I’m glad I accidentally flew in to San Francisco a day early…  I ended up upgrading my conference package to include the workshops and the first session today was a 3 hour block on Search Engine Optimization by Stephan Spencer / Net Concepts.  Great speaker and I took away a lot of good info – kind of blown away at the extent to which our site could change to be more SEO friendly.

Good takeaway in the first couple minutes: “A site without links pointing to is doesn’t deserve to rank”

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) vs SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – SEM covers SEO and adds to that paid placement (ppc), not to be taken as SEO is free – it is not.  Doing SEO correctly may necessitate the purchase of keyword tools, or vendors/contractors to assist.  Cheaper approach: If someone is doing it well – embrace and extend what they do.

86% of clicks on Google are from organic search results, only 14% are from paid search (based on eye tracking studies). However, people clicking on a paid ad are more likely to convert.    In either case, when someone is doing a search they are primed and ready to act so placement pays.  Clicks for the number one result are about 40% – this drops to 10% for the #2 result.  Ranking in multiple areas doesn’t hurt either – natural results, paid placement, image search, content network search, etc.

Yahoo is no longer the #2 search engine – more people now search via YouTube, which has moved into the #2 spot

Keywords – the word the CEO searches for each morning may not be the best (except for your job).  Pick the right keyword for your site, and speak your customer’s language.  Kitchen electronics is a common product category, but not what customers search for.  Baby products can attract more clicks via “baby names” than other keywords. Bottom line, keyword research is needed to identify what your market is searching for.  Tools: Quintura (Free) or Google Suggest / Keyword Tool / Trends / Insight.  Wordtracker is a paid tool, but based on less than 1% of the search market (dogpile and metacrawler users). Keyword Discovery is another paid service ($70/month), which shows historical trends and based on a larger user base. Advantage of Google tools is the large user base.  Check out Google Insight for Search, extends the data found in Google Trends – can see top rising search terms

Getting crawled doesn’t mean you’re getting indexed.  Getting indexed doesn’t mean you’re getting ranked.  Getting ranked doesn’t mean you’re getting clicks and getting clicks doesn’t mean you will convert.

7 steps to ranking:
•    Get your site fully indexed
•    Get your pages Visible
•    Build links and page rank
•    leverage your page rank
•    encourage click through
•    track the RIGHT metrics
•    follow best practices

Complexity can kill the crawl – Search engines are wary or dynamic pages (fear or spider traps)
Avoid:
•    stop characters (?&=)
•    session ids or long numerical strings that look like a session
•    unnecessary variables
•    frames
•    redirects
•    popups
•    navigation in flash, java, javascript, pulldown boxes

Hurdles to indexing:
complex / long urls that add no value to the page keywords
content duplication
non-canonicalization
too many links and not high enough ranking (crawl equity) Higher Page rank at the top will allow more crawl equity for pages 10 clicks down.

Canonicalization: gvsu.edu/ should 301 redirect to www.gvsu.edu for all pages (no content duplication) same for / vs. index.htm.  Use server header checker to verify 301/302 redirects and use google google webmaster tools to enforce this or live http header firefox extension.

Key word prominence is so much better than keyword prominence.  Use a descriptive paragraph at the top of the page to introduce the rest of the page using important keywords.  Title tag is the most important copy on a page and the homepage is the most important. Don’t dilute the title with your brand name – stick with the content keywords.  Title tags and descriptive link text are will remain important SEO best practice.

Random things:
•    seomoz.org – link scape
•    Get more links – link baiting.  Put out funny / useful content that others are baited into linking to – the SEO perspective of viral marketing
•    use rel=”nofollow” to tell google to not index certain links on your site (use this to give less importance to login pages, etc.)
•    seobrowser.com – tool for viewing a site as a crawler
•    siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com – check links into your site