Ultra Light Startups Explains “SEO and SEM”

Article By: Joshua ‘The Red’ Russak (Red@aclion.com)

I recently attended my 3rd Ultra Light Startups! I covered last months event in my article Ultra Light Startups- Outsourcing your startup!! This months Topic was SEO and SEM:

• Principals of Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing
• Practical advice for maximizing your S.E.O./S.E.M. investment
• Build vs buy (do-it-yourself vs hire an agency) decision criteria
• Customer testimonials and entrepreneur experiences with S.E.O./S.E.M.

For those of you unaware of this event, the mission is simple: “Tech entrepreneurs, sharing techniques to launch faster and cheaper!” A room full of 50+ Entrepreneurs with bootstrapped budgets discussing professional techniques on improving their businesses. A great source for networking and information. And more importantly, the panel at this event felt a lot more engaging than the big conferences, but the content and material was just as good, if not better!
I was very impressed with the companies presenting this time around. I made a few notes about the companies I found to be the most intriguing. Web100.com presents top 10 and 100 lists in many different categories and brings in over 125,000 page views per month. The funder and CEO of SlipFire, built a web marketing and design company using wordpress (impressive!).Other noteworthy companies included SEO Tools company SEO Drop, TurboCourt. the TurboTax for law, and Boomerator.com the one stop shop and social network for Baby Boomers (I’d like to not that they were recently mentioned TechCrunch and Mashable.com).
Once the networking+pizza 1/2 hour was over, the panel was ready to get going. It consisted of the following:

• Maisha Walker, President, Message Medium & Columnist with Inc. Magazine
• Regau Flowers, SEM Director at Comet Conversion
• Cesar Hervieux, Online media buyer and planner with Media Contacts
• Sara Holoubek, Consultant, Editor at SearchBuzz, & Director of SEMPO
• Joseph McElroy, Search Artist at Gigapixel Creative and Chair of IPTV Committee on Emerging Technolgy (SEMPO)

I usually report on the panel in the following manner: Q & A format, where write the question and provide each panelist’s response below it. It lasted about 1 hour, but here’s the most relevant content I was able to write down:
Q: How do you know you’re SEO campaign was effective/is doing well?

• Sarah: “You’re making money (everybody luaghs)…but note that setting a benchmark is very important”
• Regau: “I need to know your GOAL in the beginning”

Q: Pro’s and Con’s of doing SEM in a Content Management System (CMS)?

• Joseph: “WordPress, Joomla and Drupalare great porgrams. If you’re not going to use a CMS and start from scratch, you better be an expert”

Q: How long until you see results?

• Regau: “It depends on your campaign and goals.”
• Sarah:”As soon as tomorrow to a couple of months. It really depends on Spider Frequency from Google…oh ya, there are other search engines too (everybody laughs). SEO is like PR, where you have to pitch to the editor every day…and the pitch keeps changing.”

Q: SEO Basics?

• Regau: “A huge part is how many sites are ranking in your area! How many site are ranking against you?”
• Sarah: “3 Basics – 1. Make sure a spider can get into your site; 2. Make sure the content is relevant to the text; 3. Internal and External linking.”
• Joseph: “It’s also important for when people get there, what’s going to happen after that?”

Q: What’s the difference in promoting a Product vs. Services?

• Joseph: “You should contentrate more on PPC for Products and SEO for Services.”

Q: How much time should one spend on SEO vs. Social Marketing Optimization (SMO)?

• Regau: “If you’re aiming for the longtail, longer lasting success then SEO…SMO is an ongoing process that needs daily updates.”
• Sarah: “Utilizing social networking sites will be good for Tomorrow’s success…but you have to keep up with it then.”

Overall it was a successfull event and if you’re interested in going, I suggest going to December 4th: Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) to hear from Joomla, Drupal and WordPress experts. It’s a guarantee you’ll find what you’re looking for!