Date: 31st December 2007

Time: 09:30 – 16:30
Why pay thousands of pounds for an search engine marketing consultant when you can learn how to achieve high rankings yourself?

Do you want the skills to promote your website on the web?

Learn from one of the best Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) trainers in the business. Take control of your SEO strategy yourself, and save money!

Are you feeling overwhelmed when it comes to optimising your site to get those high rankings you want?

If you have the task of increasing the visibility of your company’s website, then we can provide the training and support you need.

This is the training that you’ve been looking for: we’re not trying to sell our consultancy or services, just great training that is clear, focused and practical.

Take a look at some examples of the companies we’ve worked with.

This training is provided by Susan Hallam, one of the UK’s leading internet marketing consultants, who lets you in on the secrets of search engine optimisation.

The truth is success in search engines is NOT a level playing field unless you know the secrets of the professionals. And yet, the income potential of having your site listed at the top of the search engines is just too huge to ignore. That’s why businesses like yours are so focused on pushing their products and services to the top of the major search engines.

The good news is that it is not difficult to get top rankings provided you understand how search engines work and you know how to make the right changes to your website.

Who Can Benefit from our Search Engine Optimisation Training

• Anyone who wants to learn how to simply and easily obtain high rankings for their web site in the major search engines and directories

• Anyone who has received bad advice or hired a bad SEO company in the past, who feel they have wasted money, or even had their website banned from one or more of the major search engines

• Anyone who is confused about how to get their site found online and needs someone to explain it in simple terms, using methods that can be implemented straight away

• Marketing teams who want to learn how to plan and deliver an SEO campaign

• All webmasters and web designers who need to know how to create search engine friendly design

• All entreprenuers who need to learn the SEO basics in order to offer their own search engine optmisation service

• Anyone who wants to learn more about pay-per-click search engine advertising

• Copywriters needing to learn how to write great web copy for their users and the search engines

So, get in touch to see how we can help you achieve higher search engine rankings…

Let’s talk about the training and support you need, and how to save yourself the cost (and frankly, the expensive risk) of search engine marketing consultants.

Give Susan a ring to discuss getting your website found in the search engines.

The major search engines can read and index the contents of your PDFs, so be sure to use these best practice optimisation techniques to get your PDFs ranking well in the search engine results.

First and foremost, you need to follow the golden rules of search engine optimisation when optimising PDFs:

• write keyword rich content based on your keyword research
• use keyword rich headings and subheadings
• give your PDF a keyword rich file name

Next, apply these additional techniques when optimising PDFs:

1. Don’t use Photoshop to make pretty PDFs – you need to be using a text package, like Word, to create PDFs the spiders can read. If you end up creating one big image file, then all the content will probably be invisible to the spiders.

2. Use the Document Properties to add keyword rich Title tags. The Title Tag will display in blue in the search engine results and help visitors to click on your content. Here you can see a PDF in the search result with a meaningless Title (”Fiches Danstar let av03″): click on the image to make it bigger!

3. Put a well written, optimised sentence at the start of the PDF. It is likely that this text will display in the search engine results page under the blue title as the description of the document. Using the example above, you can see the two lines of text in black in the search results come from the initial text in the PDF: (again, click on it to make the image bigger)

4. Include keyword rich links back to your website inside your document. These links will help the internal linking within your site, and are especially useful if another website puts a copy of your document on their site. If you’re using a free PDF maker, you may not be able to create keyword rich anchor text. I use PDF X-Change Pro to make keyword rich links.

5. Create visible keyword rich links to your PDF from pages on your website that get crawled regularly by the spiders. Good internal linking can help the spiders to find the PDF content.

If you want to read more about optimising your PDFs then read:

Eleven Tips for Optimising PDFs for Search Engines
Make your PDFs Search Engine Friendly

I confess: I wilf.

Wilf (v) : aimless browsing on the web. Short for “What was I looking for…”

You know what I mean. There you are, working industriously. And then you follow an interesting link, or read your email, or write a blog posting. And forget entirely what you’re supposed to be doing.

I like to call it serendipity. Business managers like to call it time wasting.
A YouGov poll sampled more than 2,000 people, and two thirds of them confessed to wilfing. Apparently we spend two full days a month aimlessly surfing. Men are more likely to wilf than women, and young people more likely than oldies.

By the way, here’s where you can register to get paid to participate in YouGov polls.

And if you considered following that link, then you’re wilfing…

Be glad you don’t WILF in China: Internet addicts there are treated with electric shock, acupuncture and drug therapy.

Now, back to work!

Date: 13th December 2007

Time: 09:30 – 12:30

• Introducing the principles of blogging and podcasting
• Understanding RSS
• Technical practicalities: how to create a blog
• Best practice blogging
• How to record a podcast
• Tips for blogging and podcasting success

Book your place now

What can your business learn from the “John and Anne Move to Panama” fiasco?

Well, firstly it didn’t take a rocket scientist to discover the whereabouts of mystery canoeist John Darwin and his wife Anne. Go to Google Images and just type in “john anne panama.” You’ll find them there Number One. Their photo was featured on the MoveToPanama website, and very helpfully including the date the photo was taken.

The photo has now been removed from the website, but the picture will live on. Forever. In Google cache. And on other people’s blogs and websites.

Google Universal Search integrates search results from web pages, photos, video, local information and other resources.

It may have caused John and Anne a bit of bother, but your business should be using this image optimisation to your advantage.

• Create a plan to publish a variety of types of content as part of your search engine optimisation strategy. Photos, videos, podcasts. Be sure to include your keyphrases in the surrounding content, the filenames, descriptions, ALT tags and the like.
• Use keyword research tools to see what your customers are looking for, and generate content the gives them the information they want.
• Monitor the media you put online – Google has a long memory, and you will need to be proud of the images for a long time coming.

Please take just 5 minutes right now out of your busy day, and vote to give 50 million Lottery-funding pounds to Sherwood Forest: The Living Legend Project

The money will create 300 hectares of new forest. A 250 kilometre network of walking, cycling and riding paths, one of the largest networks in Europe. And create a visitor centre worthy of Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest.

Voting closes on 12 December.

You need to register to vote; only one vote per email address.

Please Vote For Sherwood Forest!

Desire lines are those well worn paths that get us to where we really want to go – in sheer defiance of the official paved route.

Blogs gives small businesses an easy way to rapidly adapt web content according your visitors’ desire lines: what they actually want, rather than what we expect them to do.

I attended a presentation by Eileen Brown, Microsoft’s Technology Evangelist, where she applied the idea of desire lines to blogging.

One common sense way to discover your visitors’ “desire lines” is to review your web statistics and analytics. Your analytics can help you to learn about your audience:

• Which of your blog postings or web pages get the most hits from the search engines?
• Which of your recommended links do visitors follow most commonly?
• Which postings or pages hardly ever get viewed?
• What path do users most typically take through your site?
• And by extension, what do they really want?

Accommodating the your visitors “desire lines” in your blog is easily done and will provide satisfaction for those readers who want to go a different way, rather than being led:

• creating the types of content visitors most commonly read
• providing links to other credible sites
• tagging your content to faciliate discovery of related material
• comments from your readers with links to other interesting sites

On the one hand, blogging can be a powerful business tool to push key marketing messages to your readers.

But it can also act as a valuable instrument to learn more about those clients who want deviate off your planned route. Your visitors don’t always want to follow the path (read: navigation) that we lay out for them, and they don’t act the way we expect.

Learn more:

Peter Meholz (who invented the word “blog”) explains Desire Lines

And the winner of the “Best Online Business Award” is….

I was very pleased to sponsor the Best Online Business prize, awarded as part of the Women4Women business support project.

The equivalent of an uber-cool electronic maid of honour, UK Girl Thing are hen party planners and purveyors of fine hen party products.

Larisa Pich at UK Girl Thing has built an online business that demonstrates the kinds of best practice that we were looking for when judging the six nominees.

UK Girl Thing were the clear leaders:

• demonstrating sound business results, with a 25% increase in sales as a result of her online marketing activities
• unswerving commitment to the online business model, which ultimately led Larisa to take the decision to do a complete rebuild of her ecommerce website in order to make it search engine friendly
• building an online brand that is leveraged by brick and mortar marketing experience
• multichannel selling, both from her own website and as an eBay Power Seller
• email marketing her client base

Well done to UK Girl Thing!