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Avatar Posted By: Eish 110 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://searchengineland.com)
Category: SEO
In my colleague Matt Lester's recent Search Engine Land column he discussed ten tips for a more effective paid search campaign. For this article, I'll follow up Matt's advice with ten tips to help you develop a more effective Search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. But before we dive into the tips, let's briefly look at what SEO is and its key concepts.
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Comments

from Winooski 110 days ago #
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"Search engines can't follow image links or clever animated links like Flash"

Uh, did anybody edit this prior to publication? Search engines certainly CAN follow image links ("follow" in this context meaning both "spider through" and "utilize for determining relevancy and keywords via the Img tags' Alt attribute"), and they --at least Google-- certainly CAN follow links in Flash, as we've known for over two years.

from RanOh 109 days ago #
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Thanks Winooski, of course you're right and I should have been clearer, but this is the Back to Basics column and far too many websites are developed by people without a clear understanding of SEO and this is a valid comment for the purposes of basic SEO.

Alt tags on images are open to abuse and so carry little importance compared to the anchor text in text links.  Flash links can be followed but very, very few Flash developers bother with an SE-friendly implementation of Flash.

Keeping things simple means using text links (as well as images & Flash if necessary) and not relying on Flash or image alt tags to facilitate relevancy and crawling, and this column is all about keeping things simple...

.

from jaybong 109 days ago #
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Spreading false information doesn't help beginners.

"Search engines can't follow image links" This is patently false, and saying that you used that sentence to make it easier for beginners to understand is pretty weak.

Edit: And do (so called) SEO's really need to keep telling people to submit their sites to search engines. This hasn't had any effect for years.

from Justin-Goldberg 109 days ago #
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Regarding number 1, USE HITTAIL. It's the only keyword research tool you could ever need. Don't question it; just DO IT.

from RanOh 109 days ago #
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@ jaybong - Again, you are correct on the image issue and when I refer to submitting to search engines, I'm talking about the various webmaster tools programs that provide invaluable feedback to SEO's, e.g. Google Webmaster Tools.

This article was never intended for an audience of experts and if you guys get your kicks nit-picking holes from a position of more knowledge rather than helping people to understand this difficult subject then more power to you.  Yes, the article needs more clarification and had I known it would be submitted to this column then I would have provided it.  At the end of the day the basic (and I stress the word basic) information here is good sound advice to people learning SEO and that is the spirit in which it was meant to be read.

from RanOh 109 days ago #
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Apologies for the last post, in mitigation I've recently been 'blessed' with a new baby ;-) and am suffering from serious lack of sleep - you caught me at a bad time.  Am now dosed up on caffeine and feeling more reasonable...

I would like to stress that this article was originally intended for customers of Kellysearch in the UK who, in many cases, have heard of SEO but are not familiar with what it means.  I thought Vanessa Fox's article on Relevance, Discoverability and Crawlability to be  great way to summarise the founding principles of SEO and so wrote this to go out to our customers in the hope that we could engage with them and help them understand why we do what we do as well as how they can improve their sites.  It was never intended as a comprehensive guide and quite how it got into SEL I'm not sure.

The piece is over a year old and has suffered many edits at the hands of well-meaning PR companies, hence for example the lack of clarity over the SE submission.  I appreciate the feedback and am aware of the article's limitations - please do add clarification where required.

from jaybong 108 days ago #
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@Ran0h

I wasn't aware the author did not submit this to SEL. I think it's fine to write whatever you want, when it appears on a site like this though - however basic the content is - it should at least be accurate.

I have no problem with beginner material being posted on SEL and my intention was not to nit pick - just to correct blatant falsities. Most SEO (ie the stuff in your article) is very easy to explain and doesn't need to be dummed down.

Having reread your comments and the article, I still feel that when you made the point about images, you were not dumming something down, you were replacing something simple and accurate with something simple and inaccurate, and thus making it harder for a beginner to understand, especially if they have read contradictory advice.

In light of your comments about not submitting the article though, I humbly shift the blame to the SEL editors.


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