13 Takeaway Tips from the TPA SEO AuditBlueGlass is changing things up a bit; this session features a live SEO audit with the rumbling of thunder in the background — you know, for added dramatic effect. We totally planned this.
Greg Boser, the president of products and services at BlueGlass, and Rae Hoffman-Dolan, the CEO of Sugarrae, are reviewing submitted websites on the spot and offering free tips. Lindsay Wassell, a partner and consultant at Keyphraseology, will moderate.
And as they’re speaking, trays of Red Bulls are being ushered into the session to re-fuel the attendees. Clearly BlueGlass knows the importance of an energy boost.
In order to respect the brave souls who entered their sites into this audit, I won’t list who they are, but I will post some great, general takeaways everyone should consider.
Tools to use:
- SEM Rush
- Majestic SEO
- Raven Tools
From Greg:
1. Set Google to the city that you’re in and pay attention to how you rank in the city. Then see how you stack up against other cities.
2. Incorporate longer titles and use semantic variations — Google’s really big on that.
3. Increase ways for people to search. Implement iPad interfaces to revamp old information. Bundle a bunch of features that would me more expensive to use for the original website.
4. Go through blog posts with no comments. Focus on getting humans to engage your blog. Human engagement is going to be the new link juice.
5. Remember that date-stamp content and evergreen content is different. Not paying attention to this will affect how Google ranks the titles.
6. If you can’t use search to market a product, take advantage of content creation.
7. Always lock yourself into an established, organic and algorithmic space.
From Rae:
8. Each page should have a separate title tag. Take every opportunity you can to differentiate each page.
9. Search for “canonical redirects” if you don’t know what the term means. It’s a basic and important strategy. Use a one-step backward re-direct instead of simply deleting pages. Repurposing is important.
10. Make sure people know they’re in the right spot. Don’t leave the most important content below the fold.
11. Set up blog URLs so that it’s blog/category/post name and not just post name.
12. Watch out for split link popularity. It sometimes happens if your site has http and https versions that aren’t carefully controlled.
13. Your top keyword should always be in the title tag of your homepage.
One last miscellaneous takeaway: Rae highly recommends Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. “I honestly don’t think people should be able to build websites without reading it.”
Time to nom on some delicious DoubleTree cookies before the last session of the day. But I’d like to finish this post with my favorite out-of-context quote from Rae: “We geeks like to drink.”
I think you mean search for [canonical REdirects], given that a search for [canonical directs] doesn’t turn up much: http://www.google.com/search?q=canonical%20directs
Thanks for pointing that out, Jonathon. In my fervent typing spree, I left off the “re.” It’s been fixed. :)
11. Set up blog URLs so that it’s blog/category/post name and not just post name.
Interesting Rae Hoffman-Dolan. Most WordPress and SEO experts like Yoast recommend using just post name. Why use blog/category/post name?
Did Greg Boser also agree that it is better?
Hi George :)
I wouldn’t say I necessarily agreed about including /blog/ in the url structure. That to me is more of a decision based on whether or not the entire site is a blog. If it is, adding /blog/ to your url structure is a bit redundant. But I am a big fan of properly nesting content. And I think that should happen regardless of whether a piece of content is a page, or a post.
The main reason to do that is that having consistent structural similarity in your urls contributes to improving the chances of things like double listings, or breadcrumb listings showing up in SERPS. It also creates a bit of a easy-read safety net, which is good if you aren’t always diligent about writing good slugs. As an example, if I were to write about Google products regularly, I would work with a cat structure something like this:
domain.com/google/admob/
domain.com/google/adesense/
domain.com/google/adwords/
domain.com/google/analytics/
With that, a post about any of those products launching a new api would end up looking like this:
domain.com/google/admob/new-api.html
domain.com/google/adesense/new-api.html
domain.com/google/adwords/new-api.html
domain.com/google/analytics/new-api.html
With that, there is a ton of topically similar structure taking place. Now, like I said, you can accomplish the same thing if you are a stickler for writing good and consistent slugs, which is something Yoast does. If you went that route, you would end up with:
domain.com/google-admob-new-api.html
domain.com/google-adesense-new-api.html
domain.com/google/adwords/new-api.html
domain.com/google-analytics-new-api.html
Pretty much the same, but mine’s a little shorter. :)
Also, if you look at the pages on Yoast’s , you will see a lot of his “money” pages nested properly. Pages like this:
http://yoast.com/tools/seo/greasemonkey/
Thanks for the answer Greg. That makes sense.
Set up blog URLs so that it’s blog/category/post name and not just post name. using category is in blog post is an good idea . Thanks for posting the points, Amanda Milligan.