Today (Saturday, March 3, 2012) the Microsoft NERD is playing host to a big crowd of entrepreneurs taking advantage of an Internet Marketing Boot Camp. The event, organized by our friends at Boston SEO Experts, is a free event and offers presentations on Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing and Public Relations, and then a series of workshops.
Even though I had doubts about entrepreneurs getting up early on a Saturday morning, we have a full house.
The first presentation, from Tim Orazen of Boston SEO Experts, offered great specific information, starting with a simple three-step process including research on keywords, optimizing your website for the best keywords and building links and content.
According to Orazen, more than half of all clicks are from natural search. The first link usually garners around 18% of the clicks, the second slot gets 10%, the third gets 7% and the fourth gets 5%. In other words, go for one of those slots on your key words and reap the benefits!
Orazen offered a view of a “perfectly optimized” page for chocolate donuts, including the SEF URL, the page title, the meta description, the image tags and the text but there are other things that impact your SEO success – the amount of time it takes for your pages to load, the amount of traffic, and, of course, the inbound links.
Check out the Boston SEO Experts for more information on SEO best practices you can use.
More later!
It’s later. A day later — OK, so I got busy — trust me that it was all good stuff. I do want to share a couple of comments about yesterday’s event. A few observations:
- Seeing such a huge crowd on a Saturday morning was a feel good moment for the speakers but it also speaks to the value people saw in the event. At one point during the morning I took a picture of two rows of the audience, all listening intently, with notepads in their laps, taking notes. (Note note: they were — mostly — writing on pieces of paper, not intent on laptops and doing email. They were taking notes.)
- Deep useful content is, well, useful. The next time you are asked to speak somewhere, ask yourself, “What will the people in the audience take away from my talk? What can they go home and change or implement?”
- With a big, non-differentiated audience, take it down a notch. Too often I see speakers giving a presentation that only a few people in the audience can truly understand. If you give a great 101 level presentation, everyone wins. Even the so-called experts in the audience will learn something. Trust me on this one. None of know everything there is to know on a subject.