KWLUG Meeting: Monday, 11 August 2008

Boy, is it hot in here or is it just the eight core server?

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A slide show and talk about white hat Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing - how to bring more traffic to your site via online marketing through the search engines.

This will be a relatively non-technical presentation demonstrating techniques that will get you higher rankings and bring in more traffic. Suitable for technical folks, as well as site owners with less technical knowledge looking to bring in more traffic to their site.

Presenting on two areas:
1) Search Engine Marketing. Specifically how to run a successful Pay Per Click (PPC) Google adwords campaign. Adwords are the Sponsored Links shown in Google searches. I'll show you how to set up and manage a campaign, how technical people can write better ads than any advertising specialist and how to compete in competitive areas.

2) Search Engine Optimization. This section will discuss white hat ways to promote your site in the search engines. Specific techniques will be discussed. I'll break this presentation out into the following general areas:
- history of the search engine rankings. What used to work, still works, and what doesn't work anymore. This will provide the foundation of how to determine what search engines want and will provide some direction on the differences between white hat and black hat (where black hat means 'outside the search engine guidelines', not illegal or cracker techniques which is how black hat is used outside the search engine community). Also some background on pagerank and trustrank.
- how people search. This will show us how to target search terms and allow us to discover untapped, uncompetitive sources of converting traffic.
- On page optimization. This will be a brief discussion on specific things to change on your site that help your rankings. Technical level will be a rough understanding of HTML.
- off page optimization. Factors that affect your rankings that aren't actually on your website.
- step by step guidelines on how to make your website an authority. The premise is not to figure out Google's algorithm. Instead I'll outline how to create an authority site that the smart folks at Google will want to rank because it makes their search engine results better for the end user.

I optimized my first site about 5 year s ago. 5 years later, without any further work, the site is still ranking well. It's lasted through many algo changes intended to get spammy sites out of the search engine rankings. Using the right approach and by giving the search engines what they want you can build sustainable traffic through top rankings - on a website the search engines *want* to rank. And you can do it without resorting to technical loopholes or spammy techniques.