I have been working at this Online Marketing agency as a copywriter for the better part of twelve months now and have learned a huge amount about how to apply my writing skills to SEO and to other online marketing solutions for our clients.  While I do not consider myself an expert yet, my SEO skills have developed massively.  So when my turn came to act as the “lovely assistant” to my boss, Frank, at one of his popular Internet Marketing seminars, I thought well, it’s a day out of the office and a bit of a doddle. All I needed to do was move the mouse around a few times and set off the PowerPoint presentation.

So when Father Frank prepared to launch into his SEO sermon I have to admit to sliding down in my seat a little and preparing for a surreptitious nap. But within a couple of minutes of Frank beginning to speak, a strange thing happened. I started to get interested…

Once everyone had introduced themselves and told us what they were hoping to get out of the Internet Marketing seminar, Frank produced his “here’s one I prepared earlier” sheaf of notes. Being the (real) expert that he his, Frank had analysed every delegate’s website and there, in black and white, was the proof of just how wrong so many people are getting the basics. Out of all the websites Frank had analysed for the seminar, only one of them got a gold star in SEO; most of the rest wouldn’t even have qualified for the egg and spoon race!

As a cross-section of the travel industry it was shocking (to me at least) how few sites were optimised effectively for search engines, and how many fell into the most common traps of basic issues like duplicate content, no landing pages, not key phrase focus for any of the pages, badly done meta tags and, the worst one of all, having some or even all of the site invisible to search engines. By the looks on the delegate’s faces some of them were quite shocked too, but Frank doesn’t do these analyses just to embarrass people – this is where the learning begins.

I mentioned earlier that we had had an introduction time at the beginning of the seminar to see what everyone expected out of an Internet Marketing seminar. Nearly every one of them said they were there because they wanted to “keep up with all the changes in SEO”. But, here’s the secret – nothing’s changed at all! 

What these delegates really wanted (although they didn’t quite know it yet) was to learn the basic building blocks of SEO (which have always been the same) and apply them to their websites. There are plenty of people out there using scare tactics and jargon in order to frighten you into thinking that SEO is right up there with micro brain surgery, but using these few simple principles of making your pages relevant and credible to search engines AND people are still the best ways of increasing your visibility in the rankings.

Although in my case Frank was preaching to the converted, attending the seminar certainly gave me a new enthusiasm for ensuring I get the foundations right each and every time before trying to build fancy extensions!   It also reminded me when considering your online market, how important it is to ‘stand on your head’ (Frank’s suggestion not mine) and think online rather than offline. Bless you Frank.