SEO tips – a few comments
My friend and colleague e-Patient Dave, who gives a lot of thought to SEO, sent me a link to a set of good SEO tips from Mark Glaser at PBS’ Mediashift. Some comments:
1. Get inbound and outbound links. Links influence page rank and can reward other folks for talking about your site, but the best way to get links is to create great content. Don’t offer to exchange links with other sites – that’s too twentieth century.
2. Headlines and title tags should have keywords up front. I.e. don’t bury the lede in your headers or elsewhere. The thinking here is that search algorithms give the first few words in the header more weight, but that’s only one reason to consider this advice. It’s just good writing. (Generally good writing = good SEO.)
3. Put keywords in urls. This is sure to be helpful, if it’s within your control.
4. Page descriptions should be unique, or forget ‘em. He’s saying you shouldn’t use the same generic description for all pages, as will often happen on template-driven systems. This isn’t so much about search position as the clarity of the information displayed on the search engine results paid, which might be pulled from the description metatag.
5. Highlight your best content. Good to do, but consider whether it fits your content strategy. SEO may not be the only consideration. I’d say the same for number 6, which suggests creating theme or category pages. Do it if it fits.
7. Show only the most important tags/categories. I’m skeptical that this has a big impact on SEO, but a lot of categories might be less useful to the reader than a focused group.
8. Create a sitemap for Mr. Google and optimize images. The site map has to be helpful if you take time to put it together – it helps Google index your site more efficiently. However don’t think of it as a panacea. It’s not very high on the list.
9. Get into offline conversations as well as online ones. This isn’t really SEO, or even SMO – it’s world of mouth marketing.
