13 replies to this topic

[Jill]

SEOMoz has published some new policies for their own SEO team, which also provides some good info for SEO best practices, in general.

In the past, SEOmoz has recommended SEO techniques that I was not at all in agreement with. It's nice to see that they are finally corroborating the SEO techniques and information on what's important and not important that we've been telling people for many years. Even better is that they're using actual data and tests to back up what they're saying.

You can read the excellent article here:

SEO Best Practices from SEOMoz

[1dmf]

We never doubted you for a second Jill

[Randy]

Ever noticed how eventually all of the good ones end up in pretty much the same place, with very similar beliefs and approaches?

Two things I'll take a bit of an issue with.

1. Alt tags. They're not tags, they're attributes. It'll be an oft read article, given SEOMOZ's prominence in the field. They should make it a point to use the correct terminology and (help us) correct others misuse whenever possible. (Chris, put in your blinders if you go read that one because they use "alt tags" numerous times in that section.)

2. The rather blanket statement in the Dynamic URLs area of "This is backed up by our correlation data, which showed that pages with static URLs tend to rank higher." This is simply untrue. As they pointed out in Best Practice section URLs with parameters are just fine if one is sensible. These sensible, but still dynamic, URLs stand just as good a chance to rank well as a static page. Period, end of discussion. So their sentence above should be "Sensible, crawlable urls tend to rank higher. This applies for static URLs and all well constructed dynamic URLs."

To say one should only use static URLs is simply wrong, and is something the that can be proven wrong by almost any SERP out there. All SERPs contain some dynamic pages these days, with many of them exposing the dynamic URL address. If static pages were so darned important to good rankings, none of those sites would stand a chance.

They apparently need to run more tests on this subject.

[Michael Martinez]

I've long admired Rand's marketing talent and think he deserves the attention he gets because he puts in a lot of hard work. However, the quality of Rand's research and analysis has always been questionable in my opinion. To give him additional credit, he has hired smart people and they do seem to be learning from the huge amount of data they have gathered (and from some of their experiences).

Some of their new recommendations are still a bit iffy but he's moving closer to the fundamental principles (good design, good content) that are preferable to all the tricks that have been discussed on SEOmoz through the years.

There is nothing wrong with experimenting. I experiment all the time. But I don't put client sites at risk in my experiments and I don't advise SEOs to take those kinds of risks.

So these changes in policy are very welcome, as far as I am concerned. Kudos to Rand and the team for making the changes.

Edited by Michael Martinez, 22 June 2009 - 01:15 PM.

[Jill]

I would be interested in knowing what their data shows as far as keyword rich URLs and domains since that seems to be a contentious point. I'm surprised they didn't mention it at all.

[Michael Martinez]

I would be more interested in seeing the data for myself ....

[1dmf]

I would be interested in knowing what their data shows as far as keyword rich URLs and domains since that seems to be a contentious point.

Well you have to accept if anchor text carries KWD weight, and KWD rich URLs & Domains are used as the anchor text, well they have to carry weight , don't they? especially if they use hyphens for word separators

But I'm assuming you mean on their own, in their own right do they carry weight.

[Jill]

But I'm assuming you mean on their own, in their own right do they carry weight.

Yep, that's what I mean!

[1dmf]

an interesting test I did at home last night was searching for my domain using just the KWD's and surrounded it in quotes for exact match... you know what G! did, completely ignored the hyphen and 'word separated' it , thus basically ignoring the 'exact match' and didn't find my site.

So what does that tell us?

[qwerty]

It looks like they took Randy's (or someone's) advice regarding image alt attributes, as I don't see the word "tag" in there anywhere

Best Practice:

We recommend including alt text for all images on all publicly accessible pages. We also suggest adding images with good alt text to pages targeting competitive rankings.

Reasoning:

We have two reasons for this. First, we believe that all users regardless of limitations should be able to use the internet. This includes people with disabilities and computers trying to use semantics to make information more useful. Secondly, our correlation data showed that alt attributes were a much more important metric for high rankings than we would have thought. While correlation is not causation, it seems unwise to ignore the data and we're therefore recommending the use of good images with good alt text for pages seeking to rank on competitive queries.

I'm not crazy about the advice they're giving here, however. What exactly do they mean by "good" alt text? If they mean the text should serve as a replacement for the image when necessary (which is backed up by the first of the reasons listed in the second paragraph), I'm good with their idea of "good." However, since the second half of that sentence (and the second of the reasons) is about rankings, I hope they don't take "good" to mean that an image's alt attribute should include the page's keywords no matter what the image may be.

And they don't even bring up the grey area. If you've got an image of the words "About Us" that links to your About Us page, is the proper alt attribute "About Us," or is it OK to make it "About our HVAC company in Hibbing, MN"?

[mal4mac]

And they don't even bring up the grey area. If you've got an image of the words "About Us" that links to your About Us page, is the proper alt attribute "About Us," or is it OK to make it "About our HVAC company in Hibbing, MN"?

If the image is of the Taj Mahal then obviously "Taj Mahal" would be good alt text. But having an image of words is a strange thing and you should help people more. Maybe "Image of the words 'About us'" should be the alt text, plus have "About our HVAC company in Hibbing, MN" as the title.

What do you do with logos? Google don't have any alt text for their logo on their search page! Very helpful . Probably "Google logo" would be sufficient, you shouldn't need to spell out that this is an image of the words "Google" in this case.

[1dmf]

Google don't have any alt text for their logo on their search page! Very helpful

Yes they do

<img alt="Google" height=110 src="/intl/en_uk/images/logo.gif" width=276 id=logo onload="window.lol&&lol()">

they use it to tell you what the image is supose to represent each time they change it, last time it was to celebrate 'Igor Stravinsky' , if memory serves me.

Though Google has never managed to write a valid page in their entire life

42 Errors, 2 warning(s)

http://validator.w3....g...ine&group=0

[mal4mac]

You're right 1dmf, sorry for the misinformation. The image that appears after you do a search has no alt text. This makes sense for SEO, as you want the home page to get SEO juice for alt text. But it doesn't make sense for usability. All Google images should have alt text.

[1dmf]

G! IMO deliberately flies in the face of W3C and standards as there is no logic or acceptable reason for their main home page to have been such appauling code for so many years.

Not sure what they are trying to prove or point they are trying to make, unless they really are that incompetent?

There has to be some deliberate motive to it, any one got any guesses?