I was thinking about the SEO experience I have and it would be interesting for a thread dedicated to this topic. I think it would be great to have a resource which can be accessed and added to by everybody. Something Like a wiki. What is everyone elses thoughts on this?

 

Dave

I would be a reader and poster! For sure!

 

Oli

I'd love on too - maybe suugestions for the top ten things to do...or the top ten things NOT to do. There are a few SEO experts on the forum and so maybe they could give us the low down...I know I would greatly benefit from their knowledge and so would my clients.

Why not, it would make a nice resource.

Tip No. 1

 

Learn your keywords before you start any optimisation. Don't optimise for what you want, but rather what people are searching for that you provide.

My tip.

 

Do not always target the most common, and therefore most competitive keywords of the industry. You might ultimately waste all efforts made to optimize for those keywords

best tip I have, but this book.

 

http://www.seobook.com/buy-now.shtml

 

I got it, its immense, its updated constantly, and only £40

Makes sure you use your <h1> tag and title tag - they are very important.

 

The title on every page should be different - as they should be the title of that page, and every page on your site is different...thus needing a different title Then use your h1 to backup your title.

 

Try...

 

http://www.webconfs.com/15-minute-seo.php

 

and here:

 

http://websearch.about.com/od/searchengine...ptentipsSEO.htm

 

and...

 

http://www.1stsearchenginerankings.com/200...eful-seo-tools/

 

lastly...

 

http://www.websitepublisher.net/seo-guide/

 

enjoy!

top thread

Here's a great article about SEO for blogs, but the basic ideas could be used for any site:

 

The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs

My seo tip:

Make your site for humans and not for search engines. Think how a human user would access your site and browse through it and make the process easier for him. SEs tend to prefer those sites which follow this tip.

There is an article on www.seomoz.org somewhere that has tips from all the most important people in the SEO industry.. but I can't find it

really good idea i could really use some help in the seo stuff

My tip: SEO is an ongoing process

 

Once your site is finished and gets listed on search engines monitor what's happening for a couple of months. Make notes of your target keywords/phrases that work well (ie have decent search positions) and work on additional words/phrases which don't peform so well. A few tweaks here and there can make a big difference.

 

Depending on how much time you can put into your site it's well worth revisiting SEO aspects regularly. Monthly is great, quarterly is ok and annually is probably as long as you should leave it.

My tip: SEO is an ongoing process

 

Once your site is finished and gets listed on search engines monitor what's happening for a couple of months. Make notes of your target keywords/phrases that work well (ie have decent search positions) and work on additional words/phrases which don't peform so well. A few tweaks here and there can make a big difference.

 

Depending on how much time you can put into your site it's well worth revisiting SEO aspects regularly. Monthly is great, quarterly is ok and annually is probably as long as you should leave it.

 

Wow, I really dont agree with a single part of that

Fair enough...but why not? I'm curious!

First of all, why monitor it for a few months? your positions arent going to change magically, so whats the point?

Second, key phrase research is done before the site is built preferably, and should at least be encouraged as such. Why would you target key phrases that dont perform well? The whole point of key phrase research is that you target phrases that DO perform well, its all very well ranking number1 for something, but if no one is search for that term then there's no point at all.

A few tweaks here and there make very little difference unless you understand what you're tweaking.

 

And finally, SEO once a year? I dont think so, your site will have shriveled up and died and google will have buried it by then.

Once a quarter? Pretty much the same thing.

 

SEO is on going, if you dont focus on it at LEAST once a month, then you will stop seeing results

Your observations seem to be different to mine! I totally agree about doing research before hand, thats a key part of site development but I'll give you my take on the other stuff based on some real life examples and mother Google .

 

Changing positions

 

I beg to differ here. One client of mine deals in products where competition is particularly fierce. One moment a certain product page can have a good ranking and the next it drops right down. Typically this is due to competition updating their pages or new sites entering the market with the same product. Doing some work on the page content can sometimes restore the page to a decent position.

 

Good performing keywords

 

Customers site ranked well for chosen keywords and got 1st page results for many of them, but after a few months his search positions slipped because competing sites started to rank better, and as a result he dropped from 1st page to 2nd/3rd page (probably some Google dance in there as well ). The solution here was to rewrite some of the content, titles and metas reinforcing those keywords. Within a couple of weeks he was back on 1st page results and higher than his competitors.

 

Poor performing keywords

 

Customers core business is fairly niche specific and so caters for quite a small audience, though there is some competition in the field. Some of the more obscure keywords may not be worth pursuing for the average site but in his case, even for these keywords, it's a potential source of new custom. When you add all those lesser keywords together they all add up - "every little helps". Again with a little tweaking we got first page results for most of them and he has seen a noticable increase in business.

 

Changing business goals

 

Many businesses evolve, change direction and add new products/information. In this case a new product was introduced so the site content was updated to reflect this and targetting new keywords. The problem here is that if most of the site is already optimised for existing keywords and you need to target new ones that have an equal priority sometimes something has to give. Again, it was a case of revisiting the SEO to achieve the desired results.

 

SEO "once a year"

 

One customer of mine attends annual training to upgrade his skills and therefore needs to update his site on an annual basis so he can target new keywords related to his new skills and services offered. He's a plumber and so his site is just there to advertise his services and doesn't need any other updates. It works for him and Google still has it listed

 

Ecommerce sites

 

Many shops add new products/product ranges daily/weekly/monthly etc, quite often dozens or hundreds at a time. Typically the client might want to aim to get good rankings on a few selected items and concentrates on SEO for those items. This doesn't always work first time so by monitoring SE results and tweaking it is possible in a lot of cases to improve over a month or so. Additionally the competition often tweaks theirs as well so keeping up requires regular work.

 

If you have a store with thousands of items you can't SEO every one in one go unless you have pots of money to throw at it. By gradually working through the product list and tweaking titles, descriptions etc it is possible over time to gain huge benefits in your rankings.

 

 

So there's my take and observations. One thing I've learnt with SEO is that you can never rely on things being static for the rest of eternity. Every site has it's own SEO needs so you can't do a "one size fits all" approcah all the time. What's your take on it?

Well I work for one of those companies that "gets a lot of money thrown at it" for seo, lol. and we optimise stores that carry 3000+ products regularly.

 

I stick by my methods, I think it would be interesting to have an SEO competition on the forum!

That's a nice position to be in, most of my customers don't have huge budgets

 

Question: If you've optimised a product page to get a good results how often would you see that page performance deteriorate because of competition?

 

I suppose that's the fun of the internet, there are always more than one way to approach things and what works for one doesn't work for the next!

 

Good idea about an SEO competition - how would you see that working?

very rarely, if a product page is properly optimised then it will have category and subcategory pages behind it that re-enforce it, so if the product pages are all reliant on only a few category pages then it makes less work to optimise them.

 

for the competition it would be easy

 

Everyone is given 5 key phrases, everyone registers blogs to be optimised at any blog site, and must be a subdomain, ex. yourblog.wordpress.com - then the person who ranks highest overall in google after say a month, wins

My Tip:

 

Use appropriate and specific keywords or hey phrases that best described your site's theme. Achieving this will help you attain a better ranking in search engine results...

SEO is a trial and error process since we don't know the exact algorithm of SEs.. Discard those that are not effective and implement or use those that are effective...