Titman Firth together with two other local firms presented an hour long seminar to around 60 marketing profeshionals last week. The seminar hosted by the CIM Chartered Institute of Marketing provided practical steps you can take to make your site more search engine friendly covering technical, design and copywriting aspects of optimisation.

There is a huge amount of information available on search engine optimisation (SEO) but it can sometimes seems like a mysterious, complicated subject. But this seminar covered the essential principles of the subject and showed some highly practical tips and techniques to improve search engine rankings, and therefore traffic, leads, sales and ultimately profits.

The seminar provided answers to these questions and more:

- How do search engines work? (and what are the implications for your site?)
- What can you do to identify the right keywords and phrases?
- What are the design techniques that help (or hinder) SEO performance?
- How should you write or rewrite your site’s content to incorporate keywords?
- How can you build links from other sites to boost your ranking positions?
- What sort of monitoring will help you achieve ongoing improvements?
- If you want to bring in specialist help, where should you focus your investment?

Guests came away with an achievable checklist of things to do themselves with the option of contacting Titman Firth for further SEO development.

For further info please get in touch.

If you know what SEO means (Search Engine Optimisation) then you may be familiar with the terms ‘Organic Searches’ and ‘Pay-per-click’.

For those who are unfamiliar, an Organic Search is where a key phrase is entered into Google or similar search engine and the results are not sponsored or paid for, they come up due to the relevance of the search. Pay-per-click, however, is the opposite and are generally titled ‘Sponsored Results’ they appear according to how much the promoter wishes to pay.

My view is that both cannot be ignored or part of your target audience may be. However it goes without saying that organic searches are far more popular and effective. Particulary from a cost point of view as they do not cost per click and are generally user preferred due to their accuracy. Statistics show that Organic Searches are 6-8 times more likely to be chosen than Pay-per-click links.

At Titman Firth we tend to assess the required balance on a case by case basis as every business has different needs. Often though if a potential client’s budget for Pay-per-click is far higher then that for SEO/Organic Searches we aim to reverse the balance resulting in increased traffic and long term cost effectiveness.