Hi, I'm David White from Weboptimiser. I would like to thank the CIMA Organisation, and Harry and Jenny for arranging everything so far, and here we all are. So thank you very much for coming along.

Advanced search engine marketing... we've been in search engine marketing business for about 12 years. But before we go there, I just really want to embarrass myself for a moment. I was brought up around here and as you can see I haven't been here for a long time, the photograph was taken when I was last in Cobham.

We are here to talk not about me but about the myths of Internet search. The issue that is important about Internet marketing and search marketing is that it is so accountable and very, very measurable. I'm not going to do hundreds of slides, I could do, it's my favorite subject. I'm going to try and keep it to about 15 or 16 and try to give you the summary.

The top tips are all available at one of our websites called searchtoptips.com. Weboptimiser, we set it up really before even the search marketing industry existed and people were seeing "It will never work. Search? Who will use that?" And, back in those days the exciting things were Hotmail and Altavista. And nowadays of course, there's MSN, Yahoo, Google and Gmail and some would say nothing has changed. Primarily, the objectives are fundamentally to communicate, educate and inspire, to help people understand how we can use search, how we can use websites. And still a lot of websites are impossible to find on search engines.

This is a unashamed plug for Weboptimiser here. Just to start with, this is a screen graph that we took today and as you can see we typed in "search engine marketing" at the top. Here we have Weboptimiser here and here, twice on the page. We have the natural search results and these are the results that Google delivers through its algorithm and it has determined that when you type in that search term, our website, weboptimiser.com, should be the number one. Thank you Google!

But it's because we have created content and we've organized it for the search engine to understand that it's there and you know what this is better sites out of all of the millions of site in this category. So that's very nice of them, thank you! And then the second area, we pay for. And everyone can pay for. But in the beginning of search, when they first introduced pay per click, the more you paid, the higher the position. That situation has developed, you no longer pay for your position. You pay per click, but you don't buy your way to the top in the same way. There has been a new development a couple of years ago, called "the quality score". So to achieve the number one position in pay per click you need to have a good website as well.

The reason is, is that, if you think about it, Google's objective is to deliver the very best results to its users. So you need to take good care of the sites, of what you deliver to your customers, to your potential customers, your visitor, to be honest and to give them what they are asking for, so the page they click through to relates to the search term that they have typed in. So in some sense that's very, very straight forward. But nowadays they measure this thing called "quality score" and even on pay per click that makes a difference.

So if you have a better website it now follows that you can pay a lower cost per click to achieve number one on the pay per click results. I'm sure as accountants you all like that. It's cheaper and it's fantastic. So why does it matter, being number one? Here is a heat map. The red area is where most clicks occur, covering number one, number two, number three. So this is why we like putting our site in our clients' sites, at number one, number two, number three. Because it's going to get most of the clicks. People spend a lot of time refining their search.

So, actually, and we know this from other research, people will time in a search term, look at what appears here, not click, but edit their the search term and press the button again. And you probably recognize there yourselves. I do it. And when we are happy with number one, because this is the one that we want, we'll click on it. And that's why we love Google. Because it tends to deliver the kind of websites that we want. This demonstrates that positioning counts.

But the first thing is analytics and this is the biggest mistake or the biggest thing that people fail to do and to my mind, I'm sure to your mind too, it's nuts. You can put analytics, you can put tracking software on a website for no cost at all, and as a result this analytic software can show you what clicks occur and if you know where your clients are coming from or your visitors are coming from and if you know what they do or really how quickly they leave and if you can track it and you can see it through some analytic software then that it is going to provide you with some great insights.

The head of Google Analytics gets much more excited and says "It's a marketer's dream" And I think it is. Because it shows you where your visitors come from, what they do and how they leave. And if you know those things you can change your site and you can present your visitors with low hanging fruit or honey and give them content on the site that interests them and holds their interest.

As an accountant I'm sure you realize the benefits of first identifying where you are starting from and then tracking and seeing how the business of your website improves. "Search engine marketing spoils design" is a common myth. Basically I would suggest you that you should design what you would like to design, to create a website the way you need the business to present itself. It's your calling card and as you build it you can optimize it. And usually the problem is that text - words that people read are embedded within the graphics.

There are two kinds of graphics: the normal graphics, the JPEGs, the fixed image, done by a designer and the flash graphics and you can use graphics and achieve good optimisation, you just need to separate the text, the words in the site from the images and you can place words on top of images and achieve that.

Pay per click it doesn't matter so much, although, if you go back to the quality score I was talking about a second ago, you don't just achieve positions in pay per click according to how much you pay any more, it measures the relevance. But the spiders go and check-out your site and looks at your site and if it finds relevant text it will actually give you points or 'kudos' if you like. So that might affect your position even on pay per click no matter how much you pay. So again, you can improve your pay per click using the same technique that you would employ as if you were doing natural search optimisation.

OK, now the technical bit. This is about as technical as it gets, folks.

The issue here, which I have covered already, is to separate the design of the site from the content of the site which you can also separate from the functionality of the site.

So for instance, you might have a website promoting a product or a service, there might be some pictures of that product or pictures of people, we have video on our site and you might have a back end shop, an e-commerce system, a transactional process, a booking and order form. Traditionally, order forms, booking systems, places where you put your credit card information are done on secure servers, are normally done on a separate website that probably looks very similar to your main site.

We don't want to optimize that, we don't want search engines entering and reading credit cards so they can remain nice and secure. And all your customer data, your product, your stock records, we can block search engines from reading that. So what I'm saying is the transactional part, the business end if you like is traditionally already separate from your main website. So we only really have to concern ourselves in many ways about the design and separating the content, so that content being the words. The only thing search engines can read or understand is the words. So the technical bit here, CSS, I'm not going to explain the full meaning of Cascading Style Sheets, but that's what CSS stands for and anyone in the web market, web design should understand all about CSS. It is a system that, if it is at the heart of your website, automatically separates content from design or functionality. So that is a conversation you should definitely be having. And that's a top tip.