Thanks!
SEO is comprised of two things: original, relevant, fresh content and strategies to make that content visible. Your content is the most important thing -period-. The SEO "strategies" are tools to help Google understand your content. If your content isn't good, it doesn't even matter what else you do.
which is an ok plan, i suppose.
/not a SEO expert but plays one on tv
We have a news section on the site, as I decided to treat our facebook fan page (havent published yet) as our blog since I think the big problem with fan pages is that they dont have ongoing content. But realizing the need for content on the site, I thought a 'news' section would suffice. These same news articles I was thinking of publishing using PR web (or something like it), as I had come to understand that it could help your SEO.
I suppose its worth mentioning that I don't event know if that's a great use of our money since we operate in the ticket domain so to imporve our ceo we would be competing with the mega-sites who crush us in resources. So thinking of that way, maybe its worth more my time to spend the money on advertising?
I agree with the others, with reservations: the thing to remember about SEO is that the results compound; if you bring in 20% more visitors with your off-site marketing, and you get 20% higher conversions with your on-site redesign, that's 44% more customers. If you're going to do a PR, make sure you have a blog for your new visitors to read, too.
(Incidentally, I work at a company that does SEO, including press releases. Email address is in the profile).
To my limited understanding they would and if that's the case, then is having a news section itself an SEO strategy?
One problem with a news section is that you can't do one if you aren't generating news. Your blog can be trivial, but your news section needs to have higher standards.
Additionally - I'd mess with the title tags to be more descriptive/targeted like for the home page "Buy & Sell Tickets Online - TicketTrunk" or for the events page "Tickets for events in Ontario" (same with search result pages)
Lastly, multiple press releases being released one after the other (in my opinion - I don't know for sure) will likely be picked up/flagged as trying to game Google & will have a negative effect.
I try to space mine out for important things like launch, system improvements, milestones & event sponsorship.
with that said - I recommend ereleases.com very good syndication (onto high quality sites like Forbes, etc)
Valid point about the search box and recommended events. As you see, we do exactly that on the "buy tickets" page and the reason why we didn't do that on the name page as one of our goals was to be as intuitive and non-cluttered as possible. So we were very particular about where we spaced things, in case you were curious why.
Re: Title tags, great point.
And valid points about the press releases. Part of my marketing strategy has been giving away free events to NGos, charities, etc. (and not to mention, it helps us really put our money where our mouth is in terms of being the opposite of Ticketmaster) so I thought I could do a press release for each time I did this. Now at the rate I'm doing this, it would happen about twice a week however the LAST thing I want to be is a spammer so spacing it out for larger announcements makes sense from this perspective.
thanks!
But as far as SEO goes - do you have a blog or any original content? That's a good place to start. Also, here's a great cheat sheet:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-shee...
