Here are a few things that I learned at my first PubCon, in no particular order:
- Not everyone that’s online has a technical background. Don’t act like they do.
- To sell more effectively, trigger emotions in favor of your product or service.
- One-page-wonders can be effective sales tools.
- It is necessary to have external links to your site’s pages (from related sites with high-quality content.)
- Always be split testing improvements to your pages.
- Make your pages W3C compliant.
- Submit sites to Google Sitemaps.
- 301 redirects are necessary for moved pages and frequently requested non-existent pages.
- Perform your due diligence on sites before acquiring inbound links.
- Create content that catches eyes quickly on SERPS (both PPC ads and organic summaries.)
- “Better late than lousy”
- React and counter attack against bad Public Relations.
- Follow the $$$ but work in markets where you have interest.
- It is possible (and ambitious) to obtain control page #1 of SERPS for specific search terms.
- Study what your competition does and use it to improve your competitive advantage.
- “Create pages for users, not search engines”
- Properly send a 404 header when using custom 404 error pages.
- Don’t have any dead-end pages on your site. Always have a way to continue to other areas of your site.
- Site menus are seen as content, use them wisely.
I will be touching on a few of these points in more detail over the next few days. Be sure to check back later. Who knows? You may learn something new too.