Date: 14 March 2007

Graham Hansell is providing expert support and consultancy to this course for CIM. Graham provides regular training through the Chartered Institute of Marketing on their E-marketing courses to ensure marketers are better informed and more confident with the still new area of SEM/SEO for most of them.

In this workshop Graham will try to imagine life without our trusty search engines (eg Google) or directories (eg Yahoo). Two thirds of us use one or the other exclusively for finding relevant information on the Internet and most of us never move off the first page of results. So, with literally billions of pages on the web, it's imperative that we utilise proven search marketing tools and techniques to improve our relevance (ranking) for people searching for the types of products or services we provide.

You will learn how to:

• Differentiate between ‘search engines' and ‘directories'
• Use tried and tested techniques for improving ranking/positioning
• Decide whether to do in-house or use a specialist agency/consultancy
• Critically assess any third parties you might employ to help with ‘optimisation'
• Find out what people search for (ie the most popular searches within your market)
• Utilise ‘free' (organic) as well as ‘paid for'(pay-per-click) tools and techniques
• Exploit linking and listing strategies which improve your ranking/positioning
• Make relevant and winning ‘submissions' to search engines and directories
• Make the best use of the ‘words' at your disposal (key words and metadata)
• Make it easy for ‘web crawlers' and ‘spiders' to rate/rank your site highly
• Avoid common search marketing pitfalls and key technical challenges
• Utilise software to get the job done more efficiently and effectively
• Put together a comprehensive search marketing action plan
• Test market your search marketing using web analytics and other tools
• Set an appropriate budget and continuously measure and evaluate

Graham will be answering specific questions for each of the attendees and therefore 'giving away' £1000's of valuable consultancy. Graham is not paid for these session but instead aims to 'give something back', to help other marketers in a field which is beset by the misinformation of 'cowboys'.