Look how old this is! I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 17 years 10 months 2 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
I’ve finally decided what I’m going to talk about in my portion of SearchFest on March 7th.
From 10:45 to Noon, in Miller Hall, at Portland’s World Forestry Center, I’ll be sharing an SEO Basics session with Stanford Davis, of Straight On Internet Consulting. Stan is going to discuss the Top 10 SEO Mistakes he sees, and here’s the description of my session:
What are the magic bullets that will help you rank higher in the search engines? Do they even exist? What are the strategies that used to work, that you should avoid in 2007? What can you do to pursue better rankings today? Even more importantly, what strategies should you plan for in the future? All that and more in 30 short minutes, with time to spare for Q&A.
Now, if you’re a professional web marketer, I don’t expect you to pass up the advanced session, with Stoney deGeyter from PolePositionMarketing, Rand Fishkin, from SEOmoz, and Matt McGee from Marchex, but there should be some informative tidbits that will help even the seasoned search engine aficionado.
So what will you say at this SEO basics chat? Being in New Zealand I hope you manage to spread the info online? For me, its about providing genuine, interesting content, (i.e. what people are looking for in Google) and getting inbound links from popular websites. Finally, have the search phrase match to parts of your URL, e.g. http://www.headachecures.com is going to work well for any people looking “head ache cures” up (I feel this is the one area of Google that is too easily manipulated).
The tricky part, in my opinion, is working out what people type into google so you know what to tailor some of your content around; and this is about understanding what consumers (etc) label your product (or what their problem is, e.g. you’re better to rank high for “headache medicine” than “headachecure2000(TM)”). But the Google adwords tool helps alot:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=2
The above techniques are my simple distillation of what we tell our clients to do, and it seems to work for us (We’re on Google page one for both “open source cms” and “cms demo”)