The ONA conference session on SEO is packed, reflecting the intense interesting in understanding this dark art.

Jennifer Grappone, co-author of “Search Enginge Optimization an Hour a Day” provides a good grounding in how to ensure your site is visible.

One factor is age – an older domain is considered by Google to be more credible.

Moreover, adds Grappone, fresh news content is an advantage for news sites but a disadvantage in organic search results.

But there are ways to improve your SEO ranking.  You can help your site by including keywords in the page’s html title.

This is usually pulled from an article’s title but may often not contain the best keywords.  Instead there are ways to divorce your html title from article title, enabling a publication to use keywords in html title

As an aside, meta tags have no influence in search engines anymore, say Grappone.

There is also a big disadvantage in having different URLs for identical page.  But there is a tool called the canonical tag. This allows you to specify that one URL is the master address for duplicate content.

Google does not acknowledge paid links in assigning authority to a web page. Twitter links are all tagged as “no follow” so they will bring traffic but will not help Google ranking.

Gradiva Couzin, co-author of “Search Enginge Optimization an Hour a Day” takes over to explain about useful tools for SEO. First up is Google Trends, which provides a way of seeing what people are looking for.

Another Google tool is Insight For Search, that provides detailed information about trending search terms and what is bubbling under, as well as related terms.

Another Google tool is Adwords that can help understand the volume of keywords and related terms.

Among other useful tools are Yahoo Buzz, Facebook Lexicon that shows what is being discussed on Facebook and Twitter Streamgraphs, which does a similar thing for Twitter.

Couzin concludes with some basic tips:

• Use first and last names
• Use numeric form for numbers
• Avoid abbreviations
• Include proper names of places
• With video, include Watch in the title of the page