Danny Sullivan was in fine form for this first session, Introduction to Search Engine Marketing. I've never had the opportunity to hear him in person, so I was especially excited to attend this session. A few notes:
Getting Listed in Search Engines
Basically, there's more than one way to do this, and it's not just Google. There's web search, vertical search, and probably more. There's also more than one kind of listing: organic (this is also called editorial or natural listings), paid listings, and local listings. Local listings are different from regular listings because they target a local audience. All this to say that being number one in Google doesn't mean what it used to - you could have a number one listing in Google local search but be nowhere to be found in regular web search results. However, you always should focus first and foremost on web search listings; this is the best way to start, whether you're going for free, organic listings or paid placement.The Message of Your Site
One of the key things to focus on when building your SEO campaign is the message of your site. A good way to do this is to list the top ten phrases for your site, and then search for these phrases in various search engines. If your site does not come up for these various phrases, then your potential customers are not finding it for those phrases either. At this point, you'll either want to re-think what phrases you want to be found for, or target the phrases you want to be found for more aggressively.Use keyword research tools in order to really figure out what the best keyword phrases are to target. Focus on the long tail vs. the short tail. What is that? Well, think of a flow chart. If your target was "shoes", there are a LOT of people targeting that word as well. That side of the graph would be pretty high and short, but then look at the other side of the graph: key phrases such as "running shoes", "man shoes", or "childrens shoes" are getting much less searches, but this makes them easier to target (less competition), so when you target the "long tail", you're reeling in more targeted traffic which in turn equals a higher conversion (sales) rate.
Wrap-Up
There was a lot more, but here's the rest of the session in a nutshell:- Page content is crucial.
- The title tag should be different and targeted for every single page of your site.
- Site design is extremely important. Spiders can't read fancy Flash pages and can't crawl a site full of unclear navigation or images only.
- Links count. Make a good site and other people will link to you; you can also do a link exchange, but make sure that you're only targeting sites to exchange links with that won't reflect badly on your site.
- Site submission is kind of a mixed bag. It's not absolutely crucial that you submit your site to Google, for example, because they're more apt to find it on their own. You can pay for site submission in order to guarantee that your site shows up in search engine listings.
- Search engines could almost be called the "third browser"; webmasters should endeavor to make sure that their sites are search engine friendly before worrying too overly much about them being browser friendly.
- Meta tags are not worth spending a lot of time on. Put a few targeted keyword phrases in the "keywords" tag, and write a concise, keyword phrase rich sentence for the "description" tag. If you're really pressed for time, you can always cut and paste your first paragraph for the Meta description tag.
- Page Rank is a nice tool, but you shouldn't get too worked up about it. It's just an indicator.
