Questions from Yesterday’s SEO Training in Vancouver

Graduates of 3 Hour SEO Course

Yesterday we taught our 3 SEO course. One of the things I work hard at is to give people a chance to ask their questions and make sure that the things they must have answers to are addressed. In the course we had a few people with some search engine optimization experience but the majority of our attendees were just business owners or entrepreneurs like you that wanted to learn more about how they could get the most from their website.

Below are the questions that were asked and a few answers

Q: “When adding text on website should I put my keyword phrase in bold or all caps? Or does it matter?”
A: You start your second paragraph with your keyword phrase and use bold. This won’t give you a huge search engine optimization boost, but it will draw the visitors attention to the keyword phrase and confirm in their mind, that they’ve come to the right place. Stay away from using all caps, because there is research to show that all caps is more difficult for us humans to read

Q: “Meta keywords – I heard that these don’t matter. Is that true?”
A: Yes this is true for the most part. The major search engine (aka google) does not use the meta keyword as a ranking factor. However, other search engines do. As a good rule of thumb you should continue to use Meta Keywords on your website. Just don’t lose too much sleep over the question, “what is the right meta keyword…”

Q: “What percentage of people use Google?”
A: According to Hitwise the Google market share in the U.S. is now around 65%. In Canada, that number is much higher around 80+%. If you are curious where that Canadian number comes from comment on the post or drop me a message on twitter and I’ll let you know.

Q: “SEO does it cost money?”
A: The technical answer is “NO” rankings on Google, Yahoo!, MSN are “free” in that you don’t have to pay to have your website listed there. However it does cost you time and time is money. You will want to consult with someone or hire someone to manage your SEO efforts for you. There are some important directories that you will want to submit your site to. It does cost to have your site listed in those directories. This question is a bit relative because for keywords with lower competition it will not take as much work to gain higher rankings.

Final Question: “How often should I resubmit the XML sitemap?”
A: You don’t need to resubmit your sitemap. Once you have set it up in the google webmaster tools, it will be downloaded for you automatically. If you do a lot of reworking to your website, like adding lots of pages, you would might want to go in and resubmit the sitemap. I log into my Google webmaster tools once a week just to make sure everything is working and that there are no errors.

I hope those questions and answers help you achieve success with your website. Remember to always point your aim towards conversions and not just high rankings and more traffic.

Committed to Your Success!