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I’ve just been tapped to conduct a webinar for the fine folks at SEMpdx. It’s an hour long webinar focused on website architecture, titled Secrets to Creating a Search Engine Friendly Website.
I’ll be covering:
Domain & URL Structure
Page & Code Structure
Link Structure
The webinar will be held Thursday, May 22 from 10 AM PST. Click here to register and let me know that you’ll be attending via comments below.
When I first learned the title of the conference being developed by the crew over at Search Engine Guide I thought, “Awe, how cute. It fits the puppy theme.” Even as I was tapped to be a presenter I knew that Unleashed was going to be different. After all, I had an hour and 15 minute session all to myself. Apparently someone thought more highly of me than they ought! But I didn’t fully understand how different Unleashed would really be from the norm of search engine marketing conferences.
WOW. What a great day. The day gave us four sessions / two tracks of indepth introductions to all aspects of Search Marketing for small businesses. Each speaker had a full hour to go into more depth on their subject than any conference you’ve ever attended.
Rather than have a keynote speaker, Unleashed opened with a general overview of what Online Search Marketing is all about. Jennifer Laycock introduced three incredible presenters,
Matt McGee of Marchex and Small Business SEM (who happens to hate Twitter I do not like green eggs and ham, I do not like them Sam I am.), Wendy Piersall of sparkplugging.com and Matt Bailey of SiteLogic.com.
Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of sites where the designers were a bit lazy on the coding of the visual elements. Especially when it comes to creating new styles for the style sheet. In CSS, it’s pretty easy to develop a style that allows you to have certain portions of text display exactly how you want. But apparently, coming up with a unique style and name is just. too. difficult. So instead of naming a new style, the developers just style an Hx tag and then plaster it throughout the site.
One site that we’ve been working with has just come from a fresh re-design. Once we started digging into the code, we’ve found that the designers have taken some pretty extreme liberties with the Hx tags.
Like a sound site architecture and directory structure, product categorization can play a significant role in how both search engines and users are able to access your products. There are two important things to consider when determining how to categorize your products. 1) Is each product assigned to the most appropriate category or categories? and 2) is multiple categorization creating duplicate content? The first issue frustrates your users and the second the search engines.
Looking for examples of both of these I found exactly what I was looking for on The Home Depot website.
Ok, this one has come and gone but I wanted to provide a short debrief. I have to say that I had a fantastic time. Searchfest marked my one-year anniversary speaking at conferences. They opened the door for me at Searchfest 2007 and were kind enough to invite me back this year. Boy, am I glad they did.
I have to say that I was really surprised by the marketing power they were able secure for each session was amazing. I felt severely out gunned on both panels I was on. I was amazed at the quality of the information provided and the overall environment established by the SEMpdx team.
I always wait until the last minute for these posts. I get so busy preparing that they just sneak right up on me. I forget that people need time to make arrangements to go to these conferences. But better late then never, eh?
Date: Monday, March 10 2008
Time: 7:30 AM - 5:30 PM
Place: Oregon Zoo - Cascade Crest Banquet Center
This is a one-day event in Portland Oregon. We are past the early bird registration discount but buying a pass now is still cheaper than at the door. You can get an additional $40 off by using this discount code when registering: SEMBD. I’ll be speaking on Website Architecture this year.
Going to SearchFest ‘08 in Portland? I am. I’ll be speaking on website architecture. The SEMpdx blog has just posted a mini interview with Stoney deGeyter (that’s me, I just wanted to get my name in the link!). Check it out and let me know if I’ll be seeing you there!
Every day, we get businesses coming to us looking to improve their search engine rankings. They want to talk about an SEO campaign, but one quick look at their site and we see that SEO may not be the right approach for them. Usually in these cases, the site needs a complete usability makeover.
These businesses, however, don’t want to discuss website architecture, visitor usability, or even making their site search engine friendly. They want rankings and want them now.
Many SEOs obsess over search engine algorithmic details. They spend hours looking at the minutest of details hoping to achieve the perfectly “optimized” web page. In the process they often forget that the web page can’t just be optimized for search engines, but must also be optimized for human visitors.
Optimizing for spiders and visitors are both important for a web site’s overall success. But I don’t think they are necessarily equally important. In order for the search engines to be able to index and rank a site, a “search engine friendly” website architecture must be implemented. And while having a search engine friendly site is good, it must not be accomplished at the expense of the visitor. At best, it must complement the user friendliness of the website. At worst, it must be invisible.
Hire Stoney deGeyter or the rest of the Pole Position Marketing team for your in-house training, conference or other search marketing events. Contact us for more information.
I’ll be covering:
