ConversionConference.com is a very cool new conference being put on by Tim Ash. It's May 4 & 5 2010 in San Jose. If you are looking to get the most out of your traffic you need to seriously consider this conference.

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The very name "Search Engine Optimization" would seem to answer the question of who marketers are optimizing their site for. All the great advice you get about getting your pages indexed and finding which keywords are used in the search engines and optimizing your content to be found by the search engines--it's all search engines all the time. Or is it? At some point, you need to ask yourself why you are doing all of this.

by Manoj Jasra

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages' load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We've also blogged about site performance.
• Pingdom Tools: Every test also shows general statistics about the loaded page such as the total number of objects, total load time, and size including all objects.
• Webpage Analyzer: Their script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component
  

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The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L'Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

On-Page Optimization

A website can do just fine online without SEO. PPC, social media and other properly implemented off-line marketing efforts can really help a site succeed online with little or no SEO. But unless and until you begin to SEO your site it will always under perform, never quite reaching its fullest potential. Without SEO, you'll always be missing out on a great deal of targeted traffic that the other avenues cannot make up for.

So where do we start? SEO can be so broad and vast that we often don't know where we should begin, what will give us the greatest impact, and how to move forward. That's what I hope to answer here.