See and hear part two of David White's presentation at the Hilton in Cobham, January 2008 his chosen subject is of course search engine marketing - this excerpt continues with key points of advice that everyones site should follow to get good ratings from Google and its users.

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.

The next one: name the images. You can name every image. So if you sell pianos, name the piano, give it its part number and explain what you need to. Sometimes, we don't want to name images because there's too much text on the page, so there's a process known as tagging, also known as Alt tagging in this case. This is an alternative name for an image and it's precisely the point that search engines cannot read images, they don't have eyes as we have, they just read words, so there's a way of putting words into a site, relating to an image, and that's a tag called an Alt tag. That's something your web designer might do, or something that you can do yourself. It's very easy to do. The last two comments are the site map and tables. These have very much to do with the structure of a website or a web page. The site map is really just a page full of links. Try not to exceed more than 100 links; ideally you don't want more than 50. And if there are more than 50 have more than one page of links, I would say, multiple site maps. Give a site map per section. In fact, if you can organize your website that it is in sections, in product sections that relate to your business, that's much better for search engines and you might find yourself getting listed in more areas. And the last technical bit, don't use tables, use div's, which have other connotations unfortunately. But basically, the table system is a beginning of the internet method of creating a website and uses the hell of a lot of code to basically put pictures and put words in certain places within the page. CSS, which I advise everyone to use on their website, just makes that much, much simple to achieve. That's it, that's the technical bit, we're over.

How to validate your site

So here's what a couple of you already asked. How do you all know if your website is technically proficient? Does it work? If you go to http://validator. w3.org, enter your website URL, the address of the website, it will then tell you whether your website passes or fails. If it passes, fantastic, move on to the next one and check out your CSS, which is the next validator, and if they both pass, brilliant. And the key is, if they pass here, that means your website is going to be very, very readable to search engines. If it fails, these validators won't tell you exactly how to fix it, but they will highlight the problems on your site and they will give you a list of key points that you can then mention to or print to or forward to your web designer and say "We've got to fix these things". If he can't help, I'll be glad to. And the last point here: we like to put funny things and bits of software and tools and toys on our websites and they are great fun for humans to use often and we enjoy them. The problem is, quite often, search engines can't read them and also they don't necessarily make sense to the context of your site, so CSS is a separate file and Java Script should be put into a separate file, separating in a way, it's the same thing I said earlier, separating in a way design from content, from functionality into three different areas.

The CSS and Java Script are two functionality areas that confuse search engines. So what we do is we take the code, we put it into a separate document and we let your website call it when it needs it. Again, this is something your web designer should be able to do easily; I'm just trying to give you a conversational start if you're not already there.

Add great content

Now, great content to you is not necessarily the same as great content to your visitors. Often we would describe our business in our terms, in our jargon, so I'll use terms like CSS and things that I know about, but actually it doesn't make sense to non web people. What I'm really talking about is simplifying the design and separating the functionalities, but actually I should be saying as I have said, simplify the design and separate the functionality and I think that's a bit more understandable than saying CSS. So if I'm trying to sell CSS service I need to address it in the kind of words that my customers might use. And this is a key to making a website achieve a really good quality score. Because if people type in a search term and actually get a page that they are expecting to find and it makes sense they are going to stay there, enjoy the page and Google would have the great pleasure in delivering you to that page. Everyone wins.

Competitive benchmarking

To help you, you can look at your competitors; there are key word analysis tools. For instance, when you type in a term into Google, sometimes it says "Did you mean..." and then gives alternative words. These are the kind of free tools that you can access. There are tools that you can buy but just that simple process of searching for something similar to what you sell and using the words you want to use will show you other words that relate to your product or service. Also at the bottom of the page on the Google results, as well as on yahoo or MSN, they often say "alternative search terms", or "additional search terms" or "search terms related to what you were searching for" and what they are is a list of terms and words that other people searching for similar thing often use and you can look at those and you can think "That's an interesting way". It can give you ideas of describing your content. And if you take that onboard and starts with those terms and say to yourself "How would I describe what we do starting from those terms?" you would probably end up with a descriptive piece that would be very useful to search engine users. So this is reasonably basic and often through re-evaluating, and in our business, the times that we have to do this and take out clients to it is still very common and very often.

I've mentioned tags for images. Every page and every image, where possible, should have this. And every individual page throughout the site should have an individual title. We should almost be able to theme each page, so that there is a main theme to your front page and then there is kind of a tree of themes, other themes that can be addressed by the site map that I spoke about. Each page throughout the website should have an individual theme as much as possible and that's sometimes difficult to do because we like to relate things but the more that we can hold a theme on a page the more relevance and the stronger the focus of that page to a search engine and ultimately of that page to a potential search engine user. And part of that the meing is the way that we label objects like photographs and images and also the way that we title the page. But we don't want to get too creative, so we don't want to use words in the title of the page that don't actually exist in the page. When that occurs it starts to confuse people and if you have a title that says one thing but actually it's something else you are gong to get a poor quality score at Google.

So nowadays we like to talk about the importance of you site is about 30 to 40% of the whole picture to natural search and the other 60% is the links that the people have created elsewhere within the web that link to your site. Some of this links will sit within directories and there is a classic directory that Google relies upon which is called dmoz.org. And all you need to do is to register your site, submit your site and describe your site and someone will come along as a member of dmoz.org and read what you said about your site and answer "Yes that is true" and hit a button and your site will be listed in Dmoz. It can take a while but that would give you a link within a relevant part of a directory and it will actually bring traffic and it will be very useful for humans. Fundamentally that's the key when we are looking to achieve links we'd rather have fewer links that are very high quality rather than thousands of links that are actually meaningless. So to make them more meaningful we want the links to come from places that are relevant to your website. So, a subsection of a directory will be very relevant.

So here is a clue. If you go to Yahoo.com and if type in the search box "link: www." and then your competitors' URL it will then list up all the links that exist for your competitors and you an see where your competitors are getting their links from and guess what? You can go and look at those websites and send them an email or register on their site and basically ask the site owner to give you a link and that's a way. You know, it's slow but it could well deliver you very high quality links.

This is the last of my top tips for today: pay per click. Here you go: use analytics, this is the absolute key, ensure relevant landing pages. Make sure that what they search on, what they click on and what they are delivered to is consistent so that when they search on something they get what they were looking for. And that way your pages, your site will be more sticky, you'll get a higher position, you'll get a higher quality score, and whole thing will just work better. It's common sense really. Employ a call to action. This is another thing that clients often don't want to include or don't include and it can be a simple phone number. But these are the things that you can measure and you can put into place that people will respond to. And when they respond they can drive your business and that can help, obviously. In per pay click you can use a system called dynamic titles and what you can do is you can target certain phrases and with a dynamic title what it does is it takes a phrase that people have typed in and puts it in your pay per click result, makes it bold and it makes you advert stand out above the others. And again it's about relevance. If you typed in some words you pressed the button and you got a list of sites come up and some of them have got the same words you just typed in that are bold you are most likely to click on that one.

The region targeting is a recent thing and I think it's going to develop certainly through the use of mobile technology. And certainly you can now pay per advertising to appear on mobile phones because so many people are now searching from their phones and they are delivered an add quite often, Google advertising appears on mobile. And so you can save your money by going into the region area. You don't want to have clicks in Japan if you are not selling in Japan and if your business is based around Cobham with Google and the other search engines we can limit your region and get your business very, very targeted. That help makes it very effective. This is a big issue, the trademark. Many, many companies have trademarks but what they don't realize is often your competitors will go and target your trademark. But if it is your trademark and you have paid for it and it's registered you can just send the trademark number in an email to Google, and we'll do it for you if you like, and they will just stop other people form bidding on your trademark So that will mean your cost for bidding on your own trademark would be low because there will be no competition and you will be much more likely to get number one position because there would be no one else there. So lowest cost per click highest position, and it's your trademark that gives you that. And lots of companies amazingly don't seem to realize that the trademark protection applies online. But it does.