Last Wednesday, AgencyND hosted a Campus Communicators seminar featuring DDM, a marketing communications agency from Grand Rapids, MI. They spoke about search engine optimization, or SEO. Here are my brief notes from their talk.

• Google Instant Search is a game changer – searching for “God” returns “Go Daddy”
• When Google changes one little thing, a lot of things change in a big way
• But the core SEO basics still stand
• “Caffeine” was released in May – things get indexed faster
• Continue optimizing because things keep changing and competition is getting fiercer
• If Videos, News, Blogs, etc. are all being presented in addition to web pages, which one is the #1 spot?
• Once you get to page one, own it – have videos, news articles, etc.
• Yahoo! is outsourcing to Bing – soon down to 2 engines and their differences
• How will you optimize for Bing?
• Bing is a “better” algorithm, but is providing poorer results – for now, at least
• As Bing is used, it will learn and get better
• People are spending more time on Facebook than all of Google’s properties
• YouTube is the second largest search engine – only behind Google
• How Twitter search operates is different – it’s not about results, it’s about consuming content
• Twitter search is limited to a recent date range, not all results
• Don’t optimize for Facebook results – optimize Facebook for Google results
• Keyword tool helps you find what users are searching for, rather than what you think they’re searching for
• Build incoming links – where they matter (important sites, not just anywhere)

3 Key Takeaways

• Select the right keywords – use research, not a hunch
• Optimize content – write content toward the keywords
• Get links from appropriate pages using appropriate keywords

Resources

Rank Tracker (monitor keywords and placements)
http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/

Google Keyword Tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Recommended Book: Web Analytics – An Hour a Day
http://www.webanalyticshour.com/

Occam’s Razor – Analytics Blog
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/