SEO has evolved as one of the most important and productive marketing areas given the ability of Internet Marketing and SEO to drive traffic to your site and realize your business goals.  We are pleased to share this SEO Panel from Internet Marketing Conference in Vancouver in late 2008 that we captured for fundfindr.tv.

Huge kudos to Lennart Svanberg of IMC, local organizers IIMA and for such an impressive international line-up of speakers and content.  Well done and we look forward to IMC Vancouver 2009!

Tune into this panel excerpt on what is hot in SEO featuring Gary Beal of Sticky Eyes one of the most engaging sessions of the conference.  While the panel took place some months back, the content is still very much valid.

Look for more video from Gary soon here.  Other experts featured on the panel moderated by Rodney Bartlett of Reachd included: Bill Barnes of Enquiro, Lynn Wilson of 6s Marketing, Alexandre Brabant of emarketing101 and Sempo Canada, Ellerton Whitney of Earthbound Media Group, Omar Al-Hajjar of Magnet Search Marketing, a part of Cossette Canada.

We hope you enjoy this footage and please comment if you would like to see more video for future IMC events whether live streaming or archived.

We are pleased to present this fundfindr.tv production of one of the most engaging panels from Internet Marketing Conference Vancouver 2008.  While the panel is from a few months ago, all of the insights and tips are very valid today.  Well worth a look.  Please note, the video does run 40 minutes.

The panelists included writing experts Crawford Kilian, Elizabeth Southall, Monique Trottier, Tom McNamara and Jim DelaHunt.  For more on this panel, click here. Other tips and advice on Internet Marketing are available at the tag IMC.

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Web Analytics. Conversion rates. Revenue per customer from your FaceBook widget or Google Adwords. A growing area of expertise that is seperating the winners and also-rans in technology and other sectors relying on web traffic or ecommerce. Whether Webtrends , Omniture or other provider, mastering the tools is key to success.

fundfindr was on the scene capturing Web Analytics Guru Eric T. Peterson at the recent Internet Marketing Conference (IMC) in Vancouver, B.C. Eric is the author of 3 books , a consultant in-demand for top companies like Cisco and NBC and a sought after speaker we highly recommend spending 40 minutes with to increase your knowledge in the Analytics arena.

Attended IMC? See Eric again and refresh your perspective and achieve better retention and knowledge transfer. Missed it, fundfindr.tv is pleased to replay it for you. Stay tuned for more coverage from Tom Leung of Google and many others coming soon. Subscribe to our RSS feed.

Tune into Eric’s keynote on how investing in web analytics can create a sustained competitive advantage by taking the guesswork out of decicison making. Eric speaks on the importance of a playbook, the imperative to make it an "all-the-time" thing and For much more on Eric’s work on optimizing their online business, check out his Web Analtyics Demystified blog.

For more coverage on the IMC event on fundfindr.tv, visit here . Also worth a visit is the Techvibes blogpost by Monique Trottier on Eric’s presentation here.

One of the other panels that intrigued me and we are going to be pleased to webcast soon on fundfindr.tv was the Writing for Web panel.  The idea of being able to replay the events or see the sessions missed on an event video platform drew applause from the attendees - yay.  The overall themes were brevity, clarity and activation.  Here are some highlights:

Monique Trottier - Boxcar Marketing

1.       Don’t send stuff from info@.  Build trust and intimacy in your From line.

2.       Subject line 25-40 characters – no Free or all caps, descriptive, “tips” good.

3.       Newsletter subject line should match a heading to avoid disconnect – reflect promise.

4.       Scannability – heading, subheading, blocks, bulleted lists – to drive attention.  No big blocks of text.

5.       Avoid more on, click here, etc.  use call to action as the link, e.g. “Find out three ways to ….”

Monique’s partner in Boxcar is James Sherrett who also heads the start-up Adhack.  Loved her closing one-liner.   “Be brief, be brilliant and be gone.”

  Elizabeth Southall – Killer landing pages   Powerhouse copy

Landing pages are of course the page where visitors land when they respond.  Elizabeth covered how this is the entrance point to sales funnel.  Your goal is to to make a sale, or get email to make future sales.

Elizabeth then shared examples of the 6 elements a successful landing page must have:

1.       Headline

2.       Subhead

3.       Product shot or image

4.       Body copy

5.       Opt-in box

6.       Call to action

Tell people exactly what you want them to do, e.g.  Type your email here.  Use landing pages not just the home page for campaigns.

Jim Delahunt covered some interesting ground about writing for the cultural web - e.g. accounting for the fact that many viewers have other primary languages which he proved with a crowd show of hands.  Had a good chat with Jim and he makes a savvy point for us all to consider although I am still not sure what the basic principles of this approach are.  

Crawford Killan Writing for web 3.0

Crawford wasn’t the youngest but he was like the old shop teacher that scared hell out of you but man did you learn from him.  Not to say he was scary, or that old.  I guess he just reminded me of my old shop teacher.  Anyways….  Liked his Idea of ex-formation.  Don’t include writing that the audience already knows.  E.g. spelling out IT.

Find out where ex-formation is for your audience.  Figure out appropriate social relationship with your readers.  Write long. Cut short.  Write 150. Cut to 75.

Concise writing and display of text.  No paragraph should be over 5-6 lines long and 5-6 sentences long. Maximize hot spots.  Beginning and end of paragraph.  Not in middle.  Crawford recommended a site www.readability.info to tell you how readable your text is.

Just starting Day 2 at IMC conference and wanted to share a few nuggets in Internet Marketing.  This from Gary Beal of UK’s Sticky Eyes.  Gary impressed the audience with his expertise and quick wit one of my favourites so far.  Why does SEO matter well Gary shared how Position 1 on google is worth a 40% click-thru, position 5 is only 4%!  More on writing for web later.

Top 10 Tips

1. Make sure your page titles optimized for search – start with primary and move to longtail (e.g. Honda Prelude vs. cars).  Check out Hittail and log file analyzer – great free tools.
2. Optimize internal link structrure and use Nofollow to boost positions and kick start new nice and longtail phrases – called link sculpting.
3. Start with link juice (like about us) and spill over primary key words through to secondary ones.
4. Use external linking wisely – link to top sites.  Definitely link back if you have a link from a top site.
5. Write your content with a LSI (latent semantic indexing) and LSA (Latent Semantic analysis) focus to plan for future tech.  Use social bookmarking, forums and blogs.
6. Check for common mistakes and penalties.  Xenu is a great tool to find broken links.
7. Check your internal canonicalization yourwebsite.com or www.yourwebsite.com   - do this by checking yahoo .  Make the one (most backlinks) primary.
8. Install multiple tracking to follow keywords to conversion.
9. Bump your competitors to rank higher.  If a non-competitor ranks, help submit their url to blogs to bump the buffer you have. 
10. Optimize your 404 page – it may actually rank for you.  Get your page out to supplemental/omitted results.

http://www.stickyeyes.com/news/seo-tips-2007/