A 5 Minute talk by Chris Lowry, from allaboutchris.org, about basic strategies for effective SEO. As given at the April South Yorkshire Wordpress meetup.

1. COMING effective SEO
5 minutes on
IN FIRST
Chris Lowry
@bigonroad
allaboutchris.org

2. This guy is 1st on Google for
“Black dude sniffing armpit”,
because he understand the
three things below:
LINKS
STRUCTURE
CONTENT

3. LINKS
Currently, links from other sites to
yours are the key method for SEO.
This will change in time, but you’ll always
want lots of relevant links, from well
known sites, in a related field.
» Relevance
» Link text
» Site popularity
» Numbers of links

4. LINKS continued
So a great link is one like this:
http://www.thedesignblog.com X
Relevant
content
TheDesignBlog.com
Popular
Best Designer Ever? site
Chris Lowry, unlikely as it would seem, has
been crowned the Best Designer in the 10 million people
world, by the Queen. like DesignBlog
Relevant From his excellent web
link text design blog, you can see
he clearly has a
prodigious skill, and an
unusually devastating
combo of wit, charm and
raw magnetism.

5. LINKS continued
And a bad link is one like this:
http://myfirstknitting-blog.wordpress.com X
Irrelevant Jimmy’s knitting
content Unpopular
Blog site
Sorry, been a
while Be the first
to like this
It’s been about a year since my last
post. Haven’t done anything in that Current articles:
time. March (1)
My mate has a site if you wanna look. 2010 (1)
Irrelevant Will try to post more soon.
link text 0 comments

6. LINKS continued
Don’t worry too much about
rel=“nofollow”.
There is a myth that search engines
ignore them, but its not true. They are
likely less valuable, but still useful.
Avoid link farms!
They are awful, blatant attempts at
manipulation, and likely to cause
negative damage to your SEO value!

7. STRUCTURE
Structure is a simple, fix-it-once
addition to your SEO arsenal.
The way that your site is accessed by
search engines affects how they rank you.
Key areas:
» Permalink structure
» Site domain
» Site map
» Degradeable JS & Images
» Speed

8. STRUCTURE continued
Permalink structure
Avoid query based URLs –
“index.php?q=22”. Using .htaccess you
can achieve wonders here.
Ideally, always go for keywords, rather
than numbers – “blog/buying-a-new-hat”.
Site domain
A domain with keywords can help,
especially on smaller sites -
chrisdesign.com – but only as your main
domain. Parked domains split your effort,
and don’t help.

9. STRUCTURE continued
Site map
Helps search engines to index all your
pages easily. XML Sitemaps are supported
by Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.
With a static site, generate your own,
otherwise use a plugin that updates one.
Degradeability
Make sure all text content is visible with
CSS and JS turned off – this is how
searchbots access your site.
Images need alt tags, otherwise they don’t
register.

10. STRUCTURE continued
Speed
Google recently revealed that speed of
websites will be thrown into their
algorithm. Likely that other search
engines will follow suit.
Studies also show that visitors spend less
time on slow sites, and buy less stuff.
The golden loading time is 1.5 seconds –
get under that and you put yourself in the
lead.

11. ContentThe most important of them
CONTENT
all, and the most costly in
every sense of the word.
This isn’t even SEO, its just
truth: your website needs to be
worth visiting.

12. Content
Basically, you need people to want to visit
your site, and to link to it. The only way to do
CONTENT that is through awesome content.
Sure, keywords are important in your text,
continued but “keyword stuffing” will get you
blacklisted. Meta tags and page titles should
match content keywords.

13. TIME
Links, Structure and Content.
Easy.
However, whilst learning them
takes 5 minutes, applying them
over and over takes years.
Search engines respect age of
domains, and age increases
numbers of links, visitors.
It took her 18 years, but if
Brad Pitt ever searches his own
name, Doris has finally got her
personal website top.

14. » Code.google.com/speed :
TOOLS
links to awesome tools
» Webpagetest.org :
fast, free simple speed checker
» Google webmaster tools :
mega capable, a bit complex.
» The Noob Guide to SEO

15. QUESTIONS?
Wanna say thanks?
Link to http://allaboutchris.org
with “Chris Lowry Designer”, or
“Slightly less hairy than an ape”.