Trying to show the results of SEO is not just doing a search on your targeted keywords and viewing the latest position. It’s more than just that. Read more
When doing SEO, it’s not as easy as just picking out your main market keyword and thinking you can jump to the top with that keyword. A lot of people seem to think that generic keywords equal good sales. But this is not the case, more often than not. Good SEO requires work and research. Read more
SEO tips being lies? Okay, not always intentionally, but it happens. Mainly because with the ways SEO works changing so much, a lot of old techniques no longer work. Keeping on top of these makes a big difference.
There are several, but I’d recommend checking out this great list put together by Stephan Spencer, Chris Smith, Rand Fishkin, and Eric Enge on Search Engine Land.
Google is continuously finding new ways to measure the quality of web sites, to choose which pages should be ranked higher. Relevance is still king for SEO, but one new element for search engine optimization (listed by Google directly) is web site speed. Read more
SEO is an evolving animal. There are many techniques that worked very well in the past that no longer are as effective, if effective at all.
Google released a report card last week for product pages on search engines. This report card analyzed the levels of quality for SEO on the pages.
The short of it – Google gave themselves only one “excellent” rating, got three “satisfactory” ratings and eight “needs improvement”.
Google has stated they have taken action on these results or plan to. It’s somewhat funny to hear that the big search engine doesn’t always tweak their own pages properly for SEO purposes.
If you want more details on this, you can check out this article from the Los Angeles Times.
The stance Google’s taken on search engine optimization has always been a little hazy. However, they do acknowledge many elements of SEO as being important for a good web design (as implied by all the information given within the Google Webmaster Tools pages). But it appears they’re taking it a step further.
Google has begun a small project by showing how to improve SEO for some select pages within countries in northern Europe. They will then put up a post about each page describing their findings and what they recommend to improve listing positions.
This isn’t exactly offering SEO services for clients (like our own Tulsa SEO services), but it is showing that they acknowledge how important SEO is for improving results, and are even willing to help by giving some tips.
Mark Jackson has a good article detailing more on this in ClickZ.
It appears that Fortune 500 companies on the whole have not caught up to the internet marketing needed to rank well for their primary keywords. And many of them still don’t use pay per click marketing, even though the combination of the ones that do spend about 3 and a half million dollars daily for their keywords.
The interesting thing here is with those millions being spent, you’d think they would put the money into SEO to push their primary keywords to the top of the listings, but it appears that they are not doing this. The companies are still improving on their listings, but it’s still a minority that are even breaking the top 50 in the SERP list for their primary keywords.
MediaPost has an article with details on the exact figures involved in the Fortune 500 SEO results, as well as their PPC figures.
There are a lot of standard black hat SEO methods that have been around for a while, but those that stray a little on the darker side of SEO keep busy. There are several new tactics that these people are using.
As SEO becomes a more prominent form of marketing, black hat methods are also becoming more well-known. The latest term for these techniques is “poisoning”, which I find appropriate. These SEOs will put their poisoned links (which contain malware and installations of other nefarious elements) into various places where people will find them through either particular keywords or through social media.
As a lot of people are not aware that these attacks happen, they can often give away account information, trusting that the sites they are visiting are reliable. These attacks come through Twitter and Facebook as well as through standard search engine results.
For more info on this, check out this article by Last Click News.
Doing SEO for a massive site can be complex. In the case of a large e-commerce site, you have a ton of pages with the different products. How do you organize the categories do good SEO for all these pages?
This is a full project to do solid SEO, but some critical elements must be kept in mind.
- Google likes unique posts, good content
- Duplicate pages can hurt rankings
- You don’t need to have top listing for every one of your 10,000 pages
By looking at these concepts, this means that using the 80-20 rule is a great approach for doing good SEO for a huge site. Chances are 20% of your products produce 80% of your revenue. Focus on only these elements. Make these pages have solid content and fine-tune the on-page SEO here.
By doing this, you don’t spend so much time on the other few thousand pages, and the results are worth it. In addition to this, try to be careful about categorization – it can hurt to have categories cross each other to make duplicate pages. For example, having a clothing store with a leather category and a shoe category could have the same page in both “leather->shoe” and “shoe->leather”. There are ways to avoid this, although my recommendation is to initially construct the categories in a way that this never becomes an issue. By taking care of this up front it will help with many potential duplicate content issues.
Beyond these details, keeping great SEO for the site in general will always help. Following all these tips will increase your traffic and listing positions. For more details on SEOing e-commerce sites, check out this article by Eric Enge on Search Engine Land.
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