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Online Marketing Summit (OMS) 2009 Conference Recap

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:36:00 +0000

Well now that I have almost caught up with the work I missed from being at the 2009 Online Marketing Summit, I have to say, what a fun time! If you missed my presentation on Long Tail Keyword Optimization, Kate Fleming did a wonderful job of summarizing the main points of the presentation. Additionally there were a lot of other great presentors and presentations which made this conference the best one ever in my estimation. Thanks again to Aaron Kahlow and his whole staff of tireless workers for making it such a success. And who can forget the free Jamba Juice!

For my personally, the opportunity to perform and sing in my acoustic project for the first time ever in front of the 100+ people at the Thursday evening cocktail hour was amazing. I really enjoyed myself and so did my band. Thanks to everyone for all the kind words and wonderful feedback about the performance. That was our first show together as a band and we are looking forward to playing a lot more of them soon.

If you missed this year’s event, don’t forget that regionals are coming and definately make plans to be here next year. It really is one of the coolest conferences that you can attend. See ya soon!

Catfish

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A Preview of my 2009 Online Marketing Summit (OMS) Presentation on Long Tail SEO Strategies

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:24:00 +0000

Wow time sure does fly. Seems like only yesterday I was doing my SEO for 2008 presentation at OMS 2008 here in San Diego and now it’s already 2009! I am really looking forward to seeing everyone again this year and getting another opportunity to talk SEO with so many other industry professionals. And, what’s really exciting for me is that this year, Rand Fishkin will be speaking at OMS for the first time!

If you are not familiar with Rand, he runs SEOmoz.com, is a very well respected speaker at a number of SEO conferences, and he has contributed a great deal to the SEO community. So it’s very exciting for me to have an opportunity to speak at the same conference as Rand and talk a little SEO. I know that the OMS community will be very impressed with the depth of knowledge and experience that Rand brings to the table. And he is a really nice guy.

I will also be trying to bring some new SEO ideas and tactics to the table for 2009. My presentation this year will be focused on targeting the long tail. If you’re not familiar with the concept of long tail SEO, here is a good reference for you. Essentially we are talking about putting yourself in a position to capture as many of the less competitive keyword phrases as you can, on an ongoing and consistent basis. During my presentation, we will be talking about some of the on page, off page, universal search and social media SEO tactics that will improve your ability to target relevant, long tail keywords.

Some of the SEO topics that we will touch on will include keyword research, page titles, content optimization, internal linking strategies, blogging tactics, other social media opportunities and using analytics to augment your campaign.

It makes a lot of sense for companies to focus on long tail SEO for 2009. Advancements in personalization and Geo targeting are making it less and less likely that any two users will see the same listings for the same search query. That’s not to say that rankings for competitive keywords won’t continue to be a focus of SEO. But rather, just like the stock market, you should be diversified and not put all your SEO eggs in one basket.

One last thing, if you haven’t already signed up for free to be part of the OMS community and checked out all the cool SEO and Internet marketing blog content, visit the OMS Blog and do it!

Original dog image is a modification of a preview image of a 3D dog model by Andrey Kravchenko on his gallery on TurboSquid™

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Online Marketing Summit (OMS) – SEO and Social Media in Houston and San Jose

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:10:00 +0000

So I am finally caught up enough after being gone a week for OMS that I can blog again..lol. What a crazy week and a half its been. First I went to Houston for the first time where I met some incredible people who were very hospitable. I spoke about the SEO benefits of the social media broadcast system. I defined the social media broadcast system as:

“Your social media broadcast system is the collection of technologies that are used to broadcast your message to your friends and their friends.”

So this collection of technologies includes your blog, social networking sites like LinkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace, social news sites like Digg and Mixx, social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Stumble, image and video hosting sites like Flickr and YouTube as well as microblogging platforms like Twitter and hub pages like Squidoo. My presentation will appear on the blog at some point but I am currently using this material so it’s only available to OMS attendees at this point. But essentially we talked about all the ways to integrate these sites together as well as how to best utilize them for their SEO benefits.

My presentation seem to be well received in both Houston and San Jose although I think the San Jose presentation was a little stronger because I has already had one performance under my belt. And I modified it slightly to be a little more action oriented because I think that many people who heard the presentation were still learning about some of the concepts, likewhat microblogging is and why you should do it, and so I wanted to more completely spell out some of the tactical elements of what I was talking about so that people could walk away with a check list of things to do, even if they didn’t all make sense yet..lol.

All in all, I really enjoyed getting to talk about social media at this year’s OMS regionals. I have one more next week in Denver. Unfortunately, due to a scheduled surgery and the fact that the San Diego OMS date was recently moved, I will be unable to speak at the September regional here in San Diego. But I will be back with a vengeance in February for the OMS main conference where I will be focusing on more traditional SEO with my Shotgun / Sniper approach to SEO.

In the meantime, I will try to recover from recent OMS adventures which include jumping in the pool in Houston with my cell in my pocket. Not such a good idea if you don’t have your contacts backed up somewhere So if I haven’t called you recently, now you know why..lol. I can’t say enough though how impressed I always am with the people that I have met at these OMS events. Their collective enthusiasm for SEO and all things Internet marketing really motivates me to push my own process past where it already is. I think one of the biggest things about these events that make them so worthwhile is leveraging the collective enthusiasm of the group to energize your own passion. And of coarse, a free dinner courtesy of Aaron is always a welcome change from my own cooking or lack thereof

To everyone who I had a chance to meet last week, it was a pleasure. To the wonderful group of people I had a chance to have dinner with in both Houston and San Jose, thanks for an outstanding and entertaining evening of conversation and laughs. Hope to see everyone in Denver next week. Until then, keeping your SEO rockin!

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SEO Videos from OMS – Internal and External Link Building Strategies

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:57:00 +0000

Hello again everyone. Sorry I have been MIA this week, although I did do a guest blog over at the OMS site about the 4 most common way that marketers squander resources for SEO. But I have been incredibly busy with client work, developing new internal processes for the SEO team, and putting together my OMS presentation for next Tuesday in Houston. I am happy to say that my band has been selected for Hyperfest 2008 in New Mexico which is very exciting for us, but the planning of that event is cutting into my free time (think blog time..lol). So that’s my long winded apology for taking so long to get these new link strategy videos up.

Obviously these videos are not comprehensive guides to linking but I think there is a lot of solid advice on the subject of both internal and external links that you hopefully will gleam a couple SEO tips from. Let me know what you think!

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** Just posted the next two SEO videos from this presentation on Wed, July 9th, 2008..

With the Online Marketing Summit’s regional tour on the horizon, I thought it would be a good time to give everyone a taste of the kind of material that is presented at OMS. So I contacted the always helpful OMS marketing team and got their permission to release some video footage of my presentation here in San Diego last February. The presentation was entitled “SEO: Unveiling the Black Box – Everything You Want to Know that an SEO Wont Tell You”. Now before all you fellow SEO’s think I’ve been sniffin a little too much glue on the side, I didn’t come up with the title. *lol* So I will give you a more accurate title of the presentation: “Good SEO Practices for an Ongoing SEO Campaign”. In other words, this presentation centers around the kinds of activities you want to be doing once the initial optimization of the site has been completed.

The first two videos I am releasing for this presentation are focused on how to effectively use Google Webmaster Tools to augment an existing SEO campaign. I basically go over each section of Google’s Webmaster tools and how to use the information provided there to enhance your overall SEO performance. Keep in mind that this presentation was done in February of 2008, so there may be some slight variations in what is displayed now. Please let me know what you think of the videos. I will be posted the rest of the hour long presentation here soon. Have a great week!

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OMS Was Fun!

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:38:00 +0000

Well now that things have finally settled down a little here in San Diego because OMS is over, I am getting an opportunity to put my thoughts together about this amazing conference. And when I say amazing, I am not referring to the number of excellent speakers and the vast amount of online marketing information that was presented (although to be sure there was an abundance of both). I am referring to the number of incredible people I had an opportunity to speak with who are involved with all kinds of fascinating projects and Web sites. And it was a lot of fun to encounter so many of them who were so interested in SEO. And the OMS team did a great job of making sure everyone had a good time (some people had too good of a time..hahahaha. Don’t worry Michael, no one saw anything ).

And that’s one of the best things about doing SEO for a living is the number of varied projects I get to look at. From traditional powerhouses like Sony PlayStation, Sybase and Black and Decker Hardware and Home Improvement to the very niche focused like World’s Finest Clothing or TheGoldenOpportunity.biz, the SEO challenges of the OMS community run the gambit of possibilities. And that’s what fun, because SEO is the creative application of best practices to a wide variety of situations. It never gets old because there are always new challenges. And new people. And that’s what else is cool about SEO. It’s not just about Meta tags and redirects and site maps and all the other little details of execution. But it’s about the relationships you make with people and your ability to help other people achieve their goals, and in some cases, succeed in business. And that really is what I love the most about SEO. Of course the fact that it pays my bills is motivating as well…lol, but really the sense of satisfaction that you get from helping people is why I enjoy coming to work everyday. And it’s what I love about OMS.

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SEO Secrets – Catfish Podcast

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:15:00 +0000

As promised, here is the Podcast from my interview with Cindy at EmarketingTalkShow.com. I talk about maximizing internal linking metrics, creating good Meta data and the importance of great content for SEO. I hope everyone enjoys it. Now I have to get my stuff together for my speaking engagement OMS in two weeks. Hope to see you there!

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It’s Thursday

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 23:53:00 +0000

I am taking a small break from doing SEO to blog. Just wanted to mention that I will be appearing soon on www.emarketingtalkshow.com . I will post more details soon. OK, enough blogging for today, I have to get my OMS presentation going. Have a great day.

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It’s No Fun Being Sick

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:04:00 +0000

Being sick is the worst. I’ll leave it that…lol. Having a sick Web site (a Web site without valid HTML code) is not such a good thing either. However, it probably isn’t affecting your search rankings. In this post, Google Super Spam Fighter Matt Cutts confirms what many of us have believed for a long time, that Google doesn’t penalize sites for invalid code. However, that isn’t an excuse not to write valid code, lol. It just means it doesn’t have that much potential to affect your search listings.

In other search news, the Online Marketing Summit is coming soon and I will be speaking there about various SEO themes. OMS was a great conference last year and I anticipate it will be even better this year (how can San Diego in February be bad?).

Also, if anyone is wondering about the power of links in Google, they need only do a search for “3 ring binders”. The number 2 ranking site is http://www.3ringbinder.com/ . Now the reason its noteworthy is because if you look at the cache for the site, there is no content! Now obviously, if you look at the page itself, there is some actual content available to the end user and I am certainly not saying that this site doesn’t deserve its ranking. I have never used their services..lol. But Google sees NO content on their homepage. And yet they are ranked #2 for a word that should be somewhat competitive given the propensity for that word to result in sales of 3 ring binders. So, it should be noted that this also illustrates the advantages of having a keyword focused domain name. The majority of Web masters use URLs and not keyword focused text links to link to Web pages. Therefore, having your keywords in your URL automatically means that most of your links will be keyword focused, thereby giving you an advantage over your competitors who do not. This doesn’t justify changing a domain name in most cases, but it certainly adds to the merit of choosing a domain name that is keyword focused in the initial stages of a Web site.

That’s all for today. I am going home to rest.

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BusinessOnLine SEO Blog - Search Engine Marketing techniques for 3rd generation SEO» OMS

Online Marketing Summit (OMS) 2009 Conference Recap

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