Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals | Stacey Morgan Smith

An afternoon session on Tuesday at SMXEast in New York allowed us to “Ask the SEOs.” This session, moderated by Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of Searsch Engine Land, gave us the opportunity to get opinions from and discuss SEO questions with some very talented Internet marketers. The speakers included Greg Boser, President and CEO, 3 Dog Media; Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.; Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land; Todd Friesen, President, Oilman SEO; Rae Hoffman, owner, Sugarrae Internet Consulting; Stephan Spencer, President & CEO, Netconcepts; and Aaron Wall, Author, SEO Book. Notes from the Q&A include :

Duplicate content that’s scraped – how to deal with this?

• Stephan: Make sure you link to the canonical URL of an article within an article.
• Vanessa: Make sure the links are absolute. Go to google DMCA page to report scrapers.
• Greg: Remember the site with the most juice wins. Scraper stuff is spammers, so you usually won’t see a negative impact.
• Rae: If a scraper site is outranking you, you aren’t doing your SEO right.
• Bruce: File online to get a Federal electronic copyright number issued ($45). If you send your info out, the site that is syndicated may outrank you.
• Stephan: With a registered copyright, you can sue for statutory damages.

Google caffeine thoughts.

• Vanessa: Primarily an infrastructure change, not a rankings change. The new infrastructure may be allowing more content to be indexable, which is what could be affecting rankings.
• Todd: A lot of universal search things seem to have changed.
• Greg: Stronger trend toward using homepage instead of internal pages that may rank on regular Google … kind of like Alta Vista, may be returning best site instead of best page.
• Bruce: Found pages in caffeine that are older than pages in normal Google index. Regular index is being updated faster. If you’re seeing rankings change, your competitor could have been spidered but you haven’t been.
• Vanessa: If so, once they launch it, it might balance out.

What are the factors that influence Google Suggest – when you type and Google gives suggestions?

• Todd: Search volume, spikes, trends.
• Aaron: Stuff on Stumbleupon and viral sites that get thousands of views a day.
• Vanessa: Take advantage of suggest – optimize for the things that Google Suggest brings up.

What’s the difference between Alexa rank and Google PageRank – why are they so disparate?

• Vanessa: They are the same because they’re magical, mythical numbers.
• Stephan: You can download a piece of software to improve one but not the other.
• Danny: It’s as if two reviewers give you two different reviews.
• Vanessa: Based on if you download the toolbar from Alexa, so certain types of sites have higher rankings. Google pagerank is vaguely based on value of links. It’s not updated very often and not super accurate. Search engines don’t use Alexa at all for anything.
• Aaron: Link diversity is going to usually win.
• Rae: If you’re spending time trying to figure out value, you’re wasting time you could be spending improving your site.

Breadcrumbs – are important. all agree!

How do you determine if a site is authoritative?

• Stephan: Does it have sitelinks for nonbrand keywords?
• Vanessa: Does the site get a lot of people to it that would want to go to your site?
• Danny: A domain can have authority and transmit that to other sites.
• Greg: The time factor is the one thing that can’t be fudged. Old sites are good.

Thank you to these SEOers for sharing their opinions with the group.

Stacey Morgan Smith is the director of search engine optimization for Northern Virginia Internet Marketing Company NetStrategies. With over 14 years’ experience as an editor and proofreader, she brings a different viewpoint to SEO. Along with the rest of the NetStrategies team, she can help you increase your leads from search!