Cshel Chicago SEO, PR and Web Development

SEO 101 Call-In Show Tonight

Posted on 01. Jun, 2009 by Carolyn Shelby.

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On the Monday, June 1st live broadcast of SEO 101, we will have four tickets to give away for the Market Saint Louis “Look At Me” seminar in St. Louis, MO on Thursday, June 11. The tickets are normally $249, but we’ll be giving them away to the four callers who give us the best reasons why their business needs this seminar.

Think of this as sort of like those essay contests the English teachers used to make everyone participate in, but the differences are 1) we won’t take off points for poor grammar or spelling (because this is all about style and ability to persuade!) and 2) the prize is way cooler than some lame $50 savings bond that you can’t do anything with for 20 years.

BEHOLD, the Details

1. Listen to SEO 101 tonight at 9p Central
2. Call (646) 716-6190
3. When you’re on… give us your most compelling reasons why YOUR business needs and can use the information and tools you’ll learn at the seminar.

Just remember, the seminar is near St. Louis, Missouri. You have to be able to get yourself there and home again because we’re only supplying admission to the event ;)

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SEO 101: Mike Moran discusses Search Engine Marketing, Inc

Posted on 25. Nov, 2008 by Carolyn Shelby.

Mike Moran, author of Do It Wrong Quickly and whom we have had the pleasure of interviewing previously, talks with Brian Mark, David Brown and moi about his book Search Engine Marketing, Inc.

In addition to the obligatory, heymybookisgreatsogobuyit stuff, Mike talks with us about developing and implementing a search marketing program in your business, the ins and outs of exploring new media and social media (again, in the context of “how will this benefit my business”), and then finally, the absolute importance of optimizing your internal Web site search.

P.S. If you’re looking for something to keep you from dying of boredom at the relative-who-has-no-wifi’s house over the holidays… grab a copy… good readin’

Popularity: 50% [?]

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SEO 101: Common Newbie Mistakes

Posted on 08. Dec, 2007 by Carolyn Shelby.

I forget where Neo (David Brown) was for this episode, I think he was still stuck helping his friend get a boat into drydock. This episode is just Brian Mark and I discussing the common mistakes made by those new to search engine optimization.

In a nutshell, these are the topics we cover in this episode:

• Don’t quit while you’re ahead (or think you’re ahead) because even if you ARE ahead… it’ll last about 5 minutes. Things change all the time and if you don’t stay up on the latest trends and shifts in the industry, you’ll fall behind.
• Don’t rely on arbitrarily selected keyword phrases for your traffic. (Analyze your logs) If you read your logs, you’ll find lots of phrases that you’re naturally ranking for. It’s easier to improve your position for something that you are already ranking for than it is to rank for something you’ve never ranked for at all before.
• Don’t rely on pure traffic numbers to gauge how well you’re doing. (Analyze your logs)
• Don’t misread your logs. (Analyze your logs right) Make sure you’re filtering out robot/crawler traffic before you start analyzing trends. You need to know the bots are visiting, but as far as understanding user behavior goes, the bots skew the results. Just remove them from the equation.
• Don’t waste too much time on your meta tags. Don’t overlook them either, just don’t obsess or put too much weight on their value.
• Link building is important, but it’s not the end all, be all. Don’t think you can ignore your on page optimization and just build links. Think holistically.
• Be smart about the anchor text you use for your internal links. (Be a little more creative than linking to the homepage as “home”, you know?)
• Make sure your SEO tactics are current. Hidden text is SO last century.
• Don’t screw up your robots.txt file. A blank robots.txt is better than having a bad or broken one.
• Don’t keyword stuff your content. If you can’t or don’t like to write in a grammatically correct manner (and that’s okay… some people find it sound too formal and rigid) just remember to try to write like people actually speak. Just remember, no one speaks in keyword dense sentences.
• Don’t focus all of your effort solely on your homepage.
• Don’t make doorway pages. Doorway == Bad. Landing Page == Good.
• Don’t put your company name at the front of your title tags.

There, I think that is pretty much everything we touched on in this episode. If you can think of anything else that new SEOers should be aware of, please feel free to comment! :)

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