Yesterday we had the pleasure of hearing from Matt Idema from Facebook speaking about leveraging Facebook ads, Myself speaking on Pinterest, and Bruce Clay on SEO for the Non-SEO. It was an excellent event! Below is a recap of Bruce’s talk.
Optimize For Google
The only time you go to page 3 on Google is when you’re looking for your own site. Page one gets pretty much ALL the traffic so if you’re not there, you’re not getting traffic. This is why you should optimize for Google. Everyone says that Bing, Yahoo, and everyone else is good. But honestly, look at most websites and 90% of all search traffic all comes from Google.
Links
Attack bad links. Pay attention to all your links, even if you’re not penalized. It’ll help you rank better if you have all bad links not pointing to your site.
PageRank
PageRank is kinda like a point system. The more important links you get, the better you should rank. Google pays attention to what they are about. It’s about important points linking to your site. When more are associated with the keywords you’re talking about, the more you’ll rank for them. It’s a double sided sword though…make it natural. If you’re gaming the sites, you’ll lose. You want higher ranking links to what you want and lower links pointing to lower pages. The fewer more important links the better.
User Intent
If Google determines that your site is for e-commerce/shopping, it’ll rank and show differently than research inquiries. This is why architecture matters. Google will show the intent of the user on the query level. Pay attention to what you’re doing.
Another difference is that if you’re looking to buy something , you’ll see a ton of thumbnails. Search for research like Wikipedia, you’ll get information.
When it comes to e-commerce, if user intent is searching for shipping costs, they’ll find your shopping site. You need unique content to what you’re doing. User generated content is the best. Reviews are awesome because it’s someone is doing the SEO for you.
When it comes to c-commerce sites, make sure you’re getting past duplicate content features.
Performance Factors
Pay attention to your performance and make sure they load as fast as possible.
- Server must compress transmissions via gzip (if you turn it on),
- Combine loaded CSS (and JS) files and make it external.
- Extend the cached dates (7+ days) so pages an be rendered faster by the browser.
- Check image dimension
Changing Content
If you change a page title, Google will re-index a page immediately. You must also refresh 20%+ of a page content for a re-index. There is no official rule though so don’t take this as 100% factual. This is just based on a lot of research.
First time links from an external site will also help cause a crawl on your site as well.
Google spiders all pages at least every 90 days (according to Bruce). Many sites and pages get spidered VERY quickly. However, being spidered doesn’t help you rank better. The index is what will help you rank. If you change your page daily and don’t improve anything you won’t rank more.
Voice Recognition
Google is attempting to move forward in voice recognition. If I say “Find me a place that has pizza,” in theory, find = search, place = location (using GPS) that has “pizza” (Italian) and it translates that into “search for an Italian place around my current location.” Voice recognition didn’t change search queries. It just changed how it fundamentally shows to the user. Trys to understand the voice of the user when it comes to search and SEO.
Note: Make sure to have W3C clean code specifications…it’ll help with indexing.
Thanks to Bruce Clay for the great workshop yesterday!
