Blog World Expo 2008 - Ten Things You Need to Know About Search Engines & Findability session recap | Affiliate Marketing

Wow, sorry about the long title…

The first day of Blog World was truly outstanding. The attendees were diverse, intelligent and engaged and the speakers were honest, authentic and they shared very detailed information. It didn’t seem like they held anything back. And Dave Taylor was as forthcoming as the rest.

This session I was looking forward to since I registered for the conference. I was not all that familiar with Dave Taylor prior, but so many of my affiliate partners request information on this very topic that I was anxious to share the information beyond the blogging community.

If you don’t know Dave Taylor, www.askdavetaylor.com, I recommend you become acquainted with him. His presentation was both informative and entertaining, regardless if some of his jokes went without a communal guffaw, the humor was appreciated.

Dave basically went over four things:

Your Title Tags
Keyword Density
Smart Image File Names
and “Read More” is less

Most of the information was fairly basic if you have been playing in the SEO world, but he pointed out some very well known sites as examples that fail to follow simple guidelines.

Titles - Are they good enough to grab attention? Do they include the main topics and concepts? How will someone search for this content and can you slip a few of those terms in the title without it looking like garbage?

Keyword Density - No magic percentage here. In fact when asked what the correct percentage was, Dave answered “not too little, but not too much either”. What he did point out was that in our typical conversations, and most of our blogs are written that way, we refer to, for example, our iPod first as the Apple iPod. The second time we mention it we say iPod and after that we say “it”. His suggestion was to remove the word it and words like it and use the name of the item, person, topic, in place of those.

Another tip he pointed out related to overuse of CSS in your pages. CSS can make designing your site easy, but too much CSS removes hard coded HTML items that can help you tell the search engines what your page is about. He stressed the use of H1 tags and gave some examples of how to use html and CSS together.

Smart Image names - Are you uploading all your images with names like DVM0084.jpg? How about giving them a little more of a description.

Alt Tags - Dave’s advice - use them!

“Read More” is Less - When sites show an excerpt of an article with a link titled “Read More”, it isn’t helping them. Dave pointed out that internal linking across your pages is as important as external linking. Using Read More as link text only helps you if you are attempting to rank well for the term “read more”. Use more descriptive link text such as “Read more about the Sony HandyCam”. Get your topical keywords into those links.

Overall, Dave stressed that you need to do as much as you can to help the search engines help their users. Gaming the system doesn’t work, but using the tools and areas of your site correctly will help your site be found for the content it provides. Great content, shown correctly will lead to great results. Anyone else make this session have feedback?