I was asked to do a talk at last week’s Arts Marketing Association‘s first Tweet Meet – essentially a bunch of concurrent regional get-togethers with a shared Twitter hashtag. Firstly, a big thanks to Tim and Amy, the West Mids coordinators, for asking me to talk and for risking a subject that (useful as it is) doesn’t exactly scream excitement.
The people in the audience were unlikely to get into the code of their organisations’ websites but they were more than likely to produce content destined to go out online (marketing/press copy, blog posts, show information and that kind of thing).
What I wanted to do was give a brief skim over the main issues, demystify things a little and give some tips for improving the simple, day-to-day stuff they’re responsible for.
Here are my slides, with links to lots of resources and tools below:
Tools:
- Google Analytics
- Google AdWords
- Webmaster Tools (from Google and Bing)
- Wordtracker
- Authority Labs
- Blekko
- SEOMoz
- SEMRush
- MajesticSEO
Resources: Occam’s Razor (essential reading), Search Engine Land, SEOMoz, SEOBook, Search Engine Journal, State of Search, Search Engine Watch, Google Webmaster Central.
My final tips:
- Use keywords in your titles and a couple of times in the body of your copy (preferably early on, too)
- Don’t use ‘click here’ as anchor text
- Use alt tags for images
- Do a bit of research
- Think about what people coming via search engines might be looking for
- Seriously consider Google’s Analytics and/or AdWords qualifications
- Don’t let SEO get in the way of good content