SEO gold: Malcolm Coles’ slideshow

I very much enjoyed Malcolm Coles‘  SEO workshop last week. His presentation was full of advice about sensible SEO and amusing case studies, and the interactive ending – where Coles examined the websites of a few brave volunteers – really helped to illustrate the importance to looking at your site through a search engine’s eyes.

The studious note-taking in the room throughout was testament to the relevance of the information delivered, which is not to say that the workshop wasn’t also fun and engaging. Coles’ obvious delight in the vagaries of Google was infectious, and he created such a congenial atmosphere that some people were moved to confess that they had dabbled in black hat techniques.

For those who missed the workshop, the slideshow has been uploaded to Slideshare and you can watch it below. I have written a summary of the slideshow to help you follow it, below the slideshow.

Slides 1-10
Mythbusting and straight-setting. What SEO is and why it is important. Graphs showing click-through rates on Google which demonstrate the importance of appearing on the first page of a search.

Slides 11-19
Taking a closer look at how sites appear on Google: what appears on the search result and what the site looks like to Google (caching). This was very interesting.

Slides 20-31
The practical things you can do. Writing useful html page titles and meta descriptions.

Slides 32-40
Images and URLs. The importance of labeling images correctly and taking care of your URLs.

Slides 41-51
Remembering about internal linking; SEO-unfriendly things; bad SEO practices.

Slides 52-59
Off-site SEO: getting useful links to your site and how to track your success (or not).

Slides 60-63
Endmatter: final tips.

This workshop focused on on-site SEO; if you want to learn about the next step, web analytics, sign up for our workshop next week, on Wednesday 15th September.

If you want to read more about SEO, check out Malcolm Coles’ blog.