Advanced SEO at StartupSeeds
A while ago, I gave a long SEO lecture to the good guys at www.startupseeds.com. It was targeted to a more advance audience and points on how an "old" and "new" webmasters deal (or should deal) with SEO. Since it's in Hebrew, here are the highlights:
- Beyond links, content & structure, make sure you understand the 4th building block of SEO - user engagement (time spent, page views, bounce rate..) - very important factor that's gaining momentum and harder to manipulate
- Do SEO very early to the site launch and combine SEO efforts with other traffic sources (i.e. do not buy PPC until your structure is aligned, run affiliate promotions through the same organic pages, etc.)
- Do your own keyword research based on independently collected information (related websites, discussions, forums) and through data that is closer to your users (internal search phrases, user tags). Do your own statistics rather than relying on wordtracker, keyworddiscovery and other freely available sources
- Target long-tail rather than a specific set of competitive keywords and work bottom-up (starting with your item or product pages, moving to category or tag pages and eventually the generic phrases on the homepage)
- Rather than focusing purely on "Web" (page-based results), consider the less-competitive Google Images, News, Blogs, Videos and Products - using microformats can also boost you up to appear under "Universal Search"
- Enhance client-side experience by scoring high on yslow (gzip, caching, pages that send last-modified headersm etc.) - Better response times means more user page views and healthier crawling sessions
- Improve XML sitemap by including all possible attributes, submitting to other engines (not just google) and pinging on every change - back it up with RSS feeds for better crawling
- Replace manual and artificial "Link campaigns" with crowdsourcing - Having users embed signed/linked widgets, webmasters use and link through your API, etc.
The full video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MASS2Glfiw
