t2.ie Blog

First of all I would like to say apologies for the tardiness of this post but better late than never. I’ve been meaning to write it for weeks.

On the first of April I attended Search Marketing World in the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Santry. One of the lectures I attended was called “Managing Your SEO: Keys to Success” and was delivered by Chris Sherman.

Chris Sherman is Executive Editor of SearchEngineLand.com and President of Searchwise LLC, a Boulder Colorado based Web consulting firm. With over 25 years experience in interactive technologies, he is frequently quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Business Week, USA Today and other publications, and has appeared on CNN, NPR, CBS and other television and radio networks. For more info read his bio here. Suffice to say what the man doesn’t know about Search Engines is definitely not worth knowing.

Chris listed his top ten tips for success in search engines. please be aware that I am not using his exact words but this is the general jist of what he had to say:

1. Use natural search and paid search
2. Write for search engines and people
3. Use your customers language not your own.
4. Target both the “trunk” and the “long tail” keywords. The graph below gives a visual realisation of keywords from popular to less popular against monthly searches. The more popular are short tail, more general keywords, the middle ground is the trunk and the less popular are long tail keywords.� This graph is from http://www.marketinghub.info/long-tail-versus-short-tail-keywords/. An example: “hotel” would be a short tailed keyword, “hotel Kerry” would be a trunk keyword and ” boutique hotel Kerry” would be a long tail keyword.



5. Optimise all digital assets not just webpages e.g podcasts, videos, press releases, photos etc. Chris said that YouTube is the 2nd largest� search engine in the states.
6. Create audience profiles in the form of personas and scenarios and see how your online presence performs in such a test.
7. Focus on conversion. What do you want from your website? Sales, sales leads, newsletter signups etc?
8. Get into mobile NOW.
9. Use tools, tools simplify everything. I don’t think he was talking about spanners and screwdrivers. I believe he is talking about tools such as Google website optimiser.
10. Review/Redesign your website at least once a year. t2 like this one

There you go, that’s Chris Sherman’s top 10 tips for search engine success.