SEO/SEM Talk with Alex Brabant Through QuickLearn

Tessa:I recently had the opportunity to go to a great talk put on by Monique Trottier of Work Industries (now Boxcar Marketing) and Alex Brabant of eMarketing 101. They have started a great series of workshops called QuickLearn Training Series that are designed to bring you up to speed on a variety of web related topics all designed to make your web site a great and productive investment for your services or products.

I don’t know alot about Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Marketing so I thought it would be a great way to get a high level working knowledge of how to get your web site to rank high in web searches.
I was about ready to write some notes for myself but decided I would share these with others as I thought it was a valuable talk.

One thing that I definitely came away from this talk with was that web design and a great looking web site are only a small part of the what you need to do to give your site visibility and ranking in searches.

To have your site be something other than a brochure sitting on the internet you have to budget not only for design but also for building traffic. Most web designers aren’t SEO or SEM specialists.

Alex likened not building a ‘traffic’ plan for your web site akin to producing a magazine and never taking it out of a box. A web site, he said, needs distribution and traffic.

These are some of the points he made:

How can you ever know what the upper limit of traffic to your site can be?
Google has 85% of the market share in Canada making it harder than ever for web sites to show up at the top of search.
94% of web sites are losing money because they don’t show up in search.
97% don’t market their web sites.

So. How do you make your web site rank high in search?
This is what he had to say:

1. Your domain name is very important. The name Amrak for example, isn’t descriptive at all of what this company does which is install water filtration systems. Make your domain name descriptive of what your product or service is.
2. Multiply your web site’s entry points - blogs, facebook interface (have to check on that one actually.
3.The most important thing you can do to drive traffic is to have descriptive page titles for each page on your site. Repeat your strongest key words twice but not consecutively. The name of the company is not as relevant as the descriptors of the content on each page.
4. Each page should be optimized differently.
5. Make sure you have keywords in your domain name as well as in anchor text. (look at this link to see what I mean…www.emarketing101.net
6. Ensure you have more incoming links that outgoing links. If you give someone a link make sure you have key words in the anchor text and make sure you tell them where you would like them to put it.
7. Don’t confuse this with the blogging world where linking out is more important than linking in.
8. SEM - Google Adwords (we started to run out of time here but if you go to Google Ad Words there is a tool there that will tell you what words are the most competitive.
9. There is a tool called Compete.com that shows you how your site ranks against others
Alex finished the talk by emphasizing the following points:
Search is all about:
1. Relevant domain name, link tags, anchor tags, title tags and relevant content.

Unfortunately we ran out of time so we weren’t able to practice some of the things Alex and Monique talked about. Still I came away from the workshop armed with enough information to know that there was a whole other side to web search/marketing that I knew very little about but was fundamental to the success of any web site.

I wouldn’t think twice about taking a course with these guys again. Alex is a fountain of knowledge on this topic.

*wordpress dashboard has changed completely and I seem to have lost my editing tools - sorry for the lack of linkage!