SEO – Always worth revisiting the basics…

I’ve been offering SEO as a service to a growing number of clients for a while as both a standalone product, and also as part of everything I do in terms of content marketing and social media. Jumping into blogger outreach, social networking or blogging without a strategy which includes targetting relevant keywords and encouraging inbound links wastes quite a lot of the potential benefits and misses out on the chance for content, social media and SEO to amplify each other.

And much of good SEO practice starts with the basics, which is one reason why I really appreciated an invite to a day with SEO PR Training, who specialise in explaining the art of SEO to PR professionals, and the equally mystifying art of PR to SEO professionals. As someone who has worked with people in both camps, I can vouch for the fact that mutual understanding is unbelievably more effective for all concerned and can really give great benefits.

As a taster event, the attendees ranged in experience, so the training had to cover everything from a pretty basic level upwards, but the SEO PR duo of Claire and Nichola did a really good job of going through the building blocks really effectively (and with some nifty learning methods to make it quite fun), and then going into a lot more detail for the more advanced/geekier attendees. Ironically I ended up partnering with an old social media acquintance, @farhan, which meant we were instantly seen as the techies after an early exercise to list what things we do on our own sites regarding SEO – mainly because we ran out of space on our paper…

A couple of people asked why I’d come along if I already work in SEO, and I figured the reasons were worth sharing:

• SEO is constantly changing, and it’s easy to get so involved in working on client sites and my own that it’s always good to get outside confirmation that Google hasn’t decided the sky is pink or Bing has gained 99% of the search market while I’ve been busy building keyword lists.
• As someone who works to educate clients on best practice, it’s always good to see the training techniques being used in workshops in a more formal setting. I’m not suggesting I’m going to replicate Claire and Nichola’s exact exercises, but it definitely reminded me that learning/teaching SEO can be more fun than it sometimes appears.
• One area which can get expensive is signing up and evaluating all the tools available for monitoring and analysing every element of digital marketing, and I’m always fascinated by what services other people use, and how they rate them.

Two elements of the day really stood out for me – one was a live attempt to rank for a specific phrase, based on an article published just before we broke for lunch. Utilising existing assets and social media, it was in the top two results by the time we came back after eating, which was a great way to provide a realtime example of both what’s possible, and what elements went into it.

The other stand-out was the analysis of an example site. In this case, one of mine! The good news for me and my clients is that it did pretty well in terms of keywords and links, and the recommendations that followed were things I’d been aware of, but hadn’t found time to sort due to my daily workload – but it was a great reminder that even my spare time projects need to follow the same structured approach that I apply to client website development and SEO, particularly if prospective SEO clients find me via those sites instead of client references!

So thanks again to the SEO PR Training team for a really useful and enjoyable day, and also a really good chat in the pub afterwards which gave me a chance to go into full geek mode! The follow-up emails with a jargon buster and a full list of all the useful tools mentioned on the day are also a handy touch…