Morrow Studios – personal site of Chris Morrow, Interactive Developer

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

• 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