SEOmoz Seminar - Sessions So Good They’ll Make Your Head Hurt!

As you all know I attended the SEOmoz Expert Training Seminar last week (Aug. 19 & Aug. 20) and I had previously told you that I would review the sessions for our readers once I got back. Well, unfortunately, I cannot review the sessions for you as they have asked us not to blog about what was taught at the various sessions. I totally respect that and have no issues with not being able to tell our readers what we learned. I can, however, let you know what the sessions were about. Then, you can see why my head hurt after the sessions were over! That’s just how good the sessions were at SEOmoz and I am definitely glad that I got to attend the event.

Day One

Thinking Like A Search Engineer - Rand Fishkin

Elite Site Architecture - Rand Fishkin & Stephan Spencer

White Hat Cloaking - Rand Fishkin

Spam Detection & False Positives - Nick Gerner

Legal Issues - Sarah Bird

Site Reviews - Rebecca Kelley & Rand Fishkin

Global Search - Will Critchlow & Duncan Morris

Sitemaps & Webmaster Tools - Rand Fishkin & Stephan Spencer

Crawlability - Jeff Pollard

Day Two

Reputation Management - Will Critchlow & Duncan Morris

Social Networks For SEO - Jane Copland

Opportunities & Pitfalls Of Buying Links - Seth Besmertnik

Enterprise Link Building - Rand Fishkin

Vertical Search Inclusion - Stephan Spencer

Future Of Search Engines - Danny Sullivan

Expert Q&A - Danny Sullivan, Rand Fishkin, Stephan Spencer, Nick Gerner, Will Critchlow & Duncan Morris

These sessions were so great we’re going to implement quite a few of their suggestions in our services at Regency Interactive. Just to give you a hint of what we will be implementing; we’re going to offer more in depth site reviews, more social media services, putting more thought into conversions for our clients and so forth.

P.S. It was also great to meet the people I treat with on a daily basis: Alex Bennert, Brian Carter, Dana Lookadoo, Danny Sullivan, David Mihm, Derek Edmond, Dr. Pete, Duncan Morris, Jane Copland, Jeff Donenfeld, Joshua Sciarrino, Martin Bowling, Monica Wright, Stephan Spencer, Taylor Pratt and Will Critchlow.

P.S.S If you are ever at one of these events and by chance see something on someone’s shirt like say some chocolate from a Twix they ate a couple of hours before lunch then be sure and let them know it’s there. Otherwise, they will walk all around at lunch and throughout the rest of the day with chocolate rubbed in on his/her shirt. That’s not a good way to network now is it? :)

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August 27, 2008 | Filed Under internet marketing, link building, social media

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SEO: Are XML Sitemaps Actually Important Or Are They The Most Overrated SEO Tactic Ever?

Here lately there seems to be some debate on whether or not XML sitemaps are beneficial to achieving those top rankings on you want on the various search engines, namely Google. Recently, various SEO experts have written some posts on whether or not they think it’s beneficial to use. Here are some of those posts that are worth the read. If you know of any others please let us know and we’ll include them.

Barry Schwartz: “I have always been a believer that well on-page optimized sites do not require or even benefit much from Google Sitemaps. But at the same time, I also do believe that giving Google extra clues about your site does help. It is something you need to think about.”

Matt McGee: “Whenever I take part in a Site Review session at some conference, one of my fellow panelists will inevitably tell a webmaster something like, “You don’t have an XML sitemap. Create one and submit it to the search engines as soon as you can.” I’ve yet to have the opportunity to play devil’s advocate on that during a session, but I’m going to do it here on SBS.”

Ann Smarty: “I for one have never had any bad experience with sitemaps (though I keep reading about it now and then and agree there is probably no smoke without the fire). On the other hand, I haven’t seen any major effect either. Still I don’t think Google is so evil that it offers a tool and than turns it for bad (call me naive).”

As for our opinion, I don’t think it’s crucial to your SEO efforts, but I also don’t think it will hurt you in any way. A site map will not fix crawling issues; but will it help robots crawl a website faster? At Regency Interactive, we create XML sitemaps for all of the websites that we work on (minus any that can’t upload one) and as for the amount of traffic you gain/lose that’s something we leave our clients in charge of so we don’t have any numbers to report on the loss or gain of traffic from Google.

I’m in agreement with Barry and everyone else in that you should try it out on your own for a few months and see what it can do for you. Also, why not even go so far as to post your results as well or even comment on our post and let us know how it worked for you.

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June 19, 2008 | Filed Under internet marketing

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