A complete overview of search engine optimisation principles and practical advice for small businesses.

1. Search Engine Optimisation 101

2. What’s on the Agenda? A bit about me and e-CBD and this workshop Why search engines are so important to business SEO vs. SEM SEO Tips and Advice AdWords Tips and Advice Further Reading Question Time

4. Worked in Public Relations and Journalism

5. Joined e-CBD with Marilyn Strauss in 2001

6. Focussed on online marketing

7. Became Marketing Magazine’s ‘Online Marketing Guru’

10. Who has dabbled a little bit in SEO?

11. Who doesn’t really know much at all about SEO?

16. 78% of consumers use the Internet more than they did two years ago

17. 52% of consumers use telephone directories less than they did two years ago

18. 78% of consumers research a product online before making a purchase using a search engine

19. 73% of people prefer to find products and services using search engines than have an advertisement sent to themSource: Nielsen ‘Why Search Matters to Local Business’

22. SEO vs. SEM

24. AdWords

25. Yahoo Ads

27. SEO Tips and Advice: Understanding what Google wants

28. SEO tips and Advice: How do we know what works?

29. SEO tips and Advice: How do we know what works? Google tells us.

30. SEO tips and Advice: How do we know what works? Google tells us. Everything you need to know is publicly available information from Google.

32. To be trusted

33. To give people the most relevant results

35. SEO tips and Advice: How does Google figure out what sites are relevant? It sends out spiders to crawl the web and gather information about every page they find. These spiders crawl the web from link to link. Each link counts as a ‘vote’ for a website. The more links a website has pointing to it, the more voting power it has. As Google crawls the web, they read every page and store the text and images they find in a giant database.

36. SEO tips and Advice: What are the spiders looking for?

38. Headings

39. Words at the top of the page

40. Words in the coding on the page, such as:

41. The page ‘title’

42. The page ‘META description’

44. SEO Tips and Advice: Putting it into Practice

45. SEO tips and Advice: The Title Tag What’s a title tag?

46. SEO tips and Advice: The Title Tag What’s a title tag?

48. The title should be unique for each page.

49. When Google tries to figure out what a page is about, it looks at the title first.

50. Make sure your keywords are in the page title.

51. Keywords don’t necessarily have to be next to each other to get picked up.

52. Use shorthand (‘&’ instead of ‘and’)

54. SEO tips and Advice: The Title Tag Good Gold Coast Lawyers - O'Keefe Mahoney Bennett Bad O'Keefe Mahoney Bennett Bad Gold Coast Lawyers, Gold Coast Solicitors, Gold Coast solicitor, gold Coast lawyer, lawyers, solicitors, lawyer

56. Make it look natural. Your website copy is there as a marketing tool. The site has to read beautifully. It should make your high school English teacher proud.

58. SEO tips and Advice: Use the META Description Tag What is it?

59. SEO tips and Advice: Use the META Description Tag What is it?

61. Use unique descriptions for each page - Having a different description meta tag for each page helps both users and Google.

62. Use 140 characters.

65. Separate them with hyphens

66. Having keywords in the domain name helps, but for a business, it’s not crucial. It’s far more important to have a memorable brand.

68. Read up on them and use them properly (and make sure your web designer does too) – Put your keywords in them!

70. SEO tips and Advice: Image ‘Alt’ Tags This description is what blind people see when they navigate a website using a talking browser.

71. SEO tips and Advice: Image ‘Alt’ Tags This text also shows up if the image won’t load for any reason. It’s really important to describe the image accurately, but try and get your keywords in here as well, without going over the top.

72. SEO tips and Advice: Make your site easy to navigate Remember how we said that Google crawls the web from link to link? It finds pages on your site the same way. Make sure every page of your website is accessible from at least one text link. A ‘sitemap’ is a great way to do this.

73. SEO tips and Advice: Make your site easy to navigate If you have no links, or a site made entirely from Flash, Google can’t read your content and probably won’t list you in their results.

74. SEO tips and Advice: Create Interesting Content Remember how we said that Google counts links to your website as a vote? The best way of getting links is by having content people want to link to. Starting a blog with industry news, tips, or advice is a great way to do this. Make your website a resource for others to refer to

75. SEO tips and Advice: Link to Other People Google works by crawling around the web following links. They love links. If Google loves links, it’s a good idea to give them what they love. Think about other useful, relevant websites you could link off to from yours. Google will like you.

76. SEO tips and Advice: Get Other Sites to Link to You Getting other websites to link to you is the single most important thing you can do to get your site ranking well in Google.

78. The ‘votes’ have to be relevant though. A link from a site that isn’t about similar topics to yours won’t help you.

79. Links from powerful, trusted websites are worth more votes.

81. Submit your sites to directories

82. Contact bloggers and let them know about your site (they’ll want to know why your site is interesting enough to tell their readers about)

83. Swap links with your business partners, suppliers and clients

85. Search for the keywords you’re targeting and note the top 30 results. Go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ and check the ‘inlinks’ of each of them. See who comes up and if they’re appropriate, write to them nicely and offer to swap links.

87. SEO tips and Advice: Get Other Sites to Link to You So how many links do you need to get?

88. SEO tips and Advice: Get Other Sites to Link to You Links required to rank #1-3 in Google

89. SEO tips and Advice: Google Maps

91. Get reviews

92. Link to your maps page from your website

93. Use the keywords on the maps page

94. Make sure you appear on other people’s custom Google Maps

98. This is so big companies can’t out-bid everyone.

99. It’s nice, but it means that if your ads don’t perform well, you’ll end up paying more so always get professional advice, at least at the beginning, to help set up your campaign, or they’ll be tainted forever.

100. Include your phone number in your ad – then you don’t have to pay for the click.

102. Create a special offer

103. Setup conversion goals so you can track sales

104. Create dedicated landing pages with content targeted to people coming from Google – it’s almost always a bad idea to send people straight to your homepage

105. Make every word count, get rid of useless words

107. Further Reading

108. Further Reading Google SEO Start Guide http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html Google Webmaster Blog http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/ Google Webmaster Guidelines http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 Matt Cutts’ Bloghttp://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/ Webmaster World http://www.webmasterworld.com/

109. Audience Question Time More Information? 1300 733 088 www.e-cbd.com matt@e-cbd.com