Professional SEO Specialist - janet bartoli roussos

You know them, you’ve seen them - run a search for Sony Electronics and you see the following result:

Sony Electronics

Welcome to the world of Sony: music, movies, TV, games and electronics.
www.sony.com/ - 93k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

 So you see your sitelinks included here are product support, create repair order, etc. According to Google these are automated. You can’t try to optimize for sitelinks. The reason for sitelinks - to help users navigate your site. These are links that Google sees as those links that you might find useful rather than clicking on the home page link and then trying to fumble around and try to find the accessories area.

Now this is generally speaking relevant to those very large sites, like Sony. Google says: “If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them. “

Pretty straightforward - thanks Google!

SEO does include a good keyword rich and page relevant description meta tag of no more than 200 characters with spaces. That’s the technical general description of a description meta tag. Well, as you may know the search engines aren’t looking at your description meta tag to determine your ranking or site’s relevancy. From what we have learned it’s not being looked at when figuring the many types of algorithms.

The description tag has been largely ignored and the same non-unique description used over and over on every page. If there is no meta description at all, the search engines will retrieve the first few lines of text from your page - providing you actually have text on your page at all. Another way for search engines to acquire a description from your site would be to scrape your description that you may not have put a whole lot of SEO thought in from your DMOZ or Yahoo directory listing. Nice? No, not at all.

Your description meta tag is used solely for conversion purposes. Once you get excellent search rankings, “oh look I rank 2nd in Google for “seo consulting”, but are you converting those viewers of your 2nd place ranking? I recently gave an SEO seminar to a very large publisher client of mine. This seminar was for their technical and editorial teams. I asked the large group of 20 or so people in the class, how many of you read the descriptions in your natural search? An overwhelming 17 out of 20 people said Yes they do read the descriptions. It really does help convert - gets them in the door to your site - that’s your objective isn’t it?

It’s difficult for me to ask myself these questions, I do read descriptions - they do help me find the page I need, but I am not the typical passive searcher. This is what I do for a living. It’s always helpful to ask the average web surfer of all ages and backgrounds how do you search? What search engine do you always use? If your researching electronics how do you go about that search?  User behaviors are very important to understand search and how to effectively optimize for it.

Optimize your description meta tags for that specific landing page and you will get your best targeted traffic and should see good conversions.

I had recently joined the Web Analytics Association. To all my fellow SEOs out there, it would be smart of you to involve yourself in one of the many internet marketing related affiliations.

Yes, from a career point of view it looks very nice, but I think I will actually do something with my membership. Besides their pretty extensive job board, they also have a great blog with some great info.

The most recent post I read was on user generated content, a growing strategy for increasing the content of websites. But how can you measure it and decide if it works for you? Three important categories of analysis are: content quantity (increases crawlable content), content linkability (increases engagement), and content strength (targeted keywords that will improve SEO and/or words that indicate brand awareness). Adding content is not enough - it is essential to analyze how it influences SEO, site engagement, and brand  awareness.

What are your thoughts?

As an SEO Specialist within an interactive marketing agency and as a consultant, I see various SEO contracts for SEO services. I am still amazed at the lazy or less than par things being offered by other agencies and vendors.

There are some basic practices that should just part of the program like solid link building utilizing link baiting techniques, social media where applicable, and here’s one building a plan with an SEO strategy. Crazy I know.

I must admit it drives me nuts when I see in 2008 claims that “we will get all your must have keywords in the top 5 rankings in Google” - are you kidding me? Hello, 1995? Doesn’t anyone know what solid conversions are, ever hear of ROI? This is what a real SEO program includes.

Well, one day when colleges offer Internet Marketing as part of their undergrad programs, and SEO 101, 102, etc are offered, there will be more educated and sophisticated SEO programs out there to really compete with. (by the way - anyone who might think SEO is going by the wayside - doesn’t realize marketing has been around since the stone ages, and as long as business lives on the web - so to will internet marketing including SEO - just my two cents worth).

What’s news in the Link Building arena?  A lot actually, recently a collegue of mine shared this timely and informative link 11 experts speaking out on link building  There you will find advice from such industry experts as Aaron Wall, Rand Fishkin, and Andy Hagens - and tons more.

Great information throughout this article, one of the most important elements you do have control over is internal linking

How much do you stress internal linking on your own or clients’ sites? Do you have a quick rule of thumb or strategy to maximize the effectiveness of internal links?

This is one of the easiest things to do - and not enough SEOs care to engage in the easy practice of internal linking.  As long as its natural looking and editorially correct - your client’s site will surely reap huge rewards.  These links should be absolute and avoid using stop words if at all possible. How important is that page to the site? Is there any other way to get to that page besides the site map and navigtaional linking? You might want to consider some good internal linking from the older pages with good link juice.