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Advanced SEO – Internet Summit Day 2 Notes

Embracing Universal Search

@lindzie Lindsay Wassell Partner and Consultant, KeyPhraseSEOlogy

Commentary:

Notes:

Create great news content and you can compete with main stream news media if you have expertise in that space.  It is easier to rank a video as opposed to entering a simple web page.

Images get great rankings, make sure you have a file name, alt tag and text around the image.  Use images in News articles, places pages, and use Panoramio.  Look for any opportunity to add rich media types as they will increase your rankings.

Google Local – if you have brick and mortar locations you absolutely must in local listings and encourage and manage reviews.  Local Places page you can add photos, videos, description, categories and address.

David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors is a great resource for using Google Local.

Microdata = Rich Snippets – all the search engines got together and set standards for classifying information.  Microdata (the date about data) is really important for rankings.  Check out Schema.org for examples of this.  Music microdata can be used to have links in search results directly to songs.

Products can be tagged using microdata to make them show up in a different way so it shows the reviews.

Info on Rich Snippet resources can be viewed on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=21997.

Key Takeaways:

  1. Expand your view of Search Marketing
  2. Explore new content types and find ways to expand
  3. Identify your content with microdata to help it shine in the SERPs.
  4. Think beyond the web page

Next Generation SEO: Beyond Best Practices

@michaelmarshall Michael Marshall SEO Guru

Commentary:  The brunt of this one and its discussion of the Power Law did go over my head, but it was interesting from how this is used to generate traffic.  Personally I think he had too much content in his slides and moved too quickly so it was difficult to digest and get any true takeaways from the session.

Notes:

This is important because traffic leads to sales.

On-page Optimization has to do with Title Tags, Meta tags, ALT tags, Header tags, URL structure, anchor text, Keyword proximity is more important than Keyword density.

The Key to navigating through all of the methodology is MATH.

The Key benefit is to get the data so that you connect it to a mathematical model to create understanding.

More often than not your competitors have changed something that improved their rankings.  Don’t change too much at once on your site when it comes to SEO so you can track what you have changed.

StatistiXL is a great product for evaluating your SEO performance to do the work using Math as opposed to trial and error you will save money over time.

Make Your CMS Work for Your SEO, Not Against You

@markusrenstrom Markus Renstrom, Head of SEO Yahoo!

Commentary: The big take away here for me that the SEO team of your company needs to own how new pages are created to make sure they conform to a template that can be re-used to save money.

Notes:

It makes sense to have quality over quantity and you need to focus on your platform that you are going to use to get good SEO rankings.

Concept #1 – Expectations – If you work in search you need to educate your company on what they can expect from the results.  Markus spent time talking about what SEO is not.  SEO takes time, strategy and investment and not more links.

SEO is a long term Content Strategy.  50% of people are using 3 or more keywords to search now.  You also need to make that content accessible to everyone.  Search engines disable all of the javascript so that it can search through the content.

Think about who is the top user to your site?  Is the search engine your top user because they will actually look at everyone one of your pages.  SEO is about User Focused content.

Concept #2 Ownership – ownership created agility, enables standardization and automation, and it saves time and resources. If you create standards to tags and Urls it gets faster to create content.

Duplication is your enemy.  Your one article should not exist in more than one category. Dynamic URLs are scary from a search perspective.

The importance of tagging cannot be underestimated especially around the coverage of titles and well formed anchor tags.

Yahoo’s traffic is up even though they have reduced the number of pages by 40%.

Yahoo has its own content management system.

Next Level SEO: Social Media Integration

@bill_slawski Bill Slawski, President CEO, SEO by the Sea

Commentary: You should be teaching your clients about relevance of social in search results because they are the subject matter experts.

Notes:

Google has reacted to the advent of social media to show fresher more relevant content.

Bill brought up several sites that failed fast and hard like Dodgeball.com, Google Answers, Google opensocial, Googlevark, Google hotpot was integrated into Google places, Google SearchWiki, Google Wave, Google Buzz.  All of these have been shed and some parts are now being incorporated into Google Plus.

Real Time Search is what is changing.  The recent earthquake is great example of this.  Address recency-sensitive queries are starting to drive results from social media.  The results cannot be ranked the same way that normal web pages are ranked.  When you interact with Google Plus you are building a type of ranking system that will help results with your +1 activity.

Google Plus of course is now showing up in search results.  Authorship markup standards are now published by Google that will show your Google+ posts and your author picture to have richer content.  Authorship markup is difficult but uses the aforementioned mircodata from schema.org.  All Blogspot and YouTube contributions automatically incorporate authorship markup.  Google is using a contribution score to control how the markup is displayed in results.

Why Google+?  Well we should be using it because of the access to all the collateral data that they have access to.  Teach our clients on how to social network instead of networking for them.

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