How can you not want to hear a talk about search engine optimization by a guy nicknamed "Shoemoney"? It was thus I found myself at the SEO presentation by Jeremy "Shoemoney" Schoemaker (note the "c" in the last name, and that the nickname is all one word) at the eBay DevCon 2007 on Tuesday, June 12, 2007.
That's Jeremy and his CTO, David Dellanave, on the left, and Jeremy speaking in the session in the picture to its right.
If you don't know who Jeremy Shoemoney Schoemaker is, let's put him in context in at least one way -- the service he started, AuctionAds, a short time ago, is already one of the top eBay affiliates.
So what did Jeremy have to say about search engine optimization?
One nugget of advice he had: have your functionality in place before you implement it! In other words, be prepared for success. To put this another way, and I believe I'm paraphrasing Jeremy, if stuff doesn't work on your site, people are going to remember that, maybe indefinitely, so don't put a big seo campaign out there with a crappy site that doesn't have all its i's dotted.
Know Your Keywords.
Here's a great example that Jeremy gave. Did you know that "discount shopping" is more popular than "shopping" as a keyword[s]? So think of more "long taill" keywords, advises Shoemoney.
(The "Long Tail," in case you hadn't heard, is a concept/phrase and book by that name coined by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine, and refers to the "long tail" of the supply/demand curve, and in general how the world is becoming more niche-y).
What's a great tool for finding keywords? I've heard the praises of this one sung before. It's called inventory.overture.com -- and it "shows yahoo search volume" -- a great tool, according to Jeremy. It's so great, the Yahoo folks haven't even changed its name from when it was part of the Overture PPC service which Yahoo bought in GodKnows-00-What.
Another good one is GoogleTrends. I'm going to confess here and now that I know squat about GoogleTrends but I am looking at the site now and...wait; no I'm not, my browser is hanging.
Anyway, it's at www.google.com/trends if your browser doesn't crank up on you.
Shoemoney also dumped some SEO terminology on us...we got:
- reciprocal links
- SERP (search engine placement)
- robots/spider
- algorithm
- the "index"
- inbound/outbound links
- page ran (PR) ("pretty overrated," he says.)
Page Title:
DO: Use keywords in the first position; eg "online auctions ebay," not "ebay online auctions"
NEVER use the same title on every page
NEVER...get spammy.
DO...write a very human, readable description ("humans will make the determination").
Do use the keyword in the domain. Dashes tend to be discounted in the domain...one guy in the audience tried to make the case for them because so many domains have been taken, but Jeremy pointed out the domain name should pass the phone test. If it's hard for someone to read over the phone, forget it.
Jeremy also did some things to generate controversy, but if you want to read that juicy stuff, you'll have to read my bidbits blog tomorrow. Oh yes ladies and gentlemen I leave you with what they call "the hook" in fiction writing. :-)
Tune in for more Devcon madness tomorrow..including Pierre Omidyar's Coffee Talk!
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