KISS SEO
Posted on August 7th, 2008by Michael Martin in Guest Posts, SEO
The following is a Guest Post from Michael Martin.
When performing SEO its best to first implement the KISS strategy, Keep It Simple S…..
Forget about the old school keyword density equations, being completely W3C compliant, creating X amount of content, pages or acquiring X amount of links.
KISS SEO would include, but not limited to:
- Unique TITLE tag for each page that includes your page’s targetted keyword(s) plus the benefit followed by Company/Site name.
- Unique META Description tag for each page that should be used to enforce the page’s usefulness and be the marketing pitch to the visitor.
- A CSS styled H1 tag centered around the page’s main keyword(s) focus - as a side note when I spoke with Matt Cutts at SMX Advanced he said Google doesn’t weigh the H1 tag any heavier than an H2 or H4, but it shouldn’t be used more than once.
- Content that is both informative, unique, and useful by fulfilling a need of your target audience.
- URLs in a non-dynamic descriptive format.
- A flat site structure with breadcrumb links.
- Absolute internal linking.
- An html user friendly site map plus the backup parachute of a sitemap.xml file.
- Robots.txt file blocking any duplicate content (print pages, etc).
- Using 301 sever side redirects to consolidate similar pages and domain changes, including canocalization such as www vs non-www.
SEO can be boiled down to simply good organization of your site’s code and assets plus acquiring quality links natuarally via useful interesting content.
If this were Gene Simmon’s KISS SEO then it would be keyword heavy toward the ASSets.
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August 7th, 2008 at 4:34 am
“plus acquiring quality links naturally via useful interesting content.”
In my opinion, you can throw out the rest.
August 7th, 2008 at 5:28 am
Hang on Michael,
“when I spoke with Matt Cutts at SMX Advanced he said Google doesn’t weigh the H1 tag any heavier than an H2 or H4″
This is a *big* deal. It just doesn’t make much sense for search engines to place as much relevance on a H4 tag as a H1.. it’s semantically less significant after all!
There are thousands of sites who believe they are well optimised who have a keyword rich H1 tag, but then use lesser header tags for structuring supplemental page contents (such as the ‘Leave a reply’ H3 on this very post) - I use H4’s for all my sidebar titles, many of which are not directly relevant to the topic of that page.
Has anyone seen any evidence of this, or has anyone else heard this directly from Google? I wonder if it’s more F.U.D.
August 7th, 2008 at 7:59 am
@Rob: I didn’t write this post
August 7th, 2008 at 8:06 am
@Michael(Gray) - I know, I should have clarified by typing ‘Michael Martin’
What’re your thoughts on this comment by Matt Cutts?
August 7th, 2008 at 8:12 am
@Michael(Gray) - Sorry, I should have clarified I meant Michael Martin, your guest blogger.
What are your views on the comment by Matt?
August 7th, 2008 at 8:54 am
@Rob: well I’m off the opinion that there is more than one search engine, and using proper HX tags is just good architecture. Personally I use only 1 H1 for the title, H2-H3 in the main body, and H4-H6 in sidebars and footers.
I haven’t tested them weighting it differently for quite some time. I’m also of the opinion that if they were or were not weighting it differently, it’s not a meaningful enough part of the ranking to worry about.
August 7th, 2008 at 9:51 am
I’ve got a couple quick questions for you Michael:
* Is there evidence to suggest that you should use an absolute URL over a relative one? I’d always assumed (incorrectly apparently) that since the search engines know how to follow a relative URL, they also know how to normalise it in terms of generating a single URL (referenced by fqdn, rooted and relative) back to a single atomic URL.
* With respect to the absolute URL, do you also include the domain as well or is a rooted URL (/my/fantastic/url/) sufficient?
August 7th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
What does ‘X’ means? O_o
August 7th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
To clarify:
@Rob
When speaking with Matt I asked, if I start in my coding with an H4 or H1 embedded with the keyword phrase does the H1 get weighed any heavier in the SERPS over if I used an H4, he said no.
He followed up by saying that it is not useful for SEO purposes to have multiple H1s, but advised having a pyramid scheme for heading tags, ie 1 H1, 2 H2, 3 H3, etc - I believe it was more a design best practice advice rather than anything for SEO.
@Al
Having absolute internal URLs is not so much for the search engines as they are much better at rooting the URL, but more so now for scraping as you will at least get some links back from it.
If you are doing a lot of page testing from a staging server I would say using relative is probably best, but having absolute URLs you can be ABSOLUTLY sure the search engines will pick up on all your internal links.
,Michael Martin
http://www.googleandblog.com/
August 7th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
To Michael Martin - guest blogger,
Thank you for this article. This reinforces the basics of SEO which I have succesfully followed for the last ten years and achieved top positions for many different web sites.
No matter how long you’ve been around a reminder of the basics is always a good idea.
August 7th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
@DimoninG: “X” can mean any number 1-6
August 7th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
@Al: IMHO if you dont use absolute URLs you leave yourself open to be taken advantage of.
August 7th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
Ah, this explains why I got a mysterious email with no message body from Michael Gray the other day.
Michael Martin: good job on the basics!
August 8th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
As a followup and clarification:
@Rob
When I spoke to Matt at SMX he stated that the weighing of an H1 or H4 tag encapsulating a keyworld in the page’s code has no real SEO advantage over the other.
He also recommended not using more than one H1 tag, and similar to what Michael Gray commented, from a design perspective heading tags should be done in a near pyramid format, ie 1 H1, 3 H2, 5 H3 etc.
@Al
Absolute internal linking is not as SEO critical for the search engines to follow your links correctly as it once was, but still a best practice in case your content gets scrapped….reason being that you get those direct absolute links back to your site.
If you are doing a lot of off-domain/staging testing of your pages then using relative internal links will make your life easier and most likely outweigh the SEO absolute URL benefits.
@DimoninG
X is an algebraic placeholder for any number value
,Michael Martin
August 8th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Great article… the basics are always important and we love that you tied Gene Simmons into the mix.
August 9th, 2008 at 10:00 am
this are the common basic rules. nothing new. but The Kiss strategy? this is something new to me. lol :))
August 9th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
I appreciate the legend Michael Gray allowing me to guest post on his site - I highly recommend hearing him speak at the various SEO conferences, as I recently did at SMX Advanced up in Seattle.
Also it was good to hear from my long lost vowel relative in these comments…Michael Martine
,Michael Martin