Blog: Search Engine Optimisation with Malcolm Coles

ICT KTN Online Business Essential Clinics #1 Search Engine Optimisation

with Malcolm Coles, 15th September 2011

 

The ICT KTN Online Business Essential Clinics series began anew on 15th September 2011 at the Young Foundation in Bethnal Green. The topic for the evening was Search Engine Optimisation with Malcolm Coles presenting.

Malcolm is a content strategist and SEO consultant. He is currently the Digital Product Director at Trinity Mirror and maintains a humorous and engaging blog that focuses on SEO, Twitter, social media and newspapers. Previously Malcolm was the editor of which.co.uk, the product-testing website and consumer association. It is also the UK’s most successful pay-walled website.

Over the course of the session Malcolm showed the group that there are many ways and means to influence how people find you on the web. Malcolm provides more than just a step by step guide to improving your Google ranking, he finds a way to into the process that is fun and develops a sense of empowerment in those previously baffled. He instills an attitude that SEO is not a massive wall of tedium but is something that effects our viewpoint and therefore understanding of the world.

Throughout the session Malcolm showed how we can reverse engineer Google searches and analytics reports, to unearth patterns in your audience’s behaviour and use them to adapt your site in order to influence future searches.

Malcolm showed how rather dry stats reports become illuminated when you begin to think about the reasons for the behaviours that compel people to search as they do. A great example of this is an instance where Dr. Who fans would search for the lead actress – ‘Karen Gillan’ + ‘Underwear’ whilst sitting with their laptops in front of the telly. This would always happen over the weekend when the show is aired. However, one week the searches spiked on Tuesday instead, the explanation for this was deduced to be the fact that during this particular weekend England were playing a football match. When the repeat was aired on the Tuesday all those who were occupied watching the football match tuned in and promptly began to search for their favourite starlet in her underwear and hence creating a new spike!

If you would like to find out more about Malcolm’s presentation the slides have been uploaded here(please note these slides are from a previous presentation in 2010 and so differ slightly from what you may have seen in this session). They are quite detailed and provide many helpful tips to get you started with website an SEO overhaul as well as a few laughs too.

We have a total of seven clinics this series and so if you would like to find out more or to attend please see our programme overview. For any questions relating to this event or the series in general please contact caroline AT metamute.org.

This workshop series will be free to attend thanks to the generous support of our sponsor the ICT Knowledge Transfer Network.