I'm sitting in a CMS Expo session on search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is the descriptive term used by marketers to describe the process of luring traffic to your site by improving your position in search engine indexes.
Believe it or not, this is the first time that I've ever sat on any type of SEO discussion. I"ve just never worried about it as good content on a niche site like mine seems to already do well. Evidently, that's not the case for all sites. Perhaps, I'm also lucky in that I have a lot of SEO already built into my site by using a CMS such as Drupal that tries to stick with standards. It probably doesn't hurt that I also have keywords such as "cms", "report", "content management", and "Ruby" already baked into the site.
The speaker for this SEO Marketing session is Avery Cohen, founder of Metrist Partners. My Internet connection for this session isn't good, but I'll do my best to highlight some of the better points and keep this blog updating as the session goes on.
Lots of the things that Avery is going over in this session are general well-known SEO improvements tips. For example, as a site owner you want to improve your inbound link initiatives. However, he's doing a great job on bringing up the details. For instance, some ways to increase links to your site as the more links you increase to your site the more search engines will take notice:
- Press Releases
- Your Blog
- Social Media
- Ask for Links
- Duplicate Content Policy
Above all that the most compelling way to increase links according to the speaker is to "create compelling content". Creating compelling content can be established by achieving an emotional connection. This is what I wanted to hear. Those of us that run sites have seen to much email from SEO marketers that aren't focused on the content but instead are trying to game the system.
Additional highlights of this session include:
- Include images and words people are likely to click on to see more content.
- Include stories people will want to share with other people.
- Writing for SEO is similar to writing good content. For example, placing key words in the early part of the story so both user and search engines get the point of the article as quickly as possible.
- Some discussion about keyword density, I'm not sure I buy into this as good writing skills usually will take care of this. The point here is that you don't want to go overboard on your keyword usage as search engines will suspect you're gaming the system.
- Use more relevant and diverse keywords.
- The speaker is showing the audience not only how top searches are ranked, but also a nice ranking of "rising search"...very nice.
- Help search engines find your pages via XML sitemaps and sites.txt.
- Review your linking strategy through Google's Webmaster Tools. Is your linking strategy working?
- Buy position with paid search? He's talking adwords here or other banner space purchases such as those offered even offered here at CMS Report.