A local community college organized a Search Engine Optomization (SEO) seminar as part their workforce development program. The talk featured the following individuals:

Fionn Downhill - Director Sales and Marketing for elixirsystems.com
Terry Mickelson - Founder of pageviews.com
Lance Faulkner - Search Marketing Specialist for rhinointernet.com

Fionn Downhill: SEO Hints and Tips

Fionn’s presentation was very helpful to those starting out in the area of search engine optimization. She provided the audience with somewhat of a step-by-step approach to this topic. Also, she gave us some do’s and don’ts when it comes to keywords. These are some of the points that stuck with me.

1. Stick one or two keywords per page, maybe as far as four if they are related
2. It is best to repeat a keyword once per paragraph on your page
3. Try to include some of your keywords on your page URI (me: one can easily do this with MT by using a combination of the entry title and keywords)
4. Don’t get banned, it is impossible to get unbanned

Terry Mickelson: Link Popularity Campaigns

Terry’s talk was focused on links. In addition to his involvement with PageViews, he was promoting a company called Linkage Express which would explain the topic of his presentation. He talked about link popularity and link reputation as methods to increase your search engine visibility. Something that I found interesting was the value of links from "closely related" sites to your own content. One can easily determine that best search results would be achieved by an active community driving each other’s sites toward the top.

He made a couple of suggestions that I really did share with him. Regarding where one can find a place to post a link to your content he included directories, forums, press releases, reciprocal sites (you link to me and I link to you) and blogs!. As a blogger, right away I found myself on the defensive. As time went by, I kept thinking how there are 2 types of people posting to blogs. Those following this advise and placing comments just to get a link (spammers) and those that have something to contribute and thus help building up the "community" factor. Something else I disagree came up during the wrap-up so I will comment about it there.

Regarding press-releases, he mentioned that Google will keep them in archive for two or three years so they are a good place to have a link back to your site. It would be best If you use one of your keywords to describe your site with the link than the name of your company or URL. I wonder how easy this can be done in the corporate scene.

Lance Faulker: Search Engine Landscape

Lance’s presentation was mostly a look at the past and present of the search engine industry from a very high level above. He mostly compared Google and Yahoo! before and after the announcement from Yahoo! to enter the market. For instance, in Feb. 17th 2004 Google had close to 76% share of all search traffic through the properties to which they provided results; Yahoo! had about a 17% share through their own properties. On Feb. 18th 2004, Google saw their piece of the cake shrink to 51% (Google and AOL) while Yahoo! jumped to 43% thanks to their control over Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista and AllTheWeb. Now, I guess you can say that a monopoly fell that day?

That’s a wrap

The Q&A was done by randomly passing out blank cards to people in the audience during the course of the presentations. I tried to get a card but did not manage to get one, so I was hoping someone out there would have a clue as to what to ask. This is what I gather from the Q&A.

Search engines and flash: none of the speakers had a great solution to flash sites and one even mentioned the fact that they have turned down business offers because the target site was all flash. I guess there really isn’t there a technical solution to search binary files (how could you?). The speakers did propose the use of "noembed" tags to provide some text to the search engine. I liked that answer until the speaker went on to suggest building an entire html page within these tags to compliment the flash site. From a SEO point of view, I guess that would do the job but all I could think was someone out there using a text browser having to get a sub-par site because of the use of flash.

I would like to think that while search engines mature to handle other media formats (how will Google handle RIA’s?), it is the responsibility of the designers out there to educate their clients away from entire Flash sites.

Who’s the target? It seems like a lot of people want to be number 1 on Google and other search engines. In order to reach and maintain that level you have to think as search engines being your only audience. 100% optimized text for search engines does not work for people, mostly because search engines are not people. Traffic comes from a person making the conscious decision to go to your site, regardless of how the found out about it. If the person cannot connect with your site right away, they will not come back EVEN if you are Google’s number one pick for your chosen keywords! If you write content with people in mind, the traffic will come and people will find out about your site from means other than Google or Yahoo!.

What is next?

Overall, I really enjoyed the seminar and thought it was a valuable experience. I learned a few things about SEO that I was not aware of and now I can implement them in future projects. I was also delighted to see very little marketing talk, in the past, seminars with great potential go south thanks to too much sell-talk. I will keep my eyes open to see how these companies do in the future.