Next up on the agenda is Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com.

- Aaron Wall is author of SEO Book, which is the world’s leading book on SEO - it is required reading if you want to use SEO to maximize organic search traffic to your website.

- Aaron shows search results analysis using one his favorite tools - the Firefox SEO Extension.

- Aaron talks about his kitchen cabinet website - he gives a pretty detailed analysis of each website and how they rank well (i.e., college grants).

- Aaron talks about “Link Equity” - the idea was that sometimes it is better to expand existing content on existing pages instead of building new pages. He uses an example of a website with 10K pages, 90% of which Google has already indexed. He said by adding more pages what is likely to happen is the % of pages indexed by Google will go down. Instead - he suggests a better strategy may be to just add more content to existing, well-ranked pages that are already indexed. He suggests this maximizes link equity versus diluting the link equity by creating more pages without adding more external links.

- In response to a question from an attendee about keyword density Aaron says the more your content looks “like a newspaper writer wrote it and less that it was written for search-engines” the better your website is likely to rank. He says he doesn’t really pay attention to keyword density.

- Aaron says that there is a clear advantage to buying URL’s with trusted links.

- Aaron gave a free copy of his book to everyone in the room (nice!).

LINK BUILDING WITH AARON WALL

- Start off with trusted link sources such as the Yahoo Directory and Business.com. He suggested that by starting off with “good votes” you build a foundation and are not likely to be penalized for lower quality links that you build in the future.
- Aaron talks about buying links versus buying websites with trusted links versus building links naturally.

Social Media & Viral Links:

- Aaron discusses about purposefully making blog posts with the likelihood of emotional responses - this builds links and gets people talking.
- Controversial posts work well for building links from sites like Digg.
- “Spam is loosely based on perception.” Therefore, to get other people to submit your spam it makes it less spammy.
- Aaron talks about getting links from social media websites is good because the links come from the general web (diverse websites).
- Minimize ads on the pages you submit to social media websites.
- Aaron warns that Google may discount unnatural link growth - therefore, he stresses the need to build authority links outside of social media.

- Aaron talks about a company he has an equity stake in - ReviewMe.com - as a source for blog reviews and links.

- An attendee suggested that Yahoo Directory usually keeps your link up even if you cancel it, which makes it free.

Aaron opens up to Q & A. There were tons of Q’s!!!

Wendy from eMoms is also blogging the event and Darren and Jeremy also put out posts.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 8:57 pm and is filed under search-engine marketing, affiliate marketing, Elite Retreat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.