Return on Intention

Yesterday (July 2, 2009) I saw Chris Kenworthy give a presentation on SEO (search engine optimization) at Webuquerque. It was a great presentation and Chris really knows what hes talking about, but it prompted me to share a few tools that anyone can use to take care of the low hanging fruit of on-site SEO themselves.

1. Website Grader – This is a tool form hubspot that will go through your site and identify the seo problems you have. If you’re missing meta tags or headers the website grader will tell  you so you what to focus on.
2. W3C Validator – This tool is not really intended for SEO, but rather to validate your markup (the code that makes your site show up). This tool, like Website Grader only requires you to put in a url and it will chech it out and return a report. This can be helpful for on-site SEO, because if your site has bad markup, then the search engines might have a hard time reading it.

These tools will not get you the results that an SEO, or better yet an SEM (search engine marketing) professional can get you, but it will take care of the easy stuff you can do yourself to increase your search rankings.

Yesterday (Wednesday January 21st) I attended the first official meeting of Webuquerque, the web focused section of the New Mexico Adobe Users Group. I have been scheduled to speak to this group in November on Marketing, but this time around there was no presentation, just a chance to get together, see the group and meet the other presenters. It was a great night for several reasons:

1. I won a door prize (a book on Adobe Air for Javascript Developers)
2. I got to see some people haven’t seen in a while and meet a few news ones
3. I had some really good conversations with other web folks about web stuff

I usually attend other get togethers, like the Albuquerque Web Geeks Meet-ups, but often people go there to get away from their work, not talk more about it. There seemed to be many people at the Webuquerque group that we’re waiting for a group that not only accepted, but encouraged shop-talk. I am one of them, and I think this group will work out very nicely. 

If you are interested and around town when the events occur (every 1st Wednesday) stop by and say hi. I promise I will get more sleep before the next meeting.