Jessie Stricchiola is not feeling well, she was recently sick, so I hope she gets better soon. She was suppose to be on the panel and is a great speaker.
Adam Jewell from Net Plus Marketing was first up. He started off with explaining that since it is your business, you are most experienced in your industry and you know your product best, you know your seasonalities, why people buy your products and the keywords your customers use to find you. If you can provide your expertise on your site, then it will help people link to you and buy from you. SEO is one of the most overlooked marketing areas for most companies. When using AdWords, opt-out of content syndication initially, include a call to action and your keyword in the title, match keywords & copy to landing page, buy exact, phrase and broad match initially, and track everything. He then shows examples of some basic how tos with AdWords, and landing pages.
Anne Kennedy from Beyond Ink was next up. She will start off with real case studies. She recommends bartering for expertise you do not have, she swapped ad space for keyword research with the chamber of commerce. Optimize for niche markets, Lobster company gains sales from only organic results. Launch with good links, regional hotel site launched with links from the chamber of commerce and convention which helped rocket them up within days in the SERPs. She then listed some resources including; SEO Book, Digital Point's Tools, she recommends web trends, click tracks and conversion ruler for tracking purposes, she then goes through some directories like dmoz and yahoo and she provides an other list (these are posted at the forums and in this blog somewhere anyway). She then discusses Search News sites such as Yahoo! News and Google News, these sites are huge.
Next up was Brett Tabke to talk about Traffic Beyond the Search Engines. Direct Navigation accounts for more traffic on average beyond the search engines. He estimates that 60 - 80% of site traffic comes from "traditional means". 20 - 40% come from search results, both paid and free results. Traffic can come from reciprocal link exchanges, strategic alliances, topic directories, contests, guest books, commenting at blogs, affiliate programs, do a story on a site and they will link back, email newsletters, mailing lists, email a friend. He then showed the hamsters site (if you do not know what I mean, ask me). Usenet and forums are good. Coupons work, go to conferences and trade shows. Start a weblog, classified ads, trade mags, etc.
