I was hoping to gain some reference on SEO reading materials if any of you came upon some good reading materials do let me know. Books or author is all good
There are no shortcuts I’ll start with the bad news if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to get great results. There isn’t one. Instead, expect to do some hard work, especially when it comes to the content of your site. You will also need patience. Results do not come overnight. If you’re working on improving the search engine positioning of a client’s site, you should probably explain this to them early on. Write good content This is probably the single most important thing you need to do if you want to be found on the web. Even if your site is technically perfect for search engine robots, it won’t do you any good unless you also fill it with good content. Yes, really! Good content to me is text that is factually and grammatically correct, though that is not necessarily a must for all kinds of sites. Whatever your site is about, the content needs to be unique and/or specific enough to appeal to people. More specifically, it needs to be useful to the people you want to find your site. Good content brings return visitors. Return visitors who like your content will eventually link to your site, and having lots of inbound links is great for search engine rankings, especially if those links are from highly ranked sites. Closely related to good content is fresh content. By adding new content regularly, you give visitors a reason to come back. Search engine robots will also visit your site more often once they notice that you update regularly, which means that any new content you add will be indexed quicker. .Write descriptive page titles By making your page titles simple, yet descriptive and relevant, you make it easier for search engines to know what each page is about, and people scanning through search results can quickly determine whether your document contains what they are looking for. The page title is also what is used to link to your site from search result listings. Because of this, the title element is one of the most important elements on a page. Some argue that it is the most important element. When it comes to the order of the text in the title element, I’ve found that the following works well: Document title | Section name | Site or company name Based on a discussion here a while ago, that is probably one of the best formats for accessible title texts. Again, accessibility and SEO work together. Whatever you do, don’t use the same title text for all documents. Doing so will make it much harder for search engines, people browsing through search results, and site visitors to quickly find out what the document is about. Use real headings Use the h1 - h6 elements for headings. Using graphics for headings may let you use any typeface you want, but search engines aren’t going to pay much attention. Even if you use the alt attribute to specify alternate text for heading images, that text will not be anywhere near as important as real text in a heading element. If you cannot use real text, look at the various image or Flash replacement techniques that are available. Be aware that there may be a tiny risk involved in doing so. Since image replacement techniques involve hiding text, it is theoretically possible for search engines to penalise you. Currently that risk seems very slim, but don’t say I didn’t warn you if it does happen. Use search engine friendly URLs Avoid dynamically generated URLs that use a query string to let the server know which data to fetch from a database. Search engine robots may have difficulties with this kind of URL – they may stop at the question mark and not even look at the query string. Use search engine friendly, human readable URLs instead. This will help both your ranking and your users. I’ve seen incredible improvements in search engine results from just changing the URL scheme of a site. iIn my experience incoming links are less important the more specific and unique your content is. I have several websites that are in what you may call niche businesses. They don’t have lots of sites linking to them, yet they started ranking very well in search engines after I had applied the knowledge I’m sharing here to these sites. Use latent semantic indexing How Does Latent Semantic Indexing Work? Latent semantic indexing allows a search engine to determine what a page is about outside of specifically matching search query text. A page about Apple computers will likely naturally have terms such as iMac or iPod on it. By placing additional weight on related words in content, or words in similar positions in other related documents, LSI has a net effect of lowering the value of pages which only match the specific term and do not back it up with related terms. Flash and JavaScript are fine, as long as they aren’t required to navigate your site and to access vital information. Don’t hide your content inside Flash files or behind funky JavaScript navigation. Browse your site in Lynx, and with graphics, CSS, JavaScript, and Flash off. If that gives you problems, it is likely to cause problems for search engine spiders. Submit carefully Often slightly overrated, submitting a site to directories and search engines can be useful, especially if the site is new and hasn’t already been picked up by Google and others. Go ahead and submit it to Google. It won’t hurt, but most likely Google will find you anyway. Two directories that may be worth submitting to are Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project. Be patient – it will probably take several weeks for your submissions to be processed, unless you pay for them to list you. Don’t try to fool the search engines Don’t use cloaking, link farms, keyword stuffing, alt text spamming or other dubious methods. They may work for a short while if you’re lucky, but you risk being penalised or even banned from search engines, which you do not want. Search engines want their results to be accurate, and they don’t like it when people try to trick them. Just don’t do it. Avoid using frames While it is possible to provide workarounds that allow search engine robots to crawl frame based sites, frames will still cause problems for the people who find your site through search engines. When somebody follows the link from a search result listing to a frame based site, they will land on an orphaned document, outside of its parent frameset. This is very likely to cause confusion, since in many cases vital parts of the site, like navigational links, will be absent. Some sites use JavaScript or server side scripting to redirect anyone trying to load a document outside of its parent frameset to the site’s home page. This is a very user hostile thing to do, and it definitely does not help the people visiting your site. Just lose the frames. They are bad for usability anyway. Be careful with browser detection If you need to use some kind of browser detection, make sure that it doesn’t break when a search engine spider (or any unknown user agent) comes along. If the spiders can’t get in, you won’t be found. I’ve seen this happen on the sites of fairly large companies. Don’t waste your time on meta tags Most search engines don’t place any great deal of value on the contents of meta tags anymore. They have been used way too much by spammers. I’d suggest using the meta description element, but that’s all. Keywords won’t hurt, but they will rarely help either, so they are generally not worth the effort. Some search engines use the contents of the meta description element to describe your site in their search result listings, so if possible, make its contents unique and descriptive for every document. The long story short Ok, then. The ultra-short guide to SEO: add quality content regularly obtain some relevant backlinks but don't dwell on it if your site is niche focused and make sure your site is well-built. Hope this helps
Great thank you for your response. I love the piece that was put together by Vstar I do understand fully the fundamental of SEO I can't say I've been in the industrial long enough to brag but I do understand the basics if you will. My sole purpose is to gain some reading materials that are probably the likes of Seth Godin The Big Red Fez which was abt 6yrs ago that was published, seeing if any of you have other empowering reading material that you all would like to share. "I do appreciate your analysis Vstar don't get me wrong"
It's hard to find a trusting source of information now a days, Matt Cutts blog is a great place to look. www.mattcutts.com
Failed? So you don't consider Matt Cutt's articles, youtube videos and posts useful? What rock did you crawl out from?
Matt Cutts tells you how to play nicely with Google and do what they want you to do. From under my spacious rock, lined with the money that I earn by doing my own research and analysis I can tell you this: Doing what Google wants you to is not SEO. It may be a profitable pursuit for you (although in the aggregate Adsense is a Terrible use of your web site's real estate). Matt Cutts runs the web spam team at Google. He's not just out there shooting the breeze with his fellow webmasters. When he posts to his blog he is working hard and what he is doing is laying down a line of spiel that he wants you to follow. The definition of Search Engine Optimization is pretty simple: its a wide array of techniques employed to increase the volume of traffic from organic search results. Matt Cutts is "instructing" you on the extremely narrow range of SEO techniques that aligns with Google's business model. I don't see much difference between Matt Cutts and Joel Comm or Brad Fallon. Perhaps you would like to explain what he does that's so great? I sure hope you arent the member who gave me a red rep for my last comment, because that would be a very childish way to handle a dissenting opinion.
My own SEO strategies on my own websites!!! That's all the evidence I'll ever need I know you have your own opinion regarding LSI and Google's algorithim and I'm sure your prepared to debate this until the cow's come home! For me, the proof is in the pudding (my own websites rankings have increased since implementing LSI) I even have adwords campaigns where google will diplay my ads for keywords that I don't even have set up. for example: If have an adwords set up for "Duct Cleaning New York" Google will display my ad when someone searches "NY Vent Cleaners" Cheers
As a joke I told someone once that you can get a high ranking with the meta tag <meta name="google" content="make me number one">. Try it and your site may rank higher but will the new meta be the cause? No, because in establishing cause and effect it is necessary to isolate what is being measured from other influencing factors. This is Applied Semantics CIRCA technology in action, nothing to do with LSI. - Michael
Hi there, I just wrote an article on this subject. I think that Google is headed in a new direction with its search engine algorithms that is going to change SEO big time, and will affect lots of SEO experts and websites. Have a read and let me know what you think. Google, Google Analytics, and the Changing Face of SEO Rich
1 pr8 relevant link will out weigh 1000 pro or irrelevant links When it come to inbound links, it's quality (not quantity) that counts
site like seomoz/seobook could be helpful, also in DP there are many good thread on seo, take a look of them.
SEObook is a good option...i think you should give a try to that...But just reading SEo stuff is not going to help you should try and test various things on your sites/blogs to check what impact they make on your rankings...