Are you the conference-going type? Are you thinking of attending another marketing or search-related conference? Rebecca Kelley, a seasoned SEO person, and ex conference goer tells why she now prefers to stay home.

As she says,

I’ve been to tons of SEO and search conferences since I started doing Internet marketing in 2006, and at first they were really awesome and exciting. You can’t beat traveling on the company dime and staying up until 6 am making friends and knocking back drinks. It took a while for the luster to wear off, but when it does, you’ll discover that there are any number of things you’d rather do than climb aboard a plane, pull a lanyard over your head, and pretend that the same crap you’ve heard at the last 15 conferences is new and exciting.

Her reasons basically boil down to the fact that conferences are repetitive, appeal to newbies or groupies, have mediocre speakers, and have no significant business value. For all the time, energy and money spent attending a conference you get very little (if anything) in return.

Of course she admits that attending a conference can be “really awesome and exciting” the first couple of times. But after that it’s the same old thing over and over again.

I must admit I haven’t been thinking much about attending a bunch of conferences this year (I’m not the conference type – more the hermit type.) Now I have a few good reasons why I think they are a waste of time.

Read the very good article by Rebecca here: Why I’m Kind of Over Search Conferences

SEO (search engine optimization) is often confusing for newbies and people inexperienced in the techniques and jargon. It can be confusing even for pros who have years of experience doing professional SEO work for clients. That’s because the ground is constantly shifting. As Gabriella Sannino says in a recent article at SearchEngineJournal.com,

In yesteryears, SEO might have been nothing more than a few reciprocal links and some on page optimization. Today, it could be a long list: article marketing, blogs and other content development, URL structures, back links, you name it. While methods may change, grow or depreciate, the same two truths hold firm. They are:

1. An SEO campaign cannot be thrown together. It has to be carefully planned – as any campaign should be.
2. An SEO campaign has to be revisited intermittently and adjusted as necessary – as any campaign should be.

Read more: Increasing SEO Competition and Change: Survival Not Mandatory

Is there anything more boring than an article about web page meta tags? Unfortunately, people who create websites have to actually think about these things. That’s because they have played a role in SEO, presumably indicating (to the search engines) something about the subject matter of a particular page.

It is generally accepted that the keywords meta tag has not been used by Google for years. In fact Google announced back in September of 2009 that “Our web search… disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.” If you’d like to see the post in Google Webmaster Tools where this was confirmed you can go here.

The title and description meta tags are a different story. Most SEOs consider the title tag to be one of the most important on-page factors used by Google to identify the subject matter of your pages. The description tag also provides important keyword hints and as Matt Cutts says, “we do sometimes use the “description” meta tag as the text for our search results snippets.” So that means it has an impact on the click thru rate when your pages show up in Google results pages.

If you are publishing a blog (using WordPress, for example) this is taken care of for you when you set up your blog.

Here are some resource articles (from the Vertical Leap Blog) that discuss the use of meta tags:

Google News Introduces Meta Tags for Source Attribution
SEO Tips for More Efficient Meta Tags
More on Title Tags
Google announce that Keywords & Descriptions tags have no impact on ranking
The Importance Of Understanding Clients Business
Search Engine Optimisation – Duplicate titles and Meta Descriptions
Meta Robots Tag Syntax for SEO
Business Blogs for Business-Guidelines from Yahoo Blog Guru

According to Google, “Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster.”

When Google Instant is activated – which it seems to be unless you turn it off – Google will anticipate your searches by suggesting frequently searched keywords, and it will show the search results for the selected keyword even before you click the “Search” button.

This video demonstrates how Google Instant works.

As you continue to type the search results shown on the page change to reflect the currently selected keyword. You can still execute a search for a term not suggested by “Instant”, but many people will simply default to the recommendations.

Impact on SEO

According to a recent post at SEOBook, How Google Instant Changes the SEO Landscape, the impact on SEO practices is important but not game-changing.

1. Clearly it will result in a tighter and narrower keyword selection pattern as people simply select the recommendations given them.

2. It also “promotes the localization of results”, for the same reason (because these are what Google recommends).

3. Searching will be faster – because there is less typing.

4. Fewer organic listings will be shown because there is less screen space (the keyword recommendations take up a fair bit of space).

5. The focus on “sponsored listings” (Adwords) will be more intense. These are shown at the top of the listings.

6. Adwords impressions will be skewed by the displayed automatic search results.

Conclusions for SEO

The conclusion for your SEO efforts is that you need to target the regularly recommended keywords more than you otherwise might. This actually makes keyword analysis easier because Google is doing it for you as you type in search alternatives.

This doesn’t make SEO irrelevant, but it might make it more difficult, since, perhaps, long tail keywords will get fewer searches.

This will clearly have an impact on those of us developing SEO tutorials, courses, and guides since it will likely have a bearing on how keyword selection should be undertaken.

The Free SEO Course called SEO-101 from Linknet covers the following:

- Understanding SEO
- Basic SEO strategy
- Keyword analysis
- Keyword tools
- Optimized website structure
- Content optimization
- Link Building

If you want to promote a website and get traffic then you absolutely must know something about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Our search engine optimization course (SEO course) called SEO-101 describes why keywords are central to how the search engines work. It then explains how to create your website or blog to come up high in searches done on Google, Bing, Yahoo, Alta Vista and others.

Linknet SEO courses deal with the central aspects of search engine optimization. These include choosing the correct keywords, optimizing your content for websites, blogs, videos, etc. and building links from external web resources such as websites, blogs, social networking sites and bookmarking sites.

To register for the Free Linknet SEO Course go to Free SEO Course.

As I have mentioned in other posts, you first SEO task is to develop a strategy for covering your most important keywords, both within your site or blog, and in the external websites you have linking back to your site or blog.

Organizing your content so you adequately cover the keywords in your Master Keyword List is discussed in more detail in the post called “Organizing Your Content for SEO”, so I will not go into detail about that here.

In this post I am concerned with how you go about “optimizing” individual pages, blog posts, videos, and so on to get the most SEO value from them.

How to optimize your content

Optimizing your content is actually easier than you may think. The first optimization “rule”, if you want to call it that, is to write meaningful content that contains the specific keywords you are targeting.

This may seem like common sense, but it is surprising how often people who write things do not just come out and say what they are writing about. For example, if you are writing a review about the Blackberry Torch 9800 and you want the search engines to take note of it, it is important to make it clear that you are writing about the Blackberry Torch 9800.

The easiest way to do this is to just include the keyword phrase a few times. It is even better to use the phrase Blackberry Torch 9800 review in your article a couple of times. In fact, it would be a good idea to sprinkle your content with slightly different versions – other keyword phrases that people may be searching for – for example, Blackberry 9800, Blackberry Torch, Blackberry 9800 Torch.

It is also helpful to include other related terms in your copy – terms that make it clear your article is about smartphones, from RIM or Research in Motion, who are in direct competition with Apple who make the very successful iPhone, and so on. The more of these related terms you include in your copy, the more associations the search engines will find to other similar content, and the greater relevance your article will have in their eyes to the searchers you are targeting.

The most important places to put your keywords

The search engines don’t just look at the frequency of keywords (i.e., the number of times specific keywords appear in an article or page.) They also look at the location of specific keywords (i.e., where they appear within the article or page.)

Some locations are assumed to be more important than others as indicators of what a page or article is about. Those are the places you want to put the target keywords for that page or article.

In fact, that is the second optimization rule: Put your targeted keyword in the most important places within your page, post or article.

Just what are the “most important places”?

It is generally agreed that for web pages the most important places are:

- The page title
- The major headline
- In the first paragraph or two (near the beginning of the article)
- In bold type somewhere in the article
- In an outbound link pointing to some authoritative resource

For blog posts and articles the list is very similar, except in this case it is the article or post title that is most important. Here is the list of most important places for keywords in blog posts and articles:

- The post (or article) title
- In the first paragraph (near the beginning of the post or article)
- In bold type somewhere in the article
- In an outbound link pointing to some authoritative resource

All of these things help the search engines determine that the page, blog post or article in question is primarily about the targeted keywords found in those important places.

Once you have done your keyword analysis and settled on a Master Keyword List for your web efforts you should begin creating content that focuses on the full range of keywords in your list. By “content” I mean articles, faqs, how-tos, blog posts, videos, photos, etc., etc.

This content will make up the substance of your website or blog. But it will also be used on supporting sites that link to your site or blog. This process of building supporting content demonstrates how content creation and link building are closely related.

When you create a blog post on a blog other than your own, or when you create a Hub Page, Squidoo lense or Youtube video these will not only be valuable content on their own, but will link back to your site or blog. Placing related content on already established sites is a great way to enhance the search engine ranking of your own site.

But it is important to remember that creating content is not just about link building. Creating content is at the heart of building a successful website. After all, it is your content that people want to see and read. They will not come to your website just because it is there. Or if they follow a link to your site and they don’t find any useful content they won’t stick around for long.

Organizing Your Website Using a “Silo” Structure

It is tempting to just start creating pages within your site or blog focusing on specific keywords (or groups of keywords.) This is certainly a lot better than nothing, but working with a large keyword list can be confusing and very time-consuming.

That is why it is usually helpful to organize your site into categories and sub-categories where each category lets you focus on a group of important keywords. For example, if you have a “pet training” site, you may have categories such as “dog training”, “cat training”, “bird training”, and so on.

The content in each of these categories or “silos” will have some natural cohesiveness, and will allow you to organize your content around specific groups of keywords.

This structure will also provide new opportunities to create content, and it will often suggest new keywords as you go along. This lets you develop your content in a fuller, richer way than would be the case if you just focused on your original master keyword list.

Organizing content this way is often referred to as using a “silo” approach to building a website. Each silo is a major category within the overall structure of your site (or blog). And each silo can have sub-categories (and corresponding sub-sets of keywords) within it.

Creating Supporting Content in External Sources

The silo system has other important advantages. One of the most important is that it gives you a very helpful approach to building supporting content in external sources such as other blogs, Squidoo, Hub Pages, Youtube as well as article sites such as Ezinearticles, GoArticles, and so on.

Each of these supporting resources will have links pointing back to the main silo page, or some other page within that specific silo. This is a great way to build links from highly relevant, keyword focused content found on already established sites.

Writing articles is one of the best ways to gain some online exposure for yourself and for your web properties. As I have pointed out in a previous post, Why Article Marketing is Worth Doing you can write articles on just about any subject and submit them to many different article directories – some of which are considered authority sites by Google.

That means that not only can writing articles enhance your own status as something of an authority on the topics you write about, but when you embed links in your articles they become a great source for backlinks to your website(s). That is one the most important factors for boosting your search engine ranking.

But there are two fairly frustrating parts about writing articles that often torpedo the best intentions of many marketers and small business people. First, they take a significant amount of time to write. And, second, they can take a lot of time to submit to article directory sites.

Outsourcing your writing

The most popular solution to the “I-don’t-have-time-to-write” syndrome is to outsource the writing to people who are eager to do it for you. Often these people are experience writers who have already been exposed to the type of articles you require. And usually you can find someone to do it for a very reasonable cost.

The source we currently use is TextBroker.com and I recommend them highly. Like most freelance sites they act as a middleman between writers looking for work, and marketers or publishers looking for specific types of content.

Once you open an account you will have to deposit a small amount of money into it in order to actually place orders. Placing an order involves submitting an idea of what you want the article to be about, the keywords you want to focus on, a couple of resources they can use to find information on the topic, the length of the required article, how quickly you need it done, and the quality level (between 1 and 5) you are looking for.

Once a project is submitted, if it is left “Open”, then any writer with at least the desired quality rating can take the project on. For example, if you want a “level 4″ article, then any writer with that rating or above can claim it. Once the project is claimed the writer will submit the finished article to the system where you can accept it or ask that it be revised.

We’ve had literally hundreds of articles written by these folks and sent very few back for revisions. We often make small editorial revisions, but that is to be expected in any project.

For a 450 word level 4 article you will pay around $10. We highly recommend TextBroker.com.

Article Submission with SubmitYourArticle.com

The other painful part of the process is submitting your articles to article directories like EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, IdeaMarketers.com and many others. Since there are hundreds of these sites, and since at least 10 of them are fairly highly ranked by Google most article marketers recommend submitting to at least several of the better sites.

Even submitting one article to five or six sites can take a long time. If you intend to go at article marketing in a serious way you could be spending your whole day doing nothing other than submission.

That’s where an article submission site like SubmitYourArticle.com comes in. These guys will submit any number of articles to several of the major sites, as well as (in their words) “hundreds of other websites in our distribution network.”

The important thing about SYO is that they get your articles into the most important, highly ranked sites. Not all distribution systems do this. Also, like many article distribution sites SYO has integrated “spinning” capabilites which they call “Article Leverage”.

The one downside to the SYO service is that if you need to submit articles on behalf of different authors you will need a different account for each author.

Other than that (reasonable) limitation, SubmitYourArticle.com is the best article distribution service I have found.

Almost everybody who knows anything about online marketing knows the importance of search engines – especially Google. In fact Google has become so dominant it is almost impossible to talk about the internet without immediately discussing the role of Google.

The process of systematically trying to get the search engines to drive (“free” not paid) traffic to your website(s) is called Search Engine Marketing. SEM, as it is often rererred to, involves different ways of trying to influence search engines – especially Google – to give you high ranking for searches done on your most important keywords.

For example, if your most important keywords are “Toledo Real Estate”, SEM involves trying to get high ranking in Google searches for the phrase “Toledo Real Estate”. This way people will click on your link in the Google search results and be taken to your blog or website.

Voila. Traffic.

The two most important techniques used in SEM are

• “Optimizing” your content for specific keywords. This is usually called SEO – short for search engine optimization. SEO involves choosing the most promising keywords, and then making sure those keywords show up in your web content in the most important places.

• Link building. Getting links from other sites pointing to your content is a good way to get the attention of the search engines. They consider inbound links as “votes” by other online bloggers and publishers that your content is worth looking at.

Generally speaking, the more your content focuses on your primary keywords, and the more inbound links you have, the better your website or blog will rank in the search engines.

But there are problems with SEM…

• It is indirect. You are relying on Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. to determine who is or is not a good candidate to visit your site or blog. This can be a very frustrating experience – especially when you are in a competitive market.

• It takes a lot of time and effort (usually) to influence the search engines. Typically you will have to wait at least three months to see any lasting results from SEM and SEO.
• It is unpredictable. We have seen clients rise to #1 for their search terms, and we have seen other clients drop off the map. It is hard to know if this is ever the direct result of a concerted SEM/SEO effort. You do your best to give Google and Bing what they want, but you just don’t know for sure it is going to work.

SEM is just one part of the marketing puzzle

SEM is a valuable long term strategy which every serious online marketer should adopt. But don’t count on immediate results. Eventually as your blog gains credibility you will consistently draw traffic from the search engines. But it can often be a very long and tedious process.

Even more important, SEM will only take you so far. It is what we call a “passive” method of marketing. It is like Social Networking in this regard. Social networking – being active in Facebook, for example – will introduce you to many new “friends” and prospects. But it will generally not do much direct selling for you.

For example, if you own a restaurant and you want to run a one week lunch special, SEM will be almost useless. To generate traffic to your offer page you will need other promotional techniques. These will be discussed in future posts.

I have recently been researching the changes Google (and the other search engines) are making to local search. The SEs have been hammering away at local search for a few years now. Their objective is to essentially put the old paper-based Yellow Pages out of business – to become the default “go to” source for local business information.

So that makes Local Search very important for businesses targeting a local market. Real estate agents are obviously one of the most important business segments who should be up to speed on local business search.

Google’s local business search strategy is based on Google Maps. When you think of it, this is probably Google’s most important potential revenue source for Google Maps. As GMaps based local search becomes more dominant, it will become an important source of ad revenue.

If you use Google Maps to do a search you are using their local search system. For example, I did a search for “Waterloo Realtors” from Google.com (not the toolbar), and this is what I got:

Notice that the sponsored (paid) links are at the very top. But right under those are the “local business results”. This is what we’re talking about here. Google has elevated the importance of local search results so that, for location based searches, they come up ahead of the normal results we are used to.

The bottom line is that if you want to score well for location based searches you have to get into the local search game.

There is some helpful information at the link below describing how to get started…

Getting Listed in Google Local Business Center