SES Chicago 2008

HostingCON - Chicago 2008 More innovation in web hosting. New cloud hosting technologies are offering almost 100% uptime for websites. There was also a lot of dicsussion about how competitive it is now is to optimize web hosting sites. The toughest categories still remain the legal and real estate industries. It takes strong expertise to compete in these categories. One of my fellow SEO experts built their entire practice on SEO for law firms. They are complete experts and their clients usually see good results.

Google algorithm changes ?

Hmmm, seems like the latest changes to the algorithms have had some negative effects on a few websites. Some of the top ranking sites I usually follow have lost a bit of page ranking. Seems to be a devaluation for 'paid links' (which was always a bad idea). Apparently, sites with appropriate contextual inbound links were not affected. I'll keep following this and continue to fine tune our processes to maximize results.

How to improve you site visibility and rankings in 2007

The major search engines all agree on most of the 'best-practices' for search engine ranking optimization. Content is king! Authority sites rule! Links create authority! Don't keyword spam! Properly utilize attribute and title tags! Include proper sitemaps! Avoid link farms! Don't use any 'black hat' tricks! In other words, all those highly promoted 'get rankings quick' promotions are just the equivalent of web spam to a search engine.

What Google and Yahoo always say when they are asked publicly is 'Create a great, user friendly, website with relevant, useful content, and we will rank it for the appropriate keywords. We want to serve up quality, relevant URL's, not spam, when someone is doing a search.'

So the steps to a strong website marketing strategy start with good keyword research. The site needs to have proper attribute tags, relevant HTML title tags, and good contextual use of the highest searched keywords. Once all that's done it's time for a new xml-site map and a formal submission to the major engines. Then, it's time to start building those inbound links.

You can usually improve a site's ranking relative to it's competitors by studying what they are doing and improving upon their efforts. Once your rankings start to climb then you should do a monthly update to your site to keep it 'fresh' for the next crawl by the search engines.

We are experts in this area. Our main customers are webmasters who turn to us for technical assistance with their optimization projects. We can also work work directly on and improving your existing site. The secrets to good search engine optimization Here's some great free SEO advice:

These are the basics that all the professionals agree on:

Identify your target market through 'technical' keyword analysis

• Optimize all title tags and attributes with search engine friendly tactics
• Write good content that emphasizes your relevant keywords
• Design the site to be user friendly - test it with Google webmaster tools
• Create a solid site map with no broken links and submit it to the majors
• Start developing good 'contextual' inbound links to your site - no link farms
• Post in relevant forums, submit to relevant directories- become an 'authority' site
• Review your online competition and update your site content monthly
• Consider highly targeted paid ad campaigns
• Keep up to date on your competitors activities - they could be stealing your traffic
  
  
• Have the SEOwhiz put his experience to work on professionally optimizing your site.