Pittsburgh SEO Group » Meeting Notes

Pittsburgh SEO Group September Meeting Recap

pshank — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:25:04 +0000

The Pittsburgh SEO Group recently held their free September meeting at the Pittsburgh Tech Council offices in the South Side. Chris Hornak, Director of Operations at Eyeflow Internet Marketing, presented the session Five Legit Ways to Spy on Your Competitors.

Chris created the fictional company “Yogamatic,” and walked the SEO group members through ways to conduct research on one of Yogamatic’s top competitors. The following is an overview of the techniques he presented:

Google Tools

Most of us are familiar with the Maps, Videos, News and Images tools on Google. But Google has other vertical search options that allow you to conduct targeted research on your competition.

The Updates tool will allow you to see what social media your competitors are using, and what users of social media are saying about your competitors. The Discussions tool allows users to see threads and forums that mention your competition. This is a great place to look for – and capitalize on – complaints that people are making. And the Blogs tool allows you to see what blogs are saying about your competition.

Backlinks

OpenSiteExplorer.org is a free tool that allows you see which domains are linking to your competitors. You can view by page, domain, anchor text, or a full list of metrics. You can use this information to help determine what direction to take your own website.

Traffic Patterns

Compete.com is another free tool that allows you to spy on competitors by peeking at their traffic levels. You can graph your own traffic against that of your competition to get a direct comparison. You can see from these graphs who is growing and who is shrinking, and by how much.

Keyword Rankings

SEMRush.com and SERPAnalytics.com will allow you to enter the domain name of your competition and see what keywords are organically ranking for that site. You can also see which keywords they are bidding on and how much they spend per month on PPC. SEMRush includes a handy estimated traffic graph with the data.

Alerts

Setting up a Google Alert for your competitors means you will know when new pages appear in search rankings. Through SocialMention.com, you can set an email alert or an RSS feed that helps you keep tabs on your competition.

How search has changed over the last 8 years

AATrenHierb — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:19:32 +0000

The Eyeflow blog has a post with Phil Laboon’s presentation notes on how search has changed over the past eight years. This presentation was during our November 2009 seminar.

“One trend that I think we are going to hear a lot about next year is how search engines are going to depend more on User Reviews from various community sites like Yelp, e-pinion, and their own locals. In the past, the great hurdle was spammers creating hundreds of bogus accounts and hyping up their own companies.”

Increased Spots for Novembers SEO Meeting

AATrenHierb — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:29:01 +0000

We’ve had such a high demand for the November SEO Group meeting already all 25 seats where booked. I’ve checked to make sure we have enough space and bumped up the available seats to 40. Make sure you RSVP today to secure your place!

November Pittsburgh SEO Event Details

Thanks for Attending the March SEO Group Meeting

AATrenHierb — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:41:55 +0000

Thanks to those who made it to the March 09 Pittsburgh SEO Group meeting. Some really great discussions formed around the presentations and I look forward to the possibility of having some of you present at future meetings.

Here are some links mentioned at the meeting;

SEO Browser – see your website as a search engine does.
W3CSchools - Learn HTML
Craigslist – Free online classifieds.
EzineArticles – Free article submission site.
Dmoz - Free trusted directory.
Rip Off Report – report poor businesses practices.

We will have youtube videos of the meeting uploaded as soon as possible. Subbscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter if you would like to be notified. Contact us if you need anything else.

Meeting Notes – July 16th 2008

Chris Hornak — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:10:16 +0000

Free Link Building Techniques

What is Link Building?
Link building is the process of gaining links from other websites that point to your website or other online content.

Why is link building important?
You can look at links as votes for your website. Every link you get from another website is seen by search engines as a vote for your website. When a link specifies anchor text it is not only voting for your website but it is telling the website what the page is about and then giving you credit for that anchor text.

NoFollow vs DoFollow links
There are two main types of links those who don’t pass link value, NoFollow, and those who do, known as; DoFollow. When you’re building links you want to make sure they are DoFollow links or links that do pass on value to your website or web content.

A few free link building techniques you can do on your own…
• Forum Signatures
• Website Directories
• Social Bookmarking
• Blog Comments

Tools Mentioned at the meeting
• Sharethis Firefox Plugin – Social Bookmarking tool
• Search Status Plugin – shows you if links are nofollow, if a page has google page rank and more.
• DoFollow Diver – Find blogs that you can comment on.
• Fast Blog Finder – software to find dofollow blogs.

If I am missing anything please let me know! Thanks to those who attended this meeting and I look forward to seeing new people at the next meetup.

Meeting Notes – June 18th 2008

Chris Hornak — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:22:48 +0000

Competitive Analysis Presentation by Benson

Things Discussed: (feel free to research any of these topics)
-The hand out – I’ll see if I can get a digital copy of this and post it here.
-Benson ran a website through SEOmoz’s Page Strength Tool.
-Page Age
-Link Building
-Inbound Links
-NoFollow Tag
-301 redirect
-Alt Text
-Page Rank

Websites Mentioned:
Seomoz.org

Websitegrader.com

InstantPosition.com

Alexa Ranking

Social Bookmarking Sites like…

Please feel free to add anything I am missing.