SEO seminar with Rand Fishkin – I work as a web developer. its a great job, and its great fun (especially since I’m a geek). One of the companies we do a lot of work with have a lot of good contacts. one of them is @randfish – founder of seomoz.org.

We spend a lot of time making sure that the platform we have written performs as well as it can with the search engines. making SEO easy is a big part of the way we develop. but it still comes down to the way that the client writes their content in the end.

SEO seminar with Rand Fishkin

On Friday I was invited to an SEO seminar with Rand Fishkin. Rand fishkin was doing the talking. I learned a few tips and I also learned that our platform is doing everything right. sure there are two or three areas we can improve, but its nothing major.

the most important thing I learned is that a notepad and a pen is a fantastic thing. if you have your own site:

• write down what you want the site to be.
• dont stray from that line you wrote above
• work hard at it. it might take a while, but the rewards will come if you work at it

One of the things I realised is that you cant get enough stats. google analytics is pretty good, but for a blog its not prefect. for a blog you want people to read your page, and hopefully you want them to read another, but that’s not your main goal, your main goal is getting people directly to your post. if they choose to leave after that then google records it as a bounce. a bounce in google analytics is counted as someone who only reads the page they land on. for a blog you aren’t trying to get people to go to a second page. you only want them to return to your site later. Analytics doesn’t track this (though you can make it)

I made some minor improvements yesterday to make my site more readable for the end user. I already have a year worth of stats for people visiting my site. it shows me a decent amount of information, how many unique users, how many page views per day, things like that. I’m looking into a few wordpress plugins to get some more stats so that I can improve my site even more. whats the point of a website if no-one can see it?

I will also be going over my old posts and making them better, replacing them where needed and 301-ing them to the new posts.