Technical tome

At the moment I have my head buried deeply into a technical tome entitled Search Engine Marketing by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt. It's a book on effective search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Yep, my life rocks!

After a cursory peruse, here are some of the key points I gleaned…

Keyword prominence
To improve –
- Ensure that Query words are in titles and initial paragraphs.
- Use emphasized text (bold, italic, underline).
- Alt text on images.

Spiders (programs that crawl through the web, going from link to link whilst indexing)
To improve indexing -
- Break up a large page – improve keyword density.
- Very large pages might not get crawled.

Javascript bloat
- Move JavaScript to an external file – spider does not have to crawl through it.

Title
- Lead with generic brand name (in our case Digital Art Books – because we don’t really have a globally recognized brand name (yet)).
- Tailor to what searchers are after (digital art, tutorials, how-to etc).
- Get rid of welcome, home etc. – leaving more untruncated room for keywords.
- Combine keywords – try to use one singular and one plural form to enure the page is found no matter which form the searcher uses.

Snippets (shown below title on the search results page)
- Place important keywords together at the start of description.
- Make sure brand name is there, so customers associate description with brand.
- Around 100-150 characters (Google).
- 150-200 characters (Yahoo).
eg. Ballistic digital art books present d’artiste: Character Modeling 2, featuring tutorials by … (96 characters) Keywords: digital art, character modeling, tutorials. Branding: Ballistic, d'artiste, Character Modeling 2