SEO takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. Google takes time to see the changes in your site. For smaller sites, it may take 30 days for Google to crawl the site.

Work with Google, not against them. Google is 70% of the search traffic (Bing and Yahoo! are 25%). Figure out how their algorhythm is looking at your site with Google Webmaster Tools. Look at Keyword Research to see how you rank for different terms. Use the Keyword Research Tool to see the types of searches being done. Open Site Explorer is a great tool from Moz for evaluating your link structure. Google Trends is a great tool for seeing the cycles in searches.

Google does look at links in gmail and uses them as part of the calculation for SEO ranking.

Three areas to concentrate on:

• Popularity – Getting lots of sites to link to you
• Authority – Get the best sites to link to you
• Relevance – Lots of things. Content, links, keywords, titles, etc.

More is not better. Longer, more detailed content is better. Content near the top of the page is seen as more important by Google. It is better to consolidate content into a single page rather than spread across a site. Don’t kill pages, use 301 redirects instead. Don’t use the same SEO tactics on all your content, mix it up between the 350 different signals Google looks for. Consider going after ranking for localized searches.

Great stuff once again from Brent Payne. Wish these talks were an hour instead of 30 minutes so he could get in deeper.