Hi my name is Nicole Commander. I’m a web designer, developer and consultant, so I work on websites all day everyday, and SEO is an integral part of that because I don’t just want to create websites, I also want my clients to be successful.

Tonight firstly I’ll quickly go over what SEO is, then I’ll explain what those animals are referring to, and finally what you should be doing now and into the future to boost your SEO.

For those that don’t know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and it refers to how your site, social Media profile or other digital asset is optimised for ranking in search results.
And I want to take this opportunity to bust a misconception - SEO isn’t just about Google, it’s about all search engines. But I’m talking specifically about Google today as it has the largest market share of users.

So some of you may have heard about Google Penguin, Hummingbird or Panda and wondered what the fuss was about. Google updates its search algorithm hundreds of times a year, and these animal names have been given to the more prominent updates. These updates are used to boost search results, get rid of spam and dodgy websites, and to improve the overall search experience. Now these are all good things, but there have been a number of sites that aren’t dodgy that have been negatively effected by these updates. So you need to be careful and respect the rules and guidelines, otherwise you may find that you have been penalised.

So what should you be doing now and in the future so that you get good rankings and not get penalised? Now before I tell you, I want to mention that there is quite a number of factors that effect rankings, and these will alter depending on your website, your goals and your competition, but these are the key areas that we should all be working on.

Firstly make sure Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools is setup for your site, both of them are free. Google Analytics allow you to find out more information about how users are currently using your site and Webmaster Tools allows you to see your site how Google does. It is also important to understand how to use them and keep coming back after they have been installed, and become familiar with the features that they provide. You shouldn’t just install them and not bother checking in again. SEO is constant, you can’t just tick it off as done.

Secondly producing regular high quality original content. So this generally takes the form of articles or blog posts. You also need to make sure that your content has a low density of outgoing links. If it’s too high your site may get flagged as spam. So it’s ok to have links in your articles, but I wouldn’t be putting one in every sentence. Also make sure that you write for people, not computers. Overloading your articles with keywords will not keep users coming back.

Thirdly- get social. Getting shares from users on Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook, linkedIn etc to your content will help - but don’t get too desperate. I have seen many times companies begging for shares and most of the time users won’t share unless you’re linking to content that they think is interesting and of high quality, or if there’s something in it for them.

My Fourth point is to make sure you site creates a good and consistent user experience. If it takes too long for your website to load, I guarantee no one will hang around. Make sure your site is responsive or has a device specific strategy, and by that I mean that it looks good on whatever device it can be displayed on.

My fifth point is to read and follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines. These are guidelines that have been created by Google to inform us on the best practises to help Google find, crawl and index your site. I have also included a link to this on the last slide.

Now my sixth and last point is to tackle Google plus. Raise your hands if you use Google+? Now keep them up if your company or website has a Google+ page? So as some of you may know Google Plus is Google’s own social network. Now for a while it was a bit of a graveyard, but it has grown in a few niches and will continue to grow now that Google has and continues to integrate it with its other services. Now if we compare to Facebook in regards to the amount of traffic it’s not quite there yet, but I think it’s best to set one up now as Google Plus will continue to grow.