February 27th, 2009 by Richard Lee
Introduction to SEO – Miva Merchant 2009
Introduction to SEO – Miva Merchant 2009
Speaker: Mark Simon, Miva Merchant
Conference Notes/Descriptions:
I. How Search Engines Rank Pages
- Search Engine Rank Pages Not Websites
- What the Search Engines evaluate (Ranking Factors)
- Title
- Description (keyword and selling tool)
- Headline (Header tags, 6 tags, 1 to 6)
- Body Text (Write for your customers, write to convert, then plug in keywords later)
- Anchor Text (keyword vote for that page)
- Links
- File names
- Keyword
II. Keyword Research
- Target Markets & Demographics
- Customer lingo – may not be what you think
- Industry lingo – tribal speak
- Number of Searches
- Number of Competing Pages
- Competitor Strength
- Identifying Opportunity (lowest amount of competition for a keyword phrase vs. number of searches)
- Keyword Tools
III. Competitive Analysis (find keywords, find links, etc.)
- Getting into the Search Engines
- Measure Success
- SEO for the CEO
IV. Getting into the Search Engines
- Links from other websites
- Sitemaps – HTML and XML
V. Metrics – Measuring Success
- PageRank doesn’t matter
What does matter:
- Conversion Rates
- Average value of visitors
- Traffic Sources
- Ranking for highly converting keywords
- Inbounds links
- Bounce rate
Q&A:
What is the difference between Indexing and Caching:
Indexing (google bot) = spider your pages and stores the data in their database
Caching = last version that google has saved
If some of my page isn’t indexed how do I get them in there (site:website.com):
- Sitemap
- Interlinking top pages (link from top popular internal pages)
- Social Bookmarking
Some tools and resources mentioned during the SEO session at Miva Merchant
- SitemapPro.com
- SEORecon.com
- Linkscape Tool from SEOMoz.org
- SEObook.com