SEO is a very complex topic.  It takes many hours of reading, experimenting, and analyzing to become proficient.  The hardest part about learning online is figuring out who to trust.  If I had to pick four free resources from which to learn SEO I would choose the following:

1. Google Webmaster Guidelines – This is a pretty comprehensive document outlining how to do SEO the Google approved way.  If you were to stick with only following the rules in this guide your site would be well ahead of much of the competition.

2. Yahoo Search Topics – Particularly the section which discusses their search spider called Slurp and the section about ranking.  It also gives you some information about how to use Site Explorer to look up backlinks, something all SEO’s should learn how to do.

3.  Bing Webmaster Center – Again, pretty similar to the other two where it’s set up into different sections related to technical recommendations, content guidelines, and things to avoid.

Those three are very similar, but if you read through them you will spot similarities and come away with a good understanding of what the search engines deem important.

4.  Once you’ve conquered those three help centers, you’ll want to make your way over to Webmaster World’s Google  Hot Topics section.  This is far more advanced than the other three but provides great insight into the intricacies of creating a succesful site and ranking well in Google.  Definitely a little more advanced than the three listed above, but this resource is well worth the read.  Definitely a place to come to if you have questions about your site or how Google may be treating your site.

Bonus:

5.  Techniques and Failures for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 -  Digesting all of this content would take months or years.  It’s not important to know everything on here, but the more items from this list that you implement within your site the better off your site will be from a conversion aspect and an accessibility aspect.

Was checking into my server logs this weekend after I made a new post to see which spiders would crawl it first.  To probably nobody’s surprise, Googlebot was quick on the scene, followed by MSNBot, and Slurp didn’t roll through until a good 24 hours after it was posted.  Slurp is just not a fan of daveshap.com.

One thing I did find very interesting was that MSNBot always checks robots.txt before crawling any pages, whereas Googlebot only checked it once the whole weekend.  The grand totals were 37 crawls of robots.txt by MSNBot, 8 by Slurp, and 1 by Googlebot.  Seems like Googlebot is a much more efficient crawler than the other two.  For some reason I’m not surprised.

Did I really just say that? Yeesh. Please put away the pitchforks and let me explain.

Every search result is it’s own marketplace with it’s own rules and regulations, Some are more likely to have maps listings while others are more inclined to show recent news articles due to the recency of the topic. Some SERPs are going to contain results that have tons of spammy links and the top players are engaging in risky tactics (as outlined by the engines) but not being penalized, while other SERPs will contain sites that are totally white hat. When optimizing your desired page for a particular search result, I’ve always found it useful to look at the how the other sites in the top 10 use the keyword throughout the site, aka (gasp!) keyword ensity. The things I look for are:

• Do they use the word in the title tag?
• If so, is it in the beginning of the title tag? Do they use modifiers?
• What on-page elements contain the keyword? H1, H2
• How often is it used in the text of the page?
• Do they use the term in their navigation?
• What links do they have containing this term in the anchor texts? More importantly, can I get a link here as well.

This is failry easy to eyeball, but it’s a worthwhile exercise to undertake to figure out what you’re up against. If the sites listed within the top 10 have the keyword at the front of the title tag and are pretty aggressive with placement on the page, you will probably want to utilize similar tactics initially. As you continue to build your link profile and creep up into the top 10, top 5, etc, you can probably ease up on the keyword usage if you feel you were overly aggressive and the content could be improved by using other words, but if you’re just starting off it’s good to be in the same ballpark as your competitors.

For any given search result, if you know how often the top rankings sites are using the keyword, and you can identify the top links with the keyword as the anchor text, you’ve got a pretty good start on what it may take to rank well enough to start receiving traffic from the term.

Here are my two favorite Keyword Density checkers I use.

• Dave Naylor’s KW Density Tool – This is hands down my favorite KW density checker. It has so many additional features such as a server header response info, anchor text for internal and external iinks, and the text that appears in each page element (bold, italic, h1, etc.)
• Ranks.nl Keyword Density & Prominence Analyzer 2.5 – Has many of the same features of Dave Naylor’s plus a nifty graph.

I’m still looking for a tool that can take the top 10 for a given search result, or allows you to manually enter in multiple URL’s for comparison sake. If anybody knows of a tool that does this please let me know.

Many sites throughout the web could be picking up more long tail traffic by varying their navigation.  Based on what I’ve seen, by having the same primary navigation, secondary navigation, header, footer, and sidebar on each page, you are significantly diluting the relevancy of each page.

I’m working on a client’s site as we speak which as about 85% of the same content on each page (nav elements, header, footer, two widgets, sidebar, etc.) and if you use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool I can tell that Google thinks most of the pages are about the same keyword set, even though that is not the intention of the webmaster.  When 85% of the source code is the same on each page, it’s easy to see why Google may think this. This is something that needs to be discussed as the site is being developed.  Unfortunately this is not always the case as not everybody designs their site with SEO in mind.

What are some ways around this?  One method would be using iframes on the footer or header so that the contents of those pages are only indexed on the actual frame page and not every page.  I feel iframes have a negative stigma attached to them as they could do lots of harm if not used properly, but they are a good option for boiler plate content.  You could also not feature the footer on every page.

The best solution, although hardly the most practical (especially when dealing with clients) would be to redo the navigation.  Have clear primary navigation with a few links that appear on every page, but make sure the secondardy navigation is based on where you are on the site and make sure to have breadcrumb navigation.  The more unique content on a page will make it easier for the search engines to figure out what a given page is about and how it fits into the hierarchy of the rest of the site.