Tonight SLC|SEM in Salt Lake City, Utah held an SEO meetup event with Rand Fishkin from SEOMOZ as the speaker.

If any of you are SEO’s and familiar with SEOMOZ you can count on the key takeaway being BUILD YOUR BRAND! According to Rand Fishkin, and I’m paraphrasing, “linkbuilding” turns him off. It also turns of Google, and your rankings off if your not careful!

Takeaways:

The first position in Google doesn’t always get the most clicks!

SEO’s and internet marketers need to realize that positions in search engines mean crap if your brand is crap. If your competitor has a better written title, they are going to get the click. If your competitor has an image associated with

their search result, they are going to get the click again! Even if you rank #! in your search terms you better be aware of how the user reacts to your SERP. Here are some things to make your search result better than your competitors.

1. Google Authorship
2. Video rich snippets
3. Star ratings
4. etc

Do some research on these and other rich snippets because they have been known to increase your click-through rate over 30%!

Google is taking the first position and keeping it for themselves

As Google starts to stuff their own self server ads into search results we are seeing natural listing get pushed down. Sometimes the first position shows up on the bottom of the first page of search results! Solution? Go after the long-tail keywords instead. They convert at a higher rate anyway.

Follow what people are doing on social

Chances are people on social will be talking about a timely issue before Google ever shows data that its a popular topic. Use this nifty little tool to find out what people are talking about http://search.popurls.com/

Don’t share and forget!

Plan out your social sharing strategy, make sure you have links in your tweets and you are sharing at the right time. Study out where the links work in a tweet. If your on Twitter Use @mentions and #tags to get in front of people and to get peoples attention during specific events for your industry. If Justin Bieber is is having a concert you can guarantee 20 bazillion ravenous teenage girls are going to be on Twitter, and a lot of them have daddy’s credit card:)

Site Speed Matters

A study mentioned in Rands presentation showed that a 1.5 second increase in website load speed increased conversion 25%. Nuff said.

Google Plus share bar is the old submit URL Button

If you remember using the submit url tool on Google, they have basically revived that in Google Plus. So put your content on G+ and it will get indexed at light speed!

Special Note: Seconds after posting this very article I posted it on Google Plus as well. It was indexed SO fast that it says I posted 5 hours prior to ever writing the article! That’s fast!

CRO does nothing with crap content

No matter how much you test if a red button gets more clicks than a green button, or one call to action works better than another. They won’t do much for you if the content on your website sucks! People actually read what you have to say so don’t get chincy on your articles.

A perfectly optimized website doesn’t do what it did pre 2009

 

You used to be able to buy some links, stuff some keywords on a page and viola! Your site ranks number 1! Post 2009 Google has ravaged those type of sites with very aggressive algorithm changes (Panda and Penguin updates).

Long story short, build your brand for your users and you will get the link/traffic/sales that you need.

View the presentation deck on Slideshare:

 

Free information deserves a share!