Cebit Australia – Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation: Is it More than Following the Rules? Jeremy Bolt, Director, Bruce Clay Australia.
The packed room stands up and gives a raucous applause that lasts a good 30 seconds, some wolf whistles can even me made out over the din to welcome the esteemed Jeremy Bolt .Whoops, I’m daydreaming again, in reality there is some polite applause as Jeremy strides to the podium.
Jeremy started off his discussion about what life was like before Google and how the search engines have changed and in particular the relationship between the search engines and how this relationship has changed over time.
Getting results- things you need to take heed of:
• SEO is evolving- algorithm changes, competitors, content types, search results and technology
• SEO knowledge is critical to momentum- training and enthusiasm is critical or the project will lose speed and your competition will prevail
• SEO is like the T.V show ‘House’- the symptoms are often hard to diagnose and the cure might take experimentation
• SEO is a professional sport- use professional and integrated tools
Key SEO Factors (basics)
• On-page factors- meta tags along with a clear subject-matter focus
• Expertness- inbound links, outbound links, internal links and controlling pagerank movement
• Copywriting- structural content, Kincaid levels and clarification words
Key SEO Factors (advanced)
• Optimisation of engagement objects – videos, mp3s, images, maps, books, news etc
• Architecture aka siloing – you need to theme align your content by the relevant search query
• Spidering- a slow server discourages spiders, crawlable XML sitemap and robots.txt file
• Building trust- how trusted is your domain?
Key SEO trends
• User engagement objects
• Trust authority – vince update
• Canonicalization tags
• Personalisation / behavioural/ localisation
• Mobile
• Duplicate content
• Global spam focus
10 SEO tips
1. Keyword research ‘it all starts here’
2. Understand your competitors
3. Ongoing commitment to new content
4. Structure your site correctly
5. Include SEO in your IA
6. Professional training and updates
7. Implementation and project management
8. Continually source themed links
9. SEO KPI’s
10. Design and specification
Jeremy managed to cram a days worth of information into 30 mins and did this very well. Everyone in the audience looked captivated and for once I wasn’t the only person furiously taking down notes.
[See Jeremy I told you not to be nervous! LOL – Kate]
Search Engine Optimisation in Further Depth, Andy Jamieson, Founder, Switched On Media.
Andy used slideshare to pick and choose a whole lot of SEO presentations and cherry picked what he thought were the best slides on the SEO industry. SEO is business critical as 43% of page views come from search. So where to start when looking at SEO? Is my site showing up on the front page ? Is my site being indexed? Does my SERP look compelling?
AJAX/Flash/anything that is difficult to index, how do we handle this? Flash is used to enhance the user experience but search engines have a major problem reading and indexing the content. Trying to fix this issue you may get busted for cloaking, be careful when doing this. Don’t cloak rather provide the same content in both elements.
When to use 301 URL’s:
• Domain migration
• Canonicalization
• Site architecture changes
• Misspelled domains
Andy then gave some broad overviews on some deep subjects like the canonicalization tag, pagerank sculpting and offsite link building. All in all a nice top level discussion of some important SEO elements.

See Bruce's author page for links to connect on social media.