SES - Pimp My Site
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Written By Reprise Media | March 6, 2006 | Share This
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We know SES is officially in the books, but I realized we didn’t cover my favorite session. Pimp My Site might have been among the SES conference’s most fun and exciting sessions, but it was nonetheless very insightful and informative in terms of SEO DOs and DON’Ts. It started out with a mini Mardi Gras Parade that had confetti flying over everyone’s head and music pumping so loud that everyone at SES could hear.
Once the celebration died down, panelists got down to the business of the session: reviewing the sites of three companies and optimizing them to improve search engine rankings. The first company whose site was picked apart and then put back together was flutterfetti.com, whose manager Ronee Holmes was also a panelist. Because Ronee’s manufacturing plant was destroyed during Hurricane Katrina, she had to rely entirely on her online sales, making her search presence even more critical. Dax Herrera (a search marketer from WebGuerrilla LLC) shared some tips on what could be done to make flutterfetti.com visible to the engines. Here are some tips that he shared with the audience:
- NEVER have a splash page because it will NOT be picked up by the engines.
- Use descriptive Alt tags on images in your navigation.
- If you have multiple domains, it is best to integrate them under a single URL; furthermore, keep the oldest domain name, since Google will trust it more due to its longevity.
- Mix up new (patented) terms with the traditional terms. For example, Ronee designed a new product called Flutter Fetti® and mentioned it all over the website, but engines were not picking it up; now Flutter Fetti® is alternated with the more familiar word “confetti,” which is much easier for the engines to recognize.
The second site discussed was lactivist.com, presented by Jennifer Laycock, editor-in-chief for Search Engine Guide. The site promotes the health benefits of breast feeding, gives some tips on how to breast feed, and much more. Here are some tips that Jennifer gave to the audience regarding lactivist.com:
- Always link your sites together.
- Blogging - maintaining a blog and making your site attractive to bloggers is of utmost importance, as they represent a big chunk of your primary audience on the Internet.
- Link bait creation (tagging) is becoming more and more important in SEO.
- Track changes - implement a third party tracking system to keep tabs on your ROI.
Jennifer also mentioned that PPC advertising didn’t really work for the site, and their first press release didn’t drive much traffic their way, either. Despite these setbacks, the SEO campaign as a whole was able to significantly increase traffic, inluding 1,200 incoming links that drove 75% of clicks.
The third and final site that the panel discussed was HellaGoodproducts.com, presented by Heather Lloyd-Martin, President and CEO of Success Works. According to Heather, Hella Good co-owners Mei-Lynn Destouche and Tara Lee share two passions: eating desserts and taking baths. That’s how they came up with the idea for their company, which produces and sells freshly made natural body scrubs in a variety of sweet flavors. Heather also shared some tips with the audience on how to scrub up Hella Good’s site:
- Hella Good made a mistake at the very beggining of the SEO process: they were using the keyword “creative bath products”; it gave them a very high search results ranking, but it was also being used by another company that was producing bath products. As a result they had to come up with another keyword unique to their site. Heather suggested double checking any keyword you plan to use in optimizing your site to make sure you don’t bump heads directly with your competitors on the results pages.
- The owners also had some blogging quandaries - while they did have a good blog, they were not consistently posting entries in it. Sometimes they wouldn’t post anything for a couple of days. Also, the link from the main site to the blog often didn’t work at all. Heather’s recommendations were to keep the blog up-to-date, even if it meant hiring someone to do it. Furthermore, once again we heard that all the sites should be interconnected.
Since this session was so down-to-earth and funny as well as useful, maybe next year the Pimp My Site panel will hold something similar for the other moderators - may I suggest “Pimp My Session?”
Topics: Conferences & Events |
Did you really mean “all the sites should be linked together?” or did you mean, all the pages should be linked together? If the former, what does that mean when you only have one site, as these people seem to? —-
BTW, I couldn’t come to NYC (will have to do Chicago) and appreciate both the blogging and the podcasts, which I am slowly working my way through. I know from doing this myself that it is hard to get everything down as quickly as they say it. —-
Robbin Steif –
LunaMetrics
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