I am no SEO expert, no marketing expert, and no blogging expert but I do have expertise in all of these categories. In my travels around the SF Bay Area I attend upwards of 10 networking meetings or keynote events per month.
The hot new topic is Web 2.0 SEO aka How to drive traffic to your site.
Unfortunately time and time again when I do my due diligence on the speaker's background, their substance factor, and how their blog or websites rank I have recently been surprised by the results. Many speakers are knowingly misrepresenting themselves in regard to their credentials. Often times these speakers are leveraging their business accomplishments in other categories, unrelated to SEO or Web 2.0, as a means to securing these speaking "gigs."
Cost
Simply put the average networking event keynote speech here in the Bay Area runs anywhere from $30-$65 per event. That adds up quickly and is of great concern when I am choosing events to attend
3 Key Factors To Check
When an "expert" claims they are going to speak about methods to increase your site's traffic, Google rankings, and add links to your site you MUST perform some background checking if you want to understand if the speaker can deliver on his/her claims
#1 Alexa.com: Alexa.com (free service) remains one of the easiest, most telling sites in measuring traffic (page views and unique visitors) to a site either website or blog. Go to Alexa and input the url of your "expert's site" for instant rankings. Alexa will return Global traffic, US rankings, and a mix of page view and unique visitor numbers.
Note: If an expert claims to be able to make your traffic "explode" then they better have an Alexa ranking of UNDER 1,000,000 at the very least.
Note 2: Alexa like any other measurement tool can not capture all web traffic. It is best to combine other traffic measurement tools with Alexa for a solid idea of a site's traffic. Try Quantcast too
In my last two due diligence investigations on SEO "expert" speakers the first one came back with an Alexa ranking of over 19million which equates to about 10-20 visitors per day to their site. The second guy had a ranking in the 6million range which might provide 30 visitors per day
#2 Technorati: Links are considered the measurement of a site's Google authority and a big part of the SEO formula. If you go to technorati.com (free tool) you can input the url and check on the number of hyper links which are coming into your "experts" site. If your expert has fewer than 10 links and they are old--he probably isn't writing a worthwhile blog or he is not writing with consistency
#3 Evaluate their site: Do they write a blog? How often do they write per week? What is the date of the last blog post? Do they have a blogroll? Do they have widgets like mybloglog directory on their sidebar? Does the platform look dated? Do you like the way their sites looks?
Hits Myth
If your "expert" begins to speak about "hits" you might just want to bail. The term hits, although that is the only traffic measurement widget offered on wordpress blogs, is out dated and misleading. Hits can refer to any visitor who arrives at your site, clicks on any pictures, articles, or other documents. Each item is tallied as a hit.
You want to understand how many page views your expert's blog-website receives; how many UNIQUE visitors, and their over all traffic ranking
Remember
If the "expert's" site does not measure up in these 3 critical ways then how can the expert teach others how to increase their traffic and SEO power?
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