Tips for the Webmaster from SMX Advanced

Wow, SMX Advanced has been awesome so far. Great speakers and great information. The schedule is set up so that there are back-to-back presentations more or less through the whole day. I can only say that it is going to take a few weeks to digest all this information.

So what are the takeaways for webmasters, after listening to Matt Cutts‘ talk? One message that came through pretty clearly: after you’ve got the basics of good site concept and its architecture down, having some really fantastic content, videos or tools on your site should be the next focus. While there are still some search engine ranking gains to be had by applying yourself to the technical side of the optimizing your site, the message indicates that every webmaster needs to start looking long and hard at creating fantastic stuff for their site that users will find valuable and interesting.

To recap: having the technical side of things in order is certainly important, but if you want to realize high search engine rankings, it is essential to spend the time, effort and money to publish information on your site that is timely and helpful for the user.

Another take-away for the day came out of the Search Ranking Factors for 2009 talk, during which Rand Fishkin spent time unpacking the idea that search engines like to include freshly published content in their search engine rankings. Lots of times people are searching for news about a particular subject, and consequently the search engines will rank newly published information highly in order to satisfy the searchers’ (possible) need for recently published articles. This brings home the fact that there is a need to keep adding content to your site, and it shows that opportunities are available for sites that are regularly adding new content.

Lot’s of other great info is coming that I’m looking forward to sharing!