SEO tips and help

simonok, first hand experience trumps all when it comes to what works for a site. I’m not disputing the fact that it would work rather the fact that just because people say you should do one thing doesn’t mean its true. Lies and myths travel fast and die hard--especially with SEO.

In any event. I will say that I consider it but my navigation at or below the opening body tag is always very light. This would be a possibly huge issue for those who have a menu with 10 top level links each with 3-5 sub documents. Including markup and etc you could literally be talking 100s of lines before any content.

I agree with you, if you don’t have wads of code before your content, it’s probably not worth doing, I’m not suggesting everyone do it, and it can be a right pain to place elements correctly - just consider it.

I personally think you could put together almost any page in any manner (on an established site), and if you get quality inbound links for whatever terms you are plugging, you will get good results in serp’s

I think I have hijacked this post, I should stop now.

No hijacking going on here... it’s all information that I’m looking for so feel free to share more!

I’m guessing that you could in theory have say 3 or 4 headlines <h1><h2> etc with keywords, at the top of you site but have them match the background colour of a div so you don’t actually see the text but search engines would. Cheating maybe but if it’s relevant to your site then why not.

Thanks to all of you for the great info... it’s given me more of an idea how it works.

No don’t do that hidden text is very bad seo trick, even if its the same colour as the background, it will get you blocked by google

Really? I never thought that would get you blocked. I’ll go search!

I found this

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353

Thanks for that!

Yes don’t do any silly hidden text tricks, and I wouldn’t bother with the content before the menu thing either.

The SEO in Practice book mentioned above looks ok, albeit a thinly veiled sales pitch for their SEO Tools. (Check out the way they explain to do things, they show you the "hard way" and then the "easy way" with their automated tools. I am kind of distrustful of that type of marketing.)

Being an SEO myself, this is what I would recommend to someone looking to build search engine friendly sites:

Book/Guide: Download the FREE and very good SEO Fast Start, by Dan Theis, a respected figure in the SEO/PPC world-
http://www.seofaststart.com/download

Use it, step by step, to optimize a couple of sites yourself to gain some working knowledge at least of on-page optimization, use of title, meta description, h tags, and understand what anchor text is and how to use it with your targeted keywords.

Blogs to read:
http://www.seobook.com/blog
http://www.seomoz.org/blog

Grab SEOmoz’s free guides:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization


Just going through and understanding all this information will put you in a good position to move forward on SEO, understand the importance of linking and keyword optimization, etc. etc.

I also agree with something someone else said above - that SEO, at least it its traditional sense, is only one part of a larger marketing/design/development process, but, as far as the way that search engines rank pages and sites today, it is a pretty important part.

I would just like to add a couple of things...

I personally hate the built-in meta options for keywords etc in Modx (although its about the only thing I can fault). I find its much better to create a template variable (tv) as a text only TV and then add this to the template as follows;

<meta name="description" content="[*metaDesc*]" />.

Then it is much easier to update the meta description either in the manger of via the drop down options when viewing pages (with manager login). You can do this for keywords also

Another area to watch is your menu snippets - I have seen a few sites using the page title (e.g in breadcrumbs). However, in the search results (SERPS), you’ll want your page not only to list high, but attract the visitor to click on it because the copy is compelling.

The title should ideally include the main keyword for that page (but never keyword stuff) and be descriptive. You have about 66 characters for the title in SERPS, so if we assume for the moment we are selling a iphone app that improves battery life (dont go looking - I am making this up as a go) and this phase gets a lot of searches, we might have;

Improve your iPhone battery life by 30% | iphonestuff.com
Dont miss calls or your favourite music again, our wigit improves your iPhone battery life by a whopping 30%
Download and install today, just $19.57. More info...

The title contains our keyphase "iphone battery" within the description. Notice I have placed our company name at the end. Unless you have a strong brand (or are brand building as the priority) I recommend placing your name at the end, seperated with a pipe.

The point here is that if your menus use the title, they will quickly be to long and not make sense to your visitors navigating the site. So when you build you templates think about which tags your using and why. If a proper site description for the title in SERPS does not work in your Modx site, use something else such as menu or long title, but make sure every title and its relevant meta description is written to contain your main keyword and is compelling. If you can save the page as iphone_battery_wigit or something that has the main keyword in also (assuming your using mod_rewrite), its worth doing

On a second point do consider your site structure. If you want a particular page to be shown for iphone battery, do some site sculpturing. If all sub pages to do with the application link back to the main page, google can understand which is the important page. Links in the template to pages such as your privacy statement that are not important can have a "nofollow" on the a link - no point in wasting link juice.

Hope this helps a few of you think about which tags to use during the build so you dont end up making lots of changes afterwards

David

yes, definitely create TVs for meta description and meta keyword - the default MODx set up is quite inconvenient.

And also like edge said, think about the way you use MODx placeholders. I personal use [*pagetitle*] for my seo-oriented, keyword rich <title> text, and save [*longtitle*] and menu for on-page markup. In some cases (wayfinder comes to mind), this requires diverting from the default snippet settings.

FYI, I always have a "blank canvas" MODx installation set up with all of this in place, including default XHTML templates and CSS files - it is my own SEO’d MODx out of the box, easily customizable for me.

+1

Thanks everybody - lot of useful information.

Quote from: rossco at Sep 16, 2008, 08:58 AM

Using MODx to create the XML and registering that XML with Google.

How do I do this? Also, is it possible to generate Google sitemap with MODx?

My own SEO experience is to create with JavaScript "read more..." links so I can say shortly everything needed to my visitors and then add loads of more keyword rich text under "read more.." link but for Google robot the text is at the same page.