McFilter

Sharon Housley runs Notepage. Dave Collins runs Shareware Promotions and also writes a blog.

Update: Dave has posted his notes on his presentation on his website.

Sharon Housley's Presentation

Over 100 factors affect google ranking

Read Matt Cutts. He's a Google guru with a blog.

Things to do to improve your website's search-engine-friendliness:

• Use the title and description fields
• Use H1 and H2 for keywords
• Use keywords in URLs
• Keep hierarchy fairly flat

• The physical location of your hosting can help the ranking for that country (and likewise can hinder it for others)

• Content
• Blog
• Whatever gets links
• although... growth over time is good.
• try to avoid circular links

• Press releases - both through PRWeb and in your RSS feed
• digg, delicious, etc.
• The keyword long tail: pick a number of small specific phrases, rather than the big keywords
• Forums are good as your users will use terms you wouldn't have thought of
• Keyword tools are useful. Use them on your competitors sites too to get more ideas

Dave Collins' Presentation

There's no silver bullet to SEO. It's not just content. It's not just links

Your rank could fall became of:

• nothing you did
• nothing your competition did
• Google tweaking

A link from a PR9 site could cost $200/month.

• Don't link indiscriminately
• Create a site people wait to link to

Most search engines ignore META tags, but as they're easy to add then why not include them?

The description tag useful for Google results page - if present, Google will use the text in the excerpt from the page that it displays in the results.

Blogs are excellent, but you must keep them updated.

Finally, in your URLs, using '-' is better than '_'. Sounds a bit strange to me, but both Dave and Sharon said they'd tested it and it's true.