Iaee Ts2 Is Your Event Website Optimized Part 1

Editor's Notes

• #14: Arran - If we are to talk about SEO then that means we need to talk about the current winner in terms of search engine searches – Google. Generally what works for Google also works and applies to the other search engines such as Yahoo, MSN, ASK etc, but in terms of pure traffic, Google is the main search engine in English speaking countries and most of Western Europe.
• #15: Arran
• #16: Arran - This presentation focuses on Google for good reasons. If Google was a TV channel it would be almost as popular as ITV and more popular than BBC2 & Channel 4. SCN COMMENT: NO ONE IN THE U.S. KNOWS THESE CHANNELS. ESPN IS OUR MOST POPULAR CHANNELS AND I SUSPECT HITS A HIGH GLOBALLY ALSO. Google dominates the search market, even more so for business searches. To estimate the number of pages in Google did ASP carry out months of extensive research? No, we search for web pages with the letter ‘a’ in them!
• #17: Arran - This is a typical search engine results pages (SERP) for Google. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is about getting a presence anywhere on this page. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a sub set of SEM and is concerned with getting a return in the search results, the green box. SEM also deals with the adverts on this page – which appear, on this page, above and to the right of the organic search results. These adverts appear but the advertiser pays nothing until someone clicks on the advert. ASP can run advertising campaigns for clients – contact your account manager or sales on 020 8680 8004 for more information. This presentation focuses on SEO.
• #18: Arran - What is the difference between SEO and SERP advertising? (To confuse matters, although SEO is a sub-set of SEM, which is the whole SERP page, most SEO professionals say SEM when they mean advertising on the SERP. SEO, unless you are hiring a specialist SEO agency (which for most shows budgets is off the radar), is free and results from the search engine reading your website and returning a page or pages from your website when it thinks your website is relevant for a particular search. Most SEO experts agree that the best way to get results is to have lots of content. SEO is a long term approach and changes can take a long term to show. SEM is almost instant but costs you money per click. However you can advertise for keywords which are not on your website. SEM should be used in exhibitions for new launches (to raise awareness) and during the visitor promotional campaign. NB: A brand new website can take months to appear in ‘organic’ searches…
• #19: Arran - A definition/goal for a strategy. This is different from saying ‘to return highly in search results’ which would be like defining the goal for a football match as ‘to score more goals (SCN – Touchdowns?) than the other team’. With SEO you don’t want 1 page searched by Google – you want hundreds, maybe thousands of pages indexed by Google. But the content has to be RELEVANT to your audience – not any old rubbish. TIP: With good content visitors will repeatedly use your website thereby strengthening your brand with them. They might also recommend your website to colleagues/friends.
• #20: Arran - Read the quote. By ‘signals’ he means ‘factors’ and ‘document relevance’ really means ‘SERP appearance’. Another quote from Google also mentions that by the time it returns a SERP’ hundreds of computers have been involved up to that point. Search engines are complex, mainly because they have to dodge ‘spammy’ websites trying to cheat. So. if it was simple people would exploit it (and boy did we in the nineties…).
• #21: Arran - 200 different factors!! 2 years ago!! How can we get good results in Google with so many rules and equations going on??? As SEO experts we have to spend a lot of time working out Google - everything from reading technical blogs to reading Googles latest patents. One factor we believe, for example, is that older domain names rank ever so slightly higher than newer ones. (Brand new domain are actively ‘sandboxed’ or suppressed for a few months as well.). Could we get too obsessive about all the factors which Google keeps secret anyhow?
• #22: Arran
• #23: Arran - Google juice – okay occasionally we can weight the dice slightly in our favour.
• #24: Arran - As a marketer you need to know what you can control in terms of SEO. Your choice of web developer, be it third party or internal resource, can also drastically affect your performance. Without trying to sound preachy the pressure is on the developer now in terms of complexity. 5 years ago everything was easier: SEO, security, server reliability, design, coding, integration etc. Now clients expectations and the whole internet is much more complex and SEO is no exception. There is pressure on the smaller operators or departments to keep up and some, quite frankly, haven't. This presentation is about you but briefly I’ll mention what web development can affect. Code structure – the code must be readable by the search engines, if it can’t then only a few or even only 1 page will be indexed (stored) by the search engines. Flexibility – overall the system must be flexible so you can control all the elements you need to. Enforcement – sometimes we know you are busy and shortcuts are attempted – so we stop that! No pages appear without page titles or images without ALT tags for example. The physical design of the website is important, not just for branding or usability but structurally too. Page structure – the site must be coded in such a way that Google knows which bit is the page title and what part is the header. If not you lose useful weighting. Submittal – used to be very important but no longer. We now manually submit sites only if we have to.
• #31: Dave