SEO Usability Articles

The right links are fuel for a retail web site’s search engine rankings. But building the right links is among the most difficult, misunderstood and poorly executed aspects of search engine optimization. There are two kinds of links that retailers should focus on to improve such rankings. Links from an e-retailer’s product page to other relevant product pages within the site—with relevant, as judged by the search engine spider, being the keyword—is one type. But a retailer can’t just put a bunch of links on a site to achieve a higher rank without taking into account whether the links achieve business goals. Such links must make merchandising and business sense, otherwise they will interfere with the shopper’s experience and possibly have a deleterious effect on a retail site. The second kind of link is links coming into a site from external sources, which retailers have a lot less control over. A link from a hunting magazine to an outdoor retail site is a link from an authoritative external site and those kinds of links can boost a retailer’s search rankings. But they are much harder to achieve because they require persuading the outside site to link to the retailer’s site, a mostly manual process. This session will examine criteria for evaluating a link’s value, creative link building strategies, link building dos and don’ts, and how to leverage affiliates and social media content. It will tell attendees how seemingly innocent practices can undermine a search engine optimization program and how best practices in search marketing are likely to change in the near future.

Workshop Presenters:
P.J. Fusco, Senior Consultant, NetConcepts
Mark Kaufman, Associate Vice President, CNet Findability, CNet

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Keyword-rich contextually relevant text links are like fuel for your web site’s search engine rankings. Without good links, you are relegated to the bottom of the search results heap. Link building is arguably the most difficult; the most misunderstood and poorly executed aspect to SEO. In this session, you will learn criteria for evaluating a link’s value, creative link building strategies, link buying do’s and don’ts, how to approach webmasters, how to leverage your affiliates, how social media can be leveraged to build links, dangerous tactics, and more!

Moderator: Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts

Panelists:
Neil Patel, Chief Technology Officer, Advantage Consulting Services
Seth Besmertnik, CEO, LinkExperts
Rhea Drysdale, Online Marketing Director, Less Everything

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There are basic SEO metrics that will help with the “blocking and tackling” — things like keyword popularity, indexation, link popularity, PageRank scores, rankings, top-referring keywords, etc. There are also the red herrings, like keyword density and KEI scores, that are only distractions. But most importantly, there are a whole new class of SEO metrics that are largely undiscovered by folks in SEO and analytics alike, that are essential in order to fully capitalize on the “Long Tail” of SEO. These Key Performance Indicators include:

• Brand-to-nonbrand Ratio — percentage of your natural search traffic that comes from brand keywords versus nonbrand keywords
• Unique Pages — number of unique (non-duplicate) web pages crawled by search engine spiders
• Page Yield — percentage of unique pages that yield search-delivered traffic in a given month
• Keyword Yield — average number of keywords each page (minus the freeloaders) yields in a given month
• Visitors per Keyword — ratio of search engine delivered visitors to search terms
• Index-to-crawl Ratio — ratio of pages indexed to unique crawled pages
• Engine Yield — the amount of traffic a search engine delivers for every page it crawls

Speakers:
Brian Klais, Netconcepts
Richard Zwicky, Enquisite

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Web users rely on community-contributed-content sites such as Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers. These sites enable you to communicate directly with an engaged audience. But contribute to the conversation with care. Too much spin and you’re credibility will be shot-and your brand damaged. You’ll come away from this session knowing how these influential sites work and how to participate constructively.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Lise Broer “Durova”, Administrator, Wikipedia
Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, Hochman Consultants
Matt McGee, SEO Manager, Marchex
Jeff Muendel, Search and Online Marketing Analyst, Netconcepts

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Wikipedia is powerful. Concerned about how your company or service is portrayed? Wikipedia experts answer your questions and take you live to the site for advice on how to interact with the service.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Lise Broer “Durova”, Administrator, Wikipedia
Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, Hochman Consultants
Jeff Muendel, Search and Online Marketing Analyst, Netconcepts

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This session isn’t about SEO fundamentals. You won’t learn why links are important for rankings; you won’t learn how to justify SEO to your boss. What you will learn is how to take your search engine optimization skillset to the next level, even if you’re already a savvy search marketer. SEO expert Stephan Spencer opens up his toolkit to share insightful information that demonstrates each tool in action using audience members’ sites.

If you want the “secret sauce” to rocketing past your competitors in the search results, this session is for you.

• Learn how to gain higher rankings through “The Long Tail,” blogs, social networks, widgets, APIs, spiders, and more
• Obtain the tools and techniques to “reverse engineer” competing sites that outperform yours in Google

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This workshop will cover the fundamentals of search engine optimization (SEO) and social media optimization (SMO). The workshop will focus on how to acquire unpaid (aka “organic”) web site visitors from search engines like Google & Yahoo, as well as from social networking & social media sites like Digg, MySpace, Facebook, & YouTube.

Workshop Presenters:
Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts
Muhammad Saleem, Advantage Consulting Services (ACS)

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Ever wonder what the SEO pros know that you don’t? What tools they use every day that you don’t even know exist?

This virtual seminar isn’t about search engine optimization fundamentals. You won’t learn why links are important for rankings; you won’t learn how to justify SEO to your boss. What you will learn is how to take your search engine optimization skill set to the next level, even if you’re already a savvy search marketer.

Two renowned search marketing gurus will open up their toolkits, unveiling and demonstrating powerful tools and immediately actionable tactics. If it’s not practical, it won’t be in this seminar!

YOU WILL LEARN:

• How to gain higher rankings through Web 2.0, “The Long Tail,” blogs, social networks, widgets, APIs, spiders, and more
• The tools and techniques to ‘reverse engineer’ competing sites that outperform yours in Google
• Well-kept secrets that only the top SEO pros know
• How to take your search engine optimization skillset to the next level, even if you’re already a savvy search marketer

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:
This session is for any marketer who wants in on the “secret sauce” to rocket past your competitors in the search results. A technical background is definitely not required, but helpful.

PRESENTERS:
Stephan Spencer, founder and president of Netconcepts
Rand Fishkin, co-founder and CEO of SEOmoz

Sign up now

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In her article on content optimization, Director of Natural Search Consulting PJ Fusco discussed how important it was to have keyword themes. As she mentions in this article, where she reviews different keyword suggestion tools on ClickZ, PJ writes, “to be found for the right words on any site, you must undergo regular, extensive keyword research to understand what words people use when they search for your goods and services.”

From Google Trends to Quintura, get an inside look at these free keyword suggestion tools that can help you with content optimization for your site. Read the full review of these tools at ClickZ here.

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I’ve run across a number of local business sites which offer event calendars of some sort, and many of these companies may not be aware that they can and should add hCalendar Microformat to their pages to further optimize them for both search and user experience. I’ve previously recommended hCard Microformat for optimizing local business sites, and hCalendar can offer similar advantages, particularly as the evolution of blended search results continues.

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