Episode 2: SEO and SEM Strategies with Bill Strum

For this episode, we invited Bill Strum, an #SEO expert who shares his budget tips and tricks and what most #non-profits are doing wrong online. Bill consults with organizations to drive engagement on their websites utilizing a variety of SEO/SEM strategies. He has had a long and storied career in technology. In an earlier life he was VP of Advanced Products and Tools for America Online, responsible for strategic alliances within the Internet. Prior to that, he was the founder and President of Media Cybernetics, a company that pioneered desktop image processing and the popular “Halo” imaging tools. He received an Emmy Award in 1980, for “Broadcast Engineering”, for pioneering closed-captioning technology. #4CastPodcast

Resources:

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results – often referred to as “natural,” “organic,” or “earned” results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search,video search, academic search,[1] news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.

What is SEM?

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) through optimization and advertising.[1] SEM may use search engine optimization (SEO), which adjusts or rewrites website content to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages, or use pay per click (PPC) listings.[2]

SEO Tools and Tips

Google Trends – Great tool for figuring out trending keywords for your content.

Yahoo Directory – Pay a couple hundred bucks and get a huge initial bump in ranking.

Link Assistant Suite – Slightly expensive website optimization software. One of the industry standard tools for serious users

Yoast – SEO plugin for WordPress. Highly recommended. A great checklist for SEO best practices.