What’s in a name? In SEO, potentially a lot

By Karen DeJarnette | Published: May 3, 2011

In the world of online business, you can live and die by your name, which for small business owners usually translates into your site’s domain name URL. If you’re a spammer, you likely don’t care about your business name’s URL. Spammers buy domain names by the hundreds (or even thousands) and use each one as a disposable commodity for their nefarious activities. Once a domain name becomes associated with web spam activities, it faces punitive measures from the engines, often rendering it valueless. The spammers simply ditch that domain name and move on to the next, and the spam wars go on and on.

Most legitimate companies, however, value their domain name, and don’t want to do anything to damage it. In fact, these companies invest time, energy, and money to build their online business identities around these domain names.

The domain names of smaller businesses are often the names of the founder/sole proprietor. As such, the names of people often become business names. That’s cool. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. Unless…

How do you spell that?

If the spelling of the words in the personal name are outside of the norm, then it becomes tricky. Worse yet is when the words of the name are pronounced in a familiar way but are spelled differently. If such a business advertises in audio media such as radio, this can be really problematic. And with the Internet, just like with your English teacher in school, spelling counts. Big time.

I’ve recently worked with a couple of such businesses who faced this exact scenario. Both of these businesses recognized early on that the preferred spelling of the business domain names were not what people would naturally type in a browser bar upon hearing the name. So both wisely bought additional domain names as secondary spelling variations of the primary domain. This was a very wise and important step, but neither business finished the job of optimizing the setup so that it would benefit their site for search.

Double Trouble

To main business confidentiality, for business example No. 1, let’s use the fictitious name of Jayne Smythe as the small business proprietor. Let’s say Jayne bought the following variations of her name as domain names (remember, these are fictitious examples!):

  1. jaynesmythe.com
  2. jaynesmith.com
  3. janesmythe.com
  4. janesmith.com

The first domain name in the above list was the intended primary domain name, but it was obvious that any of the four domain names might be used by web users for directly browsing to the site or for search engine navigation queries, with the fourth domain name in the list being the most likely used variation.

To capture all of the potential misspelled web traffic, Jayne set up a full site for each of the four domain names, each completely independent of one another, but each one containing the same content. Worst of all, that site content was heavily updated on a daily basis, so there was quite a bit of logistical work to do to create and update all of the fresh content between the four variations of the same site. I’m not sure who suggested this setup, but I can imagine it must have cost Jayne a good deal of money to maintain this needlessly complex configuration.

Aside from potential maintenance costs, the additional search engine optimization (SEO) problems were multifold. For starters, each site’s domain name was competing for search engine rank against the three other variations for the same keywords, thus diluting the rank potential for the given content. In addition to that, the consequences of having all four site hosting duplicate content meant that when search engines discovered and purged the dupe content in the index, Jayne had no control over which site’s version was maintained. This splintered the source of all that great content between the four sites, making the whole thing a search engine mess.

Before I began my work with this business, I ran a Google search on the No. 4 variation, the most common spelling of the business name, intentionally knowing it was not the intended primary spelling. I found the business listed twice in the top 10! Competition is good, but not when it is against yourself!

I recommended that Jayne immediately stop providing new content to URL variations 2, 3, and 4 of the above list. Instead, she needed to shut down those duplicate sites, and then set up permanent (301) redirects for all URLs within those alternative domains to the primary domain URL. This would stop the costly maintenance work, prevent existing backlinks from breaking, yet also enable the primary URL to earn search engine credit for those misspelled links. I also recommended some significant changes in page metadata (keyword optimizing the <title> tags and adding descriptive text to previously blank <meta> description tags).

Within one month of publishing those changes, the targeted primary domain saw an 11% rise in traffic, consolidated its rankings, and enjoyed a 17% increase in new users. And now when Jayne does a Google search for her misspelled name (no matter which variation), her primary domain earns the #1, #2, and #3 spots out of the top 10. That’s how it’s supposed to be!

Finishing the redirect job right

Business No. 2 was in a similar spot. Using the slightly different fictitious name of Jayne Smith for this example, she wanted web visitors to go to her namesake domain, jaynesmith.com. But realizing that janesmith.com was the more likely spelling web users would type upon hearing the name spoken, she wisely bought that second domain name as well.

Unfortunately, the second domain was set up incorrectly in terms of SEO. For starters, while it did use an HTTP redirect, it erroneously employed a temporary (302) redirect instead of the important-for-SEO 301 redirect.

This detail is important because search engines interpret a temporary 302 redirect as just that – temporary. If a business temporarily sold out of their top-selling XYZ widget, they could set up a 302 for the widget’s sales page URL to point to a “Sorry, temporarily sold out” page URL until new inventory arrives. The use of the 302 maintains the original URL’s search engine rank, so when the temporary redirect is removed, the original URL still has its original rank. But web servers often employ 302 redirects as their default redirect type, and many webmasters unknowingly use this by mistake for all redirects. In the above example, a permanent 301 redirect is in order. A 301 causes search engines to transfer all previously earned ranking value earned by the old URL over to the new URL. A long term use of a 302 does nothing to help the redirect’s target page to consolidate search engine rank value.

The second issue was that the 302 redirected the user to a deep link within the primary domain. Given that the user was attempting to reach the site’s home page, albeit at the secondary domain, this must have led to visitor confusion, bounces, and lost opportunities for conversions.

Again, I recommended the use of a 301 redirect from the second domain to the first, and then target the redirect to point to the home page at the root of the primary domain. Within one month after updating the redirect, Jayne noted a 16% increase in the number of search engine referrals, which then grew to 25% during the next month. She was very pleased with the results.

Canonicalization

The common theme here is domain canonicalization – the process of determining which version of multiple domain names is the primary (or canonical) version. Once identified, webmasters need to drive all of their traffic to the canonical domain name.

Since you can’t control what your users search for or how others link to you, set up your site’s entry points to act as a giant funnel, which gathers many more potential visitors and use redirects to guide them to the site of your choice. When this happens with search bots, you get the added benefit of having the search index content funneled to the one, canonical domain. And given that search engines index content by URLs, you can consolidate all potential ranking dilutions to the canonical URL, maximizing its rank value.

Your business name is your identity. While a unique name can be memorable and thus be very positive, if the words in the name are unfamiliar to your target audience or the words use atypical spellings, it can also be a source of frustration for potential customers who want to find you but cannot. Anticipate their needs, know what they are likely to do, and set up your site’s name so it can be easily found (even if the easy way to spell it is not the intended business name). Once you acquire the various domain names you need, use 301 redirects for all of the alternative names back to the canonical one to ensure that any web searches and erroneously typed URLs in backlinks to your site will still work, thereby benefitting both your customers and you.

There’s even more to canonicalization considerations. We’ll get into those details soon. Until then! red diamond logo

Posted in canonicalization, SEO | Leave a comment

How to write good

By Karen DeJarnette | Published: April 21, 2011

Long ago, when I was first starting out in writing, I came across a ridiculous list of writing tips and advice that used ironic humor (which I adore!) to define how to be a better writer. Over the years, I kept building up that list with new finds and added a few of my own pet peeve contributions. To this day I still keep a copy of this page posted in my workspace, as sometimes a small laugh will help melt away temporary stress.

As this blog is also supposed to cover writing web content, I thought I’d have a little fun and share my list of advices on how to write good.

Here are several very important but often forgotten rules of English:

  1. Always avoid annoying alliteration.
  2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
  3. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
  4. Avoid clichés like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
  5. Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
  6. Employ the vernacular.
  7. Keep tabs on the use of idioms.
  8. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
  9. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
  10. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
  11. Contractions aren’t necessary and shouldn’t be used.
  12. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
  13. Only idiots make generalizations.
  14. Also too, never, ever, use repetitive redundancies.
  15. A writer must not shift your point of view.
  16. Eliminate quotations. As Emerson once said: “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
  17. Profanity sucks.
  18. Corect speling is esential.
  19. Be more or less specific.
  20. Understatement is always best.
  21. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
  22. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
  23. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
  24. Jims grammar book’s say you shouldnt use apostrophe’s with plural’s, but theyre proper with possessive’s and contraction’s.
  25. Never use a big word when a diminutive one would suffice.
  26. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of ten or more words, to their antecedents.
  27. Just between you and I, case is important.
  28. Kill all exclamation points!!!
  29. Don’t use no double negatives.
  30. If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times: Resist hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use it correctly.
  31. Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words however should be enclosed in commas.
  32. Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
  33. Puns are for children, not for groan-ups.
  34. The adverb always follows the verb.
  35. The passive voice is to be avoided.
  36. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
  37. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
  38. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
  39. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
  40. Who needs rhetorical questions?
  41. Don’t be redundant; don’t more use words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
  42. A subject should always agree with their predicate.
  43. Do not add emphasis UNLESS it is really, really necessary!
  44. Their are too many people who mix up they’re adjectives and pronouns with there contractions.
  45. Avoid run-on sentences, these are sentences that are strung together, they should be separated by periods.
  46. While sentence fragments are also bad.
  47. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
  48. Try not two confuse the numeral too with its preposition and adverb homonyms to many times.
  49. Use an apostrophe with “it” in it’s proper place (as a contraction) and omit it when its not needed (as a possessive).
  50. Eschew obfuscation.
  51. To loose track of proper word usage will make people think you have a screw lose.
  52. Only use question marks with questions? How will anyone otherwise know you are asking a question.
  53. Sentences without verbs nonsense.
  54. Should have subject, too.

I’ll be back soon with more interesting, helpful, and fun thoughts! red diamond logo

Posted in humor, miscellaneous, writing | 1 Response

Metadata on metadata

By Karen DeJarnette | Published: April 14, 2011

One of the things often omitted from a website by web developers is metadata. You can hardly blame them. The are focused on getting the page to display correctly, checking links (hopefully!) to other pages and media content, and if we’re lucky, developing interesting and compelling original content. All of that work takes time and effort. Who cares about <head> tag junk and alt text? No one, right?

Well, I can name at least one group of web users who care deeply about metadata: search engine crawlers (aka spiders, robots, or just simply bots). So why would search bots give a coder’s patootie about detailed minutiae like metadata? Well, it all comes down to how they process information. They can’t “see” and “interpret” webpage content the way you and I can. As such, the metadata (or descriptive information) about a webpage helps the bot better comprehend what it sees. And because that information is specifically intended to describe the content of the webpage, it is accorded a high level of credence by search engines.

And if you think about it, that makes sense. A page title is supposed to be a one-line synopsis of the entire content on the page! Talk about your concise, digital executive summary! That kind of boiled down content is exactly what the search engine wants to see. Why? Because it is supposed to represent a descriptive essence of the page, the text used in metadata tags is usually considered by the search engines to be excellent fodder for associating keyword relevance. (Yes, there are caveats to this, and we’ll get to them momentarily.) Keywords are a critically important method used by search engines to associate your pages’ content to queries made by searchers. Search engine optimization – it’s starting to make some sense now (I hope!).

Now that you know this little revelation about metadata, do you still think that writing metadata is unimportant in the grand scheme of things? If your website has any illusions about earning search engine rank, you need to tell their bots about the content you have on your site. Metadata is a surefire way of filling in those digital blanks.

Which tags matter?

In my earlier post, , I listed the top 13 things you need to know about SEO. That list, as concise as it was, specifically mentioned several metadata tags (and conspicuously omitted others) as very important elements to note, adhere to, and consider carefully. Let’s dig a little deeper here.

<title> tag text

The <title> tag is the most important metadata tag on the page. From the search bot’s perspective, it concisely describes the contents of the entire page. Well, it’s supposed to. While no loud alarms blare when you put two paragraphs of text in the title (or worse yet, leave it blank), for SEO purposes, they should. Search bots want to see between 5 and 65 characters used, including spaces. Titles that are too short are simply useless at describing the page content. On the other hand, titles that are too long will be truncated (and the overflow ignored) when they are displayed as the blue link text of the Google and Bing search engine results pages (SERPs). The hard maximum length is often closer to 70 these days, but not always, so 65 is a good compromise at a maximum length of <title> tag text.

Note that the words used at the start of the <title> tag text are given the most weight by search engines. That said, no person wants to read a keyword dump list, so write your <title> tag text strategically yet naturally. Also know that the best keywords you have for the page should be used in BOTH the <title> tag and somewhere in the body text of the page. That duplication reinforces them as being a high-value descriptor.

Lastly, unless your brand is your most searched-for keyword, always place your brand name (aka site name) at the end of the <title> tag text, so your other keywords can bask in the glory of that higher SEO value position.

<img> alt text

Search bots can’t “see” images. To help them understand what the image contains, always include the alt attribute in <img> tags used for content (skip it for color blocks, spacers, and the like). The length of your keyword-rich alt text should be between 25-150 characters, including spaces. Similar to <title> tags, the words used at the start of the tag have the most value to search bots. As such, it’s typically recommended that you put copyright attributions at the end of alt text.

When you write your alt text descriptions, always consider the context of the image to the page contents. For example, let’s say your image is a photo of a wine bottle. What would be the best alt text to use? The answer lies in the theme of the page. What if your page is about visiting a popular Pinot Noir winery in Oregon? What if your page is about collecting avant-garde wine bottle labels? What if your page is about recycling green glass? In any of these cases, would alt text reading “wine bottle” advance the theme of the page? I don’t think so.

<meta> description text

The <meta> tag using the description attribute is an important piece of metadata, but in a different way from the aforementioned tags. Its contents currently have little to no value in terms of ranking (due to past abuses of keyword stuffing). However, the text found there is most often used by search engines as the “snippet” description of the site placed under the blue link text in the SERPs. As such, this important text is your big chance to sell your page to searchers. Describe it well, use compelling language, and it’ll convert SERP impressions into clicks.

Limit <meta> description text to no more than 160 characters, including spaces, to keep it from being truncated in the SERP. Use natural language, but where possible, add a few keywords into its text. Not because the bots will use them for ranking relevance, but because keyword matches in queries are highlighted in the SERP page, and highlighted words in your snippet will draw attention to your listing.

<h1> tag text

The <h1> tag is not commonly considered a metadata tag, but I’m adding it here. Originally designed as a display formatting tag, it’s now considered to be more of a data description tag whose content serves as the visible, in-body headline of the page. Sadly, this key tag is often omitted from pages by designers, developers, and content authors alike. But imagine a newspaper with lots of articles but no headlines. It would be much harder to read and understand. Folks who omit the <h1> tag are building the same thing in the eyes of search bots.

Use descriptive keywords in your <h1> tag, limiting the length to between 10 & 200 characters, and for goodness sakes, don’t use more than one <h1> tag per page! Printed articles only get one headline – using more than one on your webpage only confuses the issue for bots on which one is the real headline, thereby diminishing the SEO value of both!

Lastly, don’t copy the contents of the <title> tag text for your <h1> text. You can add more text in the <h1> than you can in the <title>. Make the most of it. Besides, duplicating the text between these two tags means you’ve missed a great opportunity to build relevance for more keywords.

Don’t sweat the other stuff (as much)

Other <meta> tags with various attributes can be important to pages with international audiences. I refer you to an older blog article I wrote on optimizing <head> tag content for additional information on them.

A common question I get is what to do about the <meta> keyword tag? The answer is… not much. Here’s the scoop: web spammers so heavily abused this tag’s content in the past with keyword stuffing that the search engines long ago stopped using this tag for keyword ranking. Now that said, the ranking factors used in the search engine algorithms number in the hundreds, and the ranking factors (and their priorities) change constantly (the recent Google Panda update and its affect on some major websites is just one example). When the various search engine algorithm teams eventually decide that web spammers have given up stuffing this tag, it may start coming back into use as a ranking factor. Maybe.

As such, if you have lots of free time on your hands, you can feel free to add some secondary, lesser value keywords to this tag. But if you have anything else you could be doing to optimize the pages on your site, do that first. Consider the <meta> keyword tag to be your last priority effort for SEO.

I’ll continue to explore my again soon. Later. red diamond logo

Posted in keywords, metadata, SEO | Leave a comment

Instant gratification vs. SEO

By Karen DeJarnette | Published: March 28, 2011

In my previous post, , I started my baker’s dozen list with a critically important insight: “SEO isn’t an overnight success story or a one-time effort.” It’s page rank at #1 was not coincidental.

This is a very important statement for SEOs to convey to their clients and for webmasters to understand. You need to set expectations. The trouble is that all of us today live in a world of instant gratification. We are used to getting into a car when we want to go somewhere rather than waiting for a ride on the bus. We are used to buying songs from the Internet and listening to them immediately rather than going to the store and buying a record album. We are used to ordering pre-made food (or a poor, approximate facsimile thereof) wrapped in paper (or plastic!) and eating within seconds of paying for it rather than cooking a meal from scratch. Our Internet connections are super-fast (remember 4800 bps modems?), our TVs controlled by wireless remotes (who needs to get off the couch?), we use speed dial on our phones (who memorizes phone numbers anymore?), and we send text messages from those phones from anywhere at any time (why bother to talk?). Who has the time or patience to wait for anything?

So when a client hires a search engine optimization consultant (or when a webmaster performs his or her own SEO work on a site), isn’t it natural to expect instant results? After all, search engines crawl the whole damn web, index all of its contents, and then provide us with the best, most relevant results to our random search queries as fast as our broadband connections can show the page. Results are instantaneous with search engines, right?

Reality check

Well, not so fast, Bucko. Let’s consider what a search engine has to do to be able to serve those results. While serving up query results may be fast, little else is (for most sites, anyway. Active news content sites move faster than most others due to the nature of their content).

Note to my readers: As in much of life if not more so, the SEO world is littered with caveats. I’ll try to provide them as necessary and relevant in my posts.

When an optimized set of pages are published, they have to wait to be crawled. That takes time (sometimes a fair amount of time). Once the crawler comes, it may not crawl the whole site. Of the URLs crawled, it may not index all of them. Of those that are indexed, the content has to be parsed for keywords to create query relevance. Once done, the quality of the content affects how the relevance to those keywords is assessed. Then that content is compared to other, existing indexed content with the same relevance and the rankings are updated. This cycle happens continuously. Your competition is continuously changing their content, perhaps even undergoing their own SEO campaign. And then search engines continuously change their algorithms, which affects the rankings, which URLs are indexed, even if some URLs are crawled.

If you run CNN, your site is constantly crawled for new content. If your site is Amazon, you get a lot of search crawler time and attention across your whole site. Those sites (and similar, high-authority sites) get that degree of attention because searchers actively seek their content. The rest of us, however, have to work hard just to be noticed. Luckily, if you implement your SEO campaign wisely, such as identifying relevant keywords, filling out keyword-rich metadata fields in pages, offering plenty of unique and high-quality content, and building a good set of high-quality backlinks, you’ll create a virtuous circle that runs like this:

Good content –> crawler attention –> searcher interest –> higher rank –> crawler attention –> searcher interest –> higher rank –> … and so on.

If you keep feeding that cycle with new, good content, it’ll thrive like my Italian Sweet Basil plants in my AeroGarden! (Who knew they’d grow to be nearly 3’ tall?) Just understand this cycle ascends more like the path of a coil spring, not a rocket ship. You won’t earn the full benefit overnight. You need time to demonstrate a consistent workflow that the crawlers see, improvements that are reliably there, and earn a resulting strong traffic flow before you earn the full confidence of the search engines they need to have trust in your site.

The 4th dimension of SEO

When talking to clients, I like to use the metaphor of wealth building. Everyone in management understands this. If you are a 25-year-old and invest your first $100 into your first 401(k) plan, you don’t have $2,000,000 overnight (even Bernie Madoff’s scam Ponzi scheme wasn’t that absurdly overhyped). You need time to build your wealth. Investing in SEO is very much like that. If you invest only once, your potential for growth is limited compared to those who invest regularly. Same goes if you invest too little. If you invest in SEO way too aggressively (or worse, illegitimately), you can lose everything and be left with nothing of value. Invest wisely and allow time for the investment to work.

Now if you have a client who just insists that they must be at the top of the first page of a search engine results page (SERP) with little effort, there is only one sure-fire and legitimate way to do that – you need to buy search ads! But don’t misunderstand me here. Buying search ads in Google and/or Bing won’t elevate your “natural” or “organic” search ranking with them one iota. But if you bid well, you’ll be the top listing in the sponsored links section for a relevant query SERP! But, of course, that goes away the moment you stop your search engine marketing campaign.

So, in your attempt to earn the #1 rank in the organic SERP list, you either need to optimize for the long tail of search (where there is much less competition – and business opportunity – on a per-keyword basis) or you must do everything better than every one of your competitors for head search terms (aka the most popular – and competitive – keywords for a topic). Even if that was possible, nothing is guaranteed. And because nothing is guaranteed, the best bet is to resign yourself to the reality that legitimate SEO takes time to earn full benefits. Remember: Wealth-building. AeroGarden basil. Yeah, you get it.

So my friends, do the hard work, be consistent in your efforts, stay legitimate, monitor your site’s traffic and/or conversions over time (and then plan to revisit your SEO efforts on a regular basis to further improve upon your last effort). It’s all good.

But there’s really no silver bullet with SEO. However, there are a lot of ways to shoot yourself in the foot by trying over-aggressively (I’ll cover that later on). Time and good work are your best bets for sustained success. Pass on the word.

More thoughts on my soon. See you again shortly. red diamond logo

Posted in management, SEO | 1 Response

Everything you need to know about SEO

By Karen DeJarnette | Published: March 17, 2011

I was challenged recently to create a single PowerPoint slide that lists everything someone would need to know about search engine optimization (SEO).

Everything? On one slide? Without using microscopic fonts? Is this even possible? There are many reference books published on the subject of SEO (thick ones with small print and not an over-abundance of images), and I’m sure their authors would be loathe to claim they had actually covered everything there is to know about SEO.

That said, I was asked to do this, and I like a good challenge. Now if you ever read any of my posts when I wrote for Bing Webmaster Center blog, you’d know that I can be, well, perhaps a tad verbose. Hey, I like context! I like thoroughness! I like revealing important caveats! My goal is always to be 100% understood the first time through. So how could I possibly condense a book’s worth of material down to one slide?

Through sheer determination, I mustered up my willingness to let go of my aforementioned biases (aka foibles). I decided to just go for brevity and let all of the caveats and context blow away like so many autumn leaves (nice imagery, huh? I like imagery, too!).

So, after much deliberation, here is what I came up with. I know it’s not complete. I know there are caveats left unexplained. Heck, it was originally supposed to be a Top 10 list! I got it down to 13 and declared it done.

Let’s see how this flies in public. Here goes nothing:

Top “baker’s dozen” things you need to know about SEO

  1. SEO isn’t an overnight success story or a one-time effort. Like wealth-building, investing in SEO takes time and continued effort to earn full benefits.
  2. Research keywords using qualified tools, create a targeted list per page, and use them in multiple places on the page (in key content & metadata tags, and in domain, folder, & file names).
  3. The <title> tag is the most important tag for SEO. Write unique titles for each page, putting the most valuable keywords at the start and site branding last. Avoid exceeding 65 characters (including spaces).
  4. Write page-relevant, descriptive alt text for content images, placing the most valuable keywords first and copyrights & attributions at the end – search bots can’t “see” image contents like humans. Keep the text between 25-150 characters (including spaces).
  5. Create only <h1> tag per page, using descriptive, keyword-rich text, to serve as the page’s headline. Do not exceed 200 characters (including spaces).
  6. Write compelling <meta> descriptions for search engine results page (SERP) snippets – this text is what converts SERP impressions into clicks. Do not exceed 160 characters (including spaces).
  7. Every page should offer a reasonable amount of crawlable, descriptive, keyword-laced text for search bots to consume. This helps them develop more keyword relevance to your pages.
  8. Write unique content per page. Having duplicate text across multiple pages can diminish the SEO value of that text on all affected pages.
  9. Submit a validated Sitemap.xml file identifying your most important content pages to search engines via their webmaster tools. Be sure to reference your Sitemap file in your robots.txt file.
  10. Canonicalize your URLs to eliminate duplicate content and diluted page rank in the index.
  11. Avoid putting text content to be crawled inside of images, JavaScript, Silverlight, or Flash – bots can’t reliably read it, so it won’t get indexed.
  12. Get backlinks from relevant, high-quality, authoritative sites. They convey great value to the recipient site.
  13. Don’t expect to get high rank for a newly-published page. Search engine “trust” takes time to build.

So there it is. But you see how I did that? Each list item actually contains several discrete, related tips (parse it out and you’ll see). But I have to admit, it still wasn’t enough. I simply couldn’t help myself. In my single PowerPoint slide, I had to include a few key caveats in the Notes section (I know no one reads that stuff, but I put it in anyway). Here’s what I included there:

The above list is strictly general SEO information. Details:

  • #2: Excellent tools include Google Adwords and adCenter’s Microsoft Advertising Intelligence.
  • #3: <title> text longer than 70 characters will be clipped in the SERP’s blue link.
  • #6: <meta> description text longer than 160 characters will be clipped in the SERP’s snippet.
  • #7: What is a reasonable amount of crawlable body text? It’s debatable, but as a rule of thumb, include enough text to describe the contents or the theme of the page. (This is a long and detailed subject.)
  • #10: “Canonicalize” means to identify the one genuine URL for a page and perform technical configurations that refer all other variant URLs to the canonicalized one. (This is another very long and detailed subject.)
  • #12: Organic, legitimate link building can be a difficult and laborious process that takes much time and effort. But that is one of the factors that distinguishes common sites from authoritative sites.
  • #13: Don’t always take down seasonal pages after the event has passed. Instead, update the existing content at the published URLs every year.

OK, so there’s no mention of the proper use of redirects, using lesser header tags, avoiding web spam techniques, and so on. There’s countless things I left out, but there it is. It’s my take on the top 13 things you need to know about SEO. What’s on your list? Let me know. I’ll be back again soon. red diamond logo

Posted in keywords, management, metadata, SEO | Leave a comment

Hello World? Really?

By Karen DeJarnette | Published: March 13, 2011
A woman sitting on a road cries amid the ruins of the city of Natori, Japan.

Reprinted from MSNBC, photographer Asahi Shimbun of Reuters

This was supposed to be the first post of my new, professional blog concerning my interests in search engine optimization and web content development strategies. I have so many stories to tell, advice to share, and, quite frankly, still so many things to learn about all this that I was eager to get the ball rolling. I somehow found a rare, unclaimed .COM domain name that contained the term “SEO” that was not 57 characters long. I bought the domain, set up the blog platform, found a suitable, plain, unobtrusive blog theme to play with, and got it all set up to go. Then out of the blue, the world shook like hell, and right now all of this seems pretty damn unimportant.

Instead of mulling over what the ancient (at least in terms of the computer industry) and silly concept of “Hello World” means to me, I am in shock. I am horrified, humbled, and devastated by the events taking place right now in Japan as I write this first post. So rather than using this inaugural post to talk about me and my work, I am going to keep this short and to the point.

If you can do so, please join me in helping the people in Japan affected by the enormous Sendai earthquake, subsequent tsunami, and possible nuclear reactor disaster(s). These folks need our help right now. Please visit one or more of the following charitable sites:

There are many other worthy charities that are working hard to come to the aid of the Japanese people – sorry I could not list them all. Sadly, there are also a few sleazeballs on the Internet who are using this catastrophe as a means to scam well-meaning people out of their money. Please watch out for these lowlifes. Please go directly to the charity site of your choice to donate rather than responding to possible email spam.

We’ll soon get back to our regularly scheduled programming, but I just had to acknowledge these tragic world events. Be back at you soon. red diamond logo

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