Posted on 06/10/11, filed under General | No Comments
Today, October 6th 2011 saw LWS Creative and its team of SEO experts deliver a Serious About SEO event to 25 local business owners. The venue was the Sylvan Oak Restaurant in Findon and LWS guests were treated to some fantastic food and a seminar about the world of Search Engine Optimisation.
The Audience was extremely diverse, but with one common goal. To cost effectively increase revenue from their website.
A comprehesive writeup to follow, but the slides from todays presentation can be seen below.
Whether its a full campaign, some DIY training or some expert consultancy talk to LWS about your website and your SEO on 01903 790100 or email us at info@lwscreative.co.uk
Posted on 07/09/11, filed under General, LWS Training | 1 Comment
Search engine optimisation, to my knowledge, is not something Harry Potter ever indulged in. But his name became closely linked with this thorny subject at LWS Training’s latest Get Trained & Be Entertained event.
It all started with a reference to SEO as a ‘dark art’. In Harry Potter, the Dark Arts are magic spells and practices used for malicious purposes. Now that may apply to some forms of SEO but as our very own Voldemort, Peter Parsons, LWS programmes director, explained it’s generally a good description of the way many are left feeling about how it works. And Google likes it that way. So do the other search engines – but with 83.5% market share, let’s face it, we’re talking about the big G.
Google doesn’t reveal its algorithms – the rules and methods it uses to read, assess and rank websites – but it does drop hints. And a whole industry has sprung up to pick up, interpret and second-guess those rules in order to secure better rankings for clients. Nothing wrong with that, but there are those in that industry who practice ’Black Hat’ SEO – Keyword Cramming (overstuffing text with keywords), Cloaking (placing invisible keywords on a page, eg. white text on a white background), Doorway Pages (fake pages the user never sees), Link Buying (paying for inbound links to your website). All are unethical practices designed to fool the search engine spiders into ranking sites more highly and all, except arguably link buying, create an unfavourable experience for the user.
The subject of Dark Arts prompted a lot of questions: “Is it ok to copy and paste chunks of text from someone else’s website?” for instance. Absolutely not. In its simplest form, it’s copyright theft. But it’s also something that will get your site penalised in the rankings. “What about a phrase or a sentence?”. Probably ok.
But getting bogged down in the whys and wherefores, ins and outs, do’s and dont’s detracts from the single crucial factor of SEO – the reader’s experience. Google goes to great lengths to encourage sites to be written for visitors, not for the search engines. Its algorithms are more than capable of recognising identical text, the overuse of keywords and other black hat techniques. And they will penalise you for it. Just ask JC Penney.
The simple message when it comes to SEO is ‘remember your reader’. Create content for users. Write your keywords into your content but keep it readable. Make the site easily navigable, clean, fast, well-structured and legally compliant. Create ‘link bait’ – content so good that visitors will want to share it. Earn inbound links by promoting your site with Blogs, offline promotions, white papers, offers and corporate social responsibility.
Google will continue to change the goalposts as it strives to index the web. There is no magic wand.
Posted on 01/09/11, filed under General, LWS Training | No Comments
Are you a small business owner with ambitions to grow and grow fast? If so, you could eligible for up to £1,000 worth of funding towards training.
Skills South East, the region’s training and skills advisory service, is offering to match-fund training for companies employing between 2 and 250 people (full-time equivalant) and displaying the potential for high or fast growth. This potential needs to be:
- to increase turnover and/or staff numbers by 20% each year for three years (or 60% overall at the end of three years) – if trading for more than 12 months
- to achieve a turnover of £500,000 within three years of trading – if trading for less than 12 months
- to increase turnover and/or staff numbers by 10% in each of the next three years (or 30% overall at the end of three years)
Funding can be put towards one or a combination of training solutions, including workshops, online training, training programmes, tailored training options, peer learning and Higher Education qualifications. You can find more information on the new grant here.
These grants are available now and advisers are on hand to help assess your eligibility for the funding and your training needs, as well as to help you through the application process. Don’t miss out .
