Website Design, Search Engine Optimization

You have been reading all the live blogging and twitter feeds from #smx advanced, wishing you had attended, and possibly feeling sorry for yourself because you don’t have the necessary travel budget. Here are some tips on how you can plan for SMX Advanced 2011.

Let’s first look at the total package, you have the conference expense, which is always well over $1,000, then the airfare, hotel, transportation and eating out. We are talking about a $2,000 plus proposition, after taxes. Personally, if I am going to spend that amount of money, I would rather be with my family, at a resort or in an exotic city, not in a conference room with hundreds of search marketers. Since I do enjoy attending Search Conferences and always get great information I will share with you how I have managed to fit this expense into my tiny business travel budget and attend SEO / Search Marketing Conferences for the past 10 years. It saddens me that these educational conferences are not geared to support the small business owner and it is the corporate expense account that benefits. The example below is a sample of my itinerary for SMX Advanced 2010.

Five Cost Saving Tips For Attending Search Marketing Conferences:

1. Conference Pass: Always buy your conference pass with the early bird deals. Sometimes the amount saved at the early bird price can pay your airfare. Since you are booking so far in advance ask about the refund policy for the conference. I have found most conferences have a 30 day cancellation policy, this fee may be a few hundred dollars.Many conferences have a student price and you have to be able to prove that you are a student.
2. Travel or airfare: I always look for conferences that are close to where I live. This may not always be possible, I am in California near San Francisco and there are many great conferences to pick from every year. There are a few I like to attend, like SMX Advanced, that are further away and not so travel cost effective to get too. Therefore I may need to fly, airfare, most of you know how to find cheap deals with airfare, book well in advance or use your free miles. Kayak is a great website for finding good deals if you don’t have frequent flyer miles.
3. Transportation – Seattle Lite Link Rail from the airport into town, costs $2.50, vs. I think the Greyhound hotel bus may be over $20.00, or a cab will cost around $40.00. I am traveling lite, so I don’t have a lot of luggage to transport and I walked from the Lite Rail to my hotel.
4. Hotel – This can be a major expense especially in larger cities, no one wants to stay on the wrong side of town in a sleazy hotel. Most conferences have a sponsor hotel, or a hotel that is near the venue. I love staying at the hotel close to the venue, especially in Santa Clara at the Convention Center but sometimes due to expenses it is not possible. Many name brand hotels in most city’s have a frequent visitor program where you can acquire free nights.For SMX Advanced in Seattle, I am staying at a lower budget hotel that is 8 blocks away from the venue. It is a 20 minute walk to the conference center (downhill), granted it is not sexy, but I am saving over 50% or more on hotel fees. I am not on the water, but how many hours does one spend in your hotel room? Here are two hotels in Seattle to pick from: Best Western and La Quinta .  I frequently travel with my dog and the La Quinta hotels are pet friendly and they don’t have a surcharge. I am a part of their points program, which rewards with free nights after so many points.  They also provide free WiFi. It looks like the Best Western may be cheaper. They both have a AAA rate.
5. Food – since I am writing this while attending SMX Advanced in Seattle, and staying at the La Quinta, it is a block away from a fabulous Whole Foods Market. In fact I think it may be one of the nicest Whole Foods I have ever been in. After the cocktail parties, I grabbed a bite and a beverage went back to my room, with a frig.,  kicked off my shoes and ate dinner for under $20.00.
6. Bonus Yoga Tip: If you are into Yoga, there are a couple of yoga studios, one near Whole Foods in the Westlake Center and another next door to the La Quinta

Most that attend Search Marketing Conferences are much younger than I am so you might be thinking “whoa, this sounds old school and boring, I go to the conferences for the networking and the parties”. You don’t have to give that up, nice part is the beverages and food are usually included in your conference pass. Do your research, book in advance, pay over time and of course if you know someone in town, couch surfing can work too.

If you are a small business, budget minded how do you plan and afford your business trips?

Matt Cutt’s is one of the lead engineers and the go to guy at Google for information on SEO and how Google ranks pages for organic search. He won’t tell you what the algorithm is or the secret sauce for ranking websites but he will give you tips on how to make your site more search engine friendly.

This is the Site Review presentation from the Google IO conference a few weeks ago, Matt was also with two other people from his team at Google, Greg Grothaus, Tiffany Lane and Vannessa Fox, as she remarks is not on his team at Google. The video is an hour long and if you are interested in SEO I think worth your time. I went to Google IO, a developers conference, and debated if I wanted to sit in on this session. But Matt Cutt’s and gang kept me entertained and I learned some new things because search is always changing. If your website has any of these issues I can help you plus more.

Next week I will be in Seattle for SMX Advanced (that stands for Search Marketing Expo).

SMX West, the search marketing conference and expo was held in Santa Clara, California the beginning of March 2010. I usually attend this enlightening conference  but this year was an exception and  could not make it. Luckily today with live blogging and social media sites like twitter, it is easy to stay informed on issues that are important to an industry.  Twitter is one of my favorite platforms, I like it better than facebook, for many reasons. If you search a specific hashtag on twitter, you will see all the streams about a particular subject.  Hashtags on each twitter post creates groupings of twitters and the best hashtag for SMX west is #smx. I can also follow all the upcoming conferences. I use TweetDeck to receive my tweets and group the searches or hashtags, I am interested in following. For example another search that I follow relilgiously is #joomla, I learn about all the new and interesting developments that are going on with joomla, stay connected with developers and  I am  able to join in on the conversations.

Reading through all the #smx twitters, I found this valuable recap and special newsletter by Bruce Clay , one of the training guru’s for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and has time tested tools, if you have not heard about him check out his website. I thought his recap did a good job of summarizing the areas with the most valuable information.

Since I liked it so much I recapped his recap for you;  highlighting  some important points and sprinkled a few of my own comments throughout:

Tips to get better organic Sitelinks:

• create a site that is well-structured and easy for users to navigate;
• use meaningful page Titles (make sure your page titles are not duplicated throughout the site);
• pay attention to anchor text throughout your site;
• avoid boilerplate and repeated text;
• consider headers and other content on each page.The less links on a page means those links are more valuable.

The Need For Speed!
Google Says It Matters so pay attention to KPI’s (key performance indicators in your analytics) that shed light on page speed bottlenecks, such as visits, page views, bounce rate and time on site. Bounce rate and time on site are some of the big ones that I keep track of.

Three steps to a faster site:

• check site performance in Webmaster Tools;
• install the Firebug plugin Page Speed;
• explore tools like YSlow from Yahoo and WebPagetest.org , and hang out in the “Make the Web Faster”  forum.

Get to know and understand sites like Urbanspoon and http://www.urbanspoon.com/blog and Google Goggles, search by taking a picture. Visual Search technology. It’s visual, watch this:

Added thought, everthing is coming up mobile! Learn more about mobile search

When reviewing your analytics reports for organic search, worry about 3 things:

• opportunity;
• competition;
• attribution

Opportunity and competition are about improving rankings on terms you want.
Attribution shows evidence that what you’re doing works.

I think this next point is often overlooked today and misunderstood by many. It is a big issue and I cannot stress the importance of this enough:

Proactive reputation management is engaging with an audience in positive ways before a crisis so that the business will be in a secure position if and when a rep management situation arises.

I am planning to be at SMX Advanced in June, I will have more good stuff for you then.