BizGen 2011 Conference and 5 Simple Top Tips for Local SEO

It has been a really exciting week for us this week at SEO Traffic Lab and a couple of days ago we were Exhibitors at the Business Midlands BizGen 2011 Conference were we met a great deal of businesses interested in SEO. At the stand we were talking with people throughout the day on the different services that we are able to offer and was also running a competition for the chance to win 3 Months Free SEO Consultation, the lucky winners of which was announced yesterday on our Twitter feed @seotrafficlab55 and we are looking forward to working with Absolute Electrical Group in the near future on this exciting project for both them and us.

Throughout the day there were some really interesting speakers including Jacqui Thompson @pulsecsi with her interesting ‘A Dragons Den Survival Story’ and Malcolm York from Business Midlands @BizMids on the ’11 Step Business Blogging Guide’ among others. Our own Richard Hill gave a really interesting presentation on ’5 Simple SEO Tweaks,Tips and Tricks that will ensure your Business Attracts More Local Custom’ which was very well received and we have already had some great feedback from visitors and exhibitors alike who have been implementing some of the pointers that he gave throughout his talk.

After a brief introduction as to what exactly is SEO and more importantly why should we be using it Richard went straight into the 5 tips:

1. Keyword Research, is the MOST important aspect of any SEO Campaign one of the biggest mistakes that companies make when optimising their website is that they do it for the company name. This is not really going to be of benefit to the company as most people who are looking for you, your products and services won’t actually know who you are yet, so its much better to optimise the site for the products and services that you offer.
2. On Page Optimisation, one of the first things that any of the major search engines see when their robots visit your websites is the ‘Page Title’ and as such it is important to get this aspect right, make sure that you have the keywords that you are optimising the page for in the title of the page, if it is possible always endeavour to have these keywords at the beginning of the title and try and keep them to within 60 – 65 characters long.
3. Google Places, if you haven’t claimed your Google Places page yet then go and do it, this is a great way to promote both the business and the services you provide within your Local area.
4. Sitemaps, ensure that your site has both an html and xml sitemap. Html sitemaps are primarily designed for humans, they outline the structure of the site and aid with indexing in the search engines. Xml sitemaps are designed for the spiders can be submitted to the search engines directly and once again aid with indexing.
5. Link Building, is still one of the major factors when it comes to an SEO campaign and Richard discussed the many, many ways that this can be achieved.

As a bonus Richard also discussed making use of Local Directories when it comes to promoting your website, especially some of the FREE ones such as Business Midlands own directory. Of course we have only discussed very briefly in this post all of the things covered in the presentation given on the day and if any of you attended and would like to have the slide deck to aid as a reminder then you can get this from the following Local SEO Presentation link and to see more pictures from the event check us out on Facebook.

In the meantime we are looking forward now to BizGen 2012 and offer congratulations to the team at Business Midlands on a great event.