(or…5 Things I Learned About SEO & Stuff)
I already miss Seattle.
I was fortunate enough to arrive in the Emerald City 2 days prior to the SEOMoz PRO Training Seminar and was able to hike around and experience some of the awesomeness that Seattle has to offer. Between the beautiful downtown area and the amazing talks given by the presenters the last weekend I took away several concepts that will come in very handy in the future.
1. Grown Men Turn Into Little Boys Around Rand Fishkin. (a quote from my wife) – It’s true. Myself included. Much like a bunch of pre-teens trying to get close to their favorite rockstar, SEOs couldn’t wait to get a word – and a picture – with the founder of SEOMoz.
2. Ben Hendrickson is an Absolute Genius – Would you call a person that reverse-engineered part of Google’s algorithm anything else. The reverse-engineering we’re talking about is the part that deals with content relevancy and Ben’s LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) Tool allows you to see how relevant your content is to a search query based on the context – not just the keyword density. The LDA Tool can fairly accurately predict a site’s ranking based on the content alone. Seriously.
3. There is another Genius Out There. His name is Will Reynolds. – I could go on for an entire blog about the enthusiasm and great ideas this man offers (and I just may), but I will stick with the one that hit me the hardest. Want to find links for your site? Utilize Open Site Explorer to find out where your competitors have failed and take advantage. Simply run OSE on a competitors website and take advantage of 404 errors by contacting the linking site’s owner and letting them know that they have a broken link…and you have a link that would work just fine. Simple. Easy. Genius.
4. My Baby is Ugly. – And it makes me sad now. Tim Ash gave a presentation on the 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Optimization. Covering simple things you can do to improve the user experience, including offering too many choices, having unclear calls to action and asking for too much information (yes, you can and probably do do this), Tim really got me looking at the sites I optimize and reevaluating how I am offering my products and services to my visitors.
5. Seattle is a Very Safe & Clean City – While I would like to say that everything I learned revolved around SEO one of the biggest things I learned is that Baton Rouge makes me sad. I was absolutely stunned at how clean Seattle was and that it is possible to walk down the street (regardless of the time of day or night) and not have to worry about personal safety. In fact, the 3 biggest crimes in Seattle (in order) are bike theft (and I mean bicycle), theft from the trunks of cars (Rand said it is because Seattleites are too nice to actually break a window) and jaywalking.
Anyway, while the PRO training offered a whole lot more than I have said here (obviously) this is all I have time for tonight as I am packing to leave for Iowa tomorrow and need to get some sleep. If you didn’t have the opportunity to attend the seminars do a search on Twitter for #mozinar and dig around for a while. There were plenty of great people posting their thoughts throughout the training.
