Catfish is an SEO expert–if you read his own blog or the posts he’s done on this site, then you’ll be familiar with his wisdom. Needless to say, his session on long-tail keywords (short phrases that are very specific to your brand or product) was packed with people hoping to learn a little something extra about SEO.

Catfish broke his presentation into various “tactics,” each of which is an important part of a brand’s overall strategy for optimizing their ranking in search.

Tactic: Page Titles

With this tactic, Catfish emphasized the importance of using titles to their best effect, which really means striking the right balance between creating titles and phrases that will be read by search engines, and those that can–and will–be read by real people. There’s not much point in packing key phrases into your titles if this means creating titles that really only confuse and turn off your audience. So the key take-away: make sure you can reconcile user experience with keywords. Oh, and Google and Yahoo! don’t read your text the same way–who knew?

Tactic: Content Optimization

In short, the more content, the better your ranking. You can create the coolest site in the world, but if there’s not much text for search engines to read, you’re never going to make any real changes in your SEO. Content, content, content: more chances for you to talk about your expertise, your brand, and to get your keywords out there. Look for content opportunities wherever you can on your site.

Tactic: ALT Tags

They help with SEO and accentuate accessibility. Be sure to make each a sentence or a phrase, not just a single keyword.

Tactic: Internal Linking

Catfish emphasized the importance of creating a coherent system for internal linking. A great resource? The Crosslinker plug-in in WordPress, which allows you to create an automatic linking system for keywords.

Tactic: Blogging

This is one of the most effective forms of SEO. So that blog isn’t just filling space–it’s giving you a reliable means for making your site relevant to recent news and events, and for regularly creating new links. Plus, no need to get an IT person involved in creating content or links: just get the big content producers in your company involved and you’re off…

Tactic: Video Optimization

Who knew that 20-25% of all Google searches end up on YouTube? Catfish…

Not only do people clearly love video, but it turns out that YouTube pages also rank really well. Catfish pointed us to a video aggregation site Tubemogul.com (thanks to Jenny Lemmons for passing along the right name!) and Vimeo as great resources for making the most of video.

Tactic: Image Optimization

Images are readable in universal search, so they can definitely help in raising you in the search engine ranks.

Tactic: Squidoo

This site lets you create educational pages and communities on any topic, so if you’re a dog food company (Catfish’s example), you can create a page on dog health and nutrition, and then use your community to link back to your site.

Tactic: PDFs

Don’t waste all that valuable content contained in your PDFs; instead, convert them to HTML so that your keywords can be read. Even if you leave your PDFs in their original form, take advantage of embedded links–your PDF may end up divorced from your site, but links can take people back.

Tactic: User-Generated Content

A good forum (good was the optimal word, but it seems the advice on getting one of these needed to be saved for another whole session) is the best way to generate user content. These offer tons of opportunities for you to link back to your site’s content. According to Catfish, it is 100% worth it to develop the systems to get “a living, breathing community on your site.”

Okay, I think that’s the bulk of it–this session was information packed, so my apologies to Catfish for anything and everything I missed!