Calling all Chicago SEOs…
I started the Chicago Search Engine Optimization Meetup specifically for you. Whether you work for an agency, are in-house, freelance, or just curious about search engine optimization and what it’s all about, this new meetup is for you.
Chicago SEO group meets the first Sunday of every month. Each Meetup will be centered around a discussion of some aspect of SEO, and will likely have to do with some recent innovation or breaking news.
. Using Google Trends as a measure of cultural interest, we can clearly see that not only are people significantly less interested in our search engine optimization heroes than VH1 Celebreality stars Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, but that even the popular misspelling of the latter’s name dwarfs Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan in search volume.
Mobile Search Optimization Development at SES
It’s very exciting to see that mobile search optimization is still top of mind with the SEO community, and I’m very grateful to my colleagues at SES and SMX for helping to keep it there. Cindy Krum (not Crum or Drum, fellas), Gregory Markel and Rachel Pasqua have done a fine job of stepping forward as evangelists of mobile search optimization, and I celebrate them as innovators for that. However, when I saw the coverage from SES San Jose, I was disappointed to see that the focus was still less on optimization than development, and that most of panelists were still not demonstrating expertise at mobile search optimization so much as telling the community that they need to start thinking about the impact of mobile users on SEO. That may be fine for the SES crowd, but as a marketer with Fortune 50 clients with the opportunity to connect them with millions of users they wouldn’t have otherwise, I’m already sold on the idea. I’ve already developed the sites. And now I’m looking for mobile search optimization experts to tell me how to do it well, and I get something else entirely. Finding this information can be a bit frustrating, to say the least. Apparently there aren’t that many of us who are optimizing at this level, but for those of us who are, where can we turn?
To help move things along, we at Resolution Media have developed a mobile search optimization white paper, which will be released in the next week or two at MobileSearchOptimization.com (and the mobile-friendly MobileSearchOptimization.mobi). If you’re interested in actually optimizing mobile web sites, optimizing your web site for mobile users, and distributing mobile and local content to users on the go, I would highly recommend keeping an eye out for it. There’s apparently nothing else like it for mobile SEO at the moment.
I wanted to address something that a few of us had been talking about in the Mobile SEO Google Group. Membership is currently by invitation only, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to show some of you what you’re missing. If you’re interested in an invitation, please introduce yourself, and we’ll see if you’re a good fit for the group.
Paul Bennet mentioned his astonishment at the recent Search Engine Watch article that summarized the mobile search optimization session at SES San Jose by saying that small businesses should not waste their time with mobile SEO. The idea is that small business owners have enough on their plate right now to optimize for the mobile web, and that they should compromise by optimizing local feeds, which appear in mobile search results. To quote the author’s summary on the benefits of optimizing local feeds:
Since SEO education is as much about knowing the basics of what it takes to index and rank a web site as it is staying abreast of the latest trends and algorithm changes, reading SEO blogs is an important part of any SEO training process. At Resolution Media we have a ranked blogroll that we use to help our employees navigate the blogosphere. Recently I’ve added quite a few blogs from the TopRank Big List, increasing the number of search blogs on our blogroll to 412, and have noticed that quite a few of these blogs have a rating of “1 – disposable”—even
many of those that are listed on the Big List. There are a number of reasons for a blog getting a low rating on our blogroll, including being less relevant to our client base, but many of them are simply there because of lazy marketing writers with little to say. If you’re an SEO Blogger, please help me in making the blogosphere a better place for all of us by eliminating these
8 worst practices from your blogging bag of tricks.
Since SEO education is as much about knowing the basics of what it takes to index and rank a web site as it is staying abreast of the latest trends and algorithm changes, reading SEO blogs is an important part…
This may be difficult for me to do, as I’m not as self-promoting as many of my fellow SEO experts, but I’ll give it a shot.
Since many wet-nosed newbies claim to be SEO experts these days, I’ll give some background. I’ve been making my living in search since 2003, but have been in online marketing since 2000 when I was lucky enough to be on the team who laid the foundations for Walgreens.com. In 2005 I accepted a position with Omnicom-owned search agency Resolution Media, where I am now the product manager for their SEO product, which we call Content Placement and Submission.
I read a lot of search blogs and often have an opinion on the content. Usually these opinions aren’t made public, but if I decide, at some point, to widen the scope, this is where they’ll go.
