| What would say the 5 factors are to successful SEO? |
1. Website development
2. Fresh and relevant content
3. On-page optimization
4. Developing a strong link picture
5. Strong brand-focused content outreach via social media and PR. |
| How does "news" SEO (e.g. Google News) relate to an SEO strategy? |
If you have a content-heavy or news website, content outreach focused around your brand via public relations offer companies a way to send very strong "brand signals" to the search engines via vertical segments like Google News. Stronger brands are gaining more traction in current versions of search engine algorithms. These brand signals signify thought leadership and a stronger share of voice of your marketplace to the engines, which can boost your SERP rankings as the engines focus on returning SERP results of companies/websites that provide the most value to users. |
| The google ad search looks to all users, right? Can you narrow the search to a smaller universe/industry? |
Yes - with PPC advertising you can Geo-target your ad placements to users based on the users IP address. You can select specific cities or even a radius around certain zip codes to narrow your geography targets. |
| Is it imporant to use the metadata that is embeded into images as part of an SEO strategy? (metadata embeded using Photoshop). Is this readable to Search Engine bots? |
Yes, you should always fill out all the metadata and other attribute fields of the rich content on your website in accordance to your keyword strategy. |
| What is the optimum number of words in an online article? |
There is not set limit as to how many words you have to use for SEO, however we recommend that anything over 250 words starts to lose it's optimization value. If you have an article that is 750 words long, focus your optimization efforts on the first 1/3rd of that article in accordance to your keyword strategy. For syndication across certain channels you may have word count limits you need to hit, for instance, Google news articles must be at least 150 words. |
| Keith, great informaiton but as a CMO I dont have time to become my companies SEO expert. Can Penton do this TURN KEY for me? |
Yes |
| Is Seo Book free? |
Yes, the browser extension is free: http://www.seobook.com |
| If you have flash on your web site what is a good solution? |
jQuery is a much better solution to use for your rich or animated website content than flash. The text inside of jQuery is crawlable by the search engines, whereas anything built in Flash is not. |
| What if the the page is php with a flash animation - to clarify only part of the page is flash |
That should be fine, however we recommend that all of the content live outside of your flash animation. |
| Does Pay-Per-Click help move you up the page for natural searches? |
The answer from Google is going to be no, participating in PPC advertising will not help your SEO value. We will say that it has been our experience that companies who have very large PPC advertising budgets often do well in natural results. |
| Currently adding title/description tags to recently redesigned site - how soon will I see what I've written appear in SERPs? |
We would say that you should see Title & Meta updates fairly quickly, however Google isn't necessarily held to updating its meta description results, especially if it has already picked a snippet from your page. So depending upon the search query being used, you might only see your Title tag update in the SERPs |
| I heard that Meta Keywords aren't looked at too much by Google due to the ease of spamming. How effective are they in search engine optimization? Should they be a high priority? |
No, they should not be a high priority. Search engines have not used these as influencers for a while, however your internal search engine might use them for searches that happen on your website, so consult with your development team before not filling out the meta keywords fields. |
| Do the keyword clusters have to be in the same order on the page each time? Or do you use the words that make up the clusters? |
The best practice is to use variations of the keyword clustered phrase and your break-out phrases that you are targeting in different areas of your copy. Pages with different instances of the target term have been shown to rank much better than pages that just use the same term in many instances throughout the page |
| In addition to SEO Book, do you have any other recommendations for SEO web tools? |
We also recommend SEOMoz, SEOQuake, Firebug, and Advanced Web Ranking |
| Does advertising with places like ThomasNet and Globalspec increase your natural ranking? |
It could, it depends if the link from those places are follow or no-follow links. If they are follow links, than you will get the most value with a keyword-based link structure. |
| How long it takes for SEO to give significant results? |
It depends, but generally a strong SEO program will show SERP movement within 90 days. We recommend giving programs 7 months to really see some strong progress in the SERPs. |
| Does it matter if keywords are the same as url name or should you use spaces in-between words? |
No, you can optimize a page for whatever keyword you would like. It helps to have keyword-rich or keyword-based URLs, but it is not a necessity. |
| How often do you suggest optimizing your site? Once a year, once a month? |
We recommend updating a few of your website pages every single month. That way the engines will understand that your website is constantly being updated, your crawl rate will increase and you will get the benefit of catering well to the fresh & relevant content aspect of the engine's algorithms |
| How detailed should your navigation menu be? |
We recommend that your main website navigation should not contain more than 3 levels of your website. For instance, www.home-page/level1/level2.html |
| Is there a benefit to using a google search engine bar within my web site vs another search engine bar (example, Drupal search)??? |
Google custom search is generally not controllable, whereas you will have some customization options around internal SERPs if you use Drupal search. |
| What do you think the best overall tool would be to track hits on a website, cllick throughs, that you can combine with graphs of orders/day? |
Google Analytics |
| Is SEO important if you don't "sell" online? why? |
Yes, it is always important to position your brand, products, services in front of your target audience as they are searching for them. In the B2B space, it aids visibility, website traffic and ultimately, lead generation. If you don't position yourself in front of your target audience, that click and visit is going to a competitor's website instead of yours. |
| Are the search engines - like Bing - different in how they process searches? |
Yes, search engines do have different algorithms in how they determine rankings. For example, Bing has a strong personalization effort today that they partner with Facebook to provide results to users as they relate to their social activity and connections. Google does not use any Facebook peer-to-peer connections in it's algorithm for personalization of the SERPs |
| If we haven't started SEO, how would you suggest we begin? I work for a small b2b service company. |
We would suggest beginning with Keyword Research to get an idea of what your search engine marketplace looks like, and then with a competitive analysis of what your competitors are doing in the SEM space. |
| Do captions to visuals using keywords help? |
No, those keywords will be associated with the page, not necessarily with the image. |
| When linking to other sites for relevancy, who should you link to? |
You should link out to strong industry resources such as the BBB, wikipedia, trade magazines, and anywhere that the content will help a user's experience with what information you are trying to provide them with on your website. |
| Some HTML authoring packages insist that the home page is named index.html. So a name or word to describe the service is not an option. is this a serious issue? |
No, however to make sure that your homepage doesn't get indexed as "index.html" we recommend using a canonical tag indicating to the engines that the home page is www.companyname.com/ |
| Do similar rules apply for videos on our Youtube channel? And can you mentions some key concepts to include. |
Some key items to consider when optimizing videos on a YouTube channel include video name, title and description. |
| Are blog contents integrated into websites tracked by the robots? |
Yes, everything that you do not hide from the engine bots or specify that they should not crawl on your website will be crawled and indexed. Your blog is a great platform to boost your SEO ranking and expand your SEO targets |
| For articles with multiple pages, will this hurt SEO when using keywords? |
No, but there are steps you can take utilizing tags like pagination tag that will help show that all of the value resides in your primary page, and is not spread across the multiple pages of your articles. |
| Would it be more effective to include a map on each webpage to illustrate to webcrawlers all page titles up until the given page? |
Yes, it helps to use breadcrumbs for both bots and usability. It is also important to have both an HTML site map and an XML site map so that engines can understand the depth of your website and where your pages live. |