Stephan Spencer's Scatterings

The Scattered Wisdom of a scientist turned web marketing virtuoso

March 2010
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Natural Search Tactics for Retailers

On Tuesday I gave two presentations at the Shop.org Annual Summit. First was "Natural Search Tactics for the Retailer" with fellow panelists Ken Jurina from Epiar, Jenny Schlueter from Dell, and Ian McAnerin from McAnerin International. It was a very tactical session - focused on tools, tips and techniques. Ken covered keyword research, Jenny covered content optimization, Ian covered technical optimization, and I covered link building.

Some are a few key points from the session...

The Powerpoint, which includes all 4 presentations, is available for download here.

The second session I presented was with Amy Africa and it was a site clinic session where Amy and I did impromptu critiques of audience members' websites. Amy covered usability and conversion; I covered SEO. It was a lot of fun. There were no Powerpoints for that session.

Posted by Stephan Spencer on 09/19/2008 | Permalink

Comments (6)| Comments RSS | Filed under: Search Engines            

6 comments

  1. Excellent post Stephan and thanks for the information-rich presentation. It's a gem for anyone who's new to SEO.

    One thing that I am not clear about is that you mention site-wide links get discounted.

    Do you mean that links from the blogroll (which are on all pages of a blog) are not good. Or at least I get that links from inside an individual blog post are better than site-wide links, be they in the blogroll or elsewhere. Am I getting it right?

    Comment by Affan Laghari [Visitor] Email · http://www.carbonoffsetsdaily.com — 09/19/08 @ 10:17


  2. Great stuff Stephan! The way you share information in easy to grasp bits is very nice. Quick question, when you say "Remember that the more links on the linking page, the less PageRank you'll get." I'm a bit confused. Is this a reference to Google not liking a page that has too many links, or is there an issue with your linking page "sharing away" your link love, which impacts your own site's PR?

    Comment by Craig Tomlin [Visitor] · http://www.wcraigtomlin.com — 09/19/08 @ 15:17


  3. Affan, indeed you are correct - links from inside an individual blog post are better than site-wide links. This is because Google prefers links that appear to be earned by merit.

    Craig, being 1 link out of 10 total links on somebody's page is better than than being 1 out of 100 because the PageRank on that person's page is divvied up amongst all the links on the page.

    Comment by Stephan Spencer [Member] Email — 09/20/08 @ 15:05


  4. Though I'm new to SEO, I have been following many blogs in the last few months and never got this tip about the site-wide link being discounted, which will definitely save me a lot of time.
    I guess another reason can be that links from inside the post (or article) are normally set in a favorable context, where the text surrounding the link would also be topically relevant to the link.

    Anyway, thanks again, Stephan!

    Comment by Affan Laghari [Visitor] Email · http://www.carbonoffsetsdaily.com — 09/20/08 @ 18:38


  5. Great Post Stephan, very informative. I think links from inside an individual blog post are better than site-wide links

    Comment by Lisa [Visitor] · http://blog.findsavings.com — 09/26/08 @ 11:13


  6. Hi there, Stephan;

    Thank you for the article.

    I know it's been a while since you posted, but I FINALLY made it through your post and the power point slides. It raised up a few questions.

    You mentioned that site-wide incoming links are bad. My question is how bad? If another person's site has 500 pages that link to you in the footer, should you ask them NOT to link at all (so you aren't "penalized" by google)?

    In essence, is it better to have NO links from a site than to have several hundred?

    Or are you saying that ONE contextual inbound link with relevant anchor text might be better than 100, or 200 or however many incoming site-wide links?

    You also mentioned in the Power Point presentation that when asking for other sites to link to yours, that it is a bad idea to provide them with the text / code to link to your site. Why is that? Is it because you want a certain amount of diversity in the anchor text when sites link to yours? Or is it an etiquette issue where you think it is more likely to have a favorable response if you allow the webmaster to write whatever he or she wants when they link to you?

    Thank you in advance for any more insights you could share. And thank you again for the article and the slides.

    Comment by Mark R [Visitor] · http://www.thebuddhagarden.com — 11/14/09 @ 10:36


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