Study Sites to Improve Your SEO Skills
A great way to improve your SEO Skills is to look at the best of the best. Looking at sites that do SEO well (or sites that do it poorly) can teach you a lot SEO and really improve your skills as a SEO professional. In SEO, there are many different types of sites. There are news sites like the Nytimes.com, review sites like Yelp.com, classified sites like Craigslist.com, content sites like Wikipedia.com, retail sites like Zappos.com, services sites like Carat.com, etc., etc. Each of these sites require different strategies for SEO. The structure for these sites and the keyword optimization become critical.
Structure of the Site
Especially considering Googles latest algorithm developments, how you structure your site has become even more important. Pick a couple of sites that you notice showing up in the search results and study how they are linking into the deep pages of their site. Often times the deep pages on the site are the pages that make them money (especially on retail sites). Understanding site structure is critical in developing your SEO.
The way Hotels.com links to its deep pages will certainly be different than how Amazon.com links to their deep pages. Some sites will use content to link deeply while other sites will use different methods. Looking at the flow of the site can be a major help in understanding SEO site structure.
Link Building
There are plenty of free SEO resources that give you some information about linking. Rather than always looking at what your competitors are doing, it can be helpful to see what other industries are doing. You can learn a lot, and it could help you build a business case for upper management for developing product launch strategies, content stategies, and/or contests that will help to generate interest and thus, links.
Keyword Strategies
While you won’t be able to figure out which keywords to target by looking at the best SEO sites out of your industry, you might be able to understand their strategy. You will be able to see whether they are targeting high traffic terms or long tail terms. You will also be able to see whether they are doing keyword research for each page or if they have created a formula. Look to see how they treat their main landing pages as opposed deeper pages. As odd as it may sound this will help you to decide which keywords to target on your own site.
Conclusion
Whether the company you work for is big or small, whether SEO is your main job or a side job, looking at what the best SEO sites does will be beneficial to you. Having your own personal site (s) is very important for learning, but it is not everything. I highly recommend pulling together a list of 5-8 sites that have great SEO, and studying what each of them do extremely well.
Two Features I Recently Found on SEOBook Toolbar
Today I found a couple new features on the SEOBook Toolbar that I use that I really liked. When I first downloaded the toolbar, I am embarrassed to say, I did not do much research behind what meets the eye. There were some features I had heard people talk about but couldn’t find and never took the time to try.
Simulating User Agent:
Being able to simulate a user agent is crucial when running any type of analysis on a site. It allows you to view the page as the search engines do without having to look at the cache. Until now I have been using Google Cache and Web Developers Toolbar to simulate these experiences.
Select the competition menu and scroll down to “User Agent”:
From “User Agent” select which user agent you would like to use.
Server Headers:
The Server Header tool is another tool that I have recently discoved. Every time I want to check a URL I have been going to SEOConsultants Header Checker Tool and using their tool.
Now checking the server header will not require me to even leave the page. It will be a useful time saver going forward.
The SEO Toolbar is a great tool that I use on a daily basis and one of the tools cannot live without. I am always able to find something new and useful that I did not know about before. Leave a note below if there is a feature that you use daily.,m,
Using Foursquare Effectively
Tonight when I was at Webinno 26 I checked in on Foursquare. A couple of minutes later I was greeted with this email about an after party in the area.
It was a neat way for RiotVine to use Foursquare to find people in the area who would be interested in an event. Unfortunately this time I wasn’t able to attend, but in the future when I was at concerts or events I would love to get messages telling me about parties or specials in the surrounding area. I don’t usually appreciate email marketing, but in this case I appreciated the effort by RiotVine.
