November 17, 2006
Geoff Karcher’s Presentation
He starts out with: Why Bother:
He says its cheap, huge and seo makes your site better.
He says he is going to talk mostly about SEO.
He says he is looking for:
- Is the site indexed.
- Is it Optimized
- Is it Usable
Then he’s going to cover what he’s going to do about it.
He starts with Progress Book
The first things he looks at is to see if the site is indexed.
He looks at the title, words in body, page weight and download time. He says this site will take about 47 seconds to download because of its size.
He goes on to a SEO Analysis:
The site is not fully indexed, there are unoptimized titles and meta tags, un-optimized H1 tags and links.
He discusses robots.txt files, custom 404 error page, site maps and the fact that pdf’s are not great for indexable content.
He mentions that they should look at conversion points and add contact information to all the pages.
He goes into key phrase research. He says you can use your competitors and even your own log files to find phrases to target. He mentions that most of the time your users and customers call your product something completely different than what you call it.
He discusses search engine saturation and link saturation. He wants to see how much content you have indexed compared to your competitors and how many links you have pointing to you compared to your competitors. This will give you a good idea as to where you stand.
He suggests
- optimizing all page titles
- create keyword-rich copy
- create an optimized sitemap
- implement a custom 404 error page
- implement robots.txt file
- rewrite clean urls
Then he moves on to
Maselli Construction Co., Inc.
He says he likes to keep the size of the home page of a site to under 50kb.
He says the Flash intro is causing them a lot of difficulty. This is causing them not to get indexed. They could use some more incoming links into the site. He discusses text links. These help search engines find all of your pages. They don’t have a robot.txt file.
From a usability standpoint, he discusses consistancy. Try to keep the look consistant.
He says that 90% of people he reviews don’t have custom 404 error pages, or robots.txt files.
He said he found some broken links. So you want to click through your site and make sure everything that you want to have is truly on your site.
He talks about a Unique Selling Proposition. He says that it’s important that a new visitor knows why you are different within 15 seconds.
He did some log file analysis of the site. He uses Clicktracks.com.
He discusses that you should review your stats to modify your site to increase your conversion rate. He looks at the “bounce rate” of the home page. That shows you how many people left the site right from the home page vs. people that continued on within the site.
He suggests starting with 15-20 key phrases in the beginning of your seo strategy.
He says that you should have at least 100s of incoming links into your site.
He says that if you are not asking for the sale chances are you will not get the sale. Contact information should be easily accessible from all pages.
Now he moves on to Trommer & Associates.
He says there are similar issues here.
- Large file size
- Optimize Titles
- Optimize links to describe where that link goes to
- Robots.txt files
- Have a footer navigation
- Sitemaps
He says that requiring a Shockwave player will alienate search engine spiders and any visitors that don’t have Shockwave installed.
He talks some more about have a strong conversion point, contact information should be readily available.
He mentions that there is no industry standard bounce rate of a home page. But if he had to guess it would be 30%-50% bounce rate.
Trommer had the most pages indexed in the engines.
He suggests that they ask for the sale, create h1 tags and build backlinks.
He gives links to
Clicktracks
Marketleap
WordTracker
Whois
I missed a couple more..
All-in-all, he discusses some foundation things. They are all good ideas. And many sites still need help in these areas.
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