January 13, 2015 – At this month’s event, attendees had the chance to submit their websites for review by a panel of SEO experts, including Kevin Getch, Scott Hendison, Mike Arnesen and Michael Cottam. Four lucky organizations were chosen, however everyone who attended gained valuable insights and actionable tips to walk away with.
Here are a few takeaways from the evening:
- Ensure you don’t have any duplicate page titles or meta descriptions.
- Check your contact information across the web for correctness and consistency.
- Leverage schema markup for everything from videos and images to upcoming events.
- Take advantage of Google Tag Manager to monitor activity.
- Google still favors sites with higher word count, so beef up any pages that have low word counts.
- Utilize tools such as Quick Sprout for problematic areas on your website as well as insights into your competitors.
- Include social sharing links on your blog.
- If you’re operating a school website, be sure to include course pages for visitors to interact with.
- Check the page positions of your calls-to-action and improve where necessary.
- .edu websites are often spam targets because they tend to be trusted sites. Monitor Backlinks is a great tool for identifying any bad backlinks, as well as good ones.
It was an evening jam-packed with expert advice for everyone. Special thanks to Funnelbox, Ascension Software, Pioneer Pacific College and George Fox University for each taking a turn in the hot seat!
Sarah is a search marketing consultant, helping clients improve ROI through paid search, SEO and social media initiatives. She is also the Official SEMpdx Event Blogger and can be found at all of the monthly events.