This week saw myself and Stu Bowker presenting on behalf of Propellernet at the MDHub 100 SEO & Google tools seminar, at the Sussex County Cricket ground.

Our presentation gave a basic overview of SEO, exploring some link building tactics and the role good online PR can play. We also touched upon the power of conversion optimisation and detailed lots of free tools available to get you started.

One of the key themes that came out of the session was that Google wants to provide the most relevant search results to users, offering the best user experience possible, encouraging searchers to come back time and time again.

So how does Google decide who gets the top spot and ensure results stay relevant…? Well Google’s search algorithm looks at a host of factors, but particularly important ones include good and relevant on page content mentioning the keywords you are targeting, as well as relevant and authoritative external links to that content.

Google looks at these external links as a vote of confidence for your site or web page and as such, the more relevant and authoritative links you can gain, the greater impact this will have on your search results (providing these links are gained through ethical/white hat SEO link building techniques).

A great piece of content or link bait on your site, that people want to link to or a creative online PR story are often great ways to obtain some good links back to your site.

A brilliant link bait example from caterer.com, are the Little Gordon videos. They have great viral appeal and people will blog about them and undoubtably link to caterer.com (<– see, point proven!).

But before you embark on link building, it’s often best to get your house in order first, so to speak and conduct some keyword research. A good starting point is to make sure your website is accessible to the search engine crawlers. Then work out which keywords you want to target, using as much data as you can get hold of (web analytics, keyword research tools, asking your customers).

Once you have a good idea of this, work out the most realistic keyword targets and build content on your site, relevant to these keyword terms. But make sure these are the keyword terms people are searching for and not the terms you think they are searching for.

In Nick’s (From WebsiteSuccess) presentation at the MDHub, he cited  a great example to illustrate this. The airline industry often reference the term “low fares”, but a quick search for this term in Google’s free keyword tool shows that the monthly global ‘exact match’ search volume is 8,100. Compare this with the term “cheap flights” and the monthly global ‘exact match’ search volume is 3,350,000. This goes to show, that in-depth keyword research is essential!

So, as you start to gain more traffic from natural search, it’s worth considering running some conversion optimisation tests. Again, what you think is best is not always the case, let the data do the talking. Google optimiser is a great free tool to run some simple conversion tests.

If you’d like to take a look at the presentation slides from the event, then we’ve made them available for download below:

• MDHub - Introduction to Search Engine & Website Optimisation (PDF)

Lesley Elle Macgregor-Chatwin gives a nice summary of the MDHub event on her blog, which is also worth checking out.

Finally, I’d like to take this opportunity to thanks everyone who attended the event and thanks to Alex and Holly from the MDHub, for organising the event.