Search Engine Placement 101

Search Engine Optimization(SEO)/Placement is as important to you and your business as air is to breathe. Much like air, you use it, thrive on it and live your life based upon it but may not fully understand it or even think about it. Not knowing about SEO can cause countless and endless damage to your business. Search engines consider bad SEO as society considers a bad reputation. The more bad SEO you do to your site or domain, the longer it will take to repair the damage.

Almost all SEO firms and SEO placement specialists are fraudulent. Some deliver these fancy reports to you, complete with screenshots of what you’re doing wrong and how they will fix it but nine times out of ten they just change the domain and send it to you. Not to mention the things they are telling you they will fix and the things you need to focus on are all bullcrap. While some of them may have something to do with your SEO standings, they aren’t the keys to SEO success. These firms are trying to deliver these easy to fix items to take your money and run. In other words, meta-tags are not the keys to SEO. If an SEO specialists comes to you claiming they can get you top placement and focus on meta-tags, they’re fraudulent. No one can guarantee you placement. If someone does, they are lying.

There is no magic bullet for SEO. It is a life-time of work. It does get easier after you get on top, but it’s not as simple as getting on top and then forgetting about it. It’s just like being the top TV station for viewers. Once you get there you have to constantly keep delivering good programming, resource building etc to remain the top TV station.

With all this said, how do you get on top of the search engines? How do you stay there? Why should you even care? SEO is a very simple concept, though it is a lot of work. The holy grail for SEO professionals is www.seochat.com. They have forums and literally millions of SEO related articles written by today’s top SEO professionals and best of all it’s free. Not learning about SEO and being a ticket broker today is should criminal. You’re hurting your business every day you don’t know about SEO. Even if you don’t want to use SEO yourself, it helps you become a better online ticket broker and also helps you to not get taken advantage of by SEO firms or even employees.

Many ticket brokers ask why they should care. They feel they’ll never be able to compete with the major ticket brokers that are on top today but that’s bullshit. As I said before they’re constantly working to stay there and if you start working SEO practices today, in time you will start appearing for certain keys words in the search engines. I myself, over the past 2 years, have worked the SEO practices have come up on top for key words like “concert tickets” or “new york giants tickets”. My orders have increased ten-fold but I busted my ass to get there. Now that I am there I don’t have to work as hard to SEO to stay there.

SEO is simple. The first thing you want to do is get rid of your plug-in website if you have one. I had an EventInventory ColdFusion plug-in website for 5 years and my SEO hurt the entire time. This goes for TicketNetwork or TicketTechnology plug-ins as well. Why do plug-in websites matter? If you asked this question, let me explain. With a plug-in website, your actual ticket inventory, cart and may other pages on your website link directly back to the provider’s domain name. Not to mention with most plug-in websites, for example EI’s ColdFusion website, all sites look identical except for a few color and logo changes. So when the search engines come and scan your website, they list them as spam/clone websites and over time decrease your site in the search engine standings and I’ve even seen some sites blacklisted (removed from search engines).

So after you get your self a nice XML website on one of the exchanges, you have to start working the following SEO practices.

a. good coding of the website with current W3C standards

b. content, content, content

c. inbound non-reciprocal link building

d. keeping your website up-to-date

a. Good coding: W3C coding standards change over the years and the search engines use their rules to regulate who should score higher. They obviously don’t want to show a website that was programmed in 1992 in the top ten under concert tickets. Also another thing to consider is not using dynamic links. Always use static, even with dynamic websites

(BAD: http://www.myticketwebsite.com/tickets.asp?264:gfhgr?venue?18:3923)

(GOOD: http://www.myticketwebsite.com/bonjovitickets.html)

Besides the fact that search engines want static links, it also allows you to pack some more key words in your URL structure so this really a no-brainer. A good design and layout is also another no-brainer. Obviously when considering how your new website will look, you have to choose something that will be aesthetically pleasing to your customers and spells out BUY FROM ME! No, nos include all black websites, small fonts, large pictures, flash websites, too many links etc.

b. Content: Google is what is known as a content search engine, not the retail search engine. Content is a very time consuming process. If you have in mind just to go to wikipedia or related website and take their content and put it on your website, it would be better if you had no content at all. Google has ways to find out if you stole content with their bots and you will pay. Always write up original, unique content in your won words for your website and make sure you put enough keywords in your paragraphs on each page that you want this page ranked under.

c. Non-reciprocal inbound links: This can be summed up in one word; popularity. If search engines gave their users non popular links, they’d be out of business pretty quick, meaning people would stop using them for their searches. How do they tell which website is popular without using spyware or related junk such as Alexa? Simple, by how many other websites link to your website. The more individual, related websites that link to your website, the higher your website will rank in search engines. Don’t try to be cute here and put 10, 000 links to your website on a single domain you won or try to use all your domain names to link to your website in a spammer method. Search engines look at the IP addresses on these domains and checks to see if these sites that are linking to you actually have content and aren’t just being used as link farms. Search engines also look to see if related sites are linking to your website and these count much higher. If a medical waste website is linking to your Britney Spears ticket page, obviously this won’t count as high as if a Britney Spears fan website is linking to this page. How do you get these websites to link to you? It’s as simple as having a nice website with good images and awesome content. Then these fan sites will WANT to link to you. The worst thing you could do for your business is just have a simple plain-jane, one in a billion ticket broker retail site. No one wants to link to that junk. Of course there are other methods to get people to link to you. You could pay them or go and request them to link to you. But keep in mind reciprocal links, meaning they link to your website but you’re also linking back to their website, doesn’t count as much as they linking to you but you not linking to them.

d. Keep your site up-to-date: If every time you used the search engines to search for something a website that was last updated 1995 came up, would you continue using that search engine? The same goes for a website that hasn’t been updated alll year. This is what search engines specialize in. They can actually tell when your website files were last updated and they keep copies of your website each and every time they come to it and check those against their most recent copy. Not updating your website is sabotaging your SEO chances. This doesn’t mean you ahve to spend more time working on your website than you do buying and selling your tickets. A simple couple hours a week will do wonders for your SEO. Change links on your homepage to the most recent shows, change some images and add some content to a few even pages that didn’t have content before or change some content that was already there.

Now that you know the basics of SEO, don’t stop here. Go to seochat.com and learn more. In this economy, help your business. Wholesale is great but retail is better. Sell more tickets and SEO is how to do it for free. PPC is not, don’t pay for advertisement when you could get it for free.