betfair

Here’s some notes from the session at WordCampUK on SEO for WordPress, presented by Nick Garner of Betfair. Will tidy up later with more links and stuff.

1. you can’t hold your website users’ hands the whole time. SEO can make it easier for them to find what they want
2. What have you got that others don’t? What do you want on your site? Structure your content for search engines, use analytics and get social with links
3. Using WordPress with the right plugins helps
4. Content - useful and entertaining? Can the people writing your content actually write well? Need for enthusiasm. Would you read your content?
5. Jon Bounds tweets - “ I’d love a discussion about whether or not it’s all a bit vulgar, rather than how to do it.”
6. Who do you want to visit your site? Motivation: PR, money making or ego? Picture your reader and write for them
7. Think like a librarian when structuring content: correct titles, categorisation, avoid duplication
8. When building sites, get metadata in first, then the content. Don’t bury under piles of javascript & navigation stuff
9. The cost of some sites using ‘traditional’ CMS can make you sob
10. Security issues with WordPress? Can’t do ‘hard baked’ pages?
11. Get Google Analytics and webmaster console
12. If you are getting 90% traffic from search engines, that’s bad. About 60% is probably best.
13. Gaming search engines gets harder as processor grunt increases. Don’t bother putting your black hat on.
14. It takes time to get right, but can save a lot of marketing pennies
15. Journalists are cheap - get them to write your content
    
16. Can’t beat good writing
17. Links: general directories are useless.
18. Pimp yourself around: comment on related sites with link back to yours, put signposts up on relevant sites, be remarkable/stand out so people want to link to you
19. Getting pageviews is fine, but to what end? You can generate traffic, but what do these people do when on your site except consume bandwidth
20. Plenty of content, lots of key phrases
21. 10% of traffic will have commercial intent
22. Adsense is horrible (agreed!) If you are going to run ads use affiliate schemes
23. The fundamental thing is that Google wants to find the sites that people want to see, so it really is just about the content
24. SEOdigger.com - find out what keywords a site ranks for