Purple Squirrl

SEO still focussed on text

In the video below, Google’s Search Evangelst Adam Lasnik explains that if you are going to post images and video, text is still needed to help search engines find your page. He says that using Flash as example is good for “engaging users but still focus on text as the primary mechanism for communicating”.

The objective of course is that you need to be found. Just like I’ve done here with this video, if I were to have just embed the video with a good post title the search engines would find it more difficult to find it .When you’re trying to make money online you need to be found via natural search. If you don’t use text then you haven’t really prepared your content properly from an SEO perspective.

SEO - Update on Metrics

As SEO matures it’s interesting to see that the value and sort of metrics is also changing. Stephan Spencer over at Marketing Profs writes an article about some of the metrics now being tracked for SEO.

Here are the metrics Spencer mentions -

1) Brand-to-Nonbrand Ratio
2) Unique Pages
3) Page Yield
4) Keyword Yield
5) Visitors per Keyword
6) Index-to-Crawl Ratio
7) Engine Yield

Numbers are interesting, they can certainly tell a story but only if sliced & diced the right way do they tell the accurate story.

Perfomics Details the 4 Pillars of Natural Search

The folks over at Performics have posted four articles explaining the 4 main things any website owner needs to be concerned about when optimizing their site to be found on Google, Yahoo! or any other search engine. If you are looking at moving the needle with SEO then take some time to study these articles.

The 4 Pillars of Natural Search

Pillar Number 1: Indexation
Pillar Number 2: Content Optimization
Pillar Number 3: Link-Building
Pillar Number 4: Distribution

Their posts are clearly meant as an primer since they do not delve into any of the tools required to do any of the research necessary. In the coming months I will be posting more info on what I’ve done with this blog regarding SEO and what tools I use. I’ll also post what Wordpress plugins are good to have for SEO.