Transcript

This is a transcript of David White, Managing Director of Weboptimiser Media Ltd, speaking at our Search Marketing Masterclass in February 2008

How does Google work technically but what does that mean to you? Or what could that mean to you? These are all the services that you can access within Google just by opening a gmail account. And I have to be honest, I don't use all these services and I don't use, necessarily, all the services that I'm going to say that you should use. But my team do and many of our clients do and I would suggest that you do because these are all gateways, if you like, information gateways into Google.

And if you use these freely available gateways into Google, you're inviting Google to fundamentally read your website and understand that it's there from these different angles. And it's all these different angles that accounts for why Google delivers about 80% of all search results.

The alerts up at the top: The neat thing about the alerts is you can type in your company name, you can type in some key words that are suitable for the campaign that you're running, and Google will automatically alert you with any news - any freshly indexed information. And that can keep you in touch with what's going on and it just arrives in your email box so that's very simple, completely free.

As a result of seeing that information, you can say 'Hey, that's interesting. I'll click on that, it relates to my key word'. Go and read it, find an article, and that article might be some where you can add a comment to and in that comment, you put a link back to your website. So there's another clue.

In essence, optimisation for Google is 60% links, sort of 25-30% structure and the remainder is actually the on page content (the words). The structure's important because it enables navigation, it enables Google to read around the site. The content is the content that it believes that site is about. And then all the external links, which need to be the majority; all the links from all these other places that point to your site, they actually kind of confirm that other people think that's the idea, that's the concept.

And I would suggest that less links is greater than more links, even though there's that huge percentage. Because there's a tendency to go after thousands of links but there's a difference between a good link and a bad link. So Weboptimiser back there, our website, we're number one but actually we've got very few links. So if you count the links that our competitors have, they have more and we have less. So if links are so important, why are we number one? And I would suggest that the links that you acquire need to be very few but very high quality.

The next one is blog search. You know, I think whatever you do in terms of linking you've got to fundamentally consider it from the user proposition first. If you're actually getting a link and you're getting traffic primarily - and its qualified traffic, and it's appropriate traffic - then actually that's really what you're after. If there's a spin off to it, which there is an appropriate link that doesn't have no follow on it, then that's going to help you in your search marketing as well.

You can type in your search term, see what blogs there are out there, and basically go comment and participate with the online community. Add value by giving general information and hoping you'll be rewarded by a link. Just through this process, you will actually achieve enough good links.

There's a range of services here that it takes time to do and you need a strategy but you can use these as part of your strategy. And much better to use elements within Google because it's legal or acceptable and it contributes to this known way, this open door that Google offers and our only cost in doing this is in time and effort.

Google Analytics: It's another way into Google. You sign up, you put your site on Google Analytics, Google knows all about your site, fantastic. Find out if you're spider-able but you start to get information about what users are doing, where they're going so you start to see key words and how they're accruing. And you can use this long-tail knowledge, coupled with analytics to drive and develop your content on your site. So it's ever so simple; just want to give users what they're looking for really but the analytics gives us some proving information.

Optimisation - SEO terms - requires 60% links to your site, half of the balance is then the structure of your site and the other half is roughly speaking the actually content. The structure an the optimisation, if you like, now affects pay-per-click.

So in pay-per-click there's a system known as a quality score: It used to be, especially in other search engines like Yahoo, etc, up until very recently, the more you paid the higher your position. Now you can pay a lot of money but not have the top position. You're only going to have a top position if you have a quality score. In other words, the site relates to the search term and Google can see that does and gives you a score accordingly.

And as visitors cost money in any case and the price per visitor is going up, as more and more people are using search systems - especially pay-per-click - then it's more important that you grab the customer or the visitor and satisfy them straight off because it cost you three or four times as much or cost you a lot of money and simply lose that visitor to someone else.

We want to separate the design, the content and the functionality and a lot of this, like the https is automatically done for us. But there are further steps that we can go in deliberately separating content from design. So we're not saying 'forget design'; you can actually have the design that you need and that you want. But bear in mind search engines require words so what we do is we effectively float the words on top of the design. So it means what the search engines sees when it spiders a site is a page full of the text and it's not obliterated by the design.

Find out how many links you've got, find out how many links your competitors have, find out who they have linking to them. And start to work out who's got the biggest page rank, do the search in Firefox or add the page rank tools so that you can actually see the SEO tools so you can actually see the page rank in the listing of the sites that link to you. That way you can just choose the site of the highest page rank.