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

Matt Cutts recently suggested that SEOs “try to predict where Google is going in the future” rather than trying to “chase the algorithm”. Here are some Google predictions according to Peter Da Vanzo of SEOBook.com:

• Google will continue to dominate. Facebook is important, but not as a search engine.
• Blackhat sites will not bother Google unless they bother Google users.
• Google will continue to add services that maintain Google’s own position of prominence. This will probably mean the big boys with money will dominate even more than they do now.
• Go where your users are. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp. But Google clearly thinks Google is #1.
• Local is big and will get bigger. Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Local, Google Street View. Local on mobile. This is where a lot of the action will be over the next few years.
• SEO may change, but not that much, and not that quickly.

More on this topic:

SEOs Should Focus On Where Google Is Heading

Key Take Aways from Google’s Matt Cutts Talk at PubCon

Top 9 SEO Tips from Matt Cutts

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

Building links is an important part of promoting your website(s) and building an online presence. The more you get involved in different places around the web the more you will be noticed and the more traffic you will ultimately get. This is what you might call the “Prolific Principle”. The more prolific you are, the more your “presence” will grow.

This applies to content – publish as much fresh, original content as you can – and it applies to links pointing to your web properties. Be prolific – get out there – a lot.

In an article published a couple years ago on the HubSpot Blog Peter Caputa compares the link building process to passing through the “grades” you go through in high school. The article is called Did You Graduate From Link Building High School Yet?

Peter suggests to really master this process will take 4 years (like it does in high school), and that you have to move through the stages gradually. I think this is probably an exaggeration. If you get good advice you should be able to move through the stages quite a bit more quickly than that, and I believe the stages overlap more than he suggests. Nevertheless, the article makes some good suggestions. Here is my summary with comments of my own…

In Stage 1 (Grade 9) you should build links that don’t require anyone else’s help. These links include directory listings, many of which you can get for free, and references on social media sites where (among other things) you can create a profile – also for free.

I would add to this you should try to get at least one or two links from established sites that will result in your site being indexed as quickly as possible – perhaps from a friend or colleague. If you own a local business look for local business directories. Not only can you get listed there, but you can find other people you might exchange links with.

In Stage 2 (Grade 10) you should launch a business blog and begin adding content on a regular basis. Then start publishing articles on sites like Ezinearticles.com, GoArticles.com and others. You can use a submission service like SubmitYourArticle.com for distribution to a large number of sites.

As I outline in a previous post about article marketing this is a good way to get links (by adding them to your “resource box” on each article) and to build a reputation as an “expert” in your field. Of course this requires writing original, interesting articles. If you are stumped for original content you can just do reviews of other people’s articles or products (like this article) or you might consider using an article writing service like Textbrokers.

In Stage 3 (Grade 11) you should start networking with as many people as possible who share your interests. The object is to make yourself visible. This requires participation and “engagement”.

One way of doing this is to find a number of bloggers in your niche and start making meaningful comments on their posts. This is called blog commenting.

This will gradually introduce you to fellow bloggers and your link in each comment will attract a small amount of traffic from other commenters or readers. Once you gain enough confidence you can approach some of the bloggers you have met this way to do a guest post on their blog. That way you can leverage their readership to enhance your own visibility.

By this stage your blog should have a fair bit of valuable content so you should register it with as many blog networks as possible. MyBlogLog.com is a good place to start. This will help you meet other bloggers with similar interests and will give you some tools for tracking your traffic as it gradually grows.

You can also use other social media to gain visibility for specific blog posts. Digg and Stumbleupon are good places to start. You can also post references (and links) to specific blog posts on your Facebook wall, Twitter, and wherever else is appropriate.

Remember, the objective here is to build connections with key people and use the connections to build visibility. Content is the key. Build content on your blogs, in articles, and with guest posts.

In Stage 4 (Grade 12) you become a power blogger creating all kinds of content: articles, training courses, white papers, webinars and videos. All of these things attract readers, links, and subscribers. If you have done it correctly you should be an important, highly visible part of a vibrant community, and you should be at the top of the search engine results for your most important keywords.

Many webmasters and bloggers think of “link building” as a difficult, boring, mechanical task where the objective is to pile up mysterious things called “links” for the sake of influencing the Search Engines.

This is an old-fashioned, outdated and increasingly ineffective way to tackle the job of putting yourself on the map. In the rapidly evolving world of social media it’s all about getting noticed by real people. And the best way to do that is by being strategic and creative in what you publish.

Link Baiting Revisited

One common practice, much discussed four or five years ago, is “link baiting”. The idea behind link baiting is to publish something so unique, compelling, funny, interesting, entertaining or valuable that others will simply link to it to tell their own readers about it.

Now in case you think this technique is outdated, consider how Youtube videos go “viral” (another concept that is starting to sound old-fashioned). Somebody publishes an outrageous, funny, disgusting, cute or whatever video and the chain reaction begins. Person A tells person B who tells person C and on it goes until a million or so people have watched it.

The same thing happens with blog posts (although usually in a less dramatic way). The trick is to say something interesting, original, or controversial and then tell people about it to get the buzz going. The buzz is helped along by people linking to you.

This article from way back in 2006 describes 5 different types of “hooks” used in writing articles and posts intended to get a buzz. The hooks are News, Contrary, Attack, Resource and Humor. See the article for more detail on each of these.

Strategy: Target influential sites or hot topics

The fastest and most effective way to make a significant splash is to focus on influential websites or blogs within your niche. Find a post or video about some hot topic that is getting a lot of exposure and feedback. Then use that atention – that buzz – to bring attention to your views.

Remember, your objective should not just be to “get a link” from these sites. It is more important to get their attention – make yourself visible – Expose Yourself!, by contributing to the conversation in a significant way. That way you may turn other bloggers into allies in your quest for online success.

Blog Commenting – also revisited

The most obvious and easiest thing you can do is add comments to widely read blog posts. Unless you want to become known as the local attack dog you should try to come across as positive and supportive. But don’t just agree with everything they say. Try to add something new and interesting to the conversation.

Unfortunately most well-read blog posts have many comments and yours will just be one among all the others. So you want to do what you can to stand out from the crowd. One effective way is just to write a longer comment than everyone else. This makes it look like you have something substantial to say about the topic, and it also looks like you have put some real thought into what you have said. Of course it helps to actually have something interesting to say.

Taking blog commentary to the next level

If you find an article or post that really warrants it, go ahead and write a review or commentary and publish it in your own blog. This works especially well for current “hot” topics – or blog posts that are getting a lot of attention.

Make sure you let the original author know about your review. Either send them an email directly, or mention your review in a comment on the original. That way you are exposing your own stuff to readers of the original.

The objective is to “piggy-back” on the success or popularity of the original. At the same time you can bring yourself to the attention of the original author, and gain an ally who can help you become more widely known in your chosen niche.

Other Resources:

Link Baiting & Effective Link Building

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.

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.

While SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not the “be all and end all” of online marketing, it is certainly an important part of it. Many would argue it is the central part, and the foundation for all your other efforts – social networking, email promotions, article marketing and even offline marketing efforts.

That is because becoming serious about SEO forces you to take an analytical look at your web presence and “optimize” it so you “target” it in the most effective way.

If you want to become a Search Engine Optimization expert here are 6 areas or tasks you will have to master.

1. Keyword Analysis – First, you must understand what keywords are and how they function in the world of web search. Your target keywords affect both your on-page (or “on-site”) SEO and your off-page SEO. On-page SEO refers to the integration of keywords into your actual content. Off-page SEO refers to the way you approach the task of getting other sites to link to yours.

2. Site Structure – Second, you should understand how the internal structure of your website affects how the search engines view your site. I’m talking here about the way your pages are organized, how they should reflect and emphasize your most important keywords, and how they should be interlinked.

3. Keyword Integration – Third, you must be good at creating content that contains the keywords you want to emphasize. This should be done in an organized way where specific pages focus on specific keywords.

4. Ongoing Content Optimization – Fourth, you should create a plan for creating optimized content on an on-going basis. Your objective should be to flesh out your target keyword list with content that covers all your most important keywords.

5. Create A Link Building Strategy – Fifth, you should create a link building strategy in order to create references pointing to your pages from as many different websites as possible. You want links pointing to as many different parts of your website as possible (not just the home page.) There are several ways you can create or encourage others to create links pointing to various pages within your site.

6. Execute The Link Building Strategy – Sixth, now that you have a strategy for building links you should execute that plan diligently and persistently.

If you follow this outline you are virtually guaranteed to improve your search engine rankings. I will be discussing each of these tasks in future posts.

The eternal question for web marketers is How do you get people to come to your website? It doesn’t matter if you are selling a product like cell phones, a service like landscaping, your own info-products like ebooks or DVDs, or your own original music. It doesn’t matter. To be successful online you have to get people to come to your website. You have to get traffic.

One powerful way is to build your web presence by spreading information about your products or services around the web. You have to reach people where they are. If people in your target audience are not at your website (yet), you have to go where they are and try to draw them in.

We’re not talking about advertising here – although advertising is important and certainly works.

We’re talking about offering free information that people are interested in reading or listening to or viewing. This is what we call compelling content – stuff that people are interested in and that addresses needs or desires or interests that your target audience have.

But creating this kind of content has HUGE problems!

1. Many of us do not have the time or talent to produce compelling content.

2. Hiring other people to write articles or produce interesting, informative audio presentations or videos for you may be too expensive.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a simple solution to this problem.

Well, believe it or not, there is a simple solution and it is staring you in the face.

You can use other people’s (free) content to draw your prospects to your websites.

Using other people’s content

We’re not talking about stealing content and putting your own name on it. No, we’re talking about aggregating other people’s content and associating yourself with it – exactly the way Google does.

In case you haven’t noticed, Google doesn’t produce any significant content themselves. They take the stuff you and I produce and aggregate it in their search results pages. Then they run ads on these results pages and make billions of dollars.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could do something similar? Well, you can. You can aggregate content focused on your own niche to create a valuable resource that people interested in your niche will visit.

Sources for this kind of content are almost limitless. Here are just two of them:

- Articles from sources like Ezinearticles.com, focused on your keywords

- Videos from sources like Youtube.com, focused on your keywords

The trick is to select content (articles, videos, blog posts) that are focused on your target keywords. Make sure to punch up the titles and introductory remarks so they contain the keywords you want to focus on. Then build links to your aggregating site to improve its performance with the search engines.

Claiming Pre-Written Content as Your Own

Another common source of pre-written content is what are called Private Label Rights articles, or PLR. These are available from various sources on the web, usually at dirt cheap prices.

Unfortunately the quality of PLR articles is usually pretty bad. They are often old, rehashed and repackaged, and have probably been published many times on other sites. Unless you intend to edit them extensively PLR articles are pretty much useless.

Other sources such as BlogEasy offer regular installments of pre-written content for specific niches. The initial niche being focused on by