Shelly Brown (Southwest Baptist University) was the hostess of the lunch table about “Search Engine Marketing,†today at the EduWeb Conference in Baltimore.
Drew Olanoff, Senior Web Developer at Educational Directories Unlimited, is one of the seven very nice people who agreed to share their notes with all of us who couldn’t attend the EduWeb conference this year. This is Drew’s first post about the conference.
During the lunch roundtables, I had the pleasure to sit down with Shelly Brown, the Director of Web Services at Southwest Baptist University. Among those attending were my friends from the Vermont Law School, who have been setting trends with their own blogs.
Shelly let us know that she’s done a lot of SEO (Search engine optimization) work both at her school and for personal ventures. She obviously spends a lot of time tracking trends and paying attention to the likes of Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
She handed out some slides, and then let us know that the #1 way to find your way in search engine marketing is trial and error. Shelly has all of her knowledge because she jumped right in and did it. It was awesome hearing from someone who is doing search engine work in the field that I monitor so closely.
She set up her session by explaining the difference between Organic and Paid search engine marketing. Organic is just the natural rankings you get on a search engine, and paid is the advertising or keywords you can buy on a search engine.
Shelly has more experience in the organic model, and doesn’t spend much money on the keywords. She showed us a picture of the spots on a Google results page that get clicked the most. Amazingly it’s not the ads, but the first 3 natural listings that get the most love. She then explained that she has seen a boost in ranking since implementing a Google Sitemap. Basically, a Google sitemap tells Google what pages you have on your site and gives them the link to check it out, rather than you waiting for their “crawlers†to come visit. That was a great tip!
The good stuff came next.
She showed us the top 10 strategies for optimization:
1. Titles – Paying more attention to your title tags
2. Inbound links – Getting other sites to link to you counts with Google and most other search engines
3. Limit dynamically generated pages – Basically, make sure that your pages will display correctly in a browser, or it won’t show up to a search engine crawler
4. Create a sitemap specifically for Google bots
5. Avoid frames
6. Internal link structure – ever page should have a link to every other page on your site
7. Don’t try to spam googles crawlers – You could get blacklisted!
8. Focus on target keywords
9. Install Google’s free toolbar – It gives you pagerank info on any page instantly!
10. Meta tags – Explore your meta description and keyword tags. Make sure they match the content on each specific page.
All in all this was a great session. Everyone got involved in the discussion, and some great tips were given.