Baltimore Affiliate Summit Meetup
Last night was the first (of hopefully many to come) Affiliate Summit Meetups. Shawn Collins set this up to be a great way for local affiliates to get in touch with one another, meet each other, and find out more about the industry from other’s eyes. At least that’s how I see it…
So onto last night’s recap from my eyes. For those of you that don’t know who “Admin” on this site is, I’m Robert Adler. The main reason that I bring that up is because I don’t feel like describing the next few paragraphs as “Rob Adler presented about…”. So before I even get into it, I just wanted to get that out of the way.
Last night started out well. My business partner and I (our company site) arrived at the buy.at office at about 5 or so PM, which was an hour early. So we just relaxed, took advantage of their extremely comfy couches, and talked some strategy with Amy and Kim. Within the first 30 minutes I knew the meetup would be a success, mainly because I now have 2 more vendors to promote – and one of them being for a niche that I’ve been wanting to re-enter for a while (for those that know me: I’m coming for you Fortune 500′s… No trademarks in the domain this time). So after that as people started to roll in from all over. We had one of my friends from Harrisburg PA drive down for the meetup, as well as others from all over Maryland. So let’s get into it.
I gave a presentation that was entitled “SEO 101″. It stayed with the “101″ about 20 minutes before people started asking more advanced questions, and then went into a full blown Q&A. I tried my best to cover the basic as well as the more advanced, I just wish I had more time to go into the more advanced tactics (but I actually doubled my time anyway, 1 hour presentation in the alloted 30 minutes – oops). So just to recap some of the more basic (and I do mean basic) tips/tricks I went over:
- Title Tags
- H1 Tags
- H2 Tags
- Meta Descriptions
- Meta Keywords (with the one small curve-ball tip: obey)
- Keeping your keyword density at a decent level, and not to over-optimize
Then after that a few questions came in regarding situational optimization – as in their own sites and needed help/an example. One of the best questions I’ve gotten in a while was from Sid from the Webmechanix Maryland SEO Company. His original question was how to structure multiple categories within a site to optimize the juice flow from root-page links. I took it one step further to explain how to limit a penalty (if you should get one) to a section of your site rather than site-wide. Here’s basically how I explained it:
- Use a tree structure. Root to categories, categories to sub-categories, sub-categories to products, etc.
- Never link from products in one category to products in another, keep the “branch” isolated off.
- Always link from the tips of the branches (product pages) up to the sub-categoeis with the optimized anchors, and from sub-categories to the categories.
- Other tips & tricks that I won’t put on here (You had to be there. Come next time!) that helps really limit penalties as well as optimizes link juice flow for ranking bonuses.
There are some other tips and tricks that I won’t list here and will be remembered as the “exclusive” for the people that attended. Not that I don’t want the traffic for throwing out some nice tips to have you share this page with friends, but some things have to be kept exclusive to encourage going to the meetups. There are meetups in 48 49 states now, so I’m sure there’s one near you (unless you’re outside of the USA … in which, sorry 
)
Here’s a link to the pictures that were taken by the buy.at crew.
After the “presentation” (see: Rob Adler ranting and rambling about SEO) we went over to the Sly Fox Pub in Federal Hill for some drinks/food/chatter. That ended up well and we left around 10:00-10:30ish. I don’t regret a second of it. I hope some of the attendees can say I taught them something, as well as I know we walked away with some leads and I know it’ll result in money in my pocket. Bottom line: the Affiliate Summit Meetups are a necessity for all internet marketers. Period.
Hey, Rob. Great job last night. Good talk.
Yes, All-in-One SEO is no longer supported. I would recommend Platinum SEO plug-in for making teh moniez.
http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/all-in-one-seo-pack-plugin-for-wordpress-no-longer-supported-or-maintained.html
Sounds like you had a great discussion – I need to make it out to one of the B’more meetups.
Yeah I’m going to definitely look into that and will probably convert to it sometime soon, but thanks for following up – helps! Talk to you soon brotherman.
@Shawn – Definitely! It’s be a blast to actually see you locally instead of in 5 different states.
Looks like it was a great event! Thanks for the post and glad that you’re involved! Let’s make next month’s meetup day even better!
@Jim – It was a blast. Can’t wait for the next one, we even talked about holding smaller weekly events kind of like boot-camps or joint projects. We’re going to try that baby out and see how she goes.
Next month will DEFINITELY be bigger, it has to be. Thanks for the support and comment!
Rob, I heard really good things about last night.. both Yanni and Sid came in raving about your level of SEO mastery – very cool man.
Not to mention: the post above is pretty money, especially the part about organizing internal linking with categories and the whole tree structure approach.. were you a compsci major? Just wondering ;0
Lastly – thanks for the link to WebMechanix! – mind changing the link title to “Maryland SEO Company”?
@Arsham – I’m glad that Yanni is acting like he always does, and continues to rave about my perfection. I was an InfoTech major with a minor in Computer Security, so I dream in algorithms.
As for the link, your wish is my command – But I believe in Karma so if we don’t see something back, I’ll change it “#2 Maryland SEO Company”.
Sounds like a great time! I know we had fun at the one in Denver.
FYI – there are at least a few AS meetups now being organized in other countries, so this thing is going global!
@Jeannine – It was a blast. I’m glad it’s going global, it completely deserves to! I’ve already talked to Kim & Amy about some ideas that will set us apart from the rest, I’m really hoping Baltimore keeps growing so we can get the local-industry here revitalized. A lot of people are too standalone here.
Rob,
Thanks for coming and for giving such a thoroughly enjoyable presentation. I look forward to seeing your smiling face at many meetups to come!
Rob, your presentation was great for the mixed (expertise-level) group we had. It certainly helped make the evening a success.
I’m not too bad with SEO (being at this stuff for a dozen years), so I actually did “understand” everything about which you spoke. However, I certainly did not “know” all of your points. I learned some good and new things – and had a bit of a refresher on others. Time went by too quickly. It was also nice to continue our conversations at the “social gathering” at the Sly Fox.
@Kim – I’ll always be there to smile and encourage the night, don’t you worry.
@Bill – I appreciate your feedback & comment, and coming from you that’s a great compliment that I was able to teach you something. We’ll definitely sit down and talk about some stuff in the future, I’d love to show you under the hood of a few of my properties and give you a little more detail about the depth. I think you’ll find it interesting.
@Chris Monty
That post about All-In-One SEO being discontinued and unsupported is from 2008 man. It was picked up by another developer and has been regularly updated since then with the most recent update published on February 9th. It works perfectly fine.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/