Happy 2009, eventholders!  This is the 4th installment in the “How to Promote your Events Online” series, though I am dropping that part from the titles from now on.  Too many words.

The goal of this article will be to share a number of simple tactics you can use to try to improve the performance of your Eventbrite event registration pages in search engine results.   These recommendations and tips derive from some of the things I’ve seen work for some of our eventholders.

1. The very first point is to be sure your event is public.  There’s a little check box at the bottom of your event creation form, under “Additional Options“, marked “List this event in the Eventbrite directory and on the Internet”.  The default is checked, but make sure, because an unchecked box means your event is dead in the water SEO-wise.  We place a “<meta name=“robots” content=“noindex, nofollow” />” tag in the code of your page, which is a pretty effective way of preventing that page from being indexed by the search engines.  This means your page will not turn up in results.  When you uncheck the public box you also deprive yourself of exposure on Eventbrite.com, as we list only public events on our publicly-available event listing pages.  Same thing goes for blasting out your event to our network of partners.  No go.  So be sure the box is checked!

2. Name your event something that helps you.  This is something of a no-brainer, but it bears stressing that your choice of what to call your event can play a huge role in your SEO performance.  The name of your event is not only the HTML title of the event registration page, it is also the anchor text that links to your event page from all the places we link to it on Eventbrite.com.  Make the name of your event as close as you can to the term you’re hoping people will type to find you.

3. Leverage your event organizer page.  It’s one of the tenets of SEO that pages with more links to them are more important and therefore more deserving of visibility.  You can take advantage of that principle on Eventbrite by exploiting the fact that all your event registration pages link back to your organizer page, making it a kind of hub.  This imparts a small but meaningful amount of additional SEO merit to your organizer page which can make all the difference.  Be sure to give the event organizer a useful name that contains your target terms, as the organizer name will be used as the anchor text in links to that page from your registration pages.  A great example of this tactic being used to good effect is this organizer who is placing very high for “Adwords Seminars“.

4. Link to your registration page from every place you can, from your blog, from your company web site, from your friend’s blog.  Use the term you want to rank high for as the anchor text in the links.  This is pretty much the most effective of all the techniques, if you can only do one.  Here’s an example on behalf of an eventholder who wants to place high for “Stanford Burns supper“.  It really works.

5. The last pointer I want to leave you with is start early.  The effects of the tactics described above increase with the passage of time, so be sure to create your event now and get a jump on the competition.

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