A few weeks ago I attended the SEO Moz Advanced SEO Training Seminar in Seattle, Washington. Below are my notes from a few of the talks we had, covering a wide variety of SEO topics. If you’re interested, most of our seminar should be available on DVD.
Advanced Reputation Management: Pro-active & Reactive Strategies for Control of the SERPs – Will Critchlow & Duncan Morris
- What is reputation management?
- Kind of search results
- Controlled
- Positive
- Negative
- Kinds of management
- before
- during – monitor, assess, decide, engage, review
- after
- Tactics
- Sub Domains – having many strong sub domains, helps to dominate search listings
- New Domains
- Affiliations
- Hosted Content – Youtube – use universal search. Profile pages also important
- Keyword research – full names, title, nicknames, online handles,
- Long Tail
- Ranking for issues – ipod scratched screen, niche terms etc
- Keep it Natural
- Look for shared names – people with the same or similar names, same surname ranking, etc
- SERP Replacement
- Universal Search – youtube videos rank, is good
- Rebrand – Change name, get married, middle initial
- Pitfalls
- Google wants diversity – keep all links in order, now what links to where
- Universal search not always a good thing – it can just jump in there above your better search listing
- Long Tail never goes away
- Dodgy clients – less of a problem than expected
- Wiki-Circularity – something untrue makes it onto wikipedia, reputable journalists uses wiki as a source without checking, powerful newspaper website now has untrue story on it, wiki uses newspaper as authoritative source – now you’re screwed
- Rapid Fire Round
- Use own domain strength – no 301’s.
- Don’t forget legal tactics – copyright infringement, Libel, DMCA
- Greyer Tactics – buy links
- Black tactics – Google URL removal tool – use if somebody’s server has down time
Opportunities & Pitfalls of Buying Links
- Ideal Structure for buying links
- Critical mass of links
- Bad Reputation of paid links
- historically, most paid links have been search spam
- used to game the system
- no consideration to users
- manufactured authority – create a blog, outsource content, purchase links, create keyword specific affiliate sites, point links from main site to arbitrage sites
- Paid Links can be effective
- when used correctly
- most SEO/SEM has paid link strategy
- Focusing Link authority – domino rally
- Evaluating Publishers
- Verticles
- Relevance
- Metrics
- Where to point links
- top pages f funnel that convert well
- pick category pages
- Getting double listings in google
- aiming links at sub pages – helps focus your existing domain authority and triggers double listing
- Baseline Metrics
- SERP
- Derivative SERPs
- Replacements of more appropriate landing page
- Traffic tied to rank
- value per visitor
- organic conversion rates
Enterprise Level Link Acquition Strategies
- Ineffective Strategies
- directory and submission based link building
- link requests – super bad
- link spamming
- Focus on overall link popularity ROI, not individual rankings
- long tail reminder
- low hanging fruit before going after harder ones
- Inter-Network Linking
- Links from partners and clients
- Badges and Widgets
- Building Link-Target Content
- Licensing for Links
SEO Tactics for Vertical Search Inclusion and Rankings – Stephan Spencer
- Optimizing for image search
- Images on site should: Include keywords in image filename, include keywords in alt attribute, have good descriptive text, be on a page all about the keyword, subject, be opted in to googles images lab
- Image SEO via Flickr
- use high quality photos
- unique title
- Description for photo
- Create thematic sets
- add to flickr groups
- Geotag photos
- Post each pictures page over to delicious, using handy submission links
- Add digg link
- Optimizing for Local
- business name in title
- similar business name in domain
- local address in webpage
- phone number on page
- proximity to city center
- Microformats
- Optimizing for Mobile Search
- Google Mobile Spider – Separate from google bot, google indexing ranking separate from main.
- Optimizing for Google News
- top 5 news site
- submit site for submission
- blog/news site must be group effort – no solo bloggers
- needs original content
- give proper attribution
- Optimizing for Google blog search
- full text, not summaries – web bugs?
- 20 or more items on blog page
- multiple feeds
- keyword rich item title
- brand name in title
- most important keyword in title of site
- compelling site container
- Optimizing for Video Search
Global Search Landscape & International Targeting – Will Critchlow & Duncan Morris
- Global Search Landscape
- Internationalization versus Localization
- The Problem
- Desire for relevancy vs poor indicators
- Hard to specify where you want your search content to show up – where should it be targeted at?
- Local indicators
- CCTLD
- hosting location
- address on page
- registration with local
- WMC flag
- language
- Currency
- Challenges
- Content – rewriting for different locations
- Content – remember conversions/culture
- Solutions
- One powerful domain – Ikea.com
SEO MOZ Site Review Checklist – What SEO moz when they look at a website for a client…
- Search Engine Friendlyness
- Canonicalization
- Duplicate Content
- URL Parameters and Dynamic URLs – Search engine and user friendly usls
- Spiderable Content
- Visibility in Search Engines – visible?
- HTML Site Map
- HTTP Response codes – 404, 301, 302, 500
- Hosting/IP Issues
- URLs – careful with subdomains, secure pages, TLD+geographic location
- Title Tags
- Meta Descriptions
- In-Document Keyword Use
- Content Quality and Use Issues
- Avoiding Spam/Penalties
- user Experience & First Time visitor Impressions
- Site Structure
- Home page specifics
- User Centered Design Test
- Web Credibility Guidelines
- Form usability/software application accessibility
- Navigation Consistency
- Building Content
Advanced Solutions to Common Site Errors – Rand Fishkin
- Robots exclusion protocol
- Info:URL
- Linkdomain
- Crawl test
- Boost Chances of Indexation
- Flow of page rank
- Moving to a new domain
- prepare with webmaster tools – register new and old sites on one account before the move takes place
- 301 redirects – pointing on an individual url level
- Earn Press and links to the new domain
- Check duplicate rankings in search engines
- Using links to Canonicalize
- Check for Cannibalization
Avoiding Being A False Positive – How Black Hat Impacts White Hat Sites – Nick Gerner
- Evidence
- Web Spam Taxonomy
- Prevalence of Spam – 2002 (%7) 2004 (18%) 2008 (40%)
- Domain Name of IP Address – detection
- Theory
- Standing out from the crowd – human and machine tuning
- Implementations – Page Rank, Trust Rank, Anti Trust Rank
- Speculation
- Lots
- Dot Zero Effect – most things that end in “dot zero” are not valuable content
Search Marketing Action Items from the Legal World – Sarah Bird
- Protecting your Website
- Terms of Use – if you have a website, you need a TOU
- Use the DMCA and CDA – Register with US copyright office, in order to use DMCA ($80 fee)
- Working with Clients
- Incorporation – make sure to be incorporated, for asset protection
- Contract Concerns – need Disclaimer of Warranties, Opportunity to Cure, Limitations of Liability, Indemnifications.
- Enforcing Agreements – Oral agreements are technically enforceable, but not a good idea. Email agreements are being upheld in courts recently.
- Working with Creative Content
- Third-Party keyword triggered advertising
- Danger of comparative advertising
- Tightening Advertising Laws
- Out of time
How to serve different content to search engines and users without violating the spirit of SE guidelines
- Search engine cloaking detection methods
- Automated – don’t actually catch that much
- Manual – very effective
- Goals of cloaking detection – finds sites that have manipulative intent
- Methods of Detection
- User Agent Detection
- User Agent + Reverse DNS Lookup – recommended by google
- Javascript/Flash execution – SWF Object
- Cookie Detection
- IP Address Tracking
- Click Behavior
- Requests robots.txt
Site Architecture for Enterprise, Content Heavy Domains – Rand Fishkin
- HTML Sitemaps – limiting to 50-100 links/page, no matter site size
- Directing Link Juice – Build egalitarian link structure, identify high and low page rank sections, create links from high juice pages to low, use nofollow to control flow – (Analytics – find pages with the best referring link traffic)
- Category & Article pagination issues – pagination creates tidal wave of duplicate content for engines. Best practices – use snippets, use nofollow, use 301 to canonical versions
Site Architecture for Microsites – Rand Fishkin
- For time sensitive materials for big brands – Example – GM Volt
- Guerilla marketing campaigns – 10 reasons to date a unicorn https://mingle2.com/dating/unicorn
- Domain name keyword targeting – good opportunity to target for keywords
- Small sites for maximum SEO – Flow link juice, keywords in products and services, linkbait worthy content
Site Architecture for E-Commerce Sites – Stephan Spencer
- Breadcrumb Navigation
- Linkjuice and Flow
- URL Testing & Iterative Optimization
- Site Pagination
- Excessive pagination can cause numerous pages of product listing to not be crawled.
- Must optimize pagination structure – keep it all relevant
- Attribute based navigation – sometimes slices of navigation are the same – must add value to user, make nav different – NoFollow price breakdown navigation because it’s useless to the user
- Tagging – Great for deep internal linking, interlinking
- Site Archetecture for Blogs
- SEO Title Page plugin for blogs
- Related posts – working top 10 posts into homepage
- URLs – rewrite urls to contain keywords, hyphens, but not underscores. Maintain legacy URLs
- Feed URL – using mybrand.com to rebrand your feedburner site feed into your own
- Anchor Text
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