Letters of the day…

S is for Search

E is for Engine

O is for Optimisation

This morning I went to get my link juice flowing at a free workshop with Manchester based SEO consultants theEword. Being a social media geek I’d already been impressed by their work earlier in the year on the Manchester Twitter Report. Therefore I was a delighted to have the excuse to visit theEword HQ and get some expert insight into the dark art of SEO. As well as a pinch of pay per click (PPC) thrown in for good measure.

So other than learning I (and my All About Audiences colleagues) easily succumb to GIANT beanbag envy (surely every office needs one!) – here are five top tips I thought I’d share:

1) Make search engines happy by giving them:

• High caliber, relevant content that is regularly updated
• An increasing volume of inbound links from a mixture of well respected sites
• Providing a website structure and code that makes life easy for bots as well as for humans

2) Flagfox is a nifty Firefox extension that enables you to determine the physical location of a website’s server. This will help when trying to identify sites as part of a link building campaign. Hear Google explain…

3) Content is king. Ensure it is focused on your keywords but still engaging for your readers. Adding interest with formatting to text and images improves the user experience as well as assisting search engines in their quest for quality sites.

4) When researching keywords for PPC don’t just rely on yourself. Use the wisdom of the crowd to see which words your colleagues, friends, family might use to search for the same product or service.

5) With PPC use a focused landing page and undertake A/B testing to maximise conversions. Adopting this method allows the impact of any refinements to be tracked.

Want to learn more? theEword will be running further free workshops in the New Year, so make it a resolution for 2011 to get your head out of the SEO sand and get along.

Image c/o Leo Reynolds licensed under Creative Commons.