November Boston SEO Meetup Event Recap
November 16, 2011 by Nick Stamoulis
On Monday, November 14th, the Boston SEO Meetup event was held at the Arlington Library. Due to a last minute cancellation by the evening’s scheduled speaker, the event switched into SEO roundtable mode, with SEO veterans answering the questions of several new attendees, swapping SEO success stories and discussing the state of SEO in general.
Before the roundtable discussions began, Boston SEO Meetup founder Dave Matson took a few minutes to share with the group some of the interesting things he learned at PubCon Las Vegas. A few of the key findings he shared were:
- In an effort to provide better search results for users, the search engines are now looking at sites as a whole, not just at the individual pages. Site owners should take a serious look at their site, as a few bad or spammy pages can drag the rest of your site down with them.
- Social sharing signals are massively important. Site owners should strive to create content that is shareable and encourage social connections on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ to share/post content.
Dave talked about his own attempts to make content more shareable, by capitalizing on a hot topic that could be tied back to his brand. Dave operates the site getlawyerleads.com, which focuses on generating leads for criminal defense attorneys nationwide. He freely admitted that he doesn’t work in the most “shareable” industry, but that doesn’t mean he can’t produce creative content that people will be interested in. He wrote a post about what Occupy Wall Street protestors should do if they were arrested and the post eventually found its way onto several Occupy Facebook pages and earned over 1,000 Likes in the process! As Dave said, “it’s basic information that is repackaged in the right way for the right audience. Whether you’re onboard [with the movement] or not, these people are passionate.”
The roundtable section of the evening focused on a few main topics including: geolocation, mobile SEO, QR codes and link building. Some of the main points to come out of those discussions included:
- Drill the mobile user experience down to two buttons, click-to-call or fill out a lead form. The less work a mobile user has to do to connect with your site and your brand the better.
- QR codes aren’t being as quickly adopted by US consumers as they are overseas, but there are very unique branding opportunities available for larger brands willing to pay.
- You don’t have to focus your link building on just companies within your niche. It’s worth taking one step out of the box and building a network of related links. For instance, one attendee (bostonlimos.com) got advice to build relationships with complimentary services such as hotels, salons, restaurants and so forth to expand their link building capabilities.
- It’s hard to trip the search engine “filter” when you are being legitimate with your SEO. One or two mistakes shouldn’t negatively impact your site. Just don’t make it a habit!
It was announced that there will be no Boston SEO event for December 2011.
Brick Marketing was the event’s food sponsor.
