Headstand Media

Last night Headstand Media hosted our Nightstand 3 event. Thanks to all of you came out and participated despite the snowy weather. We had a great time of networking, discussion and learning.

Kyle Williams, SEO Specialist at Headstand Media, was the guest presenter for Nightstand 3. Kyle’s presentation was entitled: SEO Marketing Basics. View the summary of his presentation below, as well as both a PDF and PPT version of the presentation ready for download.

Search engine marketing has changed from being an optional traffic source, to a requirement all website owners must include in their overall business strategy. Applying proper search engine optimization practices to an un-optimized website will often increase traffic base many times over. Having the right fundamentals in place can create a snowball effect, where visitors not only find your site from search engines, but continue coming back.

Fundamental SEO Concepts

• Use keyword analysis tools such as WordTracker or Google AdWords to find out what terms ‘real people’ search on related to your business. When choosing keywords to target, try and pick phrases that are as specific as possible. These are generally less competitive and will yield a more targeted visitor.
• Have your website created with as much text as possible, while not sacrificing design aspects. Search engines cannot read the text used in your images.
• Take advantage of the benefits in using CSS (cascading style sheets) vs. traditional table-based layouts. CSS provides a good foundation for proper SEO techniques.
• Search engine optimization is a natural process. Think about whether the SEO strategy benefits your users. If the given technique is being done only to improve your search engine rankings, it may be a bad idea.

SEO Marketing Basics (PDF 850 KB)
SEO Marketing Basics (PPT 150 KB)

Check out the photos we posted on flickr. Feel free to comment and tag these photos as you see fit!

Thanks again to all who attended. Please leave comments, questions and suggestions off of this post. Feel free to pass our blog and Nightstand information to anyone else in your network who you feel would enjoy and profit from coming to a future Nightstand event.

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