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Barbara Coll, founder and CEO of WebMama, and Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay Inc tackled the topic of Organic SEO. Both are bonafide experts in the field. Barbara Coll has been a Search Engine Optimization practitioner for years, and was the founding president of SEMPO. Bruce Clay is well-known from his Search Engine Relationship Chart, and boasts SEO clients like Edmunds, and MTV.

This session was full of hands-on practical advice to ensure your site will perform well in natural search. Of course, everyone would love to appear on top of natural search rankings, and if you follow their tips it can happen for you too. Or at least maybe it will help.

Here are a few of their suggestions (I warn you, these are very "practical". That means boring if you are not into this topic):

Regarding your site's source code:

• The title tag is the most important item in each page from a search perspective, so you should be sure that it is descriptive. From my own experience, I know this one change alone can make a big difference. Barbara suggested that you check Google to see how many pages are indexed by Google. To do this search for "site:www.yourdomain.com". If you see a lot of pages with the same title, you need to do something about it.


• Use Alt tags for images on your site. It will be required by disability laws in the United States soon and it helps from a search perspective.


• Use meta-Keyword, and meta-Description tags. These have gone out of vogue, but both speakers agreed that you should still include them.


• Keep your code clean. Remotely link CSS and JavaScript files in separate files

Regarding Keyword Selection:

• It is important to structure your site in a way that identifies you as an expert on a particular topic. Bruce's example here was that if your site is all about white marbles you may pretty easily be seen as an expert about white marbles, but if you speak about red, green, blue and yellow marbles too, you may not even be seen as an expert in marbles. So your themes and the words you use to describe your themes is important.


• Make sure you understand how search engines match synonyms of your phrases. You can see what phrases Google treats as synonyms by adding a tilde in front of your search phrase. For example, by searching for "Search Engine ~Optimization" you'll see that Google treats "submission" and "placement" as synonyms for "optimization".
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Both speakers also agreed that every site should use a site map. This means the XML feed versions for Google and an actual plain-text version for users. Also, they suggested using the Yahoo Site Explorer tool to see whether you've been indexed.

That's it. Do those things and you'll be number one in no time. And, if you're not, please send your "comments" to Barbara or Bruce. Tell them Steve Hall sent you.