Greetings Team Betamouse! Today the Panel discusses how to alter your Disney blog or site to ensure the best SEO (search engine optimization). Do you have any advice or tips? Email: show@betamouse.net.
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- Henry introduces the Panel.
- Scott explains in depth what SEO is.
- Henry explains how a relevant domain may be necessary.
- Scott explains why you should or should not have Disney in it.
- Henry discusses changes your permalink URLs to make them the most relevant.
- Scott and Katie discuss making your site SEO friendly when not knowing much code and how websites like SquareSpace and WordPress help you with this already.
- Henry and Nate discuss the options of Google Analytics and compare it to the analytics of Woopra.
- Henry and Scott discuss Google Webmaster Tools.
- Scott discusses writing for SEO versus writing for the reader, which is the best way to go?
- The Panel discusses link backs, are they good for your site or not?
- Katie questions the reason why some small blogs would use Ads on their site.
- Henry gives tips and tricks about dates and tagging your blog posts to increase SEO.
- Nate asks about SEO using image links.
- If you have any ideas about Disney SEO tweet us, like us or chat with us on FriendFeed!
As a website manager, I really appreciated this episode. Are there other web developer podcasts you listen to or would recommend? It’s such a fluid field and it’s so hard to keep up with the latest trends and sift through what’s good info and what isn’t.
Hey Rae, you may enjoy some of the podcasts on the 5by5 network: http://5by5.tv/! I really like the Ruby Show, but it’s very ruby/rails specific.
Very interesting episode. Your experiences and advice matched closely with what I’d already decided when I was looking into how Search Engines work. I came to the same conclusions – don’t make too much extra work in trying to falsely trigger search engines, just do it the honest way and make your content good and relevant to the site’s visitors. Be reciprocal in linking to sites which you judge to be of good value to your readership (not just link exchanging for its own sake, that’s bad!).
It’s worth creating and submitting a sitemap too I think – although most SEs will still crawl a logically laid-out site fine. Not sure how much use metatag keywords are, but it doesn’t do any harm to add some that are relevant to your content and page title.
It seems to be working OK anyway, most of the big search engines seem to rank my site pretty well for most of the common combinations of searches for the Port Orleans resorts. And Google seems happy with my code, even though I chose to go very “web 1.0″ with my layout I still get a clean bill of health from its HTML checkers, etc.
Andre
Awesome, thanks so much for the comment, Andre! It was a fun episode to do. We may do another one on this subject at some point! Keep on rockin’ it with portorleans.org!
Henry a couple of things
–First I love betamouse! Just stumbled on it and have been having fun listening.
–Second, I want to echo the sitemmap comment. Google likely will figure you out anyway, but I had literally tenfold increases from yahoo and bing after I submitted sitemaps to them too.
–Third, note the “wrong searches” that are bringing people to your site, and add something for them to land on.
For example, I was getting a ton of search-based traffic on my site for the 2011 Disney Military salute.
The problem was that since this has not been announced so far, I had no content about it.
People would look at a few pages on my site, and then go away, presumably frustrated.
So I created a new page that says the salute has not yet been announced. My pageviews per visit for this search term has gone way down–which is a good thing, as it means people are finding out just what they need about this salute.
“;’ I am really thankful to this topic because it really gives great information `-;