Search Engine Marketing October 8, 2007

Cost
£395 + VAT for E-consultancy subscribers
£495 + VAT for non-subscribers

Grow your online business with a cutting-edge search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy for your best possible return on investment. Make sure you spot and take advantage of those early win opportunities.

Effective marketers continually look for ways to enhance and improve website visibility in the natural search engine listings. To increase the number of quality visitors to your website and boost online conversions, it’s essential to understand the key attributes of SEO: website structure, search term research, content creation and link equity.

The essence of a successful strategy is knowledge. With over 62% of the UK population now online and spending £5bn over Christmas 2005, you need to understand your online audience and their searching habits. A clever strategy will measure and analyse search term performance, visitor traffic from Google, Yahoo and all the main search engines and competitor activity.

Remember, SEO is not a mystery. It’s about attracting the right customers at the right time. Completing this course will equip you with the necessary understanding, technical know-how and insight to build a SEO strategy that will stand up in today’s fiercely competitive online marketplace.

WHO IS THE COURSE FOR?
This course is for marketing professionals who may already be running an SEO campaign. You understand the basic concepts but want to refine your approach in order to ensure you’re running a campaign that takes full advantage of every opportunity for competitive advantage and commercial success.

Whatever your relationship to managing your website’s SEO campaign – direct, through an agency or as a consultant, this course will provide you with the essential skills for campaign success.

HOW WILL I BENEFIT?
After attending this course, you will be able to:
• Plan, manage and enhance your SEO strategy for maximum return
• Refine your approach to search term analysis and selection to increase overall campaign value
• Understand and manage your online brand in order to grow your market share in the natural listings
• Improve your measurement, reporting and analysis methods for a focused campaign

WHAT WILL I LEARN?
Best practice methodologies and strategic skills will equip you with essential knowledge to plan and implement a successful SEO campaign. The course covers the following:

Understand search engines
Starting with a behind-the-scenes look at a search engine like Google will help you to understand how the natural listings are created in order to target them efficiently.
• How search engines crawl and index websites
• The relevance algorithm and the wide variety of factors that affect a websites position in the listings
• The latest search engine developments and how they could effect a website

Search engines – access all areas
Now you understand how a search engine works, you need to make sure they can access your website. This section delves into various techniques that will help you ensure your site is open all hours.
• Managing multiple domains and the challenges faced
• How to design a website and overcoming structural and URL issues
• How to deal with session IDs and cookies
• Flash and frames and their effect on the search engine friendliness of a website
• Overcoming issues with content management systems (CMS)
• Navigation Issues - once in, you need to make sure a search engine can move around easily

The ideal site structure
A successful SEO campaign is based on a few key structural elements that you should aim to mimic.
• Depth of document in-site – the less clicks a user has to make the better
• Organising multiple subjects
• How a site map can help

Content and copywriting
Search engines are user centric. They rank sites that are user-focused and demonstrate a commitment to improving the visitor’s on-site experience.
• Selecting and integrating search terms to a website
• Important on-page elements and Internal linking
• How to achieve a good balance of content and keeping it fresh and unique
• Managing multi-language sites and translation issues

Build a strong online community
Search engines assess and rank a site based on the strength of its online community. An effective link building strategy will lead to a wider presence in your online marketplace and encourage your natural search engine listings.
• How to encouraging long term natural link growth and identify topical hubs
• How to maximise existing links
• Quality over quantity is key
• How blogs and RSS feeds work and can enhance your campaign
• Press releases, do they work?
• What to avoid and why
Watch out for a few common pitfalls
There are some unethical and ‘black hat’ approaches to SEO that should be avoided. This section of the course will explain such techniques and why to avoid them if you want your SEO campaign to thrive.
• What is cloaking and hidden content
• Avoiding unnatural linking (e.g. link farms)
• The potential damage of associating with undesirable ‘bad neighbourhoods’
• Protect your brand – be aware of techniques that could harm your online brand

Accurate tracking for ongoing success
To understand and enhance the value of your SEO campaign, you will need to effectively track and analyse your SEO activity.
• Why track visits and conversions
• Tracking and the tools available
• Search term analysis for enhanced campaign performance
• Custom reports that reflect your campaign objectives
• Maintaining successful results for a focused campaign and maximum value

What’s on the horizon?
The search industry is forever evolving. To close, this course takes a brief look into future innovations, how they might effect your business and what you can do to plan ahead.

WHO IS THE WORKSHOP LEADER?

David Reilly, Barracuda Digital
With over 7 years experience in the digital sector including senior positions at Associated New Media and SEO consultancy Weboptimiser, David is Managing Director of specialist Search Marketing Agency, Barracuda Digital. Barracuda Digital provides dynamic search engine optimisation and paid search marketing solutions for both clients and agencies delivering exceptional return on investment. In plain speak this means we are good at getting websites top results in search engines, leading to more customer visits and sales.

David has spoken on Search marketing subjects for leading internet authorities, Enhance Media and E-consultancy, written a number of leading SEO white papers for magazines and delivered tailored training courses for IBM, Haygarth Digital and Hatmatic. He is completely passionate about search with a special interest in new Search marketing innovations such as Optimised RSS, Blogging and Social search.

In has spare time David likes to listen to music, practice his Flamenco dancing and explore long-haul destinations. A lucky escape from the Tsunami in Sri Lanka 2 years ago prompted him to set up Barracuda Digital.

Official Website: http://www.e-consultancy.com/knowledge/events/1313/search-engine-marketing--manchester-training-event.html