Basic SEO Final Chapter

[ Basic SEO: One – Two – Three – Four – Five ]

Basic SEO 1-4 was intended to be a quick lesson for web site owners that want to get some basics out of the way before they put a pro “on the job”.  You should continue to create good content. You should also be ready for intermediate SEO work which includes link building. If you aren’t ready to hire a pro then I am listing more advanced articles for you to continue on your quest for the Holy Search Grail. Keep in mind, just like some people will never be able to solve computer hardware and software issues some of you will never be able to perform good SEO. I know there are some popular posts right now about SEO being easy enough for a cave man, or it’s all a scam but it’s really like any profession. Some people excel at it and some don’t and never will.

Read More on SEO:

SEO Basics – Aaron Wall from SEO Book gives a more in-depth look at the basics.

Beginners guide to SEO – Hobo SEO has a nice PDF you can download for SEO beginners.

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Basic SEO For Everyone Chapter 4

[ Basic SEO: One – Two – Three – Four – Five ]

header elementsIf you read chapter 1, 2, 3, then welcome back. If not then you can read SEO Basics 1,2,3 here.
Let’s look at the heading element. There are 6 levels defined H1 – H6. Let’s keep it simple, you should have one H1 on each page and it should be a well crafted description of the entire page content. Yes, I am aware that Matt Cutts said you can have multiple H1 elements on a page. He didn’t say you should, just that you can. Without too much detail I say if you have the content for two H1 tags on a page then you might have enough content for two pages.
You can have multiple H2 elements and normally they would be the title of each section on the page.  H3-H6 can be used in each section to define subsections. When used properly the heading elements create an order that is easy to follow. It sounds like a lesson in HTML but it is very useful in organizing content. The search engines understand headings and they love organized content, so will your readers.

Back in the day (1 year ago?) people were big on keyword density. It was abused and it has been addressed. As usual, good content that reads well works best. Yes, you should do keyword research and you need to use keywords in your content but there isn’t a magic number you need to hit. Let it read natural.

What about copy writing? You can optimize copy after it’s written but it’s usually easier if you keep search optimization in mind while you are writing new content. Have someone that is not afraid to tell you the truth read your copy. If you aren’t good at it then get someone else to do it even if you have to pay for it. It doesn’t have to be great, it just needs to offer what your visitors are looking for and it needs to be easy to read unless your target audience is all propeller heads or Kris Kristofferson.

added: If your headings don’t include your primary keywords for that page then you might have a structure problem. I am not talking about going back and spamming the headings. If you didn’t naturally include the primary keywords in the heading elements then you should re-evaluate the need for the page.

Move on to advanced SEO.

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Is Twitter The Future of Search?

After reading the interviews BusinessWeek did this month with Google execs I started thinking a little more about search, where it’s headed and what effect it will have on SEOs and search marketers. You get the feeling that Twitter has search in turmoil. Both Microsoft and Google are trying to cut deals with Twitter to license Twitter feeds. In the Business Week interview Matt Cutts makes a comment that Google had crawled BusinessWeek 7 minutes before he visited it. Sadly he tried to imply that this was unique to using Google, going as far as saying other search engines could be 4 or 5 days. In my research Bing has been crawling news sites nonstop for a while. The point is that Bing and Google are very concerned with real time, Twitter has proved that real time is where it’s at.
When asked about an option to request Google results for the last 5 minutes Udi Manber, vice-president of engineering and head of the search quality group, responds “we already have that” but in the very next breath he says it’s 24 hours not 5 minutes. It’s obvious the reality of Twitter’s appeal is on his mind. tweety Does the fight for Twitter feeds mean we will see #1 and #2 results dominated by inane comments from Twitter in the future? Let’s hope not.
Amit Singhal runs the core ranking team at Google and in his interview with NewsWeek he does calm some of my fears but he also has Twitter on his mind. When answering the question “what about truly real-time search?” Amit includes in his answer “it’s not just Twitter”. Yes, it appears Twitter is on everyone’s mind. He does say that just because something is said right now doesn’t mean it should be put in front of the search results.
Who knows, maybe quality will remain the goal and we won’t see search dumbed down to reality TV.
What about Eric Schmidt? He has something to say about Twitter too. His concern is how to rank the data and include it in results. He makes the comment that “Twitter and Facebook aren’t the last things we’ll see”.
So what does all the chatter and concern about Twitter and Facebook mean for the SEO business? I can see a real issue if the search giants don’t have the resources for real-time. They might reduce the crawl on the small business sites to weeks or months so they can increase crawl times for popular sites to minutes. We might find it takes much longer to get a new site listed or a new design or content indexed. It could also be the next blow to quality. We saw what AdSense did to the web so I can imagine the SPAM tactics that will evolve once real time is indexed.

Time will tell, tweet on.

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SEO Meets Politics

I check my email this morning and I have a link to a political piece titled Nowhere Else To Go and then I hit Twitter and I find a link to a new post by Aaron Wall about how the SEO industry went corporate. Aaron could have easily titled his post “Nowhere Else to Go“. The crossroads in these two articles are alarming. One difference is that you have two political parties that are the same but sell themselves as representing two different cultures and in the SEO article you realize we really only have Google. Some people pray for Bing or Yahoo or a combination to catch up with Big G but will it matter? Or will we just have two parties that play favorites to Corporate America while stepping all over the little guy and our Internet freedom? With Google we already have things like the dreaded eviction notice from AdSense:

“While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we’ve decided to disable your account”

You have just been declared an Internet terrorist, try to figure out why. If you are a scammer then you know why but what about all the poor saps that don’t have a clue why they were banned? You can’t get any information from Google other than a canned response on their website. Basically their claim is that they can’t tell you what you did wrong or everyone would stop doing it and search wouldn’t be as safe. What? Their advice is to admit in an email that you broke the rules and promise never to do it again. First you have to undo what you did that you don’t know about? Cop a plea to a charge you disagree with when they have provided no evidence.

A friend of mine jokes all the time “Google is the CIA“. Sometimes I laugh, but only sometimes.
Aaron quotes Google as saying “the reason that so many people come to Google is that for the last decade, we’ve worked really hard to protect our users“. Ahh, the infamous we only step all over you to protect you, there will be long lines and forms in triplicate but it’s for your own good.
Someone I follow on Twitter mentioned an issue with a key phrase dropping in the SERPs after some link building and I can only wish him luck and feel his pain because we have to guess what it takes to fix the issues. Once again Google can’t tell us what we did wrong (in their eyes) because we might stop doing it. I can tell you. You know what you did? You tried to compete with Corporate America, you bastard.

Now we have the Government asking everyone to spy on his neighbor and rat him out for anything “out of the ordinary” and we have Google begging the little SEO to rat out his competition. The weaklings will be indoctrinated and sell their own freedom so they can be “friends” of Google (or the Feds).
What can we do? Nothing, you have already lost, you just haven’t figured it out yet. You are still moving your chess pieces around but the big boys left the table a long time ago. They only play with each other now. Enjoy the left overs.

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Facebook Pages in SERPs

It’s happening! Small companies that can’t afford high dollar SEO work are starting to see their Facebook Business Pages appear in the search engine results. They can get results for keywords faster and cheaper on Facebook than they can’t get with their own company website by leveraging Facebook’s authority. Will we start seeing more abuse with long keyword stuffed page names? Probably, just like page sculpting with the nofollow tag we will once again see how creative the populace is when it comes to taking advantage of something. Is there a new policy for business pages on the horizon? Should there be? Eventually it all works out just like hidden text, keyword meta abuse, and 60 character 10 hyphen domain names but how long will it last or how far will it go is yet to be seen.

Don’t get left behind, get your business on facebook but beware, your content will be indexed and it should convey a feeling of professionalism. Every marketing avenue that leads to your company is another door to your store, be careful what you put on display in the window.

Check out Hubspots free eBook: How To Use Facebook for Business

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