SEO - driving traffic to your site

Half day in-company training course

Ideal for anyone who wants to increase the traffic to a website by the use of SEO techniques.

Outline Tailored to your needs

Intro

What is ‘Traffic’ anyway?
Why does it matter and how should a better understanding affect what you do editorially?
Traffic data and what it means in terms of readers of your content
Hits, page views, ad inventory, site ‘stickiness’, referrals etc. Which stats matter and why.
Why referrals are important and how they are created
What are the most important sources of traffic to your site?

Doing it: Search for a news story and write down the key points of the story and how you found it

Sources of online traffic

Print audience
Your existing online audience
Untapped audience interested in your content

Making the most of your audiences online

1. Print audience

The myth of audience cannibalisation
Closer integration of on and offline content
How to drive traffic from a magazine to a web site
Understanding what content is appropriate in which medium
Exploiting reader loyalty

2. Existing online audience

Why do they come back to you?
Where else might they go and why?
What you can do on the page to improve loyalty
Other ways of building loyalty (email newsletters, newsfeeds and RSS, special content, registration etc)
Design for more page views and more ‘drill down’

3. Finding your new online audience

Who are they? How do they differ from the audience you know?
How do they find relevant information online?
Where do they go for info if not you?
Links from other sites
Emailed content from friends
Directories (eg Yahoo)
Search engines (eg Google)

Doing it: Identify competitor web sites and analyse their attempts to address each of these audiences

Making your site work better with Search Engines (AKA SEO)

What is SEO?
What is the importance of SEO?
Why high-quality, relevant content is the most important factor of all

Understanding search engines

Why they are so important
How they work
The difference between a directory and a search engine
What is a search engine algorithm?
Understanding search results
Why search engines constantly adapt

Doing it: Familiarisation with Google searches and what they show

Keywords, tags, metatags

What is a keyword?
Creating a keyword list
What are tags and metatags?
What is an alt image tag?
What is important here?
Knowing and using keywords
Developing and managing a tagging policy

Doing it: Creating and researching a keyword list using Google. Discuss how these keywords can be most effectively used in pages

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