Date: 27th June 2008

Susan will be joining speakers such as Levi Roots of Reggae Reggae Sauce and Dragon Den’s fame at the forthcoming Getting Creative in the Food Industries conference.

This one-day conference aimed at SME’s in the Food and Drink sector to demonstrate how creative technologies and new ways of thinking can stimulate sales and enhance profitability.

• Showing SMEs how to raise profits by increasing their creative capacity
• Innovative ways to embrace future trends and a changing global marketplace
• Reaching your marketplace through new digital and online technologies
• Getting noticed: is your company brand, packaging, advertising, PR, printed and digital communications all working for you?
• Giving you the knowledge to keep you one step ahead of your competitors
• Real-life case studies
• Providing opportunities to network with businesses in the Food Industry and the Creative Industries (e.g., advertising, film & TV, design, brand developers, publishing, web applications, PR etc)
• Participation in one of four creative workshops

Date: 27th June 2008

Time:

This is the third year that Susan has been invited to speak at the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants Members in Practice Conference.

This two day conference, now in its 23rd year, is an enjoyable and cost effective way of gaining relevant CPD and networking with like minded colleagues.

The theme is ‘building a better business’, which will focus on helping members in practice increase their earning power.

See the full programme on the CIMA Global website

Location: Renaissance London Heathrow Hotel, Bath Road , Hounslow TW6 2AQ

Contact: Imogen Cooper 020 8849 2265 mastercourses@cimaglobal.com

Date: 24th June 2008

Time: 09:00 – 17:00

What the Course is About

This practical one-day workshop is for artists and arts organisations who already have a website, have one in development, or are thinking about creating one. It will demonstrate how to generate consistently high levels of the right kind of traffic to your website, employing simple and low-cost promotional techniques, and how to make sure that visitors to your website can get what they want and enjoy the experience.

What the Course is About
This practical one-day workshop is for artists and arts organisations who already have a website, have one in development, or are thinking about creating one. It will demonstrate how to generate consistently high levels of the right kind of traffic to your website, employing simple and low-cost promotional techniques, and how to make sure that visitors to your website can get what they want and enjoy the experience.
Level
Beginner to intermediate
Course Outline

Using real examples, including participants’ own websites, the course will cover the following topics:

• Techniques for optimising your website for search engines
• How to design your website to get the ‘most desired response’
• Tried and tested techniques for your website health checks
• A look at recent developments, including blogging, podcasts, online press releases, MySpace/social networks
• How to do email marketing and easy steps for publishing an email newsletter

Learning Outcomes

At the end of the day you will have ideas, information and techniques to help you improve your website, and the basis for an internet marketing action plan which you can apply to your own organisation.

Course Location:  Waterside Arts Centre, Sale

For more information and to book a place:  Arts & Media Training

Is it better to use the singular version of your keyword, or is it better to use the plural version? For example, will I get more traffic for the word “laptop” or “laptops?”

The answer, of course, is it depends. There is never a one-size-fits-all answer to selecting your key phrases.

Hitwise produced a very interesting analysis comparing the top 10 key phrases containing the word “laptop”, excluding branded terms. And they conclude that the use of the singular or plural versions might indicate different buying behaviours.

Phrases like “cheap” and “free” appear prominently on both versions, but Hitwise identified that for the top phrases:

• the singular version was more commonly used when looking for laptop accessories like batteries, bags and cases
• the plural version contained stronger buying singles, like “laptops UK” or “pink laptops”
• the singular version also contained plural qualifiers like “laptop computers”

And when analysing which phrases then resulted in searchers going to a shopping website, Hitwise concluded the plural version generally drove more visitors to ecommerce or buying sites.

You might conclude that the plural version would be best for your search engine optimisation strategy.

But if we look at the Google Trends data comparing laptop vs laptops, we see that more than twice as many people in the UK are searching for variations of the singular as compared to the plural versions:

So what is going on? This, of course, is the Long Tail, users searching on literally thousands of variations of your keywords, for example “light weight laptop” or “finger print recognition laptop.”

So what might we conclude from all this?

• compare the search volume of your specific phrases, for instance “laptops uk” vs “laptop uk” and build your content and linking strategy accordingly
• but do not overlook the broader keyphrases that encompass the high quality detailed searches your propsects may be using.

Changing your website domain name is a big deal.

Changing your domain name will result in immediately losing your rankings in Google, even if you keep the same content on the new domain name.

Cold Hanworth Forge teach blacksmithing courses, and found that their website was generating lots of course bookings. But the site was old, and the time was right to have a new website that the business could be proud of.

As part of their web makeover, the business owners were advised to get rid of their successful www.teachblacksmithing.com domain name, and use a brand new domain name with their company name in it instead.

And when the new website went live, their site disappeared from the Google results. Whereas they were previously in the top 10 for all their keyphrases, they now languished way down on pages 9 and 10 of the results.

And most importantly, they discovered their training bookings dried up.

The disaster was all down to changing their domain name.

We had a very quick discussion, Bob reverted back to his old domain name, and straight away he was back to getting bookings on his lovely new site direct as a result from regaining his high rankings in Google.

The mistake Bob made was not to plan for his domain name change. But to his credit, he spotted the problem, and quickly tried to figure out where things went wrong.

Google has provided a useful checklist for changing your domain name and they readily acknowledge that domain name changes are not easy.

And even when you have a member of staff dedicated to managing the changeover process, it will still take months (potentially) for your site to regain its rankings in Google. Take a look at TKG’s blog where they document their domain name changeover process.

There are times when domain name changes are desirable or inevitable, and just like any change in your business marketing, success is all in the planning.

Date: 16th June 2008

Time: 09:00 – 17:00

Successful Search Engine Optimisation

The Intermediate one day Hallam Search Engine Optimisation seminar focused on improving your rankings in the search engines, solving your SEO problems and answering your search marketing questions.

This independent, practical and highly enjoyable SEO Training course is a must for businesses who want to get found in Google.

You will learn how to:

• Diagnose your website problems
• Create an SEO plan of action for your website
• Use search engine optimisation tips and tricks to increase your rankings and traffic
• Understand why some sites rank so highly
• Measure your SEO success

Date

Monday, 16 June 2008 or
Wednesday,  2 July 2008

Times

09:00 – Registration & Coffee
09:30 – 16:30 Course
16:30 – 17:00 Informal Q&A

Venue

2 miles from M1 Junction 23
Loughborough Innovation Centre
Epinal Way
Loughborough   LE11 3EH

Fee

£295.00 + VAT (payable by credit card or cheque).
Includes comprehensive course notes, lunch, drinks and snacks.

Click here to book your place now via email

About this Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Training Course

This is not a course for absolute beginners:  we are assuming that you already have a website, or you may be planning a new website and that you understand the basics of how search engines rank pages.

This is going to be a fast paced day, and it includes as much SEO knowledge as you can stuff into your brain!

You will leave the day with a written plan of action detailing the specific steps you need to take to optimise your website.

Susan’s workshop materials are constantly updated as the industry shifts and changes, and this workshop will reflect the latest strategies to reflect the evolving search engine optimisation  marketplace.

You will be provided with a comprehensive set of course notes, articles and reference guides. Following the course, you will have access to Hallam’s password protected online library of SEO support resources.

Seminar Programme

• Update:  the lastest news in search on the Internet
• Principles of SEO: content, links and relevancy
• Jump starting poorly performing websites
• Producing keyword rich webpages
• How and when to use keyword analysis tools
• Copywriting perfect webpages
• Understanding Google Page Rank
• Innovative techniques for getting inbound links
• How to use Blogging as an SEO tool
• Your Google Toolbox: Webmaster Central, Local Search & More
• Google Analytics:  What to measure, and how to interpret your web statistics
• Staying out of trouble with the search engines
• Researching your competitor’s SEO campaigns

The Trainer

Susan Hallam one of the UK’s leading Internet marketing trainers and consultants, with more than 20 years experience in the information industry.

She is a regular speaker at conferences including Search Engine Strategies, InternetWorld, and the East Midlands eBusiness Club’s Web Academy and eBusiness Expo.

£295.00 – Monday, 16 June: Intermediate SEO Training £295.00 – Wednesday, 2 July: Intermediate SEO Training

Frequently Asked Questions (PDF)

Terms & Conditions

Want to understand how Google works? Want the information straight from the horse’s mouth?

Google have just produced a very useful PDF booklet called Making the Most of Your Content: A Publishers Guide to the Web.

It’s excellent. Read it. Even if you think you know it all already, read it.

Warning: Geek Alert

I found this on Matt Cutt’s very useful posting discussing Google’s improved documentation. Lots of Google goodies in there of a technical nature, including robots.txt, IP delivery, nofollow, and quality guidelines

In May Google AdWords lifted the restrictions to bid on your competitors’ trademarks.

What this means is that you can legitimately use AdWords to buy your competitors’ company name, product names, and trademarks with a view to siphoning off their traffic.

The strategy is to recommend alternatives to their products, and acquire new visitors to your website.

And it could be a great way to get well qualified visitors to your website. Self-selected visitors, giving buying signals, in marketing terms this might be called “low hanging fruit.”

For example, AsdaFinance are busily buying the keyword “Egg”, our lovely Derby based online bank and credit card company:

Little companies are piggy-backing on big company reputations, with what appears to be a small Gloucestershire conservatory company cleverly buying up the Wimpey brand:

I am also aware of some tit-for-tat bidding going on, where you will find that the MoneySuperMarket website is bidding on the phrase “confused.com”, and confused.com is bidding for the phrase “moneysupermarket.”

Google AdWords, of course, is laughing all the way to the bank.

Keep in mind that you are NOT entitled to use the trademark in the ad text itself, and that Google will require the advertiser to remove the trademarked term and prevent them from using it in the future. They will not investigate advertisers using the trademark in the keyword list.

What if you are on the other end of the stick, with competitors buying your branded keywords?

There are a number of different strategies if you want to protect your brand against AdWords raiders. One would be to crowd out the competition by utilising multiple AdWords accounts, multiple websites, and creating multiple ads, like MBNA are currently doing. The risk, of course, is that your ads are competing against yourself, and visitors like me might click on everyone of your ads, and burning your budget.

Alternatively, you can give affiliates free reign to buy your trademarked terms, letting them pay the advertising costs and again dominating the advertising space.

The British Library has got to be one of the best kept secrets for small businesses in the UK.

I spent a profitable afternoon researching a business project, and gained free access to industry reports that quite literally could run into hundreds of pounds.

The Business & IP Centre at the British Library, located next to St Pancras Station in London has masses of business information just waiting for you to come and use it. And it isn’t any stuffy library; it’s dynamic and beautiful and useful.

Online business databases, Market research reports, Trade guides, Industry guides, together with friendly and knowledgeable staff on hand to help you it.

And if you are local, then take advantage of their workshops and advice sessions.

Get yourself on the train to London, get yourself a free Reader Card, and get your business the information it needs.

It’s A National Treasure.