Search engine marketing 101: Driving more traffic to your website – the fundamental techniques.
Why do you need this course?
Search is the primary method most of your visitors use to find your site (or worse, to find your competitor's sites). Getting on the first page of Google is extremely competitive, not just for commercial websites. A key technique for getting people to your site is an search engine marketing (SEM).
The goal of this workshop is to clarify your options and help focus your efforts. You're probably familiar with some of the terms and phrases being tossed around, but you're not yet clear how exactly all the techniques fit together. What search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques should you be using? Should you be paying for keywords? And what exactly is the difference?
What we'll cover
Search engine optimisation:
- How to determine the keywords and keyphrases to focus on
- Why sitemaps are surprisingly important
- What metadata matters, and what doesn't
- How the quality of your content is one of the most important factors
- Inbound links - what can you improve about them?
Search engine marketing:
We'll examine how it works, for both Google AdWords and Yahoo Search. We'll also explain how AdSense fits into the picture as well.
In particular we'll examine:
- What the advantages of paid search results are (beyond the simple fact that money buys you visibility).
- How bidding works
- How to be clever about bidding
- What you should know about click fraud
We'll also touch briefly on how to measure the success of your efforts - are you getting visitors and value from your search engine marketing efforts (our web analytics workshops will provide far greater detail).
What you'll get out of it?
After attending this course, you will be able to:
- Design and implement an SEM programme for your company
- Be confident on whether to focus on SEO or whether you need to spend on paid ads
- Drive more qualified visitors to your site
