SEO Training at ActiveRain University

If you're blogging on ActiveRain as part of a strategy to benefit from SEO (search engine optimization), one of the most imortant resources you can access is Bob Stewart's SEO webinar at ActiveRain University.

Last March, Mary & I hired a company to build a new website for us - actually a sub-domain of our existing website - that included indexable IDX property search, 31 pre-defined neighborhood and  feature searches, and good keyword structure. It came with almost all the bells and whistles - except for one major item: backlinks. And our website company was brutally honest with us - they told us that unless we did our part - providing good backlinks - we would basically be wasting our time and money.

Backlinks are simple, but critical. They are links from other locations to your website, and how they are structured and where they are coming from is vital to obtaining good search results - i.e. being noticed by Google. Our company made some suggestions and provided some guidance on how to do backlinks, but since I hadn't started blogging yet, it was a bit vague to me. They did, however, make one awesome suggestion - they pointed me to ActiveRain as one of the best places to start blogging. They said it was an ideal place for backlinks to come from - a huge, authoritative site with everything Google loved.

So I joined and started blogging (which is compressing a very long story into very few words). Then I discovered ARU and saw that they were running frequent webinars, one of which was on SEO, so I signed up. The timing was good - I had done a few posts, put in some links to my website, and was a bit familiar with the mechanics.

But Bob, master of SEO and a great educator, guide and explainer, took me to a much higher level. He demonstrated to us the right structure for links, and explained how they needed to work with keywords and be connected to the right content. It was an information-packed hour, presented in an entirely logical fashion. I came away with a roadmap of how to make my website work the way it was intended to, and a much better understanding of what I should be writing about.

Bob and ARU provided the missing pieces of the puzzle, and once I started doing things the right way, the results were immediately noticeable - there we were on page 1!

ARU is still running the SEO webinars - currently a couple of times a week. You can find the schedule here. And they are also available as video tutorials if your schedule doesn't work for the webinars. Check this class out - it could very well wind up as one of the most productive hours that you've spent here on ActiveRain.

Mary & Dick Greenberg Coldwell Banker - Fort Collins 702-A W. Drake Rd. Fort Collins, CO 80526 970-689-4663 www.maryanddick.com