Speaker: Stephen Noton (Adverted) Position: Senior SEM/SEO Consultant
While Google's been around for just 7 years, Stephen already has 8 years of relevant SEM/SEO experience. Qualified Google Advertising Professional and is an Official Yahoo! Search Marketing Ambassador.Absolute vs. Relative Links Some search engines like Yahoo! for example, seem to have difficulty resolving relative URLs. To be sure, use absolute URLs. That's big in Yahoo! Tells the spider exactly what you want to crawl.
Dash vs. Underscore There are three types of doing it:
- filename.html – read as one long word.
- file_name.html (underscore) – a little bit better from a usability standpoint; but search engines still read it as one long word.
- file-name.html (dash) – usability help; SEs read it as separate words
Build product focused pages. Think micro sites. For example you have these data: description, photos, reviews, and product specs, it would be better to split that content into 4 pages (and create a micro site). After the session, a conference atttendee asked if breaking the content up into 4 pages was a good technique when instead of having one long page you end up with 4 very short pages? I ididn't quite get Stephen's answer, but I think it was something to the effect of "it doesn't mean you can't add content to each page; you should consider adding more content."
I would add that having 3 more pages means having 3 more optimized landing pages, which is better than pumping all keywords into just one page.