The title might mislead you to think I went to a wild party, but the shots are not of the adult beverage nature.  I did consume a few cheese steak sandwiches.

This week I had the opportunity to speak on search engine optimization at a conference put on by the Immunization Action Coalition out in Philadelphia.  The conference is called the Social Media Summit and focuses on helping the medical and health community bring awareness to vaccinations, immunizations and health using social media and Internet marketing.

My role was sitting down with many of the various organizations attending and conducting a review of their website and search engine optimization efforts.  In my hour sessions I focused on SEO best practices, establishing trust online and offered action items for their websites to improve their websites visibility to Google, Bing & Yahoo.

It was a fun challenge to work with medical and health organizations both large and small and discuss websites ranging from 15 pages to 50,000 pages and the  efforts needed to optimize content and spread their message online.  From building links to maximizing your meta page title, we covered a lot of ground.

Organizations I worked with over the 2 days included:

• American Academy of Family Physicians
• ECBT – Vaccinate Your Baby
• National Association of School Nurses
• Autism Science Foundation
• National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners
• National Network of Immunization Nurses and Associates

The conference also engaged some other social media professionals to launch a social campaign right from the conference for Real Guys Immunize.  A very cool idea for a conference.

The best news is that I didn’t have to get any shots to take part in this conference, but I did learn some valuable information on vaccines and children.  My thanks to all of the great attendees I met, the Immunization Action Coalition and Eventive Meetings.

The most recent web design project to hit the Five starting line-up is for the Minnesota Twin’s own Joe Mauer and his Quickswing baseball training product.  This e-commerce website sells the signature Joe Mauer baseball hitting aid and other batting tools to develop an All-Star swing.

A Focus On E-commerce Fundamentals
Mauer’s Quickswing has been selling their baseball training products online for years, but their former e-commerce site had holes in it.  We took the Joe Mauer approach and focused on the fundamentals:

• An engaging, unique and clean custom web design
• Clear navigation, content and links to view and buy products
• Well structured and simplified product detail pages
• Search engine friendly build-out leveraging SEO best practices
• Easy e-commerce check out steps
• Flexible and easy back-end management for the client (SMC)
• Secure shopping with SSL & Merchant account services

We’re pleased with the overall outcome of the website and look forward to driving an increase in sales online for the Quickswing.  We’re not mad about having the Mauer team in our dugout of great clients either.

Check out the website: http://www.mauersquickswing.com

I’m excited to have taken part of an incredible group of local search panelists for David Mihm’s 2010 Local Search Ranking Factors.

For the last three years, David has sough out, compiled and published his Local Search Ranking factors that are the read in local search.  In bringing together a great group of local search experts together you get more than one opinion, rating and thoughts on over 60 elements that are part of local search (good, neutral or bad).

Many of my favorite local search gurus are included in the panel including Mike Ramsey, Paul Jahn, Ed Reese, Mike Blumenthal, Andrew Shotland and more. Over 30 experts, all in 1 post.

Thanks again to David Mihm for this incredible resource and having myself and Five Technology be a part of it.