August 14

SEO Friendly Web Design

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I’m finally getting some of my notes from the “Voices That Matter” conference I attended in Nashville, TN in June. I was flooded with great information from Shari Thurow in her session “Redefining Search Engine Friendly Design”

If you’re looking for a great starter book on SEO check out Shari’s book Search Engine Visibility.

Below are my notes.

Types of Search Queries

  • Navigational: 10-26%
  • Informational: 62%-80%
  • Transactional: 10-23%

Navigational Search

URL most important – reason being number one in search results is near impossible unless domain name matches query

Many people use Google or Yahoo rather than using address bar

Informational Search

  • wants information on a topic
  • quick answers

Example: what is the phone number of my dentist (use office name and location

Transactional Search

  • users want to interact with website (not necessarily buying anything; game, download pdf, etc.)
  • have separate splash page for transaction (ex. search for “Adobe CS3″; does not include pricing info yet amazon does

Yahoo siteexplorer is a good way to see refers and how people are aearching

Building blocks of search engine friendly sites

  • index text
  • follow links – give search engine on-the-page criteria
  • measure popularity – 3rd party links pointing to URL

Text (sorted by most important):

  1. title tag – #1 tag for search results
  2. Breadcrumb links – sense of place; where am I?
  3. heading ( h1, h2, etc.) – use CSS formatted text; not images
  4. intro paragraph
  5. calls to action

Link component

  • -site navigation scheme
  • cross-linking
  • URL structure: too long (users tend to skip to sites with shorter URLs)
    • Good: www.yoursite.com/products.html
    • Bad: www.yoursite.com/pageviewer.aspx?id=128623478236&category=goodproducts&whateverelse=something
  • Relevance: information architecture
  • Major influence: Number and quality of links to a site

Conclusions:

  • presonas and profiles should be based on querying behavior
  • Build landing pages based on known querying behaviors
  • Semantic markup is critical
Links:
  • seobrowser.com – shows what the search engine sees
  • linkfinder.com ????
  • mattcutts.com/blog – SEO information
  • adwords.google.com/ - tool to generate keywords
  • wordtracker - free tool for keyword suggestions
  • scholar.google.com – best resource for SEO

Book suggestion: Chris Sherman: Google Power

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 11:18 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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