2. Introduction
• Don’t believe anyone that says SEO is difficult and you can’t do it
• There is no silver bullet or quick wins
• It’s a discipline, you have to prepare and train for it.
• Search engine optimisation is a pretty large subject
• Like anything there are different opinions on execution
• Hopefully each of you will find a couple of take-aways to put into
practice.
3.
4. SEO
• If you talk to people about SEO, some have this a8tude that it’s a secret dark art…This is so far
away from the truth!
• Google likes happy users and wants to give their users the best matching relevant content to
their search
• If you have honest, relevant, fresh and unique content you will rank
• In addiEon to you wanEng to get higher rankings and compeEtors being placed higher that
yourself, it maybe the case that you need to look at SEO if you have other sites with negaEve
comment/content about your brand which rank higher. You would deal with these in the same
way in terms of opEmisaEon and try to rank higher on a number of pages for the keywords
they appear on so that you push them down the ranking and hopefully onto page two and
beyond.
5. We are going to cover:
• 5 Key components to successful opEmisaEon
• Workflow for SEO
• Useful tools and links to use
• QuesEons
6. Interes=ngly enough…
52% of companies carry out SEO entirely inhouse, while 17%
use an agency exclusively.
29% report they use both an agency and in-house resources for
SEO.
Source:
7. Interes=ngly enough…
Just over a third of companies (35%) are spending £5,000 or
less on SEO per year
Some 65% are spending more than £5,000 on SEO each year
14% of companies are spending more than £100,000 on SEO
annually, and this includes
3% who are spending more than £1 million on SEO annually.
Source:
8. Interes=ngly enough…
To track ROI from SEO:
Over two-thirds of respondents (68%) are using clicks / visitors
Over half (53%) use position
Under half (42%) are using the number of sales
Just under a third (30%) use the value of sales.
Source:
9. The SEO marketplace is estimated to be worth
£436.4m in 2010, up 26% from £376m in 2009
11. 5 Key components to successful
optimisation
1. Do Keyword Research
2. Fine Tune your Site and Sitemap
3. Create a Blog
4. Add Unique Content
5. Build Backlinks
13. Keyword Research
• The most important element, does take some time, knowledge and understanding but that’s not to
say it can’t easily be learnt.
• These are the phrases and keywords you wish to target and rank for in order to drive traffic
• Differentiate between which phrases/keywords are:
• Money makers and which are for Vanity
• Money makers are those which are relevant to your business, which are typically long tail
• Long tail search is a longer more descriptive phrase.
• Vanity ones can be words which have a high traffic but don’t give you an ROI.
• It’s the difference between long terms strategy and easy pickings which bring money in.
• For example: We could optimise for “Wine” which is high volume, but hard work or we could go for
”White wine” which is more relevant. Even better would be to also optimise for “Old Vines Chenin
Blanc 2010”, there’s obviously less traffic but users on the hand know exactly what they want, so we
would say these are more likely to convert phrase.
• We tend to keep these in a spreadsheet or CSV format as most tools allow you to upload easily.
16. Fine Tune your Site and Sitemap
• The first stage of natural ranking is to make sure the site is doing all you can in terms of
it’s setup and configuraEon.
• Key elements to look at are: Meta data such as Meta Titles, Meta DescripEon, alt tags and
image Etles
• Google makes us of This is semanEcs search and wants to know which pieces of
informaEon are important to you, and therefore will determine this by looking at Htags
H1, H2,H3 also bold, underlined and so on.
• And the locaEon of copy within the html is becoming important, trying to achieve page
consistency, page load speed and just good pracEce coding.
• URL’s or website addresses should be clean and free from strings and parameters where
possible, which are characters like “?” And “=“ URL rewriters should be used in this case.
Urls should also have keywords within them as part of the structure.
19. Create a blog
• Preferably on your Site Domain, which will increase number of pages and give your own domain the
relevance.
• Creating a blog on your domain allows:
– You to talk more about the products or service than you can on key pages of your site.
– Ensures you write fresh, unique relevant content.
– Gives you an opportunity to write about your industry topic or product.
– For example let’s take wine again: There’s only so much you can write on an ecommerce site regarding wine and it’s producers.
– But on a blogs:
- Recipes, food and Wine matching
- About the producers / interviews
- Imagery of the vineyards
- Wine tasting tips
- Events
• All thee give you a competitive advantage and gives you opportunities to talk about your products
and have relevant phrases in your content.
• Blog posts are more likely to be linked to which is an important part of SEO, which we’ll talk about
later.
22. Adding unique content
• Unique content is vital to a search opEmisaEon strategy. Content
can be copy, imagery, video and so on.
• If you use pre‐posted content form another source, no credit is
given to your own site, so there’s no SEO value
• The value is given to the site page which first indexes that content.
• Unique content is also your chance to put your own stamp on
things. Showing your creaEvity, experEse and if the content is
helpful or relevant to that person you potenEally secure future
visits also.
• If you don’t have Eme to create content yourselves, then it’s worth
creaEng a network of freelancers.
25. Building Backlinks
• Back link are another key and important component to SEO
• Back links are when an external site other than yours links to your page.
• Every backlink poinEng to your website is equivalent to a vote FOR you, and the
more votes you have ‐ the more exposure you will receive from the major search
engines
• Part of the Google algorithm gives each page a Score, which is assembled with a
mixture of factors, this is called PageRank find it’s a numeric score ranging from
1‐10
• You might have heard of a Penguin update, this isn’t a refresh at London Zoo it’s
the latest update from Google, they have given less significance to just placing
directory backlinks and so now only quality links and relevance is being given a
heavier weighEng. So it’s beier to have 100 good quality links than 1000 bought
generic links.
• Some tradiEonal link building exercises include other blogs, news and syndicaEon
sites, directories and social plajorms and bookmarking, adverts, business links,
and reviews.
28. Monitoring and Reporting
• When you are optimising for search is vital that you
record the benchmark keyword stats.
• That’s the only way you’ll know how your activity is
performing
• As well as just reporting on rankings you should monitor:
– Visits via non paid search results
– Number of keywords found for (Brand & Non-Brand terms)
– Number of entry pages
– Revenue by keyword
