Next up on the Search Engine Strategies London 2010 agenda for me was seeing Matt Bailey of SiteLogic give us a really top-to-bottom overview on the basics of Search Engine Optimisation. His clarity and amount of presentation energy is quite something! As a relative newbie to SEO myself, it became a mind-gym exercise to take it all in. Nevertheless, here is what did manage to sink in.
Matt started with the basics and quickly contrasted SEO with PPC in simple terms: PPC is something you can control and SEO is something you can affect. The elements you can control are the landing pages, rank and titles to name but a few. Organic search optimisation is an long-term game which requires the right pages ranking for the right words at the right time. So far, I'm keeping up.
The next part of the discussion was about something I have experience with in PPC and this is Keyword Research.
This is where it all starts, the foundation for any optimisation programme. Matt encouraged us to understand the language of customers and of the market and not to automatically use our jargon to describe products and offerings. It was here that Matt highlighted two industry tools used for keyword research. We forgive him for not mentioning the best tool in the industry! ;-)
The Microsoft Advertising Intelligence tool provides absolute search volume numbers allows for bulk keyword research in the Excel environment. Download it at www.letsearchmakeyousmarter.com.
We went down a more technical, HTML route for the rest of the class and Matt recommends taking a class in HTML if you're interested in getting more involved in SEO. Having a good grasp of HTML helps you to understand how search engines read your website. A good, clean site architecture is a basic requirement, as is good content and good links.
On links, the point was made that incoming links are like word of mouth referrals. Search engines recognise this and if a lot of authoritative sites point to your site, then it will benefit you in the rankings.
Other factors to consider when optimising:
1. Page titles: one of the main ways to influence your rankings
2. Page structure: title, meta, headline tags, etc
3. Headlines and headings. Newspapers are a good example of how to format text on a page
4. Keyword meta tags - Matt says to forget about them! But do spend time working on the meta descriptions as these affect the snippet on the SERPs - search engine reults pages
5. Alt text - every image you put online should have alt text. Don't stuff with keywords but with descriptions. This is especially important in helping screenreaders
Matt mentioned the Google Webmaster guidelines as a valuable resource (and they're excellent), but we've also pointed him to Bing's Webmaster Community too which will help you get ranked well in Bing too: http://www.bing.com/webmasters
Read all our posts on SES this year.
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More from the team tomorrow!
Colm