FitBloggin’ had a great mix of panels focusing on both health and wellness and general blogging topics. I attended two great sessions about SEO while I was at the conference – the first one, Building Your Blog Through Organic SEO And Image Optimization, was presented by Nicole Bullock of Cute Culture Chick and offered great info, regardless of your familiarity with the topic.

I got all kinds of interesting takeaways from this session and also had a chance to run two questions by Nicole that I’ve been mulling over for a while: The first was the debate as to whether or not internal links and links to social media profiles should be “Nofollow” or “Dofollow” – Nicole’s opinion was that a normal, non-anchor-text dofollow link is fine here – and the second was about duplicate content. As I rebrand and make this my primary lifestyle blog, I’d like to start publishing my “Top Ten With…” interview series on this site so that Contest Corner can continue to focus on serving up sweepstakes. However, I don’t intend to move any of the old content over here – the archives on Contest Corner will remain, I’d just like the series to start fresh over here. My concern is that two sites using the same interview questions could cause a duplicate content issue, even though each interview is unique. Is your head hurting yet? 😉 At any rate, Nicole agreed that this is a tricky one and advised that I do some digging into Google’s most recent policies on duplicate content to glean the best mode of action. It was great having a chance to ask these questions in person, as I feel it’s a little easier to explain than typing out a wall of text on a forum or email.

The second SEO panel I attended was Video SEO, presented by Lisa Johnson. Lisa is a trainer who makes fitness videos for YouTube and had all kinds of great tips for making higher quality, optimized videos and how that benefits both your YouTube channel and blog.

You’ll have to forgive the photos – due to crazy circumstances I had only gotten 45 minutes of sleep the night before, so I think the blurry photos sum up my mental state at the time. 😉 Fortunately I took notes and still absorbed all of the info even though I looked like a zombie! I wasn’t articulate enough to risk asking a question at this session, but I wish I’d gotten a chance to ask her more about YouTube comments. Lisa mentioned the importance of “Likes” and comments on your YouTube video, as they make your video appear higher in search rankings, so she said it’s important to reply to every comment you get. I’m wondering how she deals with trolls – I’m not talking about those who disagree with me, but rather people who post explicit comments on my videos. The people who comment on my videos either mistakenly think I’m a “MILF” and go into great detail about it, or they think I’m a total dummy – which is fine, but I don’t really see an appropriate way to respond to either. 😉

If you have an interest in SEO, I’d highly recommend checking out the live blogs which I have linked to for each session – I really enjoyed both of these presentations and filled my notebook with some good suggestions!