Best SEO tips straight from the SEO Pro’s.

I asked this on HARO: HelpAReportor.com & got back 5 guest SEO speaker leads today to plan for our possible Oct 4rth & Nov 1st meet ups with these SEO tips:

Name: Brian Hawkins (BostonSEO.org Boston SEO Meetup)
Category: High Tech

Media Outlet: BostonSEO.org Boston SEO Meetup

Deadline: 07:00 PM EST – 15 July
Query:

We are looking for speakers & advice from accomplished online
publishers, affiliate marketers and SEO professionals. We have
over 850 members with 75 internet marketers that attend our
monthly Boston event to share SEO knowledge, network and
learn monetization options. We are interested to hear about
your tools and SEO techniques that you use, and anything you
would like to share with the group members as a Fall speaker or
email us your best original SEO tip for a round up guest post on
BostonSEO.org thanks www.Twitter.com/BrianHawkins

1. Google Places

My tip would be to not forget about optimizing for Google Places. These are the business listings that come up next to the map when one searches on things such as [boston lobster restaurant]. These listings require a local address, so they are not as overrun by lead aggregators as the traditional listings are. They also generally come up above the traditional listings, so they really draw the eye.

A couple of years ago, I had a client in the travel industry that saw a 20% drop in traffic Google, and a nearly 25% drop in sales from Google. Meanwhile, all their ranking tools were saying everything was fine. What we determined is that for most of their keywords, Google was now returning the map, and a third place listing was actually below the fold.

This was causing a significant drop in traffic. More worrisome was that it was causing an even greater drop in sales, so it was the best traffic that was going away.

There are similarities between optimizing for traditional SEO and for local SEO. With both, you are attempting to improve the prominence for certain keywords, but with local SEO, you are also working to increase the prominence of the listing’s location.

The potential traffic increase is large already, and Google’s continued focus on local suggests it will only grow. Any company that needs to bring in website traffic, phone calls, or physical visits from people in a particular location should certainly be considering local SEO.

Brian
–
Brian Combs, Founder and CEO
ionadas local LLC
Twitter: @BrianPCombs

2. Link Exchanges Still Provide Value

* A negative connotation exists around link exchanges since it was the first way to really abuse Google’s link based algorithm.
* There are misconceptions about link exchanges including that link exchanges provide little or no value due to Google deprecating the value of the links.
* Link exchanges are natural. If a site has no reciprocal links it actually appears to be _unnatural. _
* The relevancy of the link location is just as important, if not more important, than metrics usually associated with link strength such as page rank, the number of links on the page, etc
* Link exchanges with relevant link partners are a great way to drive traffic to a site because users are already searching for a particular category of products or related products.
* Link exchanges are a valid source of traffic and back links but must be used as _an element_ of an SEO strategy. People who make the mistake of only engaging in link exchanges are those who help fuel existing misconceptions.

Ryan Woolley, who is the vice president, group director of client services at the digital agency Response Mine Interactive

3. Benefits

Make sure to think about benefits first, features second.  Benefits answer the visitors top question, “Whats in it for me?”  Benefits convince the visitor he really needs this product or service in general.  Features answer the visitors question, “Why should I buy this from you?”  If the visitor isnt sold on the benefits, the features are largely irrelevant.
Practice recognizing the difference by listening to radio ads while driving and calling out loud what each sentence represents: benefit, feature, call to action.  My clients struggle with this element of great content more than any other, but the conversion rate impact when implemented is enormous.

Aaron Overton of Heatherstone.

4.  Client Testimonials
Client testimonials are always a great way to validate the declarations of excellence you reverberate throughout every communication channel you use. Although they can seem a little partial, testimonials can have influence over people on the fence about your product or service.
Testimonials can also provide potential customers and clients with more insight into your work and how you do it. If gathered correctly, your testimonials should be relevant, believable, trust-generating, and support your success statements. They should also push a few more hesitant searchers over to your side of the fence. Are your testimonials helping you convert more? Do you know how to get great client testimonials from your raving fans?
Every business with a website has a client that is a raving fan. Someone who reads every one of your blog posts, is always early for your meetings, and is genuinely excited about your business relationship.  A testimonial of glowing words is always nice, but quantitative results are more convincing. Use questions designed to get quantitative answers, but just a starting point. If an effective question comes to mind during the conversation, dont hesitate to ask. Here are two examples, one with and one without quantitative results:

Example #1 – Without Quantitative Results

Working with the Austin Law Cowboys has been really superb! They helped me get the money from my car wreck that I deserved. Now I dont have to worry about paying the bills and arguing with my wife.
Example #2: With Quantitative Results

Working with the Austin Law Cowboys has been really superb! They helped me get $45,000 from my car wreck and another $50,000 for medical bills two months before I was even out of the hospital! Now my wife and I are enjoying a much less stressful time during my recovery

Since most people dont typically use numbers when giving a testimonial it is important that you ask the right questions in order to get the quantifiable figures you are looking for. One way to do this is to get your clients to elaborate on the benefits they received that addressed their pains.
If you want to see which testimonials are working and which are not, run an A/B test for two landing pages. Set up one landing page with a testimonial and one without. Research shows that the testimonial will beat the competition by 158 percent. But don’t take my word for it, try an A/B test yourself.
SEO testimonials are valuable content and cause increased frequency of content creation and more traffic to your site. They will help convince some of your potential customers to try out your product and service, and back up all your claims of excellence that you reverberate throughout the Internet. If you are using gathering great testimonials, they should be doing work for you.

Ben Finklea is CEO of Volacci, a search-engine marketing firm, and an SEO expert.
Seasoned craftsmen worth a darn have a workshop of tools that help them excel at what they do best. Painters have brushes, carpenters have hammers, and mimes have invisible boxes. SEO practitioners are no difference.

5.  Cross Linking

One very easy way to perform SEO is by including keyword text links in your blog that points to your main website or a specific page of your main website. I have a blog with about 170 postings and within the signature line of each of my postings I include a text link with my main keyword phrase linking to my website home page. This has helped me get and retain top rankings on Google for my #1 search term for over 4 years.

Peter Geisheker, CEO

The Geisheker Group Marketing Firm

Twiiter: http://twitter.com/geisheker

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/geisheker

6. Program Your Title Tags

If you have basic SEO knowledge, chances are you know the importance of optimizing the title tags of your sites pages. However, if your website features its own database-driven search engine (e.g. for products you offer), you may not be optimizing the individual search result pages produced by the engine. Doing so is an opportunity to add potentially hundreds or thousands of pages and relevant keywords for search engines to index.

Come up with a formula for the title tag that pulls keywords from your database and that enables each search result page to have a unique title (e.g. Product Name | Company Name | Product ID #); doing so will help ensure that each page gets indexed. This should be an easy task for your web developer; a little PHP (or similar language) inserted in a single title will result in unique, keyword-rich title tags across your search pages.

Anna Pavlichenko

A internet marketing specialist at Marketade, a boutique Internet marketing and web design company that works with small businesses, mostly in the DC area.

Please comment below to share your best original SEO tip?