Working Web 1 recap

Wil Reynolds from SEER Interactive came by the center yesterday to do the first session of our "Welcome to the Working Web" series on web stats & search engine optimization. (That link's for you, Wil.)

It was a whirlwind. Wil's a captivating presenter, and he moves fast, so you had to really hold on to your head to keep up with him.

Here are some of the bullets from his talk:

--Wil recommends Google Analytics as the best & cheapest way to track your webstats. It's free, but setting it up requires putting a little chunk of code into all of your website pages.

--if you're google-phobic or don't have the means to put that code into your pages, you should check out www.quantcast.com or www.compete.com to get a sense of how your web site is doing.

--Make sure you know *why* you're looking at your web data. Have specific, quantifiable goals that are consistent with your business plan. What exactly do you want people to do on your web site, and how does the data show they're doing it? have one or two numbers you watch, and ignore everything else. This is the cardinal rule.

--Make sure your site is designed to be Search friendly. Avoid flash intro pages!

--The big search engines ignore meta-tags. Don't even bother.

--The content of your home page is key, the title of your home page is even more important. Put your important keywords into the title of your home page, if possible.

--Be aware of the keywords you want linked to your site. Look into Google Grants as a tool for jump-starting your search-based advertising.

--No SEO firm can promise you a #1 search ranking for a given keyword. It's impossible to guarantee that-the search algorhythms change all the time, the environment changes all the time. This promise, according to Wil, is a sure sign of a bad SEO firm. Now a promise to get on the first *page* of a search... that's another thing.

--What you do *outside* your web site is at least as important as what you do *inside.* The more active your organization is on blogs, YouTube, twitter & other web outlets, the higher you will be ranked. Search engine rankings, especially Google's , are based largely on how people *outside* your web site are talking about it & linking to it. So cultivate your web-image outside, and share as much good "proprietary" stuff as you can.