Bruce Clay had two minutes to talk. His view on organic is straightforward, the role of SEO is to reengineer the Web site to do well in search engines. Technical components, Copywriting, Expertness (linking).
Todd Friese, oilman, he said sometimes they don't reengineer the site but make the site work right away (i.e. cloaking). If they can, they like to rebuild the site from scratch. He said again, you do not want to stand out with your SEO tactics.
Mike Grehan said there is a fine balance between a site that is doing well with technical problems, and a site that has tons of links anyway. He said there is a balance, and it depends on your competitive environment.
Q: They are new to the SEO game but have been doing a lot of PPC campaigns. He asked if the panel can help define an allocation of resources towards the SEO campaign. A: Todd said its very difficult to give a number, it can vary greatly depending on the industry. He said, you probably have a number in your head, probably double it. Mike added, take a look at how you figured out the PPC and apply that logic to the SEO side. Take some out of PPC and move it to SEO. Todd then added that there are many SEO companies that do a revenue share plan. Todd says he does it a lot and he loves it. Bruce added that you will probably get different prices from all the different exhibitors. It is virtually impossible to have a one size fits all. Bruce said mostly on new sites, they pay him to just tell them what is wrong. And if they want to move on, they can. Mike added he wrote an article last week, he said it is strange that people who come from the technical side, they can spend hours, days, weeks, months fixing things. But if you look at everything in your competitive environment, it might just be that you need more linkage.
Q: I came to this conference last year, and I am on the first page for most my keywords. I want to be on the top of the results, move me up higher. I have sites on the same IP address, what is the threshold of the number of links pointing to a site from the same IP address? A: Bruce is not a fan of having tons of links from the same IP address, it will make you stand out more. It must look natural. Mike added if it looks unnatural in a link connectivity map, those links will jump out at you.
Q: Can outbound links hurt or help you? A: Bruce said there is a bow tie affect where quality sites link to quality sites. Bruce says he finds it important to link outbound resources. Detlev Johnson said everything else being equal, if you link to quality sites it will help a little. Mike said you need to think philosophically, you are in control who you link to, not who links to you. He explains the linkage within the community are very important. Todd said in his jibrish pages, they always linked to the Yahoo Directory and top sites in those cloaked pages. He said do away with reciprocal linking as best as you can.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about the Google Sandbox? A: Mike said from a purely scientific approach, new sites have very little links. Todd said a friend and him do a radio show and he spent a whole hour ago. He said he feels a lot of this goes with temporal link analysis. One way around it is a by doing a 301 from an established domain name. He said he puts out links a bit slower. He said he was talking about it with Mike, and one example of a new book that is released, if its not read that often then it wont be on the new release shelf anymore. So a new theory is, try doing a site: match and then click on it a few times. Mike then added, he knows search engines to click tracking.
Todd said what he is doing is putting the content on a subdomain of an existing site. He then throws links to the subdomain. After that gets rankings, a few weeks later, he will 301 that subdomain to the new domain name.
Q: How do you deal with directory listings such as DMOZ? A: Todd doesn't submit there anymore. Bruce said he is really fed up with them. Mike said it is taking so much energy to submit to this one place, just go somewhere else with your time. Detlev said an ODP link does benefit your site, but it is not as important as it once was before. Bruce added that they had success submitting to local city.
Q: Whats the best url structure? A: Mike said hyphen is a separator and underscore is not. Mike said he here no more then three. Todd adds that this is true. He tries to keep any hyphen out of the domain name, the page name he puts hyphens in those.
Q: Someone asked, besides for linking, what else would you recommend? A: Todd and Mike said, nothing comes to mind. :) Detlev said there are things on the page that do have an affect. He said the title of the document. Mike added the meta tag is back for yahoo, not sure how much it helps, then add that. Bruce said do everything you do the best you can do it, so do on all the page stuff (meta, title, h1, etc.). Todd said sometimes you scroll for days in the source code, clean up the code, use style sheets externally, use javascript externally, etc.
Q: Some attendee has a problem with a CMS program. A: Go to CMSMartix.com for information on that.
Q: I have a site with multiple tld's for country specific sites. The technical components are all in english, will that cause a duplicate content issue? A: Yes.
Q: My PageRank dropped to 0 yesterday. A: Todd and Mike said, drop the toolbar today. The toolbar information is not "precise". So stop looking at it.
Q: Plurals vs. Singular. A: Todd said he just targets plural and doesn't worry about the singular. Mike explains that plural is great because it takes the engine to the Nth degree. Bruce said he uses both on the page, what ever is naturally used, he uses it in the content.
