Yes, it’s been a full 3 months since the last meetup, so it’s time for another.  Based on the feedback on the group polls, we’re holding this on a week night, rather than a weekend, and we’re going to be doing more of a formal presentation style for the meeting.  There’ll be presentations from Debra Mastaler and myself covering topics from Link Building to Reputation Management.

If you’d like to attend, you can find out more about the meetup over on the VA SEM group meetup pages, but the basics are that it’s going to be held at the Serengeti Communications offices in McLean, VA (1493 Chain Bridge Road, Suite 303) on August 1st, with doors opening at 6pm, and the presentations scheduled to start at 6.30pm.  If you have interest in presenting, drop me a note to simon at searchenginetigers.com and we’ll see what we can do.

Hope to see any that can make it out here next Friday.

On Friday SEMPO sent out logo’s for all who have passed their certification program, for them to post to their websites. Curious as to what it looks like? Here you go…

So you want to put a website up for your business, or you already have one up, and you know enough to know that to make your website work for you, you have to do some Search Engine Marketing. But where do you start? Well, I’ve put together some links below to resources that will at least explain what you didn’t know you didn’t know, and get you moving in the right direction. These links are not the be-all and end all of information on these topics out there, but they’re good enough to get you thinking and point you in the right direction, too many links may make you feel overwhelmed.

Education

The first step is Education. Before you start running, you need to know how many legs you have. Attending a conference, reading a good book, and taking certification courses all help. The link here is a poll, which gives you an idea of how some of these courses and conferences rank, but it also gives you links to their websites.

Best Conferences and Certification Courses

Keyword Research

Keyword research is vital for your site. If you don’t do it correctly you have no idea as to whether your site is visible to as many potential customers as possible. The right keyword research can lower costs for pay per click, and just generally increase your sales. The article linked here has a full discussion on keyword research from Lisa (”The Lisa”) Barone at Bruce Clay.

The 5 steps of Keyword Research

Page Optimization

So now you know what to target, the next question is how to target. If you can incorporate them into your URL i.e. nashvillebuggywhips.com, then that’s great, but more likely than not you’ll want to go with your brand as the name. So what’s the first element on your website that you want to target? The title tag. This article describes everything you want to know about the title tag.

All about Title Tags

Next you want to work with your meta tags. Remembering that while these elements may not have the power they once had, they’re still worth looking at and getting right (especially the ROBOTS tag, which can impact indexing on your whole site).

The Meta Tag primer

Next, you want to make sure that you have good content on your site. The search engines love good, unique, relevant content. If you have plenty to say about your company and it’s products / services, do it. While you want to weave the keywords into your content, just remember that all of the text on the page will be indexed and so you may pick up searches for a long tail search such as “premier buggy whip supplier in nashville”. These searches don’t happen too often, but they’re much more likely to convert into a sale for your company. This next article talks about using your content to help your site

Content is King

Link Building
Now that you have your site up, the next step is to make sure that people know about it. Just building a site and optimizing it does not mean that it will rank well in the Search Engines. Their current algorithms are based largely on trust, and one of the ways that that trust is generated is through links to your site. The more high quality, relevant links that come to your site, the better. How do you get links? Well there are several ways. You can contact other site owners and get them to link to you (you may have to link back to them though), there are directories, both free and paid that accept links, there are paid linking services, and then there is linkbaiting, where you write an article / put out a video / do something different, that spreads virally, and results in them linking to the site. There are many companies out there now that specialize in linkbaiting services, especially to the relatively new phenomenon of Social Media sites such as Digg. The first link below is to a running section of SearchEngineLand that deals specifically with link building topics. The second is an example of a linkbaiting campaign from SEOmoz.

Link Week

The Super Digg

Analytics & Reporting
So you have a site, it has incoming links, the search engines have indexed it. How do you know how well it’s doing? You need to have an analytics solution in place. Are they expensive? Well, it depends on the level of analysis, and whether you need real time analysis, or you can afford to wait until the next day. The link below discusses six packages that can provide analytics data for your site without costing you a penny.

Analytics on the cheap - six free stats packages

Alternatives

What else might you want to look into? Well, there’s blogging, podcasting, and social media sites, the number of which seems to grow fairly regularly. Here are the final 2 links, the first addresses how you may want to use podcasting in promoting your business, and gives you a list of resources, the other describes using one off the social media sites - Flickr.

Podcasting for small businesses

Marketing on Flickr

“Daddy, where do web pages come from?”
“Well, someone has an idea and they find a web developer that they like very much and…”
“No daddy, I already know that from the playground. What I want to know is what is S-E-O all about”
“Oh boy, I didn’t think I’d be having this discussion with you so soon…”

Tonight I asked my wife to describe what I do, and her description was “Um… You try to get traffic to sites, and then someone makes money”. Maybe my 5 year old understands what I do?… ok maybe not: “You work on a computer”. But what about customers? Do they know what it is they’re getting themselves in for? There are three types of customers that I’ve come across, those that don’t know what it is, but they want it and those that know enough to be dangerous (those that actually know enough to do it themselves aren’t necessarily in the customers bucket). For both sets of customers education is the key, understanding what they know, filling in the gaps for them, and setting realistic expectations are the best ways to go. Basically treat them like you’d want to be treated by a vendor. If you don’t it’s only going to come back and bite you in a soft tender spot at some point, and if that happens too often you might find yourself having to explain to your spouse exactly what your new job is… although maybe it’ll be an easier one for them to understand.

(thanks to SEOWife for the idea behind this post)

Let’s start off with the disclaimers: I am a SEMPO member, and a member of the SEMPO In-House Committee. Now that that’s out of the way, on to the topic.

A week ago SEMPO launched their Fundamentals of SEO course, covering such topics as
History of Search Engines, How Search Engines Work, Linking & Directories, Keywords, SEO Web Design, Copywriting, SEO Roadblocks, Submissions, Tracking & Reporting, Pay Per Click I, Pay Per Click II, Current Innovations, Intellectual Property, and SEO & PPC Resources. The cost for the course is $499 for anyone, $399 for SEMPO members, and $250 for military or students (12 credits or more). I wanted to see exactly how good the course was to determine whether or not it was something that I could recommend for the rest of my team, so I signed up for it on Thursday.

On Saturday afternoon I started the course. Each topic has a lesson comprising of 35-70 pages of subject matter and mini-quizzes, and concludes with a test that requires a 74% grade to pass. You are not allowed to pass on to the next topic until you have completed the test for the presious topic. By Saturday evening I was done, with all of the tests having been completed. So what was it like? Well, having taken the Sun J2EE and the NSDJA (National Sash and Door Jobbers Association) professional examinations in the past, I would have to say that it was closer to the NSDJA exam. What does that mean? Well, the Sun exam involved studying the course material, then going to a testing center to actually take the exam, under exam conditions. The NSDJA course was open book, with the quizzes being mailed in for grading (this was 1996, it’s hopefully been updated by now). The SEMPO course was basically open book, with a button being pressed at the end of every exam, and if you failed the exam you could retake it. Also, unlike the Sun exam, the questions were the same every time you attempted the exam, so if you happened to mark down your answers, you could run back through and change those that you were not so sure about, and regrade them until you pass. Some of the exams used the same questions that were in the in-lesson quizzes, so if you had completed those, you were set for the test.

There were also some minor typo’s within the lessons themselves (I sent in a list of the ones that I noticed), but since this is new (I believe I was one of the first dozen to sign up for the course), that’s to be expected. The lessons are also slightly out of date already, as this industry moves rather quickly, discussions on Yahoo PPC in some sections talked about Panama, but not in a detailed way in all.

All in all, its not a bad start for the SEMPO institute. I’d like to see them do some randomization in the questions, and maybe implement and external testing / maximum amount of retakes policy. Then the certificate of completion will actually mean more. As for whether I’ll recommend that the rest of my team take it. I will, but probably in a month or so, when some of the kinks have been corrected. I’ll also be signing up for the advanced courses when they become available.

Update: Today (2/12) the certificate showed up at work.