SEO Tips We Can All Use

On March 19, 4/5ths of the Finn Digital team attended the latest Milwaukee Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) event featuring Brent Payne, director of search engine optimization for Tribune Interactive.

Brent provided an overview of what search engine optimization (SEO) entails, statistics on how Googlebot calculates its search algorithm for the powerhouse search engine Google, and useful tools we can all use to evaluate how our websites measure up.

Some Key Takeaways:

There are roughy 2,000 queries made per second on Google. While that number may seem impressive, it's key to remember that 87% of people don't go past the first page of Google's search results, which is why it's so important to rank in that first page.

Google's search listings automatically refreshes every 30 days, so your updated content will appear in the search refreshed at a bare minimum once a month. But if Google deems your site "important" enough, it's web crawlers--known as spiders--will review your page and update your listings more often.

How do you get your site to be "spidered" or "crawled" more often? Update your content and make sure it's relevant. Google looks for three things, particularly for inbound and outbound links for your website: popularity, authority, and relevance. It's not just about the number of links coming in and out (popularity) but where the links come from (e.g., links from .gov and .edu will have greater "authority" than links from John Doe's blog) and how relevant both the links and the associated content are.

GoogleBot is the search "robot" that crawls the millions of websites on the Internet for links/code and has 3 key attributes that need to be kept in mind: it's literal, it needs context, and it's blind. GoogleBot only crawls the information it finds on the website, and doesn't understand jokes or "clever" content. It sees the text/code and that's what it uses for its calculations (again proving that relevance is key). It uses the links as jumping points to build context for its search, so if all of your links are about X product and they link to other websites about X product, it increases the context being created. Finally, it's blind: GoogleBot cannot see iFrame content (HTML content inside HTML content), JavaScript, Flash elements, or images (so sites that are all Flash, like some of the larger companies, can be "blank" to GoogleBot). It only reads text and links, so good web developers (like the ones we have here at Finn Digital) update the code to allow for crawlers to recognize Flash and images. It's more work, but a small effort in boosting SEO.

When doing searches, Google hits your home page most often, so keep your newest, updated, relevant content here.

Keywords are vital to increasing your SEO. The URLs, content, and links on your website pages should have key phrases in them to boost relevance. Remember that Google doesn't find possessives, acronyms (unless popularly known within your industry), or plurals to be very important as long as the rest of the key word/phrase is intact. A great tool for checking your keywords: Google Keyword Reserach Tool.

GoogleTrends: to keep up with all of the changes on Google, check out GoogleTrends. This will provide the top 100 queries in the last hour by percentage of increase, making it easier to track just what's "hot" and what's not. To review search terms within vertical markets, try Google Insights for Search.

Don't delete your content! It's possible to repurpose your content to boost SEO. If you need to remove content, use a 301 redirect to keep all of those SEO power already built up to transfer to your new page (a good web developer can help with this!).

Most importantly, have a web analytics program like Google Analytics or Omniture installed for your website so you can keep track of your own traffic and be able to boost SEO yourself.

You can also view the entire presentation here

follow Brent Payne via twitter if you want more information.

-Tiff P.
Media Project Manager