Ingrid Gonçalves, communications director at Center for Labor and Community Research from Community Media Workshop on Vimeo.

When Ingrid Gonçalves said during a round of introductions that she had five Web sites to create or update, I knew I had to try out the flip camera to get her story. It turns out to be a great story, not so much for how unusual it is, but for how typical it is, I think you’ll agree! (Apologies, this time the wrist is really shaky–I’m still learning!)

Ingrid was one of about 20 folks at this morning’s search engine optimization workshop this morning, led by
Tim Frick from Mightybytes. Tim delivered a workshop highlighting how to get found online, drawing on info from his forthcoming book tentatively titled Return on Engagement from Focal Press.

Below the fold here you will find, in the somewhat unlikely event that anyone finds it useful, my more or less complete notes on Tim’s presentation, which I found useful in charting some benchmarks for SEO. In a nutshell, here’s the Tim Frick program (of course it makes more sense when you see him lay it out, but still, it’s a good one):

1. Content, content, content–Have a content strategy and implement
2. Install an analytics package so you know what your Web visitors are doing when, etc.
3. Use alerts to see who is talking about you
4. Track user behavior and adjust your approach as appropriate
5. Rinse, lather, repeat (in other words, go back to step one, fine tune your site–”it’s never done” Tim says)

What do you think– is this an accurate description of what you do right now? Or what you aspire to be doing? Let me know in the comments or by email! Meantime enjoy Ingrid’s story and if you want more, click to see some notes in the rest of this (phew) looong post (hopefully, doing justice to Tim’s presentation):

Tim broke the session into three big parts and some add ons: Strategy, On-domain content, and Off-Domain Traffic. This made really good sense to me, and here’s a bit more highlights from each part:

Strategy
In 2006-2007, Tim added a content management system, CMS, to his Web site and started working on it 10-15 minutes a day. Pretty soon he was working on it 20-30 hours a week. Or as he puts it, “We got in over our heads very quickly.” This section covered some thoughts on how to avoid that–I’m sorry, I did a really poor job of noting these down!

On-Domain Content

• Tip: Think about design from a standpoint of what promotes your credibility, such as: speedy loading, reliability (think spelling), useful content
• Good resource: Andrew King’s book Website Optimization, from O’Reilly Media
• It’s important and useful to use an XML sitemap generator com (like this one) to help you to tell Google about the content at your site as well as how frequently your site updates (which governs how frequently your site is crawled)
• Thinking about keywords–this was a simple exercise of just writing down 5-10 words for how you imagine your audience looks for you online, then 5-10 words that differentiate you from your competition, then cut in half. Ultimately, the goal here is to come up with a short list that will fit into phrases that people use to search for you. A number of sites can help with this. Wordtracker.com is one.
• We talked about how cool wordpress is (Tim led the way, we at CMW agree!) and looked at back ends of Wordpress, which Tim uses—he showed us Timfrick.com—which he notes took him 4 hours to build — and he joked, 3.5 hours were for the logo at the top of the home page.
• In terms of where keywords go: Tim showed us how to think about putting them in  the title: (65 characters is as much as fits easily in a page title—this will autoload above the url window in your browser), in the headers, and in the names of the image files (so take an extra minute to rename the image files, not generic like image01234)

Off-Domain Traffic

Twitter Phishing! If this happens to you, benefit from Mightybytes experience just the other day. This would be very valuable info for someone who has been a twitter phishing scam victim. It happened to Tim just this past week, one of his mightybytes colleagues blogged about what happened and what to do if it happens to you here.

Use RSS Feeds. Really! Use them.

ShareThis, video, Facebook, twitter (be strategic—get followers that care about what you’re going to say)—the way to get followers is to follow others, flickr (MightyBytes makes beer and has their flickr site set up with pix of it–this made me thirsty); niche networks that fit your work;

Other Tools: news releases, esp. online–eg PRNewswire, PRWeb. This was kind of intriguing: instead of, or in addition to, google news alerts, Tim actually also uses a service that predates the google news alert called gigaalerts. We’re gonna give it a try.