Getting Google to Love Your Website Webcast

I joined last week a webcast by Stephan Spencer titled “Getting Google to Love Your Website” organized by O’Reilly. Spencer is the author of the only SEO book I ever read on SEO: “The Art of SEO“, published by, surprise, O’Reilly. The webinar promised to teach “both SEO fundamentals as well as advanced tricks and tactics that only the elite SEO experts know.” Unfortunately the first 45 minutes was spent on the basics, on topics I already knew. Then the last bit, where I would have preferred to spend the majority of the time, was either rushed through or mentioned only in passing, saying that there is no time for it or it will be the subject of a future webcast.
Now, that I got that out of the system I can tell you that it was an excellent presentation. I appreciated that the slides were offered for download for participants. I sent an email requesting them from Mr. Spencer’s assistant and got it the same day. I was asked not to circulate it, so I won’t share it here. In the same email I also received a link to a word file full of SEO best practices. The doc not only included 14 best practices, but also 29 worst practices and detailed explanation for all. I am happy to report that I was already doing most things right.
We were encouraged to tweet through the session from within the interface (that automatically added the #GoogleSEO hashtag), but that didn’t work with Chrome on Mac. So I did it on my own Twitter account instead. To provide a summary of the event I collected here all the tweets I sent out during the presentation, and I boldfaced the ones that either contained new information for me or want to revisit later. (They are in reverse orde, first post being the last.)

• Worst practices include: using competitor names in meta tags, spamglish, splogging, cloaking, scraping, pagejacking… #GoogleSEO
• SEO: Metrics That Matter j.mp/sMgnY6 #GoogleSEO
• Right metrics include: # of fresh pages, % of site indexed, page yield. Use authoritylab.com #GoogleSEO
• Anatomy Of A Google Snippet j.mp/b6mshN #GoogleSEO
• Logarithmic nature of PageRank: the higher you get the harder it is to get higher. #GoogleSEO
• Build quality links, not just quantity. Use j.mp/k87HR for PageRank data. #GoogleSEO
• Get your pages visible: every page has a song (keyword theme). #GoogleSEO
• Google index challenges: complex URLs, content duplication, cannibalization, non-canonicalization (www. or not). #GoogleSEO
• Better pagerank -> the deeper your site will be crawled and more frequently. #GoogleSEO
• 7 steps: get indexed, make pages visible, build links, leverage pagerank, encourage ctr, track right metrics, best practices. #GoogleSEO
• Google Insight for Search: with maps, countries and categories. #GoogleSEO
• Google Trends is simplistic, provides graphical relative search volume comparison. #GoogleSEO
• Google Adwords: turn off broad matching; turn on exact match (unlike the default). #GoogleSEO
• Keyword Discovery is at (surprise) j.mp/4zaQGA #GoogleSEO
• Keyword research tools: Keyword Discovery (with historical data) #GoogleSEO
• Keyword research tools: wordtracker.com (free and paid version) #GoogleSEO
• Soovle.com is Stephan Spencer’s (author of “Art of SEO”) favorite keyword brainstorming tool. #GoogleSEO
• Soovle.com aggregates keyword suggestion from Google, Yahoo Bing, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon, Answers.com. #GoogleSEO
• Google Suggest (autocomplete): search volume inferred based on order, but no quantifiable value. #GoogleSEO
• Keyword brainstorming tool: Quintura, Google Suggest, Yahoo Search Assist, Soovle #googleseo
• Right keyword: relevant to your business + popular with searchers #GoogleSEO
• wetting appetite: “calculating missed income opportunities” with formula #GoogleSEO
• attending Getting Google to Love Your Website webcast #GoogleSEO j.mp/tJcJ1W

The event was captured and anybody can re-watch it till next March.
Looking forward to the next presentation I signed up at O’Reilly on HTML5.