Search Engine Optimization Basics and Search Engine Best Practices by Top SEO Experts

Search engine optimization basics used to be pretty straight forward - the key was (and still is) good content, focussing keywords for each page, aligning titles and the H1 tag, and maintaining page rank.

The featured entrepreneurs are experts at pre-Web 2.0 optimization.

Nancy Andrews         Brad Fallon          Mel Strocen         Dan Thies         Michael Wong

Nancy Andrews  

Nancy Andrews started her career in the 1980s as a finance analyst in the corporate world. Nancy thrived in the corporate environment and gained a keen sense for sorting out whether the numbers in a business plan would have any substance in the real world. Then husband Bob thought he would start an Internet company of his own. Nancy moved form looking over his shoulder to total involvement in their company that provided webmaster services and helped people with SEO.

Then one night Bob suggested that Nancy have a look at the figures that one of their clients was turning over online. The staggering size of the backend convinced Nancy and Bob to move into ecommerce. As a great believer in finding information Nancy actually did source some top notch expert support through studying Michael Campbell's "The Revenge of the Mininets", and Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon - now of Stompernet fame.

In 2004 Nancy and Bob signed up for a coaching course with Andy and Brad. She used her TheGolfCollection.com site for the course and within 2 months she had the website up to number 2 on Google. As Nancy honed her SEO skills the site bounced around in top ten next few months got to number 1 site in 2005. TheGolfCollection.com has been at the top of Google, Yahoo and MSN for competitive golf phrases such as 'golf gifts' and 'golf accessories' ever since, despite fierce competition from corporates.

Recently, Nancy started blogging about her strategies and opinions on the web at GiantSlayer.net. It is her intention to teach how she slays corporate competitors through SEO with a goldfish-bowl, public view of her SEO efforts. Her release of Giant Slayer - managed by product launch specialist Mike Long - generated huge interest and sales.

Brad Fallon  

Brad graduated from Claremont McKenna College in 1990 with a degree in Economics from Claremont McKenna College and followed up by graduating second top in law at the University of Florida in 1997. In January 2004, Brad started online with a $2,000 start-up investment for My Wedding Favors.

From first year sales of $1.2 million Brad's online businesses exploded to $32 million in 2006. Brad powered his online success by astute SEO search engine optimization)and rapidly gained recognition as a sought after expert in SEO. Brad became host of the pioneering Search Engine Radio, and wrote Creating Customers Out of Thin Air: Secrets of Online Marketing for Offline Businesses.

Brad enjoys helping entrepreneurs and business people leverage Internet marketing to grow their businesses and so he co-founded StomperNet with Andy Jenkins in October 2006. StomperNet has a faculty of Internet marketing experts who provide training through DVD courses and online classes, as well as an online community, proprietary software and quarterly live conferences. With the involvement of experts like John Reese and Frank Kern, StomperNet’s October 3, 2006 launch smashed first day sales record for online information products with a whopping $18.3 million.

In January 2008 StompetNet added social network marketing to its program with its SMARTS program. SMARTS immediately sold out but you can get on a waiting list for the next coaching session. Brad Fallon is the CEO of FreeIQ, launched in 2007 as a free host site for unlimited audio and video presentations, seminars and demonstrations for speakers, authors, consultants and experts from many fields.

And FreeIQ’s ReviewRank™ search algorithm uses reader reviews and other factors to rank the quality of submitted content. Premium Media Products, LLC, a media publishing arm of Brad's Smart Marketing network helps authors and consultants to make and market premium media products - webinars, teleseminars, subscription podcasts, e-books, DVD home study courses, and live workshops recorded in its Seminar Studio.

Mel Strocen  " ...creative thinking, networking and hard work are still the keys to success on the Net".

A low profile, high achiever, Mel Strocen hooked into the internet as a hobbyist in 1995 and extended his hobby to start a website Jayde.com, a search engine and web directory, in 1996. By 1999 traffic growth lead Mel to quit his 20 year position as property management Regional Manager to develop his website and to co-found the iEntry newsletter network.

Two years later he cashed out of iEntry and to build the Jayde Online Network of websites which now number 20-odd web properties. Webmaster newsletter site SiteProNews.com, search engine and directory ExactSeek.com and newsletter directory and search engine GoArticles.com are cornerstone sites for the network. The combined readership for Mel's newsletters is 700,000 to 800,000.

Mel's slickest strategy was to create search engine and newsletter websites that complement and support each other through in-house linking to create an internal and circular traffic flow. He suggests 3 steps to the traffic numbers game: 1. Create and maintain quality website content; 2. Develop, maintain and leverage online business relationships; and 3. use low or no cost promotion methods such as ad swaps, recirculation of traffic, discussion forums, articles, and press releases.

Dan Thies  entry by May 30th 2008

Michael Wong  

Michael Wong is a self-taught Internet entrepreneur who started a web site for under than $500, in 1998. 18 months later iBoost Technology bought his site for a "considerable" sum. Since, he has notched up millions of dollars in sales and referrals for his businesses, clients and joint-venture partners. Michael has dozens of articles published in various respected internet marketing and web development web sites and newsletters such as SiteProNews and WebDeveloper.com. and has published three books on search engine marketing. Sharing the picture with Michael is his wife (and CEO) Amy.

Michael is a SEO expert. He optimized the iBoost network to post over 2,000 top 30 rankings across all major search engines, that stacked on an additional 400,000+ monthly visitors and 8 million monthly page views. He walks SEO his talk in his AMGY.com Network, that he launched in March, 2002. His dozen sites, consisting of over 3,000 content pages, draw over 100,000 targeted visitors every month, making about 750,000 page views.

He claims that most of his traffic comes traffic comes from organic search (95% from Google), with advertising, syndicated articles, mentions in newsletters, links from other web sites, word-of-mouth, and repeat visitors adding on a minor share. His flagship websites, Mike's Marketing Tools and Mike's Ecommerce Software, are packed with his reviews of personally tested Internet marketing tools.

Classic Ebook:

Search Engine Optimization Guide