So I’m at PubCon in Vegas this week, which I’m really excited for. This is my first conference, so I’m not entirely sure how this all works, but hopefully I’ll be able to pick up some good information and do a little networking.

I’ll try to post about some of the stuff I’m learning on this blog, so expect to see daily posts for the next few days.

Update: I think I’m only going to blog the stuff that I thought was of particular interest, meaning that some speakers won’t get a mention. Sorry.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to approach SEO mentally, and thus far, I’m pretty much equating it with my experience with keyword-based cpc advertising.

When I’m working in AdWords doing SEM, the mantra I’ve come to revere has been “think like the customer.” If you can learn how to put yourself in the shoes of someone searching for your product/service/information, selecting the proper keywords to bid on and writing the proper ad copy comes a lot more naturally, and the ads generally perform much better.

Thinking like the customer takes a little work, however. You need to identify the demographics of the individuals that are interested in your product/service/information (PSI from now on, for your sake and mine). Are you trying to sell to teens? The elderly? Men? Women? The type of person you’re advertising to matters, particularly when it comes to the type of copy you’re going to write.

Once you have a basic understanding of who your customer is, you can then think about the potential search terms your customers are going to use to find your PSI (stuff, from now on. PSI is a little lame). If your product has fairly good brand recognition, then name-type terms are going to be very valuable. On the other hand, if your product is new, or you are trying to create a niche, you’ll do a lot better selecting descriptive keywords that detail problems that your stuff solves or things that your stuff improves. For example, if you created a tool that makes your internet faster (pretending that no such tool exists) then you would bid on terms like “speed internet up” or “faster internet.”

Generally, the most valuable terms will have the most competition, which means higher bids. Thus, tools like the Overture Bid Tool are invaluable, because they let you see the top bids for the keyword you select. This high-bid, high-value rule isn’t always true, however, so I’ve learned not to be shy about putting keywords up that have no bidding whatsoever. You never know if there is virgin keyword territory that is yet untapped.

Now on to my point. It seems that SEO is much the same way. You figure out who your page is meant for. You figure out what keywords are going to draw those people in. Is your service revolutionary, and therefore niche-creating? Or is it about something more established, like insurance? Using these keywords, you then create content geared towards your target demographic (your site should look very different depending on whether it’s meant for senior citizen shuffleboard players or teenagers looking for snowboard tricks).

You should also prioritize which keywords are the most relevant to your site, and because those are the keywords that are most likely to have a lot of competition, you will have to work harder on link building using those keywords. Consider your time linkbuilding to be like money in keyword bidding. Generally, the better keywords cost more. Hey, time is money, right?

I’m still getting the details sorted out, but this is the best way I can make sense of things using my previous experience. Any other ideas that I might be missing?

Ok, so JazzcatSEO was actually indexed by Yahoo! and MSN a few days ago, but today is the first time I’ve seen this site show up in a Google search, and in the end, isn’t that the most important thing?

In other news, I was listening to SEO Rockstars on WebmasterRadio.fm, and Greg Boser mentioned how he has some domains that are just parked and not currently under development. He made an offhand comment about having content and links on those pages so that they could start to develop some link age and trust, despite their stagnant status. His idea was to use an API to put comment on the page, but I figure an ambitious webmaster could take a minute and throw up some unique content, add a couple of links to web properties that need some extra link-lovin’, get some Adsense up, and let it sit until they have time to work on it. At least this way, you get indexed, you start to develop some trust, and if things go really well, you might even make a few bucks off of Adsense on the parked domain.

I took this to heart, and after throwing up some WordPress and Joomla installs on a bunch of new sites that I’m not currently working on, I did some limited interlinking between all the new sites, so if all goes as planned, by the time I’m ready to start development on these sites, they’ll already have some good links and a decent Pagerank. Now I just need to put up som content, rank it, and monetize the traffic. Easy business, right?

There’s a thread currently on the Digital Point forum talking about picking up SEO experience by doing pro bono work for charities and other nonprofits. This seems like a really great idea for several reasons.

The first reason is that you get to deal with people who are most likely just thankful for the help. While this isn’t necessarily universal, odds are that the nonprofit will be somewhat less demanding therefore less stressful to cut your teeth with.

Working with nonprofits, you’ll most likely be working in slightly less competetive spaces (unless you want to start spammin’ and jammin’ on PPC from the get-go). This gives you the chance to sharpen your skills before you start playing with the big boys.

You can write off your time on your taxes as a charitable donation!

Also, as Ammon Johns pointed out, this is a great networking opportunity. You’ll have the chance to meet and work with people of a caliber that you otherwise would never have been able to meet. You’ll get your name out, and you may even pick up some other jobs as a result!

Charities can be a great reference, or at very least, they can throw you a good link (thanks, mcanerin).

Finally, you get the satisfaction of helping someone out that really needed you. And that’s something that money can’t buy.

Coming Soon: Ideas for Approaching Nonprofits

I had a paradigm shift in the way I understand SEO. Previous to posting on the forums and emailing a few expert SEOs, I viewed SEO as a largely technical profession, despite my feelings about the creative possibilities of the field. However, after hearing from my elders and betters, I have to admit that SEO is a much broader and more inclusive discipline than I had previously believed. So let me share my understanding of the field at this point.

SEO is actually a very wide-ranging and inclusive field with plenty of room for specialization. And depending on the specialization you choose, you’ll have need of different skills. That said, there were a few universalities that seemed to come out across the board. The first universality was the SEO is not merely web programming. Rather, it is marketing, and therefore a solid understanding of people and marketing tactics is essential to being a successful SEO. A couple of resources that were suggested to me were Malcolm Galdwell’s Tipping Point and Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

Another essential skill is risk management. Regardless of what kind of SEO you practice, you need to have a good idea of what will happen when you tweak a page or start a new linking strategy. You don’t want to kick your, or more particularly, your client’s page out of the index.

One skill that was also mentioned, that I actually felt halfway competent at, was writing and content creation. I’ve heard that “content is king” but never has it been so firmly impressed upon me. I’ll never doubt again.

I did get several responses about which technical skills were the most useful (which is what I was driving at initially, although I don’t think I would trade the digression for anything). The general consensus was as follows, in order of importance:

1. HTML
2. Design and CSS
3. Programming (PHP, Perl, Linux, Apache, etc)

Ultimately, my conclusion is that SEO is a holistic discipline in which most or all of these skills are required in order to be truly top-tier. And it just occurred to me that I should turn this into a top ten list. Look for it…

Thanks to Stuntdubl, Graywolf, Black Knight, SEOTutor, and everyone else that chimed in. I look forward to picking your brains to a further extent in the future.