From Beast Bloggers Camp, Tech Liminal, Oakland, October 24, 2009

Search Engine Optimization Best Practices: Scot Hacker, UC Berkeley

General:

• Eighty percent of users click on one of the first three results that come up.
• SEO is the process of getting your site to appear up at the top in searches.
• It’s important to separate the good ideas and best practices from the snake oil. There are a lot of cons going on.
• Good content is key.
• Quality (of content and material) is more important than quantity (bombardment) for SEO.
• Google has 200 ingredients in its secret source of searching content. They change them constantly.

Organic methods of SEO:

• High quality content.
• Write content for readers, not search engines.
• Have well structured content.
• Have clear and specific page titles.
• Strong use of keywords in body, heads, subheads. But don’t stuff the keywords.
• Use meta descriptions. Clean urls.

Content:

• Be unique. Cover what no one else is covering and become an expert.
• Use short paragraphs and clearly marked sections.
• Get to point quickly.
• Make use of links.
• Use kick-ass title tags. Title tags should have keywords; unique on every page of site; no more than 70 characters.
• Have high quality incoming urls.
• Use Facebook and Twitter to gain incoming links. (But don’t self-market.)
• Build reputation with good content.
• Be liberal but don’t overdo outbound links.