Last week I had a great conversation with Brian Keith and his CEO Ian Lurie, I recently reviewed his book Conversational Marketing.
Ian's provided me some SEO suggestions for my blog, (it's just part of the offerings that his firm offers) and given me permission to share with the world. Some of these I'll look into, but being limited on time, I won't spend too much effort on all of them.
I've been pretty public in stating that SEO and SEM are my weakest areas (Corporate Web programs and Social Media being my strongest)
In any case, do you see any other suggestions that would make sense? Do you agree with what Ian's suggested. If you're a SEO expert, it would be great to hear your input too:
Hi Jeremiah,
Here are some SEO ideas that might make a difference for you. I'm
focusing more on issues that are keeping search spiders from crawling everything than on specific keyword optimization. These tweaks should 'open up' your site and give you more leverage across the board:1. First, you've got a redirect set up that sends folks from www.web-
strategist.com to www.web-strategist.com/blog. And, it looks like a
client-side redirect. That's definitely hurting you - our test
crawler had a lot of trouble with it. Try one of a few things:- Repoint so that the blog is at www.web-strategist.com, rather than
the subfolder. This would hurt you in the short run as search engines
reshuffle, but for the long term it's a great solution.- Change to a server-side 302 redirect instead of a client-side
redirect. Search bots prefer that.- Put some kind of intro page at the root address. I don't like that
idea at all.2. A more generic contingency design issue: Your 404 error page
currently reads 'sorry, no posts matched your criteria'. Try a little
more explanatory text, and maybe a link or some advice as to how they can find what they were looking for.3. Shorten your URLs. Right now your entire article title goes into
the file name. Search engines don't mind dynamic URLs any more, but
huge URLs do seem to pose problems. My theory is that, since search
engines are wild about hierarchy, they likely attribute longer URLs
to content that's farther down in each site's structure, and accord
that content less importance. Try to keep your filenames to 20
characters or so.4. Right now you aren't using totally correct semantic markup. In a
perfect world, the XHTML markup in each page should describe the
information's place in your page structure, not how it looks. So the
article title should be an element, subheadings should be and sub-subheadings should be . Right now your article titles are
H3, and your subheadings are just in a STRONG element, so they're
regular paragraph text, bolded. Again, search engines are nuts about
hierarchy. This change will help them better determine what's really
important on your site.Hope this helps. Once these are set we can chat about keyword
optimization.Thanks,
Ian
President
Portent Interactive
An Internet Marketing Agency
http://www.portentinteractive.comAuthor, Conversation Marketing
http://www.conversationmarketing.com/internet-marketing-book
So, what do you think? Do these recommendations look reasonable? Thanks Ian for your time.
link to original post