My presentation from Content Management World in Melbourne - May, 2011. I spoke to the brief below: Developing a strategy to drive traffic to your site and improve conversions • How to get your site found through optimised web design • Leveraging online and search marketing, SEO and social recommendations to maximise traffic • Practical ideas for attracting and converting audiences

1. Site Design, SEO, SMO and Reporting Andrew Hughes – Snr. Consultant SEO & SMO May 05th 2011

2. Today’s Session Did you know? The search results How to approach SEO/SMO The Fundamentals Site structure On page elements Sign in/register/purchase Reporting & Testing Social Top SEO Actions Questions 2

3. Did you know #1 Google Shopping arrived in Australia two days ago (03/05/11) Action: You can add a feed through merchant centre 3

5. Total reach 42.5%

6. Over 14 minutes spent on YouTube per user each visit**

7. Average 62 YouTube pages per user each monthAction: Create and optimise content in different forms 4

8. Did you know #3 Bing ‘Liked results’ Bing’s organic results promotes links that your friends have ‘liked’ publicly or shared on Facebook. This is to encourage friends and family recommendations. Action: Implement FB Likes & Shares

9. Did you know 3.5 Clicking this button will publicly express your ‘like’ for the website in Google search results Google +1 Action: Apply For +1 Here

10. Did you know #4 •~$917 billion worth of retail sales last year were “web-influenced” • Online + web-influenced offline sales = 42% of total retail sales •By 2014, the web will influence = 53% Forrester Research March 2010 7

11. Did you know #5 PPC spend = 92% of Internet marketing dollars <10% of all clicks are made on PPC adsOrganic clicks yield >90% of all traffic Only 8% of all SEM spend is spent on SEO 8

12. The Search Results 9

13. The Universal Search Results Page Paid Search Results Driving direct response with tailored messaging and up to date offers Organic Search Results Increasingly active social communities lead to higher SEO rankings Video Search Results Social growth results in more relevant videos. Image Search Results Active communities lead to higher coverage Latest (Google) News Articles Digital PR 10

14. What The User Looks At 5 sec. 10 sec. 20 sec. 15 sec.

15. How to Approach SEO/SMO 12

17. Relevance - there is no point your website talking about new motors if the audience is searching for new cars.

18. Catch people early in the purchase cycle – category based searches & product research

19. Use your SEM campaigns to immediately find out what keywords are most profitable / offer highest ROI.13

21. Google Keyword Suggest (Below)

22. Advanced Search Functions –Eg Wonderwheel (Right)

23. Bing Keyword Research Tool

24. WordTracker (more US based)

25. Your own analytics package (Omniture/GA/WebTrends)14

26. Understand Your Current Site What are people doing on your current site? 15 Top – Google Analytics | Bottom Left Crazy Egg | Right ClickTail

28. Google AdPlanner

29. Hitwise (CAN be insightful but expensive)16

30. The Fundamentals 17

32. Hosting, Application & Site Speed (Target site to Australia if you have a .com)

33. Install and understand Webmaster Tools – Google/Bing/Yahoo

35. Use Semantic structures within content (H1>H6 sensibly)

36. Consider Web and Mobile accessibility

37. Don’t use Flash. If you can’t avoid it offer HTML alternatives

38. Understand that you should be able to test new layouts & designs at every opportunity...18

39. Site Structure 19

41. Keep the user in mind at all times (your research as a guide)

42. Use intuitive menus and navigation

43. All pages are not equal – consider priorities and quick links

44. Ensure that your content can be crawled (Spiders)

45. Sitemaps – XML & HTML all help this

46. Breadcrumb navigation (RDFa, Microdata or Microformats)

47. Separate content types if necessary, but try to keep on one domain!20

49. The first file that Google looks for on your server is Robots.txt

50. Use Robots.txt to reference your Sitemap Index File

51. Don’t use robots.txt to limit crawling – you want this!

52. Create page, image, news, video sitemaps to help index content

53. Use RSS for news/blog content or special offers

54. Consider: Dynamic Title, Description, Keyword, RDFa data based on information in db

55. Contextual linking is very beneficial – use it carefully

56. ONLY USE ONE DOMAIN – use vanity URL’s but host all content on your money domain.21

57. On Page Elements 22

59. Reference preferred content versions eg. if sort by price ensure that preferred version is canonically referenced or if neccessary, nofollow (not prefered)

60. Ensure that it is possible to navigate back to the homepage quickly

61. Use sitemaps intelligently – if you have lots of content, break it down into relevant sitemaps

62. Use offers to drive people to sign upto RSS or social notifications23

64. Images, Video (Transcripted), Specifications

65. Data rich – Rich Snippets (e.g. RDFa)

66. RSS subscribe to the category or sub category offer feed24

68. Purchase based rules – eg. three products or more = free shipping within a product category

69. Social sharing: Share & Like – OpenGraph integration / Share on Twitter. For blogs & news – Reddit/TechnoratiWhich takes us on to... 25

70. Sign In/ Registration/Payment 26

71. Simplify the process – Sign up/Sign In An interesting ecommerce fact that is very relevant: Two seconds is the new threshold that an average online shopper is willing to wait for a web page to load and 40 percent of shoppers will wait no more than three seconds before abandoning a retail or travel site (Forrester and Akamai 2009)* Improve login options: Open ID or Open Graph (Facebook) 27 * From Retail Technology Review October 2010

73. Use your reporting to track fall out within the purchase funnel

74. Offer consumers the option to pay how they want to pay.28

75. Reporting and Testing 29

77. Set up your analytics to report on all aspects

78. Understand and action the insights that it generates30

79. Testing (MVT) Test to ensure that you maximise your conversion Be it a like, consumption of content, a sale or other, make sure that you segment your users and maximise your conversions Google offer Website Optimiser for free – there are paid tools too 31

80. Social 32

82. Offering advice in the research phase – Create great content to become the authority on a topic

83. Become the Authority - Facts and figures – Infographics, leverage your data/research

84. Socially enable your site

85. Incentivise - Offers / Deals – Facebook/Google/Social Media Engagement33

86. Top SEO Actions 34

88. Design and build to be as cutting edge as you can afford to be – a site that is 12 months old looks it compared to a new site

89. Employ the best people you can, to action search and social work - They will make more out of reasonable tools, than the best tools with mediocre people

90. Record every click - if you have the storage capacity. The more you know about your site and users, the betterSo what are the foundations from an SEO perspective?

92. Keyword research should be considered in IA design

93. Try to enhance your SERP listings as much as possible

94. Don’t believe everything that Google tells you

95. Create great content that can be referenced, shared and that aligns with your social media strategy

96. Report, segment, test, learn, action – regularly

97. Do what you do best, as well as you possibly can do it

98. Don’t follow your competitors – offer the user what they are looking for36

99. Questions 37 Andrew Hughes – Snr. Consultant SEO & SMO Reprise Media: http://www.reprisemedia.com.au Twitter: @y0z2a My Blog (Just Rebuilt): http://searcheverywhere.net This Presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/y0z2a