Today I am in sunny San Diego for the Online Marketing Summit. It’s a 4-day event with a ton of speakers and sessions. My day one course was awesome. It was an 8-1pm session with Ray “Catfish” Comstock the Director of SEO for BusinessOnLine.

My Biggest Take Aways From Ray “Catfish” Comstock

Search phrases can be out of sequence. The search engines will combine the keywords even if they are not in order.

Your logo on the top left of your site is a key tool to increase your page rank by applying the proper alt tags. It will be the first thing that the search engines read as an internal link back to your homepage. This will apply for every page on your site.

Only the first link (of 2 linking sites) is counted for SEO purposes.

A 301 redirect will still track the incoming links for that page, and redirect them to the new site it is pointed at.

Don’t waste time with link to me and I’ll link to you campaigns. You need relevant quality incoming links as your goal.

Have a footer link that says “Link to us” and have all the info such as meta tagged pictures and links ready to copy and paste.

Use REL=canonical on every page. This tells the search engines what the href is for this page and avoids accidentally creating duplicate ages due to capitalization or something along those lines.

Your home page should have <meta name=”robots” content=” NOODP,NOYDIR” />

Monitor your search traffic that does not include your brand name to get a realistic view of your keyword search success.

Use Google Web Master Tools!!!

Ray was a great speaker and of course had hours a valuable content. But the above is what I found most interesting.

From the notepad of:

Shaun Frankson
VP of Business Development

Nero Global Tracking
http://neroglobal.com
http://shaunfrankson.com