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PodCamp Follow-up: What more advanced SEM tactics would people like to see?

As a follow up to the entry level SEM tactics; what 200 or 300 level subjects would people like to see?

I would love to hold a free workshop on advanced SEM strategies and analytic analysis. I am in the top 10 for "Search Engine Marketing Expert" in Google (out of over 45,000,000 results - http://www.google.com/search?q=Search+Engine+Marketing+Expert) and
would be glad to share my knowledge.

Is there an interest for this?

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Permalink Reply by John on October 31, 2008 at 3:23pm
I'd be interested.

A couple of important questions for me are:

1. How important is keyword targeting? A lot of SEO experts seem to indicate the importance of high quality content. However, I do see more advanced SEOs focusing pages based on keywords found from an analysis on the google keyword tool. I have published high quality, original content that generates significantly less search traffic than another page with less 'quality' content but focused for a term that users search. How do you balance this? Should I focus on targeting more keywords, etc?

2. How important are backlinks? Entry level SEO tends to focus on on-page optimization (title, url, meta tags, headers, etc.). However, it seems that more advanced users focus on backlinks. For instance, I noticed bertholf.com has 389 backlinks and empoweredinternet.com have 3,442 links (according to seomoz's linkscape). How much additional search traffic does strong backlinks provide?

3. How do you estimate the potential increase in traffic of SEM strategies? It's impossible to perfectly project anything but with SEM, it seems like projecting results is an enigma (at least what I have read). As such, it's hard to determine the value of investing in SEM, which reduces the motivation to focus on SEM. Are there techniques to estimate how much more traffic one would see based on different tactics?

As part of that, I'd really like to quantitative results based on campaigns that people ran, what they did, how long it took, etc. I have not seen much but it's likely an issue of not looking in the right place.

4. What are the right advanced tools to use? For instance, is it worth paying $79.95 per month for SEOmoz, etc?

In any event, I'd be interested and those are some of the topics that are on my mind. Thanks.
Permalink Reply by Rob Bertholf on November 2, 2008 at 8:36pm
Permalink Reply by Rob Bertholf on November 3, 2008 at 9:03am
Awesome! I have been meaning to contact you, I would be excited to team up on this! I have been speaking with Daniel and would love to make it a TechHui event first quarter next year. Alternately I am game for creating a seminar series which could begin much sooner. Wide open to everyones ideas, I just want to assist in any way I can to increase the awareness and knowledge level of the Hawaii Tech community.

Like many, I break search engine marketing down into various subsets (See my Search Engine Marketing overview). And divide Search Engine Optimization tactics into Search Optimization and Search Manipulation. There is alot of positive things people can learn to optimize their site, in my most recent post on the importance of backlinks I warn that the search engines will only get smarter and that techniques used today will do more harm than good in the future.



Roxanne Darling said:
Count me in! Though I will say up front I am a big fan of organic SEO and not too fond of what I perceive as artificially constructed SEM tactics. There is a big gaping hole in the middle of those where people do not understand the importance of structure and how ignorance can be causing problems..
Permalink Reply by Sid on November 3, 2008 at 3:07pm
Rob, I would absolutely attend. I don't have any suggestions for specific subjects
Permalink Reply by Mika Leuck on November 3, 2008 at 5:55pm
We will definitely send a person and help promote it on TechHui. I'm sure many local companies will be interested.
Permalink Reply by Jared I. Kuroiwa on November 11, 2008 at 2:40pm
I'm interested...
Permalink Reply by John on January 2, 2009 at 3:58pm
Btw, I found this free software that does backlink analysis on any website. I am sure this stuff is trivial and well known to SEOs but to me it's very interesting.

It essentially gets a list of 1000 sites that link to a given site and then analyzes the strength of each of those sites.

I have been trying to figure out why certain sites who have poor content are somehow ranked very high in Google. Each time, I see this phenomenon, I run this link tool and I find that the site has a few powerful sites that are linking to it. Often, these sites are buying site-wide links (usually undisclosed) and using this to increase their rankings.

It's been an eye opener to me.

I am looking forward to a future meetup to discuss such topics.

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