What a great day it was! Over 200 B2B practitioners listening to a really high quality conference programme - certainly the best I've been to in a while.
If I had to pick a clear favourite, it would have to be Chris Warwick, VP of acquisition marketing at Hoovers and the queen of search marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO). Not only was she the finest-looking speaker of the day, she was also exciting to listen to and learn from because she shared so much about Hoovers online marketing successes and challenges, warts and all.
Lifting up the hem of the corporate skirt is a good thing to do at conferences, because people are there to learn from best practise and mistakes.
Too few people do it, whilst some say they are going to do it and then don't. We don't go to conferences for a tease...
Top tip from her session which I personally took away were to keep links on each page relevant to the main content of the page, in order to optimise for search engines and rank higher on the stuff you want people to see.
Search engines only see same or similar words as related, so one has to keep the terminology clear and unambiguous and avoid being too creative with language.
SEO is a moving target as search engines are wont to change their algorithms from time to time.
It's such a complex minefield, but a few (free)...(yes, FREE)..online tools that are interesting to help audit one's SEO effectiveness are as follows:
Optimisation Purpose |
Free On-line Resource |
What the Search Engines See |
http://www.dlperry.com/what_search_engine_spiders_see.html |
Determine relative popularity of key words |
http://googlefight.com/ |
Link popularity check vs competitors |
http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm |
Traffic ranking analysis from a toolbar download |
http://download.alexa.com/index.cgi |
Hi Martin,
I recommend SEOmoz Page Strength tool for SEO evaluations
http://www.seomoz.org/page-strength
This tool helps you evaluate important SEO factors such as incoming links to the url and domain, internal link percentage, Google PageRank and whether the site is listed in DMOZ.
Also if you are a professional SEO I really recommend you download the Firefox add on SEOquake, it's the must have tool for the professional SEO
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3036
cheers,
Lisa
Head of Search
Base One
Also worth checking out is the commands in Google and Yahoo to see how many pages of your website they have indexed
just type in the following comand:
site:www.yoursitehere.com