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Attended a small Search Engine Optimization (SEO) training session hosted by Jill Whalen at High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Firm. We tried to attend a conference in Denver in 2007 but our flights were cancelled so Jill and her staff were kind enough to let us apply our tuition to her smaller training session.

I highly recommend this session to anyone who has an interest in learning how to gain rankings on competitive keywords. Jill is a goldmine of information and can tailor the learning to any level of knowledge.

The Plexus SEO staff have had great success with all of our SEO clients, but we wanted to validate some of our thinking and gather a few more helpful tidbits to give a little more boost to our clients.

We came away from the session with everything we hoped.

The main strategy of your web site if you are focused on optimizing it for certain keywords in search engines should be focused on content building and link building. In and of themselves both of those strategies are beneficial for your site and your customers, but they provide an added benefit of making your site more search friendly. I have identified several tips as Content Building or Link Building tips. I will add to this list as I find new opportunities for either.

• Content Building: Add a blog to your site. Blogger is a free tool for creating a blog and it has the capability to publish your blog to your web site with FTP. If you are a client of Plexus, you can also purchase pxBlogger and have a blog built into your site.
• Link Building: Get your blog added to Technorati
• Link Building: Buying words at The Big Word Project. $1 per letter. Make sure to buy words that you are trying to get ranked on. While this site is new and has no google Pagerank yet, it has promise considering the viral aspect of it, and that it is being linked to from many sites.
• Link Building: Check out Andy Hagans list of Social Media sites to consider when trying to build organic links.

Tagging is quick and easy way to annotate and categorize content. Tags are used in many different ways on many different web sites now. Examples include Flickr, Amazon.com, Blogger, etc.

Let me give you a good example of how powerful tags can be. Lets say you are trying to find photos of Athens, GA. Where do you even start? You could go to Google and type in "Photos of Athens Georgia" and you will get back 699,000 results. Each of those results may have a photo or two of Athens, Georgia but you would have to spend an enormous amount of time to find anything useful. Or you could go to Flickr.com - a photo sharing site - and use their search by tag feature. Thousands of Athenians and tourists have posted photos of Athens Georgia and each of those people took the time to tag their photos with "Athens Georgia". In one action, and on one web site you can see every photo that was "tagged" with Athens Georgia.

Because tags are so prevalent, and usually have very good relevance in relation to content, search engines see them very favorably. When applied to the concept of search engine optimization, tags become an invaluable tool.

Because of the way a tag works, when you create a tag, a new page is created. So each unique tag you make becomes a new page. If you made 1 blog post and tagged it with 10 individual unique keywords or keyword phrases you essentially created 1 page for the blog post itself, and 1 page for each of the unique keywords. In a very short amount of time you have amassed 11 pages for your site!

Because ONE of the factors in how well your site is ranked compared to other sites in relation to a particular keyword is the volume of content in your site, the faster you can create relevant content, the more competitive you can be.

If you have worked with us on building your site you have the capability to add any of our tools which have the tagging capability to your site. Here is a few of those tools.

• pxBlogger
• pxGallery
• pxNews
• pxFaq
• pxVideo

If you do not have a site built by us, and would like to talk to us about building your site please contact us at (706) 353-2048 or through our contact form

Not every company needs to hire a search engine optimization specialist. Chances are if you have a well seasoned and mature domain, a good number of other industry relevant and reputable sites linking to your site, frequently changing content, and competitive number of pages in your site, you are probably just a few tweaks away from being able to achieve some reasonable goals.

If you fall into this category, you probably just need to focus your efforts on optimizing the content on your homepage, your title tags, and your metatags.

Keyword research is your next step. There is a tool called Keyword Discovery that can help you focus your efforts on the most appropriate keywords. The key is to start broad. For example if you are a company that provides a service like career counseling, you should start your keyword research with a broad term like "Career". This broad search will show you every variation of keyword phrases using the word "Career". The reason for doing this is that while you might refer to your service as Career Counseling, you may find that Career Counseling actually gets less search traffic than Career Coaching. By researching broader terms you will stumble on other phrases that consumers use to find your service than you refer to it just as an industry professional.

Once you come up with 2-3 keyword phrases, make sure to place those keyword phrases in the first few positions in your title tag and provide links from your homepage to relevant content using those keyword phrases. Additionally if it is possible, request those companies that already link to you to change the words on their site that are actually linked to your site to a keyword phrase you are focusing on. For example instead of linking to you by just using your company name, have them link to you using for example, "Career Coaching with Company Name".

If you find you can't achieve your goals after addressing these key areas, you may need a professional firm to help you establish a link building or content building campaign.

I attended my first board retreat with the Jeanette Rankin foundation this past Saturday, 26th of January 2008. Surprisingly, having been on half a dozen boards this is actually my first board retreat. It was from 9:00a - 3:00p.

I am amazed to say the day actually flew by. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, the debate, the support, the energy and the excitement I experienced. This board is made up of an astounding amount of talent and commitment.

At the end of the day, as I am sure all boards that have retreats are faced with, we were left with some answers but more questions than we came with. One accomplishment we did make was to decide that the very next meeting of the board would be a working meeting where we would put in place atleast a number of the ideas and initiatives we hope to undertake in the next year. We will actually show up with laptops in hand, and spend our day writing, programming, calling, and mailing. It is exciting to think of spending a day with a group of talented individuals in more than just conversation and find out what kind of creation can come from actual work!