Pittsburgh SEO Group

To Be Announced

Chris Hornak — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 10:00:42 -0500

We are still working out a plan for the next meeting. In the mean time you can join our group on meetup.com. Once you join the group you will then get email notifications for each meeting. If you haven’t yet, please vote on the next meeting topic.

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9 Free Backlinks for Commercial Websites

Chris Hornak — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:54:47 -0500

This is a collection of websites, that offer free backlinks, any commercial website should be listed on. When choosing these websites they had to meet three criteria; high page rank, authority and trustability. In addition to the three criteria I wanted to list websites of different categories including; local listings, website directories, social networks, bookmarking sites and information syndication…

Source: List of 9 Important Backlinks for Commercial Websites

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SEO Group Website Redesign

Chris Hornak — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:37:23 -0500

Over the weekend I applied a new design theme to the Pittsburgh SEO Group website. This theme allows for me to have the next meeting featured at the top without creating duplicate content. I also like how this theme is cleaner and simpler than before. You also probably noticed that added a few sponsor banners, one at the top and two on the side. These are relative to the group and will help with maintaining and promoting the website.

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List of Free SEO Tools

Chris Hornak — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 09:02:24 -0500

I recently redesigned my personal website and included a page with free SEO tools. These are tools that I use on a regular basis to help me optimize, track and review my SEO progress. Please check out the list and if you know of any SEO tools tools that you feel deserve to be on the list please let me know.

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September Meeting - Turning Website Traffic Into Leads

Chris Hornak — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 22:30:45 -0500

Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your website to get more traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Once you have that visitor to your website what is your next goal? For many websites the next goal would be to turn that visitor into a lead.

This month’s discussion will be on the many aspects of turning your website visitors into leads.

When: Thursday 09/18/2008 @ 7:30

Where:: ITT Technical Institute

10 Parkway Center
Pittsburgh, PA 15220
4124184145

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Star Wars vs Star Trek - Google Says the Winner is…

Chris Hornak — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:16:21 -0500

Google Insights is a great keyword and industry research tool. Just type in a few keywords or phrases and google insight will compare the terms using a line graph. You can also narrow your search down to a specific geographical location. This will come in handy for websites who are more interested in local search traffic.

I decided to use this tool for a fun little experiment and according to Google search trends Star Wars has more search volume than Star Trek.

Features of Google Insights:

Narrow data to specific categories, like finance, health, and sports.
Anticipate demand for your business so you can budget and plan accordingly.
Know where to find your customers. See how search volume is distributed across regions and cities.

More Examples

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Google Page Rank Update

Chris Hornak — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:25:03 -0500

“new toolbar PageRank values should become visible over the next few days.” - Matt Cutts

This is great news… I’m looking forward to seeing if the page rank of my websites increases.

PageRank is Google’s link analysis algorithm that gives a 1-10 score to quality web content.

Meeting Notes - July 16th 2008

Chris Hornak — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:10:16 -0500

Free Link Building Techniques

What is Link Building?
Link building is the process of gaining links from other websites that point to your website or other online content.

Why is link building important?
You can look at links as votes for your website. Every link you get from another website is seen by search engines as a vote for your website. When a link specifies anchor text it is not only voting for your website but it is telling the website what the page is about and then giving you credit for that anchor text.

NoFollow vs DoFollow links
There are two main types of links those who don’t pass link value, NoFollow, and those who do, known as; DoFollow. When you’re building links you want to make sure they are DoFollow links or links that do pass on value to your website or web content.

A few free link building techniques you can do on your own…
• Forum Signatures
• Website Directories
• Social Bookmarking
• Blog Comments

Tools Mentioned at the meeting
• Sharethis Firefox Plugin - Social Bookmarking tool
• Search Status Plugin - shows you if links are nofollow, if a page has google page rank and more.
• DoFollow Diver - Find blogs that you can comment on.
• Fast Blog Finder - software to find dofollow blogs.

If I am missing anything please let me know! Thanks to those who attended this meeting and I look forward to seeing new people at the next meetup.

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Pittsburgh SEO Group Mentioned on Post Gazette’s Website

Chris Hornak — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:45:10 -0500

Good news, the Post Gazette added our next meeting to their calendar which can be found here. We hope to see the growth of this group to continue and for it to reach a larger audience. Any suggestions to where else we should announce our meetings are welcomed and we hope to see some new faces at our next meeting.

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SEO Tip: When Not to Use Header Tags

Chris Hornak — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:44:23 -0500

Recently a friend of me came to me with an SEO problem. His site is almost two years old and has a 0 page rank. I took a quick view of his site and all his paragraphs were in

tags and I think that search engines are seeing that as a Black Hat SEO method. Now I can’t say this is the only reason Google hasn’t gave his site any page rank but I am going to definitely recommend that he change it.

From all that I’ve studied and experienced during my internet marketing day job I can say it’s always good to use HTML tags that make sense. If it’s a paragraph use a paragraph tag and if it’s a header use a header tag.

Also if you’re using a header tag make sure you use them in order. Usually I have one H1 tag on the page and that’s at the top and it is the name of the page. Then below that a topic will be an H2 and once and a while I go as deep as an H3.

Why is it important to use tags?

It has been said by Google themselves that they put more weight on keywords found in header, strong and list tags.

When should I use these tags?

Just use them where they make sense. If it’s a lists of items then use the ordered
or unordered list tag
and if it’s a paragraph use the paragraph tag and use CSS Style Sheets to customize those tags.

Summary:

Use HTML tags where they make sense and use a CSS Style Sheet to customize the look and feel.

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