Ask.com outline

• links and text
• visual relevancy
• what NOT to do
• crawling tips
• advanced suggestions

Focus on the User Experience

• users want high quality original content
• link to quality pages of interest to your subject
• link to your topic community
• high quality subjec specific popularity can outweigh global popularity
• use descriptve text to link
• search engines can’t makde sense of image basked linking
• periodically review where the referrals are flowing from
• text is very important

Visual Relevance is the key to getting picked

• users tend to click those results that are visually more relevant

Basic Don’ts

• re-direct gateways
• artificial sites that point to the main site
• invisible or hidden links
• cloaking
• misspelled anchor text
• link farms

Crawling

• Ask and most search engines don’t accept cookies
• Session ids should not be included in the url
• Javascript - spiders are not good at understanding Javascript

Spelling

• users misspell terms in 10% of their queries

Custom 404’s and FAQ pages should  be used

Google - Matt Cutts