Lee Odden, Brian Clark, Stephan Spencer, Michael Gray
Q. What are the most common and dangerous SEO myths you here?
Michael Gray: He’s a fan of linking out. Helps google understand what you’re all about. Link to relevant sites.
Spencer: Meta-tags won’t help your ranking. If you stuff too much you can be penalized. Meta-description is useful in that in may influence someone to click on your link on a SERP. Alt tags don’t help except in case of Google image traffic. Comment tags also of no real benefit from ranking, ditto w/title attribute.
Brian Clark: Write for people, not for Google can be taken to the extreme.
Q. Examples of crossing the line of over-optimization.
Spencer: Too much use of keywords.
Gray: Microfocus a post, short, no value. You’re just chasing that individual keyword. You need to find the balance between the search engines and people.
Odden: You need to take your time and build up a body of work.
Gray: You need to get links from trusted bloggers.
Q. What keyword tools can bloggers use?
Spencer: Google insights for search is cool and helpful. Wordpot.com. Wordtracker.
Gray: Don’t stick w/one, use a bunch. Throw away things that don’t make sense. spyfu. Compete.com
Odden: SEOdigger.com
Q. Where should bloggers use they keyword.
Gray: title.
Spencer: In titles work in add’l synonyms. SEO Title tag plugin.
Q. Automating SEO? There is some template-level automization.
Spencer: Tag pages. (Like categories.) Use w/sticky post on each tag/category. Tag conjection page. Tag clouds.
Clark: Your own creativity cannot be automated. Automate what you can.
Q. How do we get these incoming links?
Gray: You need to do the link baiting.
Clark: IT’s social media, no man/woman is an island. Don’t be Shakespeare locked in a basement.
Gray: Crap that gets to page one on Digg will be seen, so don’t write crap.
Spencer: Don’t put Digg links on each post.
Gray: Has some adds that don’t show until the post ages so that more people will Digg it.
Q. Isn’t SEO bullshit?
Spencer: It’s important to do things right, and it’s easy to make mistakes if you don’t understand.
Q. WP v MT?
Clark: Likes WP w/some tweaks. Beautiful CMS.
Gray: WP 90% of sites he develops.
Spencer: WP rocks from SEO standpoint.
Gray: Use robots.txt to focus search engines down one path to get to site.
Spencer: do you really want to rank well for January 2008? No follow date archives.
Clark: He links to one page w/all archives. (Maybe comments, too?)
Q. How important is copywriting for SEO?
Clark: How much $ have you made for ranking well? None. It’s about persuasive writing.
Q. Link building?
Gray: Have an opinion and piss someone off. Will sometimes even turn off comments to force people to link to him to respond. If you’re not going to stand out from the crowd you’re in the crowd.
Q. Time split: onpage and offpage?
Spencer: Spend as much time as possible doing both. Create insightful comments.
SEObrowser.com Only the first anchor link counts for anchor text. Google image replacement.
Siteexplorer.yahoo.com – great tool for tracking incoming links.
Important to exist under just one domain.
Must sign up for google webmaster tools so that you can do the redirect for www and non-www.
