Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals | Stacey Morgan Smith

Tuesday’s sessions at SMXEast in New York began with Shari Thurow and “Search Engine Friendly Web Design.” Shari is the Founder and SEO Director of Omni Marketing Interactive and has a background in design. Takeaways include:

• You build a website for your users, not the search engines.
• Use industry directories, such as findlaw.com and Thomas register
• You must communicate well with the engines so they can communicate well with the searchers.
• Remember basic rules of web design for searchers: site should be easy to read, navigate, and find; should be consistent in layout, design, and labeling, and should be quick to load.
• Remember basic rules of web design for crawlers: spider must be able to index text, follow links, and measure popularity.
• Need to accommodate searcher behavior
• 3 equal parts: keyword-rich text, site and page architecture, and high-quality external link development
• Usability tests will let you know if visitors can tell what your site is about
• If search engines can’t access your pages, those pages won’t rank
• Search engines can follow flash-based links but they’re not very good at it, and they’re improving at a snail’s pace
• splash pages are not search engine friendly and usually are not user friendly
• The first things eyes go to a on webpage is movement
• People don’t come to a website to see how wonderful you are. They come to your website to see what you can do for them.
• Press release PDFs are ok on your site, but you have to optimize them the same as you would a webpage.

Shari offered up some great commonsense usability tips, and I’ve just started reading her book “Search Engine Visibility.”

– Stacey Morgan Smith