Top Tips from the SEO Site Clinic at Affiliate Summit West

Yesterday at Affiliate Summit West I attended an all-star SEO site clinic featuring some of the top SEOs in our industry. Rae Hoffman, Greg Boser, Michael Gray and Mike Streko were all on the panel and politely eviscerated audience members’ websites, dishing out invaluable information and giving great advice. Below I’ve compiled some of the top tips and tactics every webmaster should keep in mind:

SEO Site Clinic panelists

• Stay on top of those status codes! Make sure you’re checking your status codes so that your site is returning the proper codes for appropriate situations. One man’s site page was returning a 400, and Michael Gray urged him to look into what was causing the 400 and fixing the bad request.
• Move that site off Blogger! Greg Boser said that “serious” sites need to move off Blogger and other hosted service sites. You’ll bring traffic and links to your own domain rather than the parent domain/host, and it’s just more professional and better for business to have a separate set up.
• Make sure your Javascript/CSS is on external files. Greg also said that so much can go wrong when Javascript/CSS is on the page, so keep them external to avoid any issues.
• Linking to unrelated sites can raise red flags. All of the panelists noted that one attendee’s site was linking to a poker ad at the bottom of the page. The site they were analyzing wasn’t poker-related, so this link could potentially be harmful since Google could see it as being unrelated and possibly spammy or a paid link. Indeed, the woman noted that her page’s PR had dropped 2 spots and the panelists said that a good start would be to remove the questionable link.
• Check your site for canonical issues. One man’s site had multiple copies — the www and non-www version of his site was resolving, and he also had his domain with no dashes and the domain with dashes (e.g., 10e20.com vs. 10-e-20.com). Make sure that you’re sticking with a canonical version of your website (e.g., www.nodashurl.com) and 301-redirecting other versions and iterations to this central version.
• Be aware of what your webmaster is doing. During one man’s site review, the panelists found a few one pixel by one pixel links on the homepage — holy 2001 spam, Batman! The site owner had no idea these links existed and said that he has a webmaster/programmer who handles everything. After urging him to fire his webmaster, the panelists all pointed out that you need to make sure you’re aware of what your webmaster is up to and check his work to make sure that he’s not doing anything shady (either intentionally or otherwise).
• Use a theme pyramid for information architecture. Rae suggested a “theme pyramid” approach for your website content (e.g., home page –> main categories –> sub-categories –> content), as it’s the most logical and best layout for users and for crawlers.
• The faster the server, the better. The faster your server responds, the quicker your site can get crawled and the more content will get indexed.

My absolute favorite piece of advice came from Greg Boser, who suggested that you monitor questions that pop up on Yahoo! Answers, and instead of answering them right away, pay attention to which questions seem to pop up over and over again, then author up relevant blog posts that address these questions. That way, you can cite your blog post as a reference which can drive traffic to your site and establish yourself as an expert/relevant resource. Awesome tip!

The site clinic was definitely a success and was one of the best I attended at ASW. I hope you all enjoyed some of the tidbits I shared from the panel!