SEO Tips from VIP Experts
This happened during the Las Vegas Pubcon a few days ago. Some SEO heavyweight gathered and gave comments on various web sites during the Interactive Site Review session. The panel of SEO experts consisted of Matt Cutts(Google), Tim Mayer(Yahoo), Greg Boser(WebGuerilla) and Danny Sullivan(SearchEngineWatch).
Chris Richardson of WebProNews wrote a report on this session and title it “Important SEO Tips Every Should Know“. I received this report via email but cannot find it at WebProNews.com yet. Anyway, Google found me a similar list at another website - Webmasterscafe.info: “Some SEO advice after Las Vegas PubCon 2007“.
So I won’t repeat the list here. Rather, I will highlight some of the points which I find important and interesting. At the top of my interesting list is…
“No Link Exchanges” - Matt Cutts
Matt Cutts of Google is telling us not to bother with link exchange. But, isn’t the WWW built on the foundation of hyperlinks?
To many webmasters link exchange is the only quick way to get backlinks. (To find out other link building methods, read my post on How to Improve Your Pagerank.) And it is quite common to set up a link directory or resources page for your reciprocal linking campaign.
If we accept what Matt Cutts said, many webmasters, including myself will be in trouble. As you can see at the top of this page, there is a directory link to 2 link pages:
And on the sidebar, I have an ad recommending LinkMachine - Link Exchange System. So should I removed all these links… maybe not yet. Here’s why.
Google Doesn’t Want Link Farms
[Wikipedia: Link Farm]
So Google doesn’t like quick way. Google wants you to grow your backlinks at a slow natural pace without resorting to creating hundreds of pages consist of nothing but links which constitute to a link farm.
Google wants you to build useful content so that they could list it in their search results. And it is ok to refer to another website by hyperlink, from within the content of the article.
However, I believe what Matt Cutts said refer to backlinks from link page, resources page and even many of the web directories - these are useless - so don’t bother to exchange link and have you URL ended up in someone else link page.
If your website already has link pages, do not just remove them yet unless all these links are totally unrelated to your website theme.
What you can do is to add value to these pages.
- Add more useful information beside just links. Write a short description on the web page that you link to.
- Categorize and group links of similar theme.
- You can pull and display RSS contents related to theme of the links to make the page content rich.
- The link page should be relevant and important enough to be linked directly from the homepage and not buried 3 or 4 level deep.
Forget Template-base Websites
“template-base websites may not ranked well because they appear alike to the crawlers…” - Tim Mayer(Yahoo) and Matt Cutts(Google)
I am sure both of these experts are talking about Adsense optimized template and not Joomla or Wordpress templates. So Yahoo and Google know about Adsense templates. Then there is no point spending hundred of dollars buying templates from Joel Comm since the search engine can recognize the and marked them as “search engine trash“.
As for the important points, at the top of my list is: Stop Using Javascript Menu!
I believe that all webmasters and web designers MUST NOT use Javascript menu. Not only does it obstruct efficient spidering for your website by the search engine robots, it can be irritating to your users if the menu was not designed and positioned properly.
If websites that have hundred of thousands of pages, such as eBay.com and CNN.com, do not use javascript menu, why should you?
Each Page of Your Site is an Entry Point
It is very important that each of your internal pages focus on just one topic and keep it between 400 and 800 words. If you have enough material to write more than 800 words, then you should split the article into 2 and target one more keyword.
When you optimize each of your internal pages in this way, you stand a good chance to be ranked well in the search engines for the keywords and each page becomes an entry point to your website. So, instead of just having people coming to your website via your homepage, you now have multiple entry points to your website hence increasing targeted traffic and revenue.
Tags: backlinks, google, matt-cutts, Search Engine Optimization, webmasters
June 15th, 2007 at 9:49 am
[...] Quantity of backlinks is important and quality of backlinks is vitally important. There is no point in getting links from unrelated websites or websites deemed by search engines as undesirable e.g. FFA. Google will just ignore these links. In fact, Matt Cutts of Google said that you should not exchange links. [...]