Last night I had the pleasure of speaking to the Chicago Interactive Design and Development group (CIDD) about SEO.

The audience was made up of a wide variety of people with diverse knowledge and backgrounds, so tailoring the discussion towards one particular skill set was not possible. Instead I started by talking about the foundation of SEO and how the search engines work and a brief history of what the search engines algorithms are based upon.

The primary content of the presentation focused around the basics steps someone should take when trying to optimize their website, but the fun part came once we took at look at the future of SEO.

When it comes to site optimization there are 3 essential steps I discussed last night.

1)      Technical optimization – Ensuring that your site is free of roadblocks for search engines and is able to be crawled quickly and easily.

2)      Content Optimization – Once the site is fully crawlable, you want to present content in meaningful manner that includes keywords that users are looking for.

3)      Offsite Optimization – We want to drive traffic and spiders to the site from external sources. These sources would preferably be of high quality and related content to our website.

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