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SEO: What I Learned from SMCLA

Last week, the Social Media Club of Los Angeles (SMCLA) hosted a panel about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This hot topic covers all of the things you need to know about getting your site to appear in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and the newly released Wolfram Alpha and Microsoft Bing. My extremely long and detailed blog post is up at Social Media Club Los Angeles if you’re really into reading, or you can just have a look at the top 5 things I learned during the weeks leading up to the panel along with the most valuable links mentioned during the panel:

SEO Cat Wants Yer Link Juiz

SEO Cat Wants Yer Link Juiz

My 5 SEO Key Takeaways:

1. On-site Optimization includes:

  • Page Title
  • Meta Description
  • Use of header tag h1, h2, h3 with relevant content (keywords) inside
  • Alt text on images
  • Freshness of content, relevance of content to keywords you’re ranking for
  • Robots.txt
  • Sitemap.xml
  • Canonical URL w/target keyword in the URL (ex: http://www.geoffabrown.com/seo-what-i-learned-from-smcla instead of http://www.geoffabrown.com/post.php?id=32)

2. Off-site Optimization includes:

  • Inbound Links, the more the better
  • Inbound Links from .GOV and .EDU (even better)
  • Domain Age is considered
  • DMOZ Directory Listing
  • Social Bookmarking counts as inbound link “votes” (Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon)

3.  The rules are constantly changing as people find ways to trick the system.  You need to keep up on the latest via some of the following sources:

  • Search Engine Land: Search Engine Land is the industry’s leading online publication for the latest search news, research and anaylsis, commentary and expert advice. Led by search authorities Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman, an experienced editorial staff and wide range of contributors produce the most comprehensive coverage in the industry.
  • SEOMoz: SEOmoz serves as a hub for search marketers worldwide, providing education, tools, resources and paid services to help every SEO to be the best they can be.
  • Alltop’s SEO Page: Alltop aggregates RSS headlines from all of the top search engine optimization news and headlines from across the web.
  • Matt Cutts (Google Engineer) Blog: Matt is the head of Google Webspam and provides an inside view on Google’s search engine. This is his personal page, and isn’t primarily focused on SEO, but if you dig a bit you’ll get some good info.
  • Google’s YouTube Videos for Webmasters: This is the official YouTube channel for Google Webmaster Central, your one-stop shop for webmaster resources that will help you with your crawling and indexing questions, introduce you to offerings that can enhance and increase traffic to your site, and connect you with your visitors.
  • SEOChat: Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization – SEO Chat
  • SEOBook: SEO Book.com is a leading SEO blog by Aaron Wall covering the search space. It offers marketing tips, search analysis, and whatever random rants come to mind.
  • Sphinn: Sphinn is a social site for search and interactive marketers. It’s designed to allow you to share and discover news stories, read and take part in discussions, discover events of interest and network with others.
  • Brent Csutoras
  • 10e20: 10e20, LLC is THE Global Internet Marketing & Web Solutions Company® dedicated to helping small and mid-size companies meet and exceed their Internet marketing goals. Each day we strive to deliver a strong return on your investment.

4.  Do your research.  Use tools to analyze keywords, competitors, your own site’s analytics and your rankings.  Lots of data analysis is a constant method of measuring your methods and learning which ones work.  Here are some of the best tools discussed:

  • Trellian SEO Toolkit: includes everything you need to optimize and promote your web pages, to increase your web site traffic and search engine visibility.
  • StumbleUpon Toolbar”>StumbleUpon Toolbar (Firefox): discovers web sites based on your interests, learns what you like and brings you more.
  • Instant Messaging: To communicate to people that it’s time to spread the link love and get busy with the social bookmarking, tweeting and re-tweeting.
  • Majestic SEO is a company that offers a service for SEO that Barbara recommends for competitive link intelligence.
  • SEO Toolbar by SEOBook.com: The SEO Toolbar pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market directly in the search results.
  • Yahoo Site Explorer: Use this tool to see who is linking to you. Or, better yet, use it to see who is linking to your competitors! Pages here are listed by rank, so pay close attention to those that show up first and learn from them.
  • Del.icio.us Toolbar (Firefox): Quick and easy access to save sites into your del.icio.us social bookmarking stream.
  • Digg.com/tools/firefox”>Digg Toolbar (Firefox)
  • Google Keyword Tool: type in a keyword and get back tons of information about volume of searches, trends related to that term, local and global data about that keyword and synonymous words.
  • Google Keyword Search-Related Keyword Tool: similar to the keyword tool, but adds what Google thinks is related based on search patterns
  • SEO Quake (Firefox or IE): allows user to obtain and investigate many important SEO parameters of the internet project under study on the fly.
  • Google Webmaster Tools: a one-stop shop for webmaster resources that will help you with your crawling and indexing questions, introduce you to offerings that can enhance and increase traffic to your site, and connect you with your visitors.
  • WordTracker: a must have resource for any search engine marketing professional. It combines both a respectable search term database with tools that make mining the information easy.
  • Google AdWords: Once you have an account, you have access to key information about keywords, the cost of keywords, related keywords and more…
  • Google Trends: understanding trends and predicting user behavior is more than half the battle when it comes to creating compelling content that gets picked up.

5.  Social Media can play a big role in getting you the inbound links you need to rank higher.

  • Socialize your content.  Have others vote it up.  Randomize the Diggs, Stumbles, Tweets, Facebook links, etc… to make the traffic to your page as organic looking as possible.  A thousand Diggs from your office isn’t going to help your cause.
  • Be generous with your support of others and they will reciprocate.  Duh.
  • It’s a bit of a fraternity.  The top Diggers might be a tough group to crack into, but that isn’t saying it’s impossible.  See what they like and what they vote up and tailor your content to entice them to vote you up.  Also, ping them on their social networks and see if you can get a good ground swell going for your post.
  • Be everywhere.  Google isn’t the only search engine.  YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter are just a few of the many places people search for things.  You owe it to yourself and your conent to be in and rank in as many of those places as possible.
  • Tailor your site to make it easy for people to bookmark, submit, share, and comment on your content.  It’s an impulse to bookmark or Digg something, make the barrier to entry as easy as possible.

Thanks again to the great panelists who made it all possible:

Posted in Social Media.

By admin
June 5, 2009

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