COMING IN FIRST5 minutes on effective SEO

Chris Lowry@bigonroad

allaboutchris.org

LINKSSTRUCTURECONTENT

This guy is 1st on Google for “Black dude sniffing armpit”,

because he understand the three things below:

LINKSCurrently, links from other sites to yours are the key method for SEO.

» Relevance » Link text» Site popularity » Numbers of links

This will change in time, but you’ll always want lots of relevant links, from well known sites, in a related field.

So a great link is one like this:

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TheDesignBlog.comXhttp://www.thedesignblog.com

Best Designer Ever?

10 million people like DesignBlog

Chris Lowry, unlikely as it would seem, has been crowned the Best Designer in the world, by the Queen.From his excellent web design blog, you can see he clearly has a prodigious skill, and an unusually devastating combo of wit, charm and raw magnetism.

Relevant link text

Popularsite

Relevant content

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Jimmy’s knitting Blog

Xhttp://myf irstknitting-blog.wordpress.com

Be the f irst to like this

Current articles:March (1)2010 (1)

Sorry, been a while

It’s been about a year since my last post. Haven’t done anything in that time.

My mate has a site if you wanna look.

Will try to post more soon.

0 comments

Irrelevant content

Irrelevant link text

Unpopularsite

And a bad link is one like this:

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Don’t worry too much about rel=“nofollow”.

There is a myth that search engines ignore them, but its not true. They are likely less valuable, but still useful.

Avoid link farms!

They are awful, blatant attempts at manipulation, and likely to cause negative damage to your SEO value!

STRUCTUREStructure is a simple, fix-it-once addition to your SEO arsenal.

» Permalink structure» Site domain» Site map» Degradeable JS & Images» Speed

The way that your site is accessed by search engines affects how they rank you. Key areas:

Permalink structureAvoid query based URLs –“index.php?q=22”. Using .htaccess you can achieve wonders here.

Ideally, always go for keywords, rather than numbers – “blog/buying-a-new-hat”.

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A domain with keywords can help, especially on smaller sites -chrisdesign.com – but only as your main domain. Parked domains split your effort, and don’t help.

Site domain

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Site mapHelps search engines to index all your pages easily. XML Sitemaps are supported by Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.

With a static site, generate your own, otherwise use a plugin that updates one.

Make sure all text content is visible with CSS and JS turned off – this is how searchbots access your site.

Images need alt tags, otherwise they don’t register.

Degradeability

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SpeedGoogle recently revealed that speed of websites will be thrown into their algorithm. Likely that other search engines will follow suit.

Studies also show that visitors spend less time on slow sites, and buy less stuff.

The golden loading time is 1.5 seconds –get under that and you put yourself in the lead.

ContentCONTENT

The most important of them all, and the most costly in every sense of the word.

This isn’t even SEO, its just truth: your website needs to be

worth visiting.

ContentBasically, you need people to want to visit your site, and to link to it. The only way to do

that is through awesome content.

Sure, keywords are important in your text, but “keyword stuffing” will get you

blacklisted. Meta tags and page titles should match content keywords.

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Links, Structure and Content. Easy.However, whilst learning them takes 5 minutes, applying them over and over takes years.

Search engines respect age of domains, and age increases numbers of links, visitors.

TIME

It took her 18 years, but if Brad Pitt ever searches his own name, Doris has finally got her

personal website top.

» Code.google.com/speed : links to awesome tools» Webpagetest.org : fast, free simple speed checker» Google webmaster tools :mega capable, a bit complex.» The Noob Guide to SEO

TOOLS

QUESTIONS?

Link to http://allaboutchris.orgwith “Chris Lowry Designer”, or “Slightly less hairy than an ape”.

Wanna say thanks?