Ed Reese – SEO Presentation – Awesome!

On October 3rd we held our monthly meeting at Calypsos.  I know I know, it’s been two weeks and I am just now giving everyone an update….

As outlined in this blog earlier, Ed Reese from SixthManMarketing presented on search engine optimization.  The presentation was outstanding and as you can see from our picture below, everyone was glued to each new bit of information shared.

This was our best attended meeting as of yet with just about 20 people filling the conference room for an early morning meeting.  We actually didn’t do our hot seats during this meeting as the information we got from Ed was so valuable I don’t think anyone wanted him to stop.

Ed walked the group through an introduction of SEO:

1. Definition vs Common Perceptions
2. Organic Search vs Paid Search
3. Why do we care?
4. The three legged stool of search (technical, content and trust)
5. The different types of organic search
6. Local search tips
7. Tools and resources

It was a great presentation and provided many of the attendees with some great things to get started on right away.  Ed really raised the bar for our presenters by not only bringing in a great presentation on our projector but also providing handouts.  I think the next presenter will have to bring in a dancing monkey to compete. 

We are still looking for a presenter for our November meeting.  If you have an idea please let us know. You definitely want to attend these meetings where you get to meet, network and learn from companies like:

• DirtyBlueMedia
• Hog Advertising
• Keller Williams
• Whitestone Design Works
• Boeing
• Converseon
• Camp Mivoden
• Antal Consulting
• Convertech Solutions and more!

Past attendees – if you would like to have a link to your site in our blogroll, please email me at jamie@jebcommerce.com.

 

September CDA Web Marketers Meeting Recap

Last Friday we had our monthly meeting. We held it at Calypso’s for the first time and I have to say it was a great venue for our meeting. Calypso’s is a great host with great breakfast items and wonderful coffee. If you haven’t been to this coffee shop yet, make a point to work “remotely” one day this week. The wifi is fast and the coffee hot and they have plenty of space.

Ed Birch started the meeting off with his presentation on Continuous Improvement. His strong background in management was shown as he walked us through some of the main areas of continuous improvement and how we could use this concept and the processes within it to grow your business, keep your clients happy and run a more efficient business. Ed will be sending over his presentation later today. I’ll be uploading that here for you to download. If you have questions, feel free to email Ed at edward@birchconsultinggroup.com or 208-659-1690.

One of the things that stuck out to me is that we often have processes in our business, whether they are accounting processes or basic business processes, for us it was our process of contacting our partners. These process are hardly ever as efficient as possible and often have areas of waste that we can, when we map these out, that we can cut. Making these processes more efficient allows us to better respond to our market, better deliver for our clients and in the end add more to our bottom line. I highly recommend you check out the presentation. Here is a pic of Ed during the meeting:

After we all had a few questions we got into our hot seat. We didn’t have a formal hot seat for this meeting, but we all discussed Twitter and other social networking things. We discussed Twitter’s demographics and possibly uses for business, the main one highlighted was it’s use for customer service.

A few of us shared some examples where we were personally contacted by corporations who read our twitters, whether they were positive or negative, and responded to us directly. It can be a great way to interact with your customers.

At the end of every meeting, we go around the table and share any new sites or resources we have used or discovered since our last meeting. Here are the ones we shared:

• Help A Reporter Out – www.helpareporterout.com – This is a site that sends out requests from reporters looking for experts in many different areas. If you are looking to be cited in the press, this is a great resource for you to keep abreast of what opportunities are out there.
• Ed Reese, a new attendee from Spokane, gave us SEOMOZ.com.
• PayPerPost.com – Dave from Case42Media shared a case study of one of his clients and their success with this web site. Dave, feel free to expand on that in the comments section.
• MarketingExpiriments.com – A site that Randy and Denver from Trianelle use often.

Ed Reese, our new resident SEO expert, will be giving next month’s presentation. We’ll have more information on that later this month. The date will be 3rd at 8am.

I’d love to get everyone’s feedback on the meetings, so please feel free to share in the comments section here. What did you love, what did you learn?