Affiliate Summit West 2012 – Sessions: SEO Clinic

SEO Clinics have to be some of my favorite sessions at any conference hands-down. This is a great opportunity to hear SEO pros give feedback on real sites that they haven’t seen in the past. For privacy reasons I won’t be publishing the sites reviewed but I will discuss some of the tips and tricks that were shared during the clinic.

Michael Martin

Michael Martin, Senior SEO Strategist, Covario Inc.

Backlinks – this was one of the biggest issues that came-up with people submitting sites without enough backlinks to rank well for terms they want to rank for. The panel emphasized the importance of having a few solid backlinks with anchor-text matching your dominant search phrase. Reach-out to bloggers and news sources, don’t worry about having a million links, just get links that count!

Site Load Time – this is critical and even more important since Google has now made it clear that this is a part of their ranking algorithm.

Taylor Pratt

Taylor Pratt, VP of Product Marketing, Raven Tools

Don’t Index Shopping Cart Pages – this was a great tip that I haven’t seen come-up in SEO sessions much in the past. The idea is simple, your shopping cart pages have no useful content for search, so they should not be indexed.

Content, content content – at the end of the day it all boils down to great content. One of the sites displayed had thousands of pages of great content, this was a key for them to rank for some of the terms they did. Along with having great content it is so important that your on-page optimizations are spot-on to get the most benefit.

Of course a lot more was covered in this session but I can’t give-away all the good stuff. Now back down to the blogger lounge. There’s a Jenga competition going on and the winner gets a free one-hour Domain Name Consultation with yours truly. For any of my current consultation clients reading this, you know what a kick-ass prize this is 🙂

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton