I thought I’d start with the basics and headed off to the main auditorium to follow the “fundamentals Track”. The first session was called “Introduction to Search Marketing”.

Before the sessions I met with Dr. Ralph Wilson who walked up to me and asked where I was from and asked what I hoped to learn. Dr. Wilson was the main speaker the first session, so I chose my response very carefully by saying that even though I have been in SEO a while now, it is always good to hone your own skills and this session should do just that, confirm what I already know.

The introduction was done by Kevin Ryan who introduced Dr Ralph Wilson. Dr Wilson mainly talked about the big picture of search marketing and mainly the two tracks of SEM namely SEO and Paid search.

Firstly, he talked SEO and said that even though SEO focuses on organic results which can be achieved on a “free” basis, search engine traffic is not free. It does take time and time is money. However, having said that, it is the lowest cost way to get traffic to your site.

After that he mentioned that Search engines have algorithms and generally don’t reveal their formulas, therefore the only way to rank is to continually guess and tweak by means of experimentation and reverse engineering. Why, because the SE results are constantly changing.

According to Dr. Wilson, there are two ways that affect ranking:
- the webpage itself – what’s on the page and
- incoming links – the quality and quantity of links

Here are a few SEO basics he mentioned in this session

1. Conduct keyword research – what are the main keywords people will use to search for
- Analyze keywords and phrases
- Keyword analysis – Use tools like Wordtracker, Yahoo Keyword Suggesstion Tool, Google Keyword Tool and also your own traffic logs
- Keyword competition – select a niche, focus on that

2. Determine current ranking – you can use tools like WebPosition

3. Onsite SEO – make page Search Engine friendly
Ranking is based on 2 factors – what is on your pages and links to your site

Here he went into the top things you should look at for onsite SEO:
- Page Titles : use 5 to 8 words – don’t use your brand name
- Meta Description tag – use 200 to 250 characters
- Meta Keyword tag – used by Yahoo, not so much Google
- Header tags – use H1, H2 tags
- keywords in bodt text – keyword must be in first paragraph, keyword in link text, keyword in link URL – ALT and comment tags not as important

4. Help Search Engnes index each page of the site
- Don’t use splash page, especially flash – use text links
- Don’t use frames
- Use text links and not JavaScript
- Use site maps – XML format used by Google, Yahoo and MSN

5. Get links to your site
- Link popularity is important: more links, more pagerank
- Google says a site is relevant if a lot of links is pointing to it.
- Getting links is hard work – it is building relationships
- Getting links
a) in directories, yahoo, dmoz, industry related sites.
b) reciprocal links
c) articles
d) press release
e) affiliate program
f) develop a free service
g) start a blog
h) build a online forum
i) content creation
j) soial networking

6. Optimize key webpages – add keyword based om page theme

7. Don’t get banned
- check that you don have duplicate content
- don’t use doorway pages
- best behavious required
- no spamming

After SEO he moved onto PPC, which was a quick overview not really mentioning. However, i though this was interesting. He said: “Yahoo started Pay per Click, but Google is king” and this I believe to be true.

Way back in 2004 only 38% of user knew the difference between organic and paid search, today it is totally different.

Lastly he mentioned that when doing any keyword research, you need to research for both the “head” and “long tail” keywords. The “head” being the best keywords that will give a quick return based on popularity and the “long tail” which is less popular keywords but deliver more visits over a long time period.