SEO & Your BusinessBrad Wayland – bluecotton vp of business development / co-owner• @bradwayland• bwayland@bluecotton.com

About BlueCottonCustom T-Shirts for any occasion – individuals,

smalls groups, large groups

$7 million revenue

Privately owned

70 Employees

30% growth for 9 years

85% of revenue comes from outside KY

How does it work?

Design Studio

Design a Shirt

Checkout

Watch the Videohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF515-0Tduk

What is SEO?Building your website in a way that speaks not

only to humans but to search engines.

Properly categorizing content to fit with the way complicated search algorithms act.

The most cost effective way that small businesses can compete in a true “free market”

What is SEO?

Web JargonBot/Google

Bot/Crawling

Links

Natural/Organic

Index

On Page Optimization

Off Page Optimization

White/Gray/Black Hat

Traffic

Visits

Pageviews

Metrics

Analytics

Conversion

PPC/CPC

Search Results Page

What Factors Determine How Well My Site Ranks?

Content

Titles

Links

Anchor Text

Reputation

Content

Content

Titles

Titles

Make sure your website has unique title tags

This the most critical component of on page optimization

In order for pages to rank titles need to be coupled with good content

Titles

Links

Anchor Text

Reputation

Who links to whoOld domains Lots of trusted backlinksSocial indicatorsTopic relevancyHundreds of other factors

White/Gray/Black

• Buying Links

• Keyword Stuffing

• Hidden Text

• Cloaking

• Any Attempt to manipulate SERPs

JCPenney.com• Removed from Google Index

• Used Link farms to boost rankings

• More specifically• They knew that using link farms to

homepage would get them penalized so they linked with lower quality links to product pages

• Links came from sites about gambling and snoring to name a couple.

Acceptable Forms of GraySome directory building

Yahoo, Business.com, etc

Press releases In-house releases: prweb, etc

Guest posting on other sitesRelevant articles on relevant sites. Product

giveaways on blogs.

White Hat

Company Blog

Hiring a PR firm or using in house PR to convince news organizations to cover your organization

Free directories like dmoz.org

Please your customers so much that they write about you and link to you

On Page Factors

Titles

URL Structure

H1 Tags

Meta Descriptions

Meta Keywords

General Content

Image alt tags

Examples

Content Still Rules

Content Still Rules

Content Still Rules

Meta Descriptions

Add Relevant Content

To Do #1: Measuring Success/Failure

Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools

Sign up for Google Analytics

If you are serious about it consider using something like seomoz.org or raventools.com

Think in terms of months and years instead of days and weeks.

To Do #2: Basic EssentialsKnow your keywords

Develop unique title tags for every page you want to rank

Make sure you have relevant meta descriptions and meta keywords for every page

Find ways to add relevant content

Do some link building basics

To Do #3: Link Building Basics

Top Directories: dmoz.org, Yahoo, business, etc

Give product or service away in exchange for a link

Get tapped into your industry: trade magazines, conferences, etc

If you have enough content start a blog and use it to link relevant content to your site

Everything above requires TIME. Consider a PR firm.

Tips for Local SearchOptimize for Location + Keyword in Titles

Lawn mowing Bowling Green KY

Optimize page H1 tags and content with locationLawn mowing Bowling Green

Seek out a localized link profileLawn care Bowling Green

Get localized testimonials going“We have lived in Bowling Green for 10 years and

our lawn has never looked better.”

SEO & Your BusinessBrad Wayland – bluecotton vp of business development / co-owner• @bradwayland• bwayland@bluecotton.com