Search Engine Optimization - Jason’s Quick tips from Bar Camp

While re-arranging the blog posts during this blog-o-rama move (to Word Press Multi-user), I remembered Andre from nitobi’s short and sweet notes from Jason Bilingsley’s presentation at last summer’s Vancouver Bar Camp. Indeed, regular readers likely know that Andre is AKA Cap’n Ajax and was featured with colleague Alexi in Get Elastic #6 podcast “Cleaning up Interfaces with AJAX.”

SEO is a critical topic for online retailers to understand thoroughly. The alternative to mastering search optimizing is ponying up big money for PPC “Pay Per Click” adwords. For the uninitiated, AdWords are the links in the right hand column in Google - of course other Search Engines have similar schemes. Anyhow, companies (primarily retailers) bid to gain “ownership” of various keywords which they feel are important to their prospective shoppers. As you might expect, the more common a word or phrase is, the greater the desirability and the higher the bid. Then, the “winner” is on the hook for the bid amount each time their link is clicked upon by web surfers. The rate ranges from roughly five cents to ten bucks - depending on the value of the link as determined by the marketplace.

Smart retailers watch their PPC spend closely and see which terms convert most regularly and economically. Even smarter retailers concurrently work diligently at optimizing their sites for “organic” search - meaning your site naturally appears towards the top of the results (generally listed in the center of the page) without any payment to the Search Engine company.

To get you started thinking about this topic, here are Andre’s notes from Jason’s talk. Take a mental note about which steps you are already doing, which you think you can implement easily and which ones you don’t yet understand.

Note: I made a few minor edits for clarity (I don’t think Andre will mind), …

• many want to be number for one”digital camera” but it’s very hard to become number for digital camera, but … there’s a lot of money to be made for “sony 5mp digital slr”
• customer who put together a 4 keyphrases are further along the buying process
• dig through your logs to come up with the long tail list and/or use keyword generation tool Jason will post this on his blog
• they (Elastic Path) compete against IBM, MS, Oracle, but they are very slow to move on keywords so they “got lucky”
• EP has baked alot of this baked into their platform
• CSS vs Tables…CSS is better because: (1, spiders get to content quicker, 2) your keywords are higher in the page, 3) this creates better content to code ratio
• 30 keywords is the max (they use 15)
• title tag is the most important
• urls / mod rewrite to ensure clean URLS with real words, stay away from parameters
• for title tag, keep you company name at the back, put your products upfront
• marketing sherpa - landing page guidelines,
• organic results get 2.5 times the clicks, organic links get 30% more conversions
• linking is very important, links are like votes
• use link title tags inside the href tag
• create good content that people want to know about and will link to
• google only indexes the first 100k of code - look at sitepoint.com article