A trained SEO should be able to spot what your keyword phrases are, but it shouldn’t be glaringly obvious."

All of the articles linked here are good:
http://www.highrankings.com/tz-articles

and as a sometime copy writer, I like this one especially:
http://www.talentzoo.com/news.php?articleID=245

Key quote: "The most important thing to know about this phase is that copy can’t be written by just anyone. It absolutely must be written by a professional copywriter who knows how to write compelling marketing copy."

A general forum -- tons of discussions, searchable:
http://www.searchengineforums.com/

xpost what in hades is the BBC worries about search engine results for?!?!

worrieD

want to pwn the web prob

But... their news feed comes built in to Firefox! I can't imagine better SEO than that.

they are getting killed in the UK by the telegraph, who have been focusing like trained zombies on SEO for a year now; they're also desperate to boost their US readership

they prob looked at how wikipedia is 1st in everything and said why isnt that us is all

they have a pretty big website above and beyond just the news website...the BBC is a many tentacled monster! every programme has a site, every programme has a blog (or three)

xpost It's like owning the world's largest diamond, then watching a Peter Sellers movie and coming in to work the next day demanding that someone find this "Pink Panther" that's getting so much buzz.

the internet is no place to rest on yr laurels kenan

Yeah, I know, but you don't get internet laurels for a fast sprint -- less and less, as Google gets smarter and smarter. It's a marathon kind of affair.

I should go into the metaphor business.

should say "for professionals" ... basically dudes are writing the equivalent of like 10-12 wikipedia articles per day on stuff like carpal tunnel syndrome, mold-related disease and other conditions you might want to sue your boss or landlord over

― moonship journey to baja, Monday, January 26, 2009 11:30 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the fact that i have not one but several friends doing this for a living makes me worry more about our future than any stock news or anything like that.

― moonship journey to baja, Monday, January 26, 2009 11:31 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this stuff is all over the craigslist "writing gigs" page, can you really make a living off of it?

hells yeah

now that ive thought abt this theres prob three main elements to the seo

1: street teamin (aka incoming links)

2: writing (keyowrdz)

3: design (lol meta tags)

i don't get it - are they writing articles that will be posted on various "fake" sites owned by the clients, purely in order to prop up these clients' presumably real sites??

A friend of mine actually does this for a living - LG I think you may actually have met her. I can put her in touch if you want a crash course in bullshitting about this?

http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i191/fluxion23/seo_eat.jpg

i don't get it - are they writing articles that will be posted on various "fake" sites owned by the clients, purely in order to prop up these clients' presumably real sites??

― Tracer Hand, Monday, January 26, 2009 12:07 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

or they write for the main site just pumping up the content lookin relevant etc

soooooooooo fucked up

im kinda fascinated w/this tho i dont know why its like the most mundane thing in the world

but it's not, because too many people believe that jesus seo is magic

i have an idea for a novel and/or movie about a future world where all signal has been drowned out by a combination of spam/seo article noise and then um the noise becomes sentient or something and theres like some sort of da vinci-pi-talmudic code in it all and then it turns out that its actually GOD

©

that would def leap to #1 in amazons RANKINGS

lol

i really love books and movies where at the end it turns out to be god

I think at the end of your book, it should turn out to be Tyler Durden.

god...who is actually mr riffles, owner of the abandoned newspaper printing factory

fyi none of u will be thanked in my afterword

at the end of your afterword you can thank god

at the end of your afterword you revel that u r santa claus

im going to make a character called "moe" "gay" and then he will die from being a pedophile and eaten by dogs

r u sure this wouldnt be better as a blog

someone should be twittering this thread

i have an idea for a novel and/or movie about a future world where all signal has been drowned out by a combination of spam/seo article noise and then um the noise becomes sentient or something and theres like some sort of da vinci-pi-talmudic code in it all and then it turns out that its actually GOD

william burroughs made a career out of this

this thread is seriously optimised. motherfuck yes

serious question - how many ppl in america are hard at work on the worlds first 'twitter novel' right now - by hard at work i mean hiring a publicist

i feel like this form would be perfect 4 me

guys the new thing is "Chirp"

http://www.webofevil.talktalk.net/chirp.htm

that is awesome.

fyi joe if ur tweeting a novel i am a public relations professional <META name="keywods" content="public relations, pr, publicist">

you forgot to pluralize and duplicate everything four times

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/FullTextSearchControllerServlet?terms=heave+ho&offset=50&searchtype=id&startdate=&enddate=&artefact=threads&idtype=displayname&sortorder=Relevance&boardid=48

Company X can have a horde of trained monkeys SEOing their site all to hell, but Google employs 1000x in actual smart people whose job is to figure out how to PREVENT Google from being gamed. Just keep that in mind, K?

at some point its not gaming is the thing - yr just doing what google thinks is good

u cant trick me by putting tons relevant info on yr site!

ya if u cant beat the game get good at the game u feel me

at some point its not gaming is the thing - yr just doing what google thinks is good

There are two ingredients in the SEO snakeoil:

1. common sense
2. hoosing up a rabbit or two

I hold that the elements that make Google like yr site are the same elements that make yr site just plain usable and good, including things like old-fashioned networking and advertising. Anything beyond that is old-fashioned hooey.

I'm surprised that people are still hooked on <META> keywords, 'cause Google plain said that they ignore those at least 7 years ago.

they're still important for other search engines, like intranet searches etc

<META> tags are useful only where HTML can be trusted.

Er, <META> keywords. Refresh, etc., is still useful everywhere.

dood lib its really not common sense - common sense is like u have to sell something for more than you bought it in order to make a profit - what yr talking abt is esoteric computer knowledge

Company X can have a horde of trained monkeys SEOing their site all to hell, but Google employs 1000x in actual smart people whose job is to figure out how to PREVENT Google from being gamed.

...so that companies are left with no option but to spend more money on Google Adwords in order to achieve front page visibility.

OK, maybe it's not entirely common sense. However, quite a bit of SEOism is worse than chanting mystikal inkantations over yr server.

...so that companies are left with no option but to spend more money on Google Adwords in order to achieve front page visibility.

In part, yes. But keep in mind that the entire Google brand rests on the notion of trust. Google is worth zilch the instant users decide that they can no longer trust Google.

The motto, Don't Be Evil, can be translated into English as, Trust = Gold.

I recall that a few months back, an insurance price-comparison website which had dropped a lot in its Google placings claimed that they had discovered that the drop in their Google position made absolutely no difference at all to their income - in fact, I wrote about it on my blog at the time. If that's true, it's doubtful if SEO-trickery is really worth very much point at all.

^^^ excellent meta post both about seo and featuring seo strategy, i applaud you sir

Indeed! However, it definitely won't result in any difference at all to my own income, I promise.

i really dont think the less visitors no drop in sales formula could possibly be true - the whole story seems to be based on them going nah we fine

Possibly - but they're also a company that relies heavily on old-fashioned advertising, particularly TV advertising. So it could be read that the site visits generated by that type of advertising have a much better conversion rate.

yah obv seo is only one piece of the larger ecommerce puzzle omg