Keith Vera (@KeithVera)
Client Services Manager
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to attend SMX Advanced in Seattle, WA, and hear some strong presentations from some great SEOs. Overall the conference was very informative and a lot of fun. I attended the majority of the SEO tracks on both days of the conference, and my favorite session was “Build It Better: Site Architecture for the Advanced SEO, featuring @beussery, @ audette, and @SEO_Girl.
I found that on the whole, the SEO-focused sessions covered a lot of topics that are not only highly relevant in today’s natural search space, but also covered individual components of strong SEO programs that sometimes get overlooked or bypassed altogether. I’m going to cover a few of these SEO methods, tips and tricks that I have been working on implementing across various campaigns.
- As reiterated from @mattcutts of the course of the conference, in Google’s eyes, user experience is the key. Website and information architecture complements a good SEO strategy, and a strong user experience should always be the starting point with site design. SEO best practices can be leveraged later to achieve the best possible SEO value. In the simplest of terms, the primary consideration when looking at site information architecture is focusing on structuring all of a site’s content so that it can be easily absorbed by both your target audience and the engines.
- Images make good search results (and link bait) as they can give strong and relevant answers to specific search queries. Search engines will align images within SERPs or photo SERPs when images appear to match user intent. A few important points to remember when optimizing images for search are the file name, alt tags, text, captions, image quality, and includes in your XML sitemap. The example used by @beussery that I really feel drives home the point for optimization around images, is a result for the query “how to tie a necktie”. This is an example of a great result that is sure to drive a click response.
- While we’re touching on the subject of images for link bait, @chrisbennett’s presentation during the “Show Me The Links” track gave some really strong information on utilizing infographics for link bait. The best infographics are visually pleasing, and have a unique way of taking a significant amount of data and compressing it into a digestible format, or finding a unique way of representing that data. Good infographics are easy link bait, as they offer a lot of information in a small and interesting package. The following example of an interesting infographic that comes from Infographics Showcase:
There you have it, a few core ideas we took away from SMX Advanced that will hopefully inspire some new SEO ideas and activities. Have any success stories around these points that you’d like to share? Comment below:
