Peaceful Coexistence - Writing for the Engines & the Web

Brief review of WebmasterWorld conference writing for engines and the web session.

Ted Ulle:
He stated that many websites fail because they are not built in a focused order. He likes to focus on each of these issues,
in this order

• business goals & seo strategy

• get a pile of raw content - get rough content groups
• tracking system - define success and build a system to track how well you are doing
• information architecture - sorts using ideas on index cards. make it easy for people to do what you want them to. do not give more than 5 equavalent choices because it gets to be hard to chose. He also recommended the book Information Architecture.
• graphics & design
• tweak content - especially the calls to action

he said navigation is an important part of content and advancing algorithms such as latent semantic indexing means there is no neeed to
over focus on a phrase

he recommends checking server headers monthly to ensure nothing has changed

Jennifer Slegg:
She spoke mainly about duplicate content problems.

The main ways to check are to copy and past a chunk of text from the middle of your page copy into a search engine or use a tool like
CopyScape. If your content has been copied you could send a cease & decist or send a DMCA to
Google, Yahoo!, and their hosting company.

FAQ:
Ted said that pages which added at least 1 outbound link to related pages on other sites on each page tended to rank far better than
sites which were greedy with their link popularity.

Duplication filters are working down to paragraph level. Original duplicant content filter for Google was made by an intern who placed his
thesis online about 3 yrs ago...its no longer online.

Theme Master is a tool for looking at LSI related information.