Search Engine Optimization

Today I atteneded the Texas Domainers and Developers Convention to listen to Bill Hartzer’s, (Vizion Interactive), SEO Presentation. Here is a rundown of his tips:

• Title Tags- Use title tags for every single page of your site. Within your title tag you should include your business name or something else that is relevant to your site.
• Inbound Links- Relative inbound links are key to ranking higher on search results. Inbound links must be from authoritative and relevant sites. (The speaker did not mention this, but a great way to get inbound links is through the use of trackbacks) 
• Keep Content Fresh- Create an RSS feed for your site, and update your content regularly. Blogs are a great way to ensure that your site is considered fresh and relevant. 
• No more Submitting your site- now-days search engines will spider your new site within minutes of registering a new domain name.
• Social Bookmarking- Add your own site to social bookmarking sites, del.ici.ous for example in order to get more inbound links, and to get your fresh content spidered more quickly. 
• Yahoo Directory Listing- This costs $299 but according to —- this can be very useful. He reccomends though that if you prefer not to spend the $299 bucks, you can simply register your site with the sites who provide the directory listings to Yahoo. 
• Keyword Research- Whether you are interested in Organic or Paid Search you must do your keyword research to find out what people are searching for that is related to you, your business, or your product. 
• Keyword Research Tools- Bill says that these tools are very useful, but that you must remember that each of these tools use different methods to collect their data, so you must be careful not to take one tool’s information as gold. 
  • Google Keyword Tool
  • SEO Book Keyword Tool
  • Wordtracker.com (paid)
  • Hitwise(paid)
  • SpyFU.com
• Keep Visitors Coming Back- Rather than park a domain name, keep content on the site in order to build your visitors. 
• Expired Domains- use a 301 permanent redirect on moved or expired pages. 

This was a decent refresher course in SEO, but I did not get anything new out of this presentation. All in all I was rather disappointed- the speaker mentioned that there were over “126 contributing factors” that search engines rely on to rank your site, but he did not expound on this except to say, go to google and look them up! I really thought this was what I would be learning. Wow..