Serious SEO Info you can use

April 13th, 2009 View Comments

Most of the time I keep this blog pretty light. I talk a lot about what’s happening in the SEO community in Charlotte and touch on various Internet Marketing topics.

But here is some serious SEO info. It may be a little deep for some of you, but it contains valuable information you can use. It comes from Leslie Rohde, a StomperNet faculty member.

Truth is, StomperNet is impressive. I get their magazine and recently attended StomperNet Live. But they can be a bit high-pressure and their stuff tends to be expensive – valuable, but expensive nonetheless.

Regardless, Leslie Rohde is a serious SEO Engineer. To put it in prospective, Jerry West once told me over lunch that HE thought Leslie is a genius. Quite frankly, Jerry is a genius in my book. So I think you get the point.

Leslie Rohde released a video this weekend that de-bunked LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). If you find that interesting, go watch this video. If not, the really good stuff is in the next video found here.

If you do any SEO for clients or for your own websites, you need to watch that 2^nd one! It is 14 minutes long. But the explanation that he gives about harmonizing your on-page factors, your internal linking, and your external linking is DEAD ON!

Seriously, it explains exactly why many of the techniques we have been using over here at Hippo Internet Marketing have worked so well and always will.

Check it out when you have the time and leave a comment below if you like it as much as I did. I look forward to your thoughts.

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Chris

The 2nd video is fantastic. The balance between having too broad a search term in a head tag vs. too narrow a multi word search phrase could be a tough balancing act- especially when you have a number of different pages that you want to rank for different keyword phrases in a certain category-you wouldn’t want to end up competing with yourself.

RI= Topic, Reputation, Confirmation. I’d like to see more info about about the Reputation part, he kind of went through the explanation of it pretty quick but he did say it could be another 30 minute video.
Chris Kellum

Heh, I'm not sure anyone really needs to know search algorithms at that level. I think it's pretty fascinating to read, but also a relief in that enjoying the results of properly executed SEO don't require you to be a search engineer. lol
Dan should have a new post on his blog in the next day or two. Also, his "GoingNatural" video should be out shortly. Don't know a lot about it, but apparently it's going to cover how you (or "you") can do some of this kind of testing yourself. Should be pretty cool.
Corey Creed

Thanks for the extra links, Chris. Good stuff. It is amazing how many people get all caught up in this kind of an argument that really have no idea what they are talking about. Personally, I just don't need to know SEO at that deep of a level. At least not yet. I do know what works in my industry and others. This deeper stuff is only really needed and used in extremely competitive environments. That being said, some of these guys you linked to are clearly intelligent and know what they are talking about. It's fun to watch them go back and forth. Of course, I've been reading for over an hour now. So I need to go back to working and making money. SMILE
Chris Kellum

Oops, forgot to include that link. lol

Link to Leslie's comment - http://www.stomperblog.com/warning-advanced-seo...
Chris Kellum

Interesting stuff, indeed. Managed to scoot in there without getting jumped, so gracious of that. lol

I'm curious, more than anything. My idea of SEO conforms with Leslie, Jerry, and Dan (of course that's pretty easily explained, isn't it? lol) and has served me very well.

But on the other hand, I'm always up for hearing out challenging beliefs and seeing what's what. I mean there's certainly enough LSI talk and "ninja software" (my favorite!) going on out there to make you think twice about it.

By the way, if you *REALLY* want to get into the nitty-gritty of search and information retrieval systems, this guy will blow your mind. Lots of LSI talk on his blog, but this is a good one - http://irthoughts.wordpress.com/2007/07/09/a-ca...

Also, he has a new one in response to the SN videos here - http://irthoughts.wordpress.com/2009/04/09/fina...

Got a little conversation going on with Leslie in the comments of that second one, and I hope that continues. Very interesting to hear about search at this level. I don't even know what some of that stuff is, but I'm learning quickly. lol

All in all, good stuff. That's the trouble with this whole thing, though. So many factors that go into ranking that sometimes you do something and think that it's because of X that your rankings improved, but it was really Y.

But for a lot of people, they just need to see it once to proclaim "It WORKS!" Here is a comment of Leslie's I found particularly enlightening, in describing what he agrees/disagrees with the "siloing" technique.
Corey Creed

It looks like there is a bit of controversy around these videos. I just finished reading the very long debate at http://tinyurl.com/dk2sdp. Personally, I don't really care if "LSI is dead" or not. I care more about the 2nd video which had some great stuff in it. I can say from personal experience that the concept of harmonizing on-page factors, internal linking, and external linking works very, very well.
Corey Creed

Thanks for visiting my blog, Leslie. I'm honored. Thanks also for the great videos!

Sorry for getting your name wrong. I think I have it all correct now.
leslie

Thanks a lot for your support! Jerry is indeed sharp too -- if for no other reason than recognizes genius ;-).

Leslie R-O-H-D-E

PS: My last name is harder to spell than SEO is to do!

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