Social Patterns Michael Nguyen on Search Engine Marketing

This time around I asked you what separator you would use in your titles. Before doing research for this question, I never really gave a second thought about title separators. I would use either a hyphen or the pipe character and be done with it. After reading over the quiz’s comments, it’s obvious that many of you felt the same.

Who cares about title separators if it doesn’t influence our search engine marketing campaign?

Continue reading SEO Quiz - Title Separators: Conclusion

This one may not be as cut and dry as last week’s, but I’d like to see what everyone thinks. I wonder if there is a difference, if it really matters, or is this a moot discussion? I know of some usability and accessibility issues, but hopefully some of the big search engine marketing experts can chime in and give some more insight on the search engine specific issues. Well let’s get to the question and see.

Same deal as last week’s SEO quiz. I’ll let the question run for a week, then I’ll summarize the comments and give my own answer.

Q: Which separator character is best for a web page title?

• A: Keyword Phrase - Site Name
• B: Keyword Phrase | Site Name
• C: Keyword Phrase » Site Name
• D: Keyword Phrase > Site Name

What seemed like a simple and straightforward question, gradually generated an informative discussion. So far, the quiz looks like a success - with quite a number of people choosing different answers.

So what did we learn from SEO Quiz - Part 1: URLs? I’ll start off by pulling out some comments and summarizing what people thought were the best practices. I’ll finish off with my own explanation.

Continue reading SEO Quiz - URLs: Conclusion

Inspired by Rand’s SEOmoz Quiz, I thought I would start a new series here called SEO Quiz. The goal here is to ask some questions about search engine optimization and generate some discussion about favored methods.

Hopefully, these questions and answers will become useful bits of information for SEOs. Every week I’ll post a new question and leave it up for comments throughout the week. At the end of the week, I’ll pull out the most notable comments and summarize what people thought were the best practices. Of course I will add in my thoughts as well.

So lets start off with the first question.

Q: When linking to the homepage from an internal page, which of the following URLs is the best choice?

• A: /
• B: http://www.mydomain.com
• C: http://www.mydomain.com/
• D: http://www.mydomain.com/index.html