Search digest, October 5-9 2009

October 10th, 2009 Jason Posted in Week in Search, geek, links | No Comments »

We’re on a big educational push at work, with the goal of distributing knowledge and really bringing SEO into the forefront of people’s thinking throughout the business. Connected to that, we have started a regular email newsletter, passing around links for articles the team has read in the previous week or so. Just as helpful to post them here as well…

SEO basics & best practices

10 Common SEO Mistakes
This could also be called, “Why SEO touches every part of the business.”
5 Common Pieces of SEO Advice I Disagree With
There’s a lot of “best practice” suggestions out there which aren’t really the “best.” Rand at SEOMoz offers opinions on a few of them.
The SEO Playbook – Welcome to the Rabbit Hole Alice
An old post, but an “advanced beginner’s guide” full of value. Quote: “Technology and marketing were formerly unique disciplines with very different types of people. SEO’s are the folks in between.”
4 R’s of SEO: Robots, Ranking, Relevance & Results
It all comes down to this, really.
Brent D. Payne Interview | Tribune Company SEO
Brent is the the in-house Director of Search Engine Optimization for Tribune newspapers, which include pubs like the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times. A great case study in practical SEO at a large company.

Content

Title Tags Revisited – What’s a Title Tag and How Important are They to SEO?
A solid reminder about the power of the well-formed meta title.
6 steps to KILLING long tail keywords for SEOs & Content writers
A good look at researching and identifying long-tail keyword opportunities, with a bunch of specific detail about how to put various tools to use.
The Zeroth Law of Writing for SEO
The zeroth law of SEO is this: Write an article whose title is a question people are asking Google and whose body is the answer.

Technical

Optimizing Your Web Page Speed
Load time can impact how much of a site gets crawled and indexed by search engines, but can also affect user experience and conversions. It’s unfortunate this site is so completely wrapped in advertising, because there’s some really useful info buried in these pages.
A proposal for making AJAX crawlable
Google continues to work on better seeing what users see, regardless of how it’s delivered.