Last week Siteworx hosted, “Fundamentals of Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Take Two,” covering the basics of SEO as well as key best practices for managing effective SEO programs.  Typically a more formal presentation, this month’s webinar takes on a more time-friendly format intended to boil things down into relevant chunks of wisdom you can walk away with and start using right away. The aptly named segment, “30-minutes with SEO Practice Manager Gregg Wyland,” teaches attendees the key best practices for managing effective SEO programs. A full recording  of the webinar –including the presentation slides - are now available online. Once again we had an excellent Question and Answer segment that we would like to share. Please keep in mind that feedback is always welcome, especially any additional insight you may have to offer. Q: Describe why flat site architecture is typically more advantageous for search engine rankings than deep site architecture. A: In search engine rankings, flat-site architecture is more advantageous than deep-site architecture from an indexing standpoint. The more clicks needed to get to a piece of content, the deeper it is. If you have to go through eight clicks to get to your final destination we would classify that as fairly deep. The search engine only crawls your site for a limited amount of time and may or may not get to the deeper links even if they’re on a sitemap .xml file. Make sure you keep your architecture fairly flat to help from that indexing standpoint, which will in turn help from a ranking standpoint. Q: What tools does Google have from a competitors view? A: From a competitive standpoint, Google’s keyword tools are very good. However, their keyword tool leans toward search engine marketing. It tells you how much competition there is for a particular keyword. If you look at it from a keyword standpoint, you’re going to know if there is a heavy amount of traffic brought in by that particular word and if a ton of people are going to bid on that word. Ideally you’re looking for key words that drive a lot of traffic but that a lot of people aren’t bidding on. Q: How do you get started on an SEO program without a budget? A: Everybody gets started one way or another and a budget isn’t available most of the time. Try starting with a single page. Optimize that particular page and point a link to it, preferably from your homepage. Gather some traffic doing that and monitor the results. Work to improve the results. For example, if your page ranks on page six of search results for your targeted key words, see if you can move it up higher on that page or even to page five - just to get your program off the ground and and to learn how SEO works. This should give you sufficient experience to progress and move along. Q: How can social networks like Facebook and Twitter be used with regard to SEO? A: Almost everyone has Facebook and Twitter. Everyone talks about them and a large number of websites have included a “like” button on their content pages. Coming from a linking and branding standpoint, you can increase the links if you post a lot of content to your company’s Facebook page that can link back to your site.  It can help from a linking standpoint and will help generate traffic to your site, increase the amount of readers and improve your brand as well. Q: Is meta tagging still relevant or is it simply impossible to compete cheaply against companies who can buy results? A: Adding keywords to the Meta tag field is basically ignored by major search engines – Google has said it is in their algorithm but so low it is ignored. The Meta description is something that often appears in Google search results to describe your link. It doesn’t affect your ranking but may affect how someone views your result. If users see keywords from their searches that are bolded, they are more likely to click on that result. Thus, meta tagging is still relevant to a point. In terms of competing in a cheap manner, nothing is free – not even SEO. If you look at the right hand bar on a Google search page you can see the paid search engine marketing (SEM) results. From an organic standpoint, everyone is competing on the same level. The only game-changer is the amount of time they put into their particular website. Our next live web event will take place on August 19 @ 1 p.m. ET – “SEO and URL Management: The ‘What and How’ of Website URLs.” Registration is free and submission of questions is always encouraged! Enjoy the full presentation – “Fundamentals of Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Take Two”