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Page 1, P3 Google search.
That’s SEO baby. Thank you Salford Uni #SSMM course. The best search and social media education you can get in the North. True.
How To Make Friends with Google and Influence People. Learn SEO at Salford Uni.
If you want to understand SEO, read Shakespeare.
The thing about old Bill is that he possessed both a beautifully sharp, direct economy of prose, whilst also being capable of expressing complex, poetic ideas. The sparks fly from Shakespeare’s text, igniting fireworks within our souls, even today.
SEO is, like Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth or Julius Caesar, ultimately about human nature. We search to have our needs sated, our questions answered, our dreams fulfilled. Unwittingly, we define ourselves, for no matter how we paint a portrait of ourselves in real life, our search histories encode a great part of what makes us tick.
Where our eyes covet, our money follows.
SEARCH ENGINES DON’T KNOW SHAKESPEARE
Google can read Shakespeare, but it doesn’t understand it. Humans do that.
It’s been said many times before, but computers are dumb. They have to be taught stuff by geeks, which is why they keep breaking down. In real life, geeks tend to lack humanity – they just don’t care enough.
Search engines, designed originally by academic geeks who wanted a kind of peer-to-peer equation which rated their metaphorical willies, have now evolved into a frenetic, never-sleeping global marketplace.
People sell stuff, they meet for a chat, or perhaps they gamble, view potential lovers or purchase things which make them feel happy.
Google is exactly like a 16th century marketplace in Southwark, except it doesn’t understand the nuances of language like Bill Shakespeare. Google struggles with layers of meaning, it’s still learning to sift wheat from chaff.
When you look at the blunt, `short tail’ keywords which bring people to web pages, you don’t get the full story. `Car insurance’ on its own is almost meaningless. Ranking on page 1 for it, is nothing more than a start, a jumping off point.
What matters are the couplets that follow – or as SEO geeks call them, the keyword modifiers.
What did they add next; `car insurance for under 25s, older drivers, banned, drink drivers, women, over 70s, London, one day, student, overseas visitors etc?
CONSORT! WHAT, DOST THOU MAKE US MINSTRELS?
When Mercutio shoots his verbal barbs at Tybalt’s cat-proud ego, he uses a double meaning popular in Shakespeare’s era.
`Minstrels’ was slang for gay lovers and Mercutio knows Tybalt won’t be able to handle the jibe. If you google the word `minstrels’ you will eventually discover this literary reference. But only after reading about medieval lute pluckers, racist variety shows from the 70s, Richard the Lionheart’s Blondel buddy, or the chocolate sweet formerly known as Treets.
The point is, Google doesn’t know your website. Or your business. It doesn’t understand what the words on your pages actually mean, it only really sees the structure of the site and views the traffic patterns which drive visitors to your pages – or pictures/videos for that matter. As regards content, it takes an educated guess, based on other sites which feature similar keywords to yours.
So always explain things for Google. Tag every photo with relevant keywords and have a theme to those magic words. Write a meta description based on KEYWORD RESEARCH, not a hunch your marketing girl Sophie had whilst chinning another bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.
Be methodical, but be creative too. Be unique.
CREATING CONTENT MEANS LEARNING, BEFORE WRITING
Google is dumb. Fact.
Create content based on search patterns relevant for your business. Study your customers carefully, listen to the language they use, watch where their eyes take them online, learn from the layers of meaning they type into Google.
Google Analytics is agreat place to start this process. But email records, phone conversations, news sites consumed, social media photos shared and a dozen other metric analysis tools and apps can all help.
Again, sifting wheat from chaff is the art of understanding.
ALL THAT GLISTERS…
The story of your customers true lives; the passions they pursue, the fears they assuage with medicines, alcohol, food, cars or a hundred other trinkets, contain the code which links them to you.
The way your content is consumed, and crucially, shared online, is the real gold dust within your site. Ask `what is the nature of this person, what do they do with my site?’ Don’t set too much store by what they say. Half of that is bullshit.
Never stop studying your customer search volumes, always test keywords relentlessly, watch how people refine and develop their search term language as new interests hook them, because human nature never sleeps. It endures.
Like Shakespeare.
I work for LBM Marketing in Cheshire and we recently launched Watch My Wallet, a new consumer advice, moneysaving tips web magazine.
When I studied SEO and social media marketing at Salford University for three months back in 2012, I learned a few useful strategies for optimising websites, especially content. This is important because Google puts new websites in a kind of sandbox – a holding pen if you like – while it works out how trustworthy, useful and original your content is.
Obviously factors such as the structure of the site, clean IP address and many more are important, but nothing helps to boost your site’s early page rank so much as links via social media, news outlets or getting individual articles ranked highly on commonly searched keywords.
START WITH A PLAN BASED ON HUMAN NATURE
People search for a variety of reasons but using Google Insights & Trends, setting up Google Alerts, using Rippla to gauge newsworthy stories and many other tools will help you form a plan for your site itself and the content within its pages.
Choose a topical story, get a trained writer to produce keyword rich content and tag it in your CMS - it will boost your page rank.
For example we researched pet insurance terms, listed the top keywords over 3-12 months, checked typical `modifiers’ and cross-referenced that with news stories.
We found that Lloyds TSB withdrew pet cover for older pets in Feb 2012, plus we saw `reduce pet food bills’ was a common search phrase. We put them together and three weeks after launching the site, we had position 1, page 1 on google for our article.
OK, it isn’t always that easy – we didn’t get that lucky with every article, but we did get page 1 results for seven articles within 17 days after launch – got to be happy with that 
PR STILL HAS VALUE
We had a low budget PR campaign, based around syndicating press releases about topics such as `saving money on travel into London for Olympics 2012.’ That got us a backlink from the San Francisco Chronicle and other newswire services within a week of being sent out.
As petrol prices increased and the tanker drivers strike caused more searches for reducing driving into London costs, we found the original article on `cheapest ways to drive into London‘ picked up more interest through late March. That was lucky, sometimes Google works out like that.
Links from major news sites are worth having. Why? Well when your website is new you have to prove to Google it isn’t a scam/pills/porn site – it has to build trust and authority, partly through decent quality link traffic. Newspaper, radio and good blog links matter, so devote some time and money to chasing them.
GO SOCIAL, TRACK LINKS
The Watch My Wallet logo - your branding is important in the long term, so hire a good graphic designer.
We established Twitter, Pinterest, Google + and Facebook pages for Watch My Wallet. Facebook performed the best in terms of referral, closely followed by Twitter. Open a bitly account and shrink your page urls, bitly will track visits by each article or feature link for you – you can compare those to your Analytics stats.
Google + is really only worth doing to please Google by the way. It’s like a gym; many people are members, few actually use it.
We found the `8 Ways to Reduce Your Pet Food Bills’ story performed well on social media, especially Twitter. This kind of story gets people talking, so use that `Twitter rage’ factor to get links to your content. My personal feeling is you should NOT automate Twitter content, but put the man hours in.
Be a real human, be nice, it gets a better quality follower and that’s what you need to convert people in the long run. Your brand values MUST be paramount, not your follower numbers.
USE A CMS THAT IS CUSTOMISABLE
One final point; your content CMS must – absolutely MUST – have the facility to add keywords and a unique keyword description for each article or story. Tag photos and videos too, never miss a chance to define your content. It works.
Our Watch My Wallet developer has chosen Umbraco and it is performing well. Easy to use when uploading a variety of features each day too with details like default sizes for images within stories. Anything that makes your site look professional builds reader trust, so use a good CMS.
If you have any SEO tips for brand new websites, post them below – I’m always keen to learn more! ;-)
