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.
