The Business Design Centre in Islington hosted the Search Engine Strategies conference last this week which brought together some of the biggest names in search. Keynote speakers included prominent analytics writers Avinash Kaushik and Bryan Eisenberg, plus Jim Sterne, chairman of the Web Analytics Association, who NMK interviewed last year.

New Media Knowledge’s Chris Lee went along and tapped up Laurence O’Toole, director of Analytics SEO, to learn what basics firms should cover when approaching search engine optimisation (SEO) for the first time.

“Starting your first SEO campaign needn’t be too confusing as long as you get the basics right,” O’Toole said, outlining seven steps to successful SEO.

Step 1 - Add website analytics software to your website

“There are lots of free website analytics tools out there that you can easily add to your website.  It should take a competent web developer less than 30 minutes to add the necessary code to every page of your website,” O’Toole advised, citing free services such as Google Analytics and Yahoo IndexTools as traffic analytic monitors.

This software typically shows you how many visitors you get to your website, how they found you, how long they stay and which content they go to, how quickly they leave your site and whether they convert by buying something or completing a contact form.

“Without this software in place you will be wasting your time and money on an SEO campaign as you have no way of knowing whether you have been successful or not,” he said. “Set yourself some measurable targets, for example, increasing visits by 20 per cent within four months.”

Step 2 – Keyword Research

O’Toole advises companies to put themselves in their customers’ shoes. “If you were them and you wanted to buy your product or service, what would you type into a search engine?” he asked. Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool is handy here and, if you’re a local firm, think about “local modifiers”, O’Toole recommends.

Step 3 – Check your site is indexed in the major search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing.

“Each engine also has a ‘local version’ of their engine – search for ‘Google Local’, ‘Yahoo Local’ and ‘Bing Local’ and add your website yourself for free,” he said.

Step 4 – Modify your website

O’Toole advises that firms add unique ‘Meta-data’ to each page of their website. “Add a unique page title (maximum length 66 characters including spaces), description (maximum length 150 characters including spaces) and keywords (no more than half a dozen different key phrases per page) to every page on your site,” he said. “Use the keywords you identified in step 2.”

Step 5 – Add interesting content to your site regularly

“Take a hard look at your site – is it interesting to prospective users and customers?” O’Toole asked. “Would anyone link to you because they thought what you are saying is worth passing on? Be very critical and if your site does not stand up to this kind of scrutiny then get your thinking caps on and create some better content!”

Firms need to create informative content including articles, forums, videos or images, white papers - anything that you think your target audience would find valuable, and make that information easy to share on social networks.

Step 6 – Friendly URLs

“Some website builder software packages create unfriendly URLs for every page on your site which search engines and users find unhelpful,” O’Toole said. “Get your designer to use relevant keywords in each URL. These keywords and phrases should be related to the topic of the page and the content on that page.”

O’Toole recommending using hyphens rather than underscores when adding more than one word to a URL.

Step 7 – Start Building Links to your site

Firms should contact their friends, suppliers and partners to encourage links to their website using identified keywords as the anchor text for links, O’Toole. “Try and get these sites to link to different relevant pages in your website, not just the home page,” he concluded. “This is time consuming work and at this stage you can decide whether you need to use some online SEO software tools or an SEO agency to help you.”