This morning I attended a breakfast session on SEO and Social Media hosted by the Oxfordshire Innovation and Growth Team and presented by Oxford Digital Marketing. It was a really interesting morning – although it just gave me a taste for what can be done, and a rather longer task list than I went in with!
This is a summary of the main points that I came out of the session with:
Search and SEO
- Page 1 gets approx. 88% of the clicks
- Searchers don’t go past page 1, they change their search terms
- the top 3 get 70% of the clicks
- Majority of the traffic (50-70%) is from search
- You should optimise different pages for different keywords
- Keywords need to balance the:
- Number of visitors (make sure there’s enough)
- Relevant to customers (what they’re looking for, what they’re searching for)
- Right commercial intent
- Realistic competition (make sure it’s not too great) – do a phrase search to check the number of competing pages (<30k = low, 30-100k = medium, >100k = high)
- Need other people with good reputations to link to you
- The more you can influence a link, the less it is taken into account
SEO
- 1 keyword per page is better, more focussed
- Optimise by page, not by site
- If they get straight to the right page, they’re less likely to bounce. It’s unlikely someone will want your homepage
- Google ranks pages, not sites
- Optimise the:
- Title of the page (Include keywords, and preferably only keywords)
- URL to include keywords
- Meta description (what search engine shows as the summary)
- Headings
- Opening paragraph, body text, closing paragraph
- Images (alt tags for the visually impaired voice software, but also picked up by search engines)
- Links from other pages (blogs, press, news sites, forums)
- It’s all about helping the search engine work out what your page is about
Social Media
- Treat it as you would face-to-face networking
- you don’t go and shout at people about what you do and why you’re so good there, so why do it online?!
- Mindset:
- No pitching
- Participate
- Add value (show what you know and people will ask you for help if they perceive you as knowing what you’re doing)
- Be transparent
- Find information to share
- Monitor your area of expertise/retail to show you know the marketplace/latest happenings etc.
Blogs
- Great for SEO for your website!
- Having a blog tells Google your site is alive and means it will check back to see if anything has changed
On-site v. off-site
- More powerful if it’s on your own website
- off-site means the hosting site gets the indexing benefits
- off-site means you can add links onto your site
- Do as much as you can cope with
- Regularity is better
- It doesn’t have to be a thesis (either in content or length!)
- People tend to prefer short and sweet online
Forums
- Find where your customers congregate
- Post regularly, build reputation to earn your right to sell
Video
- It doesn’t have to be a film of you, it can be slides with a voiceover
- Amazon S3 is an alternative hosting site, where you control the content more
- You don’t have to have the YouTube ‘try this’ type content at the end of the video
- You can use animoto.com to produce your own videos
- Build connections
- Join groups and engage
- Optimise your profile – use keywords here as well
- Can export contacts to Outlook
- It’s a way of relating to people
- It’s not just for self-promotion; more about helping others and joining in conversations
- Much more of a business tool now that they have included pages, and made it more business-focused
- Facebook social plug-in tools for websites
- Facebook Insights
- Traffic, demographics
- Can now embed any website page within a Facebook page
Thanks for sharing! I’m focussing on blogging and social media right now. I think the biggest hurdle is creating interesting content (ie: videos, internviews, surveys, etc).