Gary Viray
October 7, 2010Lo and behold! I attended another Search Engine Marketing Conference and here are a few key take away that I think would impact our strategies on Search Engine Optimization and Search Marketing.
1. Trust Bait is the ultimate method (as of now) in order to gain links to your website
Jim Boykin of WeBuildPages.com basically, knocked out the Link Bait strategy with the Trust Bait strategy.
To serve as a resource of the niche industry where you want to build links TRUST into is by far in itself is an outstanding strategy. This is building trust directed to AUTHORITY SITES! Name it. .EDU, .GOV, .MIL.GOV and a lot more gigantic Pagerank and authority sites citing your page as a resource is something you can’t just get no matter what type of begging and praying you make.
Surely, this is an insane key take away that has been playing on my head to apply.
2. Short Tails are getting noticed again more frequently in Google Instant and THEY ARE BACK!
This one is self-explanatory and it can easily be observed by turning on the Google Instant in Google.com home page. I said, “They are back!” not because short tails were not important back then but for the reason of conversion rates and increased amount of eyeballs. More top ranking sites on short tails are more visible with the Google Instant.
But it is too early to tell yet on how this Google Instant will impact search behavior. Just like what Aaron Wall said,”Even if Google has been saying that Google Instant is the next big thing on search, still the psychology behind keyboard usage for fast-typing searchers and slow ones, they would not notice Google Instant significantly for now”. Again, this still remains to be seen.
3. Improve Click Through Rate = Increase Your Rankings!
This put emphasis on Title Tags and Meta Descriptions. For the Title Tags, one needs to think like an SEO and Clicks. While on the other hand, Meta Description, one needs to think Keywords and Clicks.
Personally, my idea on improving Title Tags and Meta Descriptions is like serving an elevator pitch! You only have a few seconds to get your searchers attention through those Meta Descriptions and Title Tags so use them rightly! Is not that the very same idea of optimization? =P
4. Tools best recommended are SEMRUSH, Google KW Tools, Google Web Optimizer, RankChecker, SEOMoz, RavenTools and CrazyEgg
These are my personal picks too. Pretty damn, tools. Way above the fold!
5. New stuff in SEO are Branded Display Ads (watch them out!), Local Ads, Sitelinks, Google Shopping Ratings, Comparison Ads, Localization, Long Tails, Google Mayday, Yahoo & Bing merge and site speed checks
Aaron Wall discussed a lot of SEO developments overtime and that the evolution of search engine has been amazingly huge compared to what the search engines 5 years ago.
5. Diversity on Pagerank and Anchor Texts!
Natural link building process takes a lot of citations coming from different sites with diverse anchor texts (website owners discretion) and with variety of PageRanks.
Altogether, this type of links acquired gives you a more solid link structure that never is will be considered a red flag by Google.
This is “going natural than appearing to be natural!” It really makes sense.
6. Information Architecture should be FLAT!
The amount of crawl rates, link juice and internal linkage favors Flat information architecture. Surely, with all these in mind, it basically would mean eliminating dead-ends and low-value pages.
I would say every page on your website should mean something and they should be valuable! Else, you just have to exclude them from the spider’s crawl paths. Figuratively, it is like putting too many road humps (useless pages) on the road (internet) without any purpose at all.
8. Market Research is the starting point on whether you wanted to do SEO or not
Charlie Ellis of GallantFish.com simplified the rocket science on SEO. It seemed like everything is pretty much straight forward when he presented his slides. But if you will look at his take away, darn! There is so much work behind those “Five Categories of Focus”.
Market Research, Keyword Research, Trend Analysis, IA (Information Architecture) and Competitive Analysis (this one where I start thinking on how it would impact the SEO budget of a client). With all these in mind, you would have a substantial amount of time on data gathering, reverse engineering , link profiling and link trust building strategy. However; with the proper SEO tools set on your belt (the SEO Ninja shurikens and samurais ), you can save lots of time. Plus, of course, a good data can present itself on your hands. Spreadsheets, Here we go!
9. PPC strategy should look closely into geo-targeting, granular campaign and ad group based on specifics and long tails
Search and Content Ad campaigns should be taken differently. No mixes between the two in order to monitor and interpret rightly every A/B testing, ctr, traffic and every data presented in your Analytics.
10. My insight. I think the inclusion of microformats such as Hcard (like Vcard), HAddress and HReview should be part of the On-Page optimization process. Why?
If you are doing more of the localization search, it would best suit your website to have your address on it with HAddress format. But the most compelling reason for me to use microformats is for e-commerce sites where Google shows in SERPs those yellow stars along with the Title Tag and Meta Description. If you are looking closely to what this yellow starred reviews on your products and goods, they basically give searchers 5 thumbs-up recommendations to buy those products with good 5 yellow stars. And how microformats take its value? HReview ! I believe gives a good conversion rate factor on your efforts. =)
5 yellow stars = 5 thumbs-up to the SEMCON organizers!
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