Blizzard Slams Colorado

Blizzard slams Colorado! For the past several days local TV stations have been warning a sizable snow would be possible today, but I wasn’t expecting anything like this. At 7:30am accumulation was around 2-3″, by 11am there was over a foot of snow and winds were breaking 40mph.

above: view of blizzard from Chad King’s balcony.

A bit of irony: Local Colorado University students are on spring break baking in the sun while 40″+ of fresh powder has fallen in the mountains, a few have been spotted racing home. In preparation for my previous visit to BlitzLocal’s Boulder Colorado office in February I packed gloves, hats, coats, insulated socks, etc. The average temperature in Colorado during my trip was around 65 during the day and 45 at night. For this March trip I just packed a few windbreakers and some light shirts… go figure.

Today’s SEO seminar has been pushed back until tomorrow. Hopefully the roads will be reopened tonight. Please stay tuned to our email announcements for further updates.

BlitzLocal Internet Marketing Seminars

We’re holding 9 training sessions this week in our Westminster Colorado BlitzLocal office.  These sessions will be presented by SEO, PPC, and internet marketing guru, Dennis Yu.

Here is the current schedule of events.

Monday (analytics)

12pm-1:30pm:metrics->analysis->action->our optimization framework

2:00pm-3:00pm: eCPM is king:a breakdown of ad network mechanics

Tuesday (ppc)

10:00 am- 11:00 am: Google AdWords Editor: how to optimize PPC campaigns swiftly
11:30 am- 1:00 pm: Building New PPC campaigns: multiple research
tools to copy competitors

Wednesday (seo and social)

10:00 am- 11:30 am: Site analysis: SEO and traffic estimations
12:00 pm- 1:00 pm: Social media measurement: influence and viral metrics

Thursday (blitzlocal: multi-channel marketing)

10:00 am- 11:00 am: lead gen: multiple channels in theconversion funnel with analytics
12:00 pm- 1:00 pm: getting things done: how to prioritize work
3:00 pm- 4:00 pm: peopleware: how to hire good people, networkmarketing mechanics

If anyone wants to learn more about SEO, PPC, and other topics from an industry expert please give me a call at 812.480.8889 and I will provide additional information and arrange a seat for you.

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of researching and molding a website’s content and content tags to reach the desired audience that is searching for specific products, topics, or services using Internet search engines. Sites often look pleasing to the human eye but are unreadable to search engine spiders. I think of a search spider as if they were a 1st grader wondering through my site. Different pages of the site have to be clearly marked with descriptive texts so that the spider knows what it is looking at. No links can be completely buried or they will never be found. A simplified sitemap with links to all the important areas of your site is a must. Link to the sitemap from every page of your site so the spider never gets completely lost.

Using Common Sense SEO Practices
A common sense approach to site building is often the best SEO tactic. When you are linking to internal pages or article on your own site think twice about the words that you use for the link titles. The relevancy of any page in Google is heavily weighted to the keywords used in the link titles on external sites and pages that link to it. If you are linking to certain pages/areas of your site on all your pages, make sure that you use descriptive link titles. For example, many people link to “Contact” on each page of their site. Who searches for just the word “contact”? Using the title “Contact Jim Brown” for the link will boost the page and overall site relevance for “Jim Brown”. I see problems like this all the time on E-commerce sites where the designers have a link to “Products” instead of “Laptop Products” or “Cell Phone Products”. Do they think people just go to Google and type in “products” and hit enter?

A Flexible CMS (Content Management System)
Using a CMS (Content Management System) is necessary unless you want to constantly edit 100s of pages each time you discover something that has a positive effect on your ranking. Nearly all open source CMS systems have plugins available that will improve many important aspects of your site’s readability to search spiders. One of the main reasons I like CMS systems are because they allow you to create the URL for the article on the fly, totally based on what title you type in. Google and other search engines give relevancy points if they keyword is also contained in the url.

Experience Counts
To better understand how to get your web site ranking higher in search results, it’s necessary to understand which terms you should focus on ranking for, and the logic used by different search engines to serve their results. There is not substitute for experience and continuous education when trying to decipher Google’s logic for how they determine the order of their search results. You need to locate some trustworthy forums, twitter users, and SEO experts on various social networking sites where you can dig into the latest SEO topics and tactics. No time for SEO? Hire an agency.