SEO overview presentation by Director of Search Kevin Gibbons, at the SEOptimise Oxford Internet Marketing Seminar in March 2009. http://www.seoptimise.com

1. Search Engine Optimisation
SEOptimise Internet Marketing Seminar
5th March 2009 – The Magdalen Centre, Oxford
Kevin Gibbons
Director of Search, SEOptimise
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2. Search Engine Market Share
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3. What is organic search?
 Organic vs paid search listings:
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4. Why is organic traffic important?
 Click through rates for organic search
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5. Our approach to SEO
Organic optimisation is about maximising the following three areas of
a website to improve its search engine rankings for targeted
keywords:
 Crawlability can the spiders navigate through your site and find the
information you want them to?
 Relevance how relevant are your pages when a potential customer types a
search term that relates to your business?
 Popularity do lots of people find the content you provide interesting and
link to it?

6. Crawlability
 Search engine friendly code/design
 Good internal linking to key webpage’s
 Easy to follow navigation
 Sitemaps (HTML & XML)
 Clean URL structure
 Removal of duplicate content
 Avoid Flash animation, heavy JavaScript code & links

7. Relevance
 Is your content relevant to a specific term?
 Are targeted keywords well-optimised?
 Are inbound links (both internal & external) related to targeted
search terms?
 Are the keywords relevant to the overall theme of the website?
 Is the content up-to-date?

8. Link Popularity
5 factors of link popularity which impact rankings:
 Quality
 Relevancy
 Anchor text
 Quantity
 Age

9. Google Tools
 Google Analytics
- Track all user activity on your website.
- Measure search engine traffic and conversions.
 Google Webmaster Central
- View indexing errors
- Submit an XML sitemap
- View inbound link data (webpage specific, popular anchor text)
 Google Maps
- Generate additional traffic both directly and via Google Universal Search.
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10. Common mistakes to avoid
 Repetitive keyword targeting – you should select one term (or group of similar
terms) for each URL
 Keyword stuffing – instead emphasise keywords in key areas, keyword density no
longer a ranking factor
 Splitting efforts across multiple domains – consolidate all inbound links & ranking
weight into a single domain strategy wherever possible
 Reciprocal linking – Google can easily identify link exchanges
 Checking backlinks in Google via a link: command query – Use Yahoo! Site
Explorer or Google Webmaster Central for more accurate results
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