Search Engine Optimization course in digital media at NY University

Last week at NYU, I learnt about one of the most interesting topics in the web area. For one minute or two, let's forget about social media, pay-per-click marketing and so on. During this one-day workshop, I learnt about the various techniques to get your web site on Google's first page (i.e organic search).


These are my take-aways from this class:

- Only 10 to 20% of people click on paid ads. The remaining traffic goes to organic search
- Google ranks web sites using an algorithm of 254 elements
- Google crawlers can't read flash (make sure at least a section of the web site is in html)
- Search engine optimization (SEO) efforts are 20% on-page and 80% off-page
- In other words, it's all about link building to your web site
- The SEO consultants mentioned that an average company might have 50 to 50 links to thir web site (and 10 for a smaller company)
- It's not really about quantity but more about quality of the web sites referring to you


Some optimizations techniques discussed in class (in no particular order)


On-page
1. Use anchor text for incoming link (eg: hyperlink will be 'digitalmarcom.com' and not 'click here' 2. Create good and self-explanatory titles (less than 40 words)
3. Add alt-tag feature to all images
4. Use clear image file name
5. 3 keywords max per page in order to avoid 'keyword stuffing'
6. A sitemap (or table of content with links to all pages' will help Google crawlers to organize your web site
7. Use no follow-tag for outbound links
8. Keyword density should not exceed 8%
9. Have a good ratio of anchor text and naked links (e.g www.digitalmarcom.com)
10. Link pages to each other within the web site


Off-page
1. Do not use link brokers. They can be cheap but most of the time, the links they sell you are of average quality
2. Solicit links from other web site and offer incentives (reciprocal building for example, free merchandise)
3. Only 10% of link building emails are returned. Be persistent!
4. A lot of social media web sites like wiki and facebook and have 'do not follow' tags
5. Blogpost, digg are ok
6. Use pingmaster to submit new posts on your blog
7. You can also submit your web site to registries like DMOZ, Giguides etc ...


And most of all, be patient. It takes a few years to move-up on Google ranking!