There was so much great stuff search engine optimization material at the New England New Media Association SEO Bootcamp last Thursday that offering five takeaways from the meeting seems parsimonious, but hey, come to the next one! If you knew nothing about SEO, it would have been a great starting place, and if you had some experience, it would have given you the chance to really dig in and talk details with some highly knowledge folks. In the meantime, here are five good SEO tidbits that came up during the conversation:
1.Off-page SEO is 3x more important than on-site SEO, according to Mark Roberge, from HubSpot in Cambridge. That means the links that point to your site. Not only the total volume, but the quality or relevance of the sites they are coming from. I wonder how many newspaper sites expend 3x the effort on cultivating high quality backlinks as they expend on on-site SEO? Of course, newspaper sites may be a bit spoiled in that they naturally develop many high quality backlinks because of the type of service they provide. But nevertheless, this is a great point, and I think especially germane to our niche content sites right now.
2. On-page SEO includes both visible SEO (title, url, H tags) and invisible (meta description, keywords, alt text and image file names, etc.). I’m happy to say our team has been working on our Web development with this in mind for years, including most recently pushing the development of a new CMS to enhance our url structure and meta attributes specifically for SEO.
3. JPGs are better for SEO than GIFs. According to Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR in Boston and San Francisco, with the advent of Google’s universal search, images and video are a big consideration in terms of drawing eyeballs to search results. And jpgs optimize better than gifs, and even more specifically, jpgs that are bigger than 200px wide and smaller than 400 px wide.
4. A good title for a page is [key phrase]: [headline]. This per Brent Payne, SEO Director for Tribune Interactive in Chicago. It’s important to work that key phrase into the headline as well.
5. CNN writes 27 different versions of a headline for a single story. This, Brent Payne also related, allows them to target each channel they are delivering content to with the most effective style. An effective Twitter headline might be different than a Digg headline, and what might trigger somebody to share a link in Facebook could be different than a link that would urge a click through on a news Web site. It’s hard to imagine having the resources for this meticulous channel targeting and massive amount of copy writing. Brent mentioned that Tribune Interactive doesn’t write this many, either. He suggested starting where you can – if you are only writing a single headline for print, add one for Web that will make sense to search, and then keep growing it from there.
So there’s five. There were so many more (a whole day’s worth!), but like I said, next time come on down and join us.
Tags: NENMA, newspapers, search engines, seo
Excellent article. It covers very important elements.
This is a very informative post. SEO is a continuous process that needs to be mastered. Three of the most important techniques are keyword choice, link building, and content writing.