How to make Google your 'best seller' - Seminar in Newbury
If Google is the great God of the internet, bestowing bountiful plenty upon loyal subjects who make the appropriate search engine optimisation (SEO) offerings and smiting to oblivion those who fail to pay their respects, then Chris Turberville-Tully and his team at Inspiration Inc are surely the Shaman who know how to appease Google.
How to make Google your ‘best-seller' was the title given to this seminar, the latest in the Trading Through Tough Times, held at the Regency Park Hotel in Thatcham, Berkshire where we had been talking about Organic PR just last week! It was Organic PR that we gave our own Trading Through Tough Times seminar at the start of the series in February and it was good to see some familiar faces.
A fellow member of the Newbury Business Group, we’ve known Chris and fellow Inspiration Inc founder Emily Tuberville-Tully for some time and witnessed the power of his expertise many times before and had already learned a great deal from him and with this new website for Morgan PR already riding high on so many searches on Google it was good to know we had been paying attention.
The seminar kicked off with an illuminating session of true or false and with a few myths dispelled Chris moved on to a boggling array of statistics about how people use Google and it rapidly became apparent to those who did not know, this Search Engine Optimisation is important whether you are in Newbury, Berkshire or anywhere else on the globe!
Then came the fundamentals!
These are the key things that you should be doing (we are!) to leverage Google in your favour:
- Key Phrase Research – find out what people type when they look for your service
- Build your website in XHTML and host it in the UK
- Create Meta data that matches your key phrase research
- Write content that matches your key phrase research
That Meta data relates to your title, description and keywords and Chris pointed out that it does matter whether you use plural or singular words. Or rather it matters – to cover both bases!
He also said the ‘keyword’ aspect of your Meta data stopped being relevant to Google four years ago, but it still was essential if you had an internal search function and was good practice in case Google changed its mind!
So how do you get even more love from Google?
- Change a portion or content of your website monthly – and every month thereafter.
- Find good websites to link to your website (a comment on this blog counts!)
- Run a low cost Google Adwords campaign as it gets a link to your site from Google!
- Submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, not least because that will give you clues where you might be going wrong.
Simple eh? Well an exercise quickly revealed that is was far from easy getting the balance and wording right, not least as there was no right answer to a question that constantly changes!
Now only one thing marred this seminar for us at Morgan PR – it was too short! Not least because of a late change made after we had booked, which saw Inspiration Inc sharing the slot with a presentation from Symantec.
We would not have come to a seminar by Symantec alone and were not alone in resenting the changes and around a fifth of the audience left after the break, ourselves included.
The Federation of Small Businesses is superb at organising seminars and networking events like this one and it enjoys a generous popularity among its local members. However, talking to some of those who did stay, they too felt they would have rather listened to more from Chris Turberville-Tully.