SEM PDX – take-aways from an SEO conference

I made a lot of notes while attending the SEM PDX conference, held 2/22/2013 at the Governor Hotel in downtown Portland.

I confirmed again that we are already using SEO best practices, but we do need to implement some things to continue in the vanguard of effective white-hat SEO.

The main take-aways from SEM-PDX, for SEO professionals (at least for me) were:

• Need to change the coding of the many websites for which I am responsible, from HTML 4.01 transitional (the easiest to code) and XHTML1, over to HTML 5 and CSS 3.
• Use the open graph meta information on sites—which apparently only really works well on HTML 5 sites, hence the previous item
• Start implementing the schema.org “breadcrumb” coding on sites that already have breadcrumbs in them.
• Use the “organization” and “address” tags from schema.org wherever there is an address in one of the sites. (Have to go back and put this in on all sites – it’s simple but time-consuming)
• Don’t use the “micro formats”—instead, use the schema.org coding.
• Make sure the “author” tags are in place for all sites, tying it in to the G+ author bio pages. The “Publisher” tag doesn’t work the same way, so don’t use it.
• Implement “twitter cards” on all sites that are active socially.
• Implement the “video” tags from Schema.org on all sites that have videos on them.