South Florida SEO Panel Discussion
Last night, for those who don’t know, was the Pro100 – South Florida web professionals SEO Discussion panel. I was invited to be one of the speakers on the panel. I really enjoyed it last night and thought there were lots of great questions coming from the crowd. The event started up at 7pm and went on until about 11pm. It was a great time and i encourage those of you who are in the South Florida area to sign up for the Pro100 Meetup. The panel consisted of four SEO’s from South Florida. I was invited to speak as well as John Carcutt from Applied SEO, Mark Clayman from alistseo, This lovely lady named Carol, which is more on the designer side with SEO knowledge.
It was a real great turnout, head over to my flickr page to see al of the photos from the event, I am just going to put up a couple here on the site. The professionals in the crowd did a great job in asking some really good questions that I thought I would touch on a couple of them in this blog post. So without further a due here are some of the topics discussed last night.
Do I need a Google Sitemap to rank well? – Answer is No
This was a great question as many people are unaware that you don’t have to have a Google sitemap to rank well. As a matter of fact the Google sitemap doesn’t affect your rankings is anyway. All it does is allow Google to find and index your pages quicker than having to go out and manually find the pages.
If you want more information about how to use sitemaps you can visit sitemaps.org. That should help you get started.
Being #1 in Google is the end all be all – Answer is No
Being number one in Google is still the main focus of many business owners. The feeling is if they are not number one, well then the campaign wasn’t a success. This is a mentality that everyone needs to move away from. Especially as Google has rolled out with personalized search, which basically will showcase different results to each user based on their past browser history. Head over to Bruce Clay’s blog and read more and the Personal Search Revolution, if you want to learn more about how it affects you.
Real things that your clients should be focused on, would be:
How much traffic am I getting each month?
Is this traffic high quality traffic or low quality?
How well is my site converting?
Is the traffic I am acquiring converting?
- If not why?
These are the issues that should be important to the success of an online marketing campaign. You can use you r analytics to find out all this information. If you are in need of more information about analytics and what it can do for you, Rand over at SEOMOZ did a post about Tracking data essential to search marketing campaigns.
Can my web designer / web master do SEO Cheaper? – Answer is No
Many companies feel that their web designer / webmaster should have all the answers and be able to effectively optimize / market their website. This of course is not true, the analogy I like to give is this:
“If I need to have surgery to repair a tendon in my knee, I am going to go to knee specialist. I wouldn’t go to a brain surgeon.”
The same holds true on the web. Building an effective web property is a team sport. One person can’t be a master at everything. So, to answer the question, I feel that a web designer can’t do SEO cheaper because of the fact that they wouldn’t be as effective as someone who Optimizes / Markets web properties for a living. In the end you end up stretching the web designer too thin and their less effective at their own job.
These were just a couple of the questions that were asked last night. If anyone has other questions or even comments about these three please feel free to let me know.
