The Fall 2010 date for my class at Portland Community College will be Saturday, November 20th, and Saturday December 4th, with no class on Sat the 27th due to Thanksgiving weekend.

This class is *not* an advanced search marketing class, and in fact, if you are already working in the field of search engine optimization I can say that you would completely be wasting your time.

On the other hand, if you are a small business owner, a web developer, or anyone else with a burning desire to learn all the necessary ins and outs of search engine optimization and Google, then I promise it could be the best eight hours you’ve ever spent for your future.

When: Saturdays, November 20th and December 4th, 2010.
Where: Mt Tabor Hall – PCC East
Who: Small business owners, website designers, developers, or anyone without a good grasp on internet marketing.
How: Sign up directly at the Portland Community College site
What: Here is exactly what will be covered:

Course Description
Business owners may not need all of the technical knowledge of a web developer, but they should be familiar with various aspects of internet marketing.

This course will prepare small business owners and web developers with all of the major aspects of search engine optimization and internet visibility.

Class Meetings
Two four hour sessions on subsequent Saturday mornings.

Ground Rules
NDQ!   There are No Dumb Questions in our classroom. All questions are welcome. Interruptions are welcome, in fact!

Students are encouraged to ask questions at any time.  That doesn’t mean it will always be answered on the spot, but it will be addressed.

Course Objectives
By the end of this course you will have your own Google account, and will be able to:

• Identify different areas of a search engine results page at Google
• Identify Paid Placements & Ads.
• Identify  local listings
• Identify organic listings
• Be familiar with how each area gets populated with data by Google
• Understand “organic” SEO fundamentals
• Review any webpage for SEO basics
• Perform basic keyword research
• Know how to get listed in the Google “local”, or “Google Maps” results
• Set up your own Google account
• Use Google Analytics
• Use Google AdWords
• Use the Google Local Business Center
• Use Google Webmaster Tools
• Identify your visitors behavior
• Do much, much more!

All of the class materials, all of the handouts etc. come straight from the search engines, mainly Google, so there can be no doubt about their accuracy.

I’ve had free reign to structure everything about the class exactly the way I wish, and I can guarantee that there will be “no student left behind”.

Come join us and register now, for class number CEU935A SEO & Marketing Your Website – or send a link to this post to someone you know who really needs it!

Educate Your SEO Clients

If you’re local, share this post with anyone you think ought to go, even some of those, um… certain clients? You know, the ones that insist on ranking for ego phrases? Or the ones that refuse to let you or your people add any content, and let their site stagnate?

Maybe you could send the ones that seem to be intentionally avoiding contact yet still expect you to make them money as their “SEO”?  Sending them to this class will make your job easier…

As I promised this morning, I have uploaded my East Portland Chamber of Commerce presentation here, including all of the links that I spoke about.

You may open it directly from this link, or just right click here and choose “save as” to get it onto your own computer.

For those that weren’t in attendance, it’s a basic presentation with a few site-usability tips, and links to what I believe are the best 12 places for listing your website for free in local directories.

This video covers titles, descriptions, keywords, header tags, backlink profile and more for My Elite Contacts, a website for a CRM system. The site is less than a month old, and already well indexed.

Next week is an SEM Hotseat event geared towards beginners. Have you come to search marketing events before and been overwhelmed?  Do you have some SEO questions that you think are too basic?  This is your chance to get that added level of detail and attention you may have been craving at other events.

Since the beginning of SEMpdx, several of us on the board have been operating under the assumption that people are no longer as interested in the basic fundamentals of search as they used to be, when we design our monthly programs.

Over recent events however, we’ve received feedback that there are a surprisingly large number of people that still don’t “get it” and would really like to have more basic information about the fundamentals of search engine optimization, and search engine marketing.

Next week’s event does exactly that, going “back to basics”, and there are still several spots left for attendance, and even a spot for a site review, I believe.

You can read more about the event and sign up directly here.

You may have a degree in English, but writing for the Web is a little bit different than writing for other forms of media.

In the back of your mind you have to be a little bit more conscious about your audience is, and you have to grab their attention, as well as that of the search engines.

The following list is designed to help you see the big picture when writing or editing content for a webpage.

I believe they are the 10 most important things to remember, but would love to see input from anyone else in the comment section below.

1. Write For Readers, and Not for Search Engines
People today have a shorter attention span than our parents, and they’re getting even shorter. We decide in a split second whether we’re going to stay or leave a web page, and if we can’t easily scan it then we just ignore it, and hit the back button.

You have to make the page easy for the reader to grasp in the blink of an eye, letting them know exactly what’s in it for them to stick around.

In doing so, you’re also making it easier for the search engines to determine the subject and context of your pages as well. I firmly believe that easy reading clean pages also make for easy spidering.

2. Make Content Easy to Digest
Break up your paragraphs into short visually pleasing chunks, and use the enter key manually to make this happen. Even though it may not be 100% grammatically correct, and your English teacher would cringe, force yourself to hit that key and create new paragraphs.

A general rule of thumb I use is to never have more than 5 lines shoved together, and the only reason for going all the way up to 5 lines is because 2 paragraphs won’t effectively stand on their own with the allotted page width.

3. Use Meaningful Headlines
Besides making the headline for your article try to use additional headlines or bolded headlines wherever they are appropriate, based on your pages content.

Don’t get hung up on the word “keyword”, but obviously, you should use subject relevant words, phrases and synonyms for these headlines, which will both draw the eye, and convey relevance to the search engines.

Never stuff stupid sounding phrases into your text, just to pump up the likelihood of ranking higher, because the search engines aren’t that stupid (anymore).

Instead, throw your preconceived notions about “keyword density” out the window, and just write relevant content, using decent grammar, that will inform your readers..

Since people scan what they read, their eyes are going to stop on the headlines, and these bolded phrases also tell the search engines what the page is about too.

The technical answer to whether <H> tags or bold is actually “better”, only matters to the true search geek. The mere fact that you are using the headlines to attract the eye on the page is enough, and for ranking, in the end, it’s probably going to come down to inbound links link anyway, so just use bold. There’s a button for the B and it’s faster, so you’re more likely to use it!

4. Make Lists
People like lists for a variety of reasons, and it’s fairly easy to work them into a document as a way of proving a point. Eye tracking studies show that people’s eyes stop on lists as well.

If you’re even moderately clever you can even squeeze small lists into long documents to break up the monotony of having hundreds or even thousands of words on a page. Lists can make the page look more digestible.

5. Use Bullet Points
When you’re writing a long piece of content you can really hammer home a point by using bullets within your text. Also, just like people, the search engines eat these up and place more relevance on sections of text that include bullet points.

If you can have those bullet points be links to other relevant areas of your site, that are not on your main navigation, you’re going to add more authority to that page, and to the pages you link to.

• Bullet points are easy to add
• Bullets points are easy to read
• Bullets points are easy to understand

6. Get to the point
I’m sure I’m frequently guilty of using flowery prose, and of course we’re all going to stretch the content once in a while and try to get a couple more instances of our chosen keywords into the article, but don’t overdo it.

Besides, if you’ve got enough information to fill a 2000+ word piece of content, then you can write three or four smaller ones, or break it up into smaller sections and subsections that include lots of headlines. Otherwise people will just not take the time to read it all, or even scan it fully, while they are scrolling past it.

7. Use Images
The extra time it takes you to break up text with images is easy to justify if you’re trying to attract thousands of people to stay on your page, and for the small writer or website owner, I think it’s even more important. (Admit it… wouldn’t this page look better with images?)

Images not only help break up the monotony of long text, and make the page look more readable, but they can also be used to illustrate a point being made, in the case of a diagram.

If you do go to the trouble of adding images to individual pages, then you’ll definitely want to take the additional time to optimize that image with a keyword relevant ALT tag, to help disabled readers.

Oh what a coincidence… using images might also help your article show up through Google’s Universal search too… How convenient!

8. Use Numerals Rather Than Spelling Out Numbers
This is true for numbers up to a certain length, but as Jakob Nielsen’s eye tracking study showed, people can’t quickly comprehend numbers with too many zeros.

Using numerals generally catches the eye and has a more immediate impact, allowing the scanner to absorb the fact more quickly than spelling out the number.

9. Use Links in Your Copy
if you have an established or larger website, don’t overlook opportunities to give yourself some deep links with good anchor text.

Not only does it provide a valuable resource for your reader, it demonstrates for the search engines too, that there is more in-depth information elsewhere on your websitesite. Internal linking on your site is one of the best ways to increase your visibility, and can even bring up old forgotten pages back into the search engines active index.

Unless you already ARE the world’s foremost authority on a subject, I think it’s also important to link to other sources as well. This allows interested readers to find out more about a given subject, and furthers the reputation of your own page as an authority, or central hub of information.

10. Write For Readers and Not for Search Engines
There’s a reason this tip is here twice, and that’s because it should always be in the front of your mind. Is there really a purpose to what you’re writing? Are you actually providing good and relevant information about your subject, your product, your niche or your service?

Does a little bit of passion actually come through in what you write? If not, then it’s not worth the effort, and you should find someone else to do your writing.

If you’re doing something “just” for the search engines, then you’re either going to fail or you’re going to get bored, and bored writers write boring content.

Remember, the ultimate goal for the search engines is to simply give users what they are searching for. When you’re thinking about a page as being “optimized” for a phrase, ask yourself if you would be happy if you landed on it after searching for that particular phrase. If not, then make it so.

This website is for a nutritional supplement designed to help people with anxiety and stress relief products. This video is under five minutes and points out some fundamental problems, summarized here…

The reality is that with only a 13 page website, and only 6 of them showing up much in Google at all, it’s going to be difficult to be considered an authority in your field. Here is the summary of what I point out in the video…

1. Basic SEO fundamentals need to be followed -

Currently the site has duplicate title tags, duplicate description tags, incorrectly formatted meta keyword tags (use of the | character like the title), no H1 or H2 tags, and undefined “alt” tags.

2. I also see no static sitemap, and your robots.txt file is incorrect – it should say this – Sitemap: http://www.sociatropin.com/sitemap.xml instead of pointing back to itself.

However, the actual sitemap .xml file is incorrect as well, lacking any particular URLs, and pointing back into your own local computer documents and settings file.

3. They also seem to be lacking the volume of content required for decent visibility comparative to the competition

4. (Not in the video) the site renders both with and without the www. presenting canonical problems

This is a regional remodeling and construction firm located in Vancouver Washington. I covered most of the basics from my SEO101 area, and pointed out an error in the robots.txt file. I hope you find this helpful, and if you have any questions at all please be sure to leave them here, so that everyone may benefit.

This is a website for authors, copywriters and editing help, that is missing a couple of the key fundamentals that I outline in my SEO101 section. The review is just 12 minutes long, but provides important information to the site owner.

Pay per click campaigns can be somewhat tedious to set up, primarily because all the data that you get from the keyword research tools need to be reworked into a more useful list. My new keyword multiplier tool should make it a lot easier!

By that, I mean you need to consider every variation that might be possible, whether that be by city name or even a synonym for a certain service or occupation, and it always seems that many get overlooked.

For example, let’s say you ‘re doing a PPC campaign for plumber in the San Fernando valley, down in Southern California.

You’ve used all your different keyword research tools, and now you have dozens or even hundreds of primary key phrases, like Plumbing, Plumber, clogged drain, sink repair, unplug my toilet in, etc.

You know that there are an almost endless number of cities and towns that people are searching besides Los Angeles, like Woodland Hills, Tarzana, Encino, Calabasas, etc.

Manually putting that list together was a pain in the neck, and a couple of years ago while performing this tedious task, it crossed my mind that this job could likely be accomplished in an Excel spreadsheet.

Now I know nothing about writing macros, so the first person that crossed my mind, was Karen Westermann, the Excel Queen, and in a few short days, I had my tool. (Thanks, Karen!)

Fast forward to 2008, in a recent discussion with my best programmer about various projects, I asked her if she could turn the spreadsheet into a web application that would run inside a WordPress page.

Much to my delight, she said “sure, in a snap” so the keyword multiplier tool was born. I suppose it’s a little bit like keyword tumbler, but I think it’s far less complicated.

All you have to do is take one group, and put them on the left side, and another group on the right side, and press the button to combine your list. That’s it.

You can also use the tool more than once, which is something you might do for an attorney with more than one type of practice, or a contractor, with many different specialties and departments..

For example, on the left side you might phrases like pizza, chicken and tacos. In the second column, use delivery, restaurants, and reviews.
in column three, put cities, and you can even put in a fourth column, of state spellings, for example.

Here’s a quick 90 second video -

Try my keyword multiplier for yourself, and please tell me what you think!

This is an overview of a rural Oregon realtor website, but needs many, if not all, of the basic fundamentals of SEO101. When you’re trying to build links for a real estate site you have to give people a reason to link to you, by providing valuable information that their own visitors will appreciate.