Freelance Forum Holds SEO Forum
The Freelance Forum hosted a three-person panel of SEO experts on July 7, 2011:
• MATT WILLIAMS, President and Founder of No Possum Consulting, a web analytics firm http://www.nopossum.com
• BRET PHILLIPS, Owner, Web Devils, offers Website Development, Social Media Management and Search Engine Optimization http://webdevils.biz/ff
• JEFFREY PLUCKER, Internet Marketing Consultant with ProspectMX, works with small businesses and Fortune 500 companies, domestically and internationally http://www.prospectmx.com
Williams opened the session with a presentation that highlighted the following pointers:
- Why measure - to test how your Search Engine Marketing strategyis working
- What to measure - what do you want to know and what will you do with the information
- Determine Key Performance Indicators - examples like revenue, traffic consumption
- Use analytics to measure brand awareness, traffic patterns, bounce rates
Phillips defined SEO as “the act of optimizing a web page in order to rank highly in organic (natural) search engine results. Writing content around specific keyword phrases that people are already searching for.” He recommended outlining your top products or services and sub-categories of each. Use Google Keyword Tool to find popular searches for your topic. For further details, go to http://webdevils.biz/ff and view his PowerPoint presentation.
Lastly, Phillips suggests using WordPress as your content management system since it is user-friendly, quick to load and has several good plug-ins (several of which are included in his above-mentioned deck).
Plucker offered several suggestions such as creating a silo of key words as well as a list of websites to help with SEO development:
http://w3schools.com http://www.opensiteexplorer.org http://www.seomoz.org http://www.seobook.com http://www.seotoolbars.com
