Sep. 11, 2008 at 12:33pm
SEO
New SEO

SEO has entered an era of testing; this is quite a fundamental shift away from old-school SEO.

Here’s a quick idea of what I’m talking about:

  • Information Architecture. Should those product pages link to 3 or 10 related products? Should there be a sub-sub-category level for the site or should you just show more results in the sub-category? Should your sub-categories link to other sub-categories or just back to the level above? How much content do you need on product pages anyway? Should I be looking to hire a copywriter for my (potentially thousands of) products to help them rank? Is that really necessary?
  • What’s the best advice for alt text on images? Should I keep them short or long and a little keyphrase stuffed? What about the alt text for the image link to my home page? Exactly how effective is keyphrase stuf- sorry, optimising that?
  • How many footer links should I have on my site? How effective are they?
  • How many products should I link to from my homepage? Should I have lots of links to all kinds of places or a few links to my top category pages?
  • How long should I make my title tags? Which works best, brand before or after the keyphrase (this is usally cut and dried but keep CTR in mind too - while this is harder to test it’s not impossible, especially if you’re running PPC on the exact phrase at the same time to monitor impressions)

These are just a sampling of the kinds of things I’d recommend playing around with where the answers are not immediately obvious and more than likely change from site to site.

Of course, all this is very well and good but there are a few things which are harder to test. For example:

  • Should you buy links? How effective are these paid links I’m buying? While you can monitor the short-term gain the long-term impact (if you get a penalty for example) can be much harder to determine.
  • Should you cloak content based on user-agent? Sure, this might boost your rankings in the short term but again this might also result in a penalty further down the line which could be very costly.