I sat in on a talk that eBay’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Manager Dennis Goedegebuure gave at eBay’s headquarters in San Jose earlier this month.
I got to chat with Dennis and he’s both smart and interesting — away from eBay he blogs about poetry, tips on San Francisco (in Dutch) and a favorite topic of mine: Black Coffee.
Note: Just to be clear, even though this was an eBay SEO specialist presenting his tips are not focused on eBay Store SEO or any other SEO for eBay Web pages.
While Dennis was through most of his presentation, I realized that he was going to make the slides available online — They are located here: Dennis Goedegebuure on SEO at eBay DecCon09.
I decided to go ahead and include my notes (below) as there were some comments Dennis and attendees made that are not in the slides — I encourage you to look at both!
Ok, on to my notes:
Dennis’s Definition of SEO
Those sound like things you want?
Here are some SEO tips, tricks and topics:
Be Worthy
First and foremost, Dennis recommends that you make sure that your product is worth talking about; if you don’t, no person will link to you or visit your site or install your application.
Read the Search Engine Webmaster Guidelines
Dennis adds that you can learn a lot from what the search engines give you…the top search engines have documentation so you should read it… such as Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Google Universal Search: Threat or Opportunity?
Google and other search engines have moved more towards images, video and news — what we call Universal Search.
This is a threat — if you are just text-based…yet this is also a great opportunity to rank higher since there are fewer businesses that have images right now.
Sniplets Presentation
Through structured meta data the presentation of your site can be enhanced. Two tools on this are Yahoo Search Monkey or Google Rich Snippets.
Microformats.org is a great resource for how to code, present, etc. better for search engines to have better display — you won’t rank better but your appearance will be better.
How Do Search Engines Work?
Search engines have crawlers crawling links to discover your content.
If your content is not linked to (hidden in java script or flash) it can not be easily discovered. Crawlers will look at your Link Structure.
Site Indexing
Search engines download html content of the page and store it in their database. As they perform this Site Index, only extractable content is stored.
Then, search engines rank it. Here are keys to their ranking (in no particular order):
How Do I Get Google To Index My Site?
To get into the Google Site Index, or other website indexing, you simply have to publish your content onto Web pages and then link to it from somewhere. Google site indexing can be done as fast as just couple of minutes or many weeks depending on the type of Web site you have (note: Google indexes blogs more frequently than other Web sites).
Taking Your “LUMPS”
LUMP stands for Links, URL Structure, Meta Content, Page Content, SiteMap. Here are some
Links
Search engines discover you through links. It also helps with relevancy.
For example, Adobe Reader is ranked for “click here” (because its Anchor Text reads: “If you don’t have Adobe Reader, click here”
Google was the first to do a link-based algorithm based primarily on:
Four other important Link-related tips to keep in mind:
URL structure
Meta Content
Meta tags are HTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page. Make sure all of your pages have a unique page title with the keywords you want to focus on.
Page Content & Elements
SiteMap Protocol
Image Search Optimization
For one of MR. Goedegebuure’s sites, 50% of his traffic is coming from image search.
Use Semantic HTML
If you would like to have one thing emphasized, use an h1 and only one h1 per page.
Three main factors
If you do those three best practices, you will rank pretty well.
SiteMaps Continued: HTML SiteMap
Build an HTML sitemap with all links on your site for users and for search engines.
Keep your number of links to 50 or fewer because Google Sitemaps frowns upon anything more than that.
Four free tools
1) Sitemaps
Dennis recommends the following tools:
…to help you to:
2) Free Firefox plug-in toolbar
You can disable cookies, images, javascript to see what the search engines see when they look at your site
You can use this to see what’s searched more: singular or plural keywords.
4) Microsoft Advertising Intellgence Plug-In
It provides trending data for keywords, Cost Per Clicks, demographic data and real data from bing.com.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge, Dennis!
If you found this posting valuable, you may want to check out my Got Google Juice? item.
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