Cshel Chicago SEO, PR and Web Development

SEO 101: Google Revelations

Posted on 26. Sep, 2008 by Carolyn Shelby.

Brian, David and I discuss two Google Webmaster Central Blog posts and the impact of those announcements on how we build sites, review our stats and logs, and how we deal with clients.

Specifically, we discuss:

• Crawling through HTML Forms — Friday, April 11, 2008
• Dynamic URLs vs static URLs — Monday, September 22, 2008

In a nutshell, Google says they pull “important” terms from surrounding pages and use them to populate search boxes and other forms in an effort to get more content. Some of the terms they pull don’t seem like things normal people would be searching for, so we’re not sure how exactly they decide what terms to try or not try. You should be able to scan through your access logs and pick out examples of the bot filling in forms to see for yourself.

As for the 180 degree flip on dynamic URLs vs. static URLs, we’re pretty much in agreement that it’s not a green light to shut off URL rewriting or stop doing “pretty URLs”. Pretty URLs enhance the user experience, and in cases where you have an existing web site that is already turning ugly, dynamic URLs into pretty static strings, you should DEFINITELY not deviate from the status quo. Changing all of your existing URLs will cause a horrendous drop in traffic while the engines try to figure out what you’ve done and get everything sorted out.

Popularity: 53% [?]

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SEO 101: Interview with MSN Live’s Jeremiah Andrick

Posted on 24. Sep, 2008 by Carolyn Shelby.

MSN Live Webmaster Tools’ very own Jeremiah Andrick joined David and Brian on SEO 101. Jeremiah gave advice on how to best use MSN Live when it comes to pagerank and results, and he also answered questions on Live results relevance as compared to Google, and took some questions about video submissions.

MSN Live's Jeremiah Andrick

Popularity: 41% [?]

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SEO 101: Link Building

Posted on 01. Jul, 2008 by Carolyn Shelby.

Dave Conklin from ProspectMX joins Ne0 and me to discuss link building basics. Why did this guy get to be the guest? Because his company made this super cute Link Building 101 poster (pdf). We managed to cover most of the techniques on this kitschy primer, but had enough left over that we might do a Part 2 to cover the rest.

The Handout
Seriously, this is frame-worthy. I’m going to get a big laminated version to put on the wall in my office.

Things we cover in this episode include:

• Press releases (for links) — pay attention as there are some good tips for not breaking your budget and how to know when you should use free services versus when it’s a good idea to use the paid services.
• Wikis and Social Sites
• Traditional Link Building — Cherry picking links, how to ask for links the right way, how to NOT ask for links, etc.
• Paid Links, Link Exchanges and Directories

Popularity: 67% [?]

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