On April 4, I moderated a panel at Social Slam entitled The New Realities of Search Engine Optimization with Rosemary O’Neill, Sean McGinnis and Eric Pratum. We were lucky to have a packed room who asked great questions. In fact, we have decided to have a follow up Search Engine Optimization Google Hangout on April 22 at 4:00 PM EDT. Feel free to post any questions here.

Meet the Panelists

Rosemary O’Neill, @rhogroupee, Small Business Rosemary O’Neill is Co-Founder/President of Social Strata, which makes the Hoop.la online community platform. For the last 14 years, she has been evangelizing the social conversation and helping customers like Mattel, Long John Silvers and HarperCollins grow thriving communities.

Sean McGinnis, @seanmcginnis, is Founder of 312 Digital, a boutique digital agency in Chicago that also provides in-person digital marketing training to business owners, marketers, consultants and agency personnel. An actor and lawyer by training, Sean has led several internet businesses and teams including one of the largest SEO teams in the US.

Eric Pratum, @ericpratum, Technical Director of Digital Marketing at Grizzard Communications Group, founder of Inbound and Agile, and analyst with a passion for SEO and a reputation for being the “social media guy.” On the Twitters @ericpratum.

20 tips on Search Engine Optimization

1. Find out what customers want and provide it. -RO
2. Learn enough HTML to be dangerous. -RO
   
3. Include dynamic elements in your site, keep it fresh and relevant. Consider adding user-generated content.  -RO
4. Stay on top of SEO news via Matt Cutts, SEOMoz, SEObook, and Google+. -RO
5. Search and Email traffic dominate online activity.  -SM
6. Being first in search engine results is six times more likely to be clicked than fifth.-SM
7. Guest post on high quality sites for powerful back links. -SM
8. Long content is king. Like Marcus Sheridan, the Sales Lion, write really long posts and see the benefits. -SM
9. SEO is important because more than 90% of internet users use search, and optimizing for search allows you to be found whether the searcher is thinking of you, your product, your industry, or anything else related to what you do. -EP
10. Good SEO gets you traffic from the right types of people. There’s no use spending time/money to rank better for terms that don’t relate to your business because 1) you probably won’t rank anyway and 2) most of those new visitors will bounce. -EP
11. Good SEO requires that you pay attention to details. You have to research quality websites for links and guest posts, keep an eye on your code, etc.
12. If you want to track your keyword ranking be sure to logout of Google or Bing, clear your cookies and set the location to the city you want to see results. -EP
13. Good SEO requires consistency. Spurts of link building, guest blogging, massive changes to your site, etc look suspicious. Have a strong brand, create great content, and think of it like a marathon rather than a sprint. That helps to build trust. -EP
14. Pay attention to the visual web. Use interesting high-quality images not just stock art. -RO
15. Use alternative text tags on your images. -SM
16. Find broken links in subject areas where you are expert and offer the owner of the blog to link to you. -SM
17. Use rel author on all pages that you author. -SM
18. Pay attention to Graph and Google+ -SM
19. If you are using WordPress install Yoast or All in one SEO. -EP
20. Every page on your website should have a a single keyword focus, and make sure those keywords are in your title, headings and body content. -SM

Don’t forget to mark your calendars for the Google Hangout on April 22 at 4:00 EDT.