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SES NY 2007 – Search Engine Optimization Workshop Key Takeaways

This is my first Search Engine Strategies conference I've attended, and SES NY '07 promises several new sessions. I attended the Monday training sessions (extra $$$) to brush up on SEM and SEO. Here's my review and key takeaways:

Session 1: Search Engine Optimization Workshop
This session was hosted by Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs. Prior to this session, I had not heard of Shari before, but she made every effort to point out her knowledge of the subject by mentioning how lawyered up she was over the sharing of content of her new and upcoming SEO book. Aside from being overly opinionated at times and acting like a classic "tech person" does in the face of newbies, her session was very good at driving home this underlying theme: Keep it simple, and don't take any short cuts.

So, what exactly does this mean? Web design is about the end-user, building an experience that is easy to use and to-the-point -- allowing the user to get the information they need quickly.

What to optimize on your site for natural search
Additionally, optimizing your product pages for keywords and phrases is an important component to search engine optimization. Key areas to keep optimized are as follows:

• title tag
• meta description
• breadcrumbs (home > products > my product name)
• Initial h1, h2, h3, etc. tags
• Initial paragraph content

If you look at your web analytics software package, you'll see that the top keywords and phrases that drive search traffic to your site will most often appear in one or more of the above 5 bullets. If you are looking to improve your natural search results with other keywords and/or terms, you'll want to make sure these terms are sprinkled into your copy in the above 5 bullets.

One of Shari's clients, medicinenet.com, trumps WebMD in virtually all natural search for topics relating to medicine (do a keyword search for "medicine" and you'll see medicinenet.com show up #2 -- and no sign of WebMD). She also claimed that medicinenet.com has never done any paid search simply because natural search has been a high priority and has been optimized over several years.

Breadcrumbs serve 2 important purposes
1.) Breadcrumbs are a great visual reference for site visitors to get a sense of where they have landed on your site. Too any web developers and designers leave out this important navigational element because they think it is obvious that the user knows where they are when they navigate a site. This may be true, but what they fail to take into consideration is the fact that many visitors will stumble upon a page within a site (from an external link, search engine, or some other means). This means the user is dumped right into the middle of your site, with no introduction and no immediate understanding to the organization hierarchy of your site. This is where breadcrumbs come into play. Jakob Nielson loves them, too (I thought it was interesting how this article came out a day after Shari's session).

2.) Cross-linking was referred to by Shari as the most under-utilized and incorrectly-implemented component of search engine optimization. Breadcrumbs are an excellent resource for improving natural search. They take up such a small foot print in your site's design, but they can serve a critical role in providing search engine friendly copy very high up in the code of a webpage. Use this area to alternately label sections -- remember, users search in many different ways. For example, we have products called "Premium Hardwood Blinds" but users are searching for "wood blinds." We can put "wood blinds" in the breadcrumbs and leave the page title as the official product name -- or vice versa.

Cross-linking is good. Here's how:
Cross-links are links to other related areas of the site. Cross-linking will help search engines index related content on your site. Link to product pages in more than one place on your site for a good cross-linking strategy. Don't force users to go back to the homepage or products page to get to products. Provide cross-links to other related products and services (like Amazon.com). Search engines loves this and will gobble up your content even more. The takeaway here is that you don't want to dead-end critical pages by not providing related links to other sections on your site.

Archival links are good to have
Press releases, articles, old product information, etc. are all OK to keep on your website. Not only do they help increase the number of indexed pages of your site in search engines, but you can simply cross-link from old/outdated product data/information to the newer information. Nothing is worse than finding search results and linking to a site where they have changed the navigational structure or discontinued a product and show no more information or related links on it. You've just lost that visitor!