I had the pleasure of attending one of Vancouver’s most intimate SEO events this past Tuesday night. Held in a comfortable room at Ceili’s Irish Pub downtown, about 60 Meetup members and non-members gathered to hear the SEO critique of 10 user-submitted websites. Four local SEO’s offered their insight into potential problems with randomly selected websites drawn from a box, lottery-style.
This was an extremely effective way for regular folk to get professional input into how they can better their websites and gain more ground within search engine results pages. Each of the four SEO’s took a crack at deconstructing each website in order to locate search engine hindrances that would influence rankings. One recurring point that affected each of the 10 submitted websites was a lack of a 301 redirect from a non-www domain to the www domain, which ensures search engines only crawl and index one website containing your unique content. Not having a 301 permanent redirect allows the engines to list both your non-www and www as separate websites with the same content that can be viewed as duplicate, harming your rankings.
Although the critique was sporadic and a little difficult to follow, if you’ve taken shorthand lessons in the past, you undoubtedly walked away with several pages of very useful information. Some points like the 301 redirect were made clear through their repetitive use, but if you’re not somewhat seasoned in the skills of search engine optimization, you may have walked away from this one a little confused.
A Q&A period after the presentation allowed some webmasters to gain a better understanding as to what was mentioned through the website critiques, allowing the rest of the room to jot down a few more notes. The room was a good mix of web designers, online business owners, webmasters and Internet marketers where networking post the Q&A actually netted some business.
The overall experience was positive and this SEO will be attending further Meetups. I highly suggest this type of get-together for both webmasters looking for SEO insight to search engine marketers looking to drum up more business.
For more information on upcoming events, head to Meetup
Hope to see you there!
