We all get Googled – people are looking for us by name on the search engines. It might be a potential client looking for you, or a “credibility check” for you and your business.

What are they going to find when they search for your name? (“Self-Googling”: I admit it, I search for Susan Hallam sometimes…)

Managing your personal brand on the web is a matter of promoting yourself, your business, and ensuring you’re giving out the right messages.

It’s a big topic, so just a few tips today:

1. Clearly search engine optimisation plays an important part. If you want to optimise for your personal name, then remember Titles and Keywords matter, and work on getting inbound linking that contains your name. It might well be worth buying your own domain name, such as www.susanhallam.co.uk Be sure to use a consistent version of your name (I’m always Susan Hallam in writing, never Sue Hallam) and be sure to associate your key phrase with your name whenever possible.

2. Build your online profile. Networking sites, social, business and otherwise, often rank well in the search engine results:

• ZoomInfo crawls the web looking for information about individuals and then compiles it into a minisite about you.
• LinkedIn is a business and social networking site that often ranks well in Google
• MySpace is widely used by businesses as well as private individuals
• Bebo is the number one phrase searched on Google this month.
• Facebook also ranks in the top 10 phrases searched for in Google in the UK this month

3. eZine articles are an opportunity for you to write about your area of expertise, helping to position yourself within the marketplace, and raise your visibility. Sources like www.ezinearticles.com publish a full author biography as well as an online chanel to syndicate your content

4. Giving away free content is a great way to promote your personal brand. Within your website you need to have a library of free materials that will be attractive both to the search engine spiders as well as your human visitors. And of course, you will be taking personal credit for what you have written which in turn helps to build your personal visibility.

5. Blogging provides a platform for your personal voice within a professional context, and of course the SEO benefits of blogging are well documented.

Charles Babbage may have invented the first computer, but it was Ada Lovelace (daughter of our own Lord Byron) who wrote the first software.

I toast Nottingham’s own first Girl Geek!*

If you’re a girl geek (or the guest of a girl geek) come and join us where I’ll be speaking at the Nottingham Girl Geek Dinner.

From what I understand, it’s a friendly, informal gathering, takes place at a bar, good chance for discussion and networking. I’ll be talking about the geeky part of search engine optimisation.

NottinghamGirlGeekDinner Rules

If you are male and wish to attend this event you must bring a female with you or be brought by a female. NO FEMALE, NO ENTRY!!!! Sorry Guys! (They will keep the numbers balanced!)

DATE: Monday 9th July 2007

TIME: 19:30 onwards

WHERE: Upstairs at Fat Cat, 2 Chapel Bar, Nottingham, NG1 6JQ
http://www.fatcatcafebars.co.uk/nottingham/index.html

HOW MUCH: £10 per head includes buffet (to be paid on the night). Drinks are to be bought separately from the bar.

WHAT HAPPENS: 7:30-8:00 Drinks, 8:00-8:30 Speaker, 8:30+ Buffet and Drinks.

BOOK YOUR PLACE: http://nottinghamgirlgeekdinner.pbwiki.com/

*(Someone who is female and has an interest in technology, particularly computing and new media. )

Andy Faulkner, based right here in beautiful Nottingham, has written a great little article on 25 ways to improve your website.

As my grandma always said, ‘common sense ain’t that common.’

Andy’s common sense suggestions are deceptively simple, and his article well worth reading.

Just to let you know I’ll be teaching a DIY Search Engine Optimisation for Small Businesses course in London on 18 July.

Learn how to improve your search engine rankings in just one day, in language that you can understand.

Venue: Oxford Street, London W1D 2EU
Fee: 255 plus VAT

This one day workshop is designed to provide small business owners and managers with a complete understanding of how to improve their rankings in Google and the other search engines.

Get in touch if you would like to book a place

In a single day, and in plain English, Susan will cut through the jargon to deliver practical search engine optimisation information and the latest techniques that can be instantly applied to your website.

Every business regardless of its size is able to take advantage of the opportunities offered by search engine marketing. This workshop will provide you with practical steps you can take to grow your business using search engine optimisation.

You will be provided with a comprehensive set of course notes, articles reference guides, and a course certificate. Following the course, you will have access to the Hallam online library of Small Business SEO Resources.

Seminar Programme

• Understanding how search engines work
• Seeing your website the way the search engines see it
• Identifying your ideal key phrases
• Crafting simple but perfectly optimised web pages
• Building powerful links from other websites
• Learning why other websites rank as well as they do
• Jump starting poorly performing websites
• Understanding the most important SEO principles
• Clearing up search engine optimisation myths
• Staying out of trouble with search engine
  

Book your place now

eBay has pulled all its sponsored advertising off Google in the USA.

What a shame; that means Americans won’t be seeing adverts for idiots for sale on eBay (this link shows adverts still operating in the UK)

The alleged cause of this drastic action? Cheeky Google planned a big party promoting Google Checkout on the same day and in the same city as eBay’s premier seller event, eBay Live.

And at the root of it all is eBay’s refusal to negotiate with Google over the use of Google Checkout as a mechanism for buyers or sellers. Google Checkout, of course, is a direct competitor to eBay’s own PayPal. Google Checkout is banned for use on eBay.

eBay’s position is that Google Checkout is unproven, and eBay expresses concerns over Google Checkout’s fraud and security issues.

Perhaps it really has something to do with keeping competitors off the PayPal turf?

The upshot is that removal of PPC advertising has cost eBay a 7% drop in traffic from Google. Google is the number one source of traffic for ebay.com. I would have expected a more dramatic drop, but the Hitwise analysis of the spat reveals the top search terms in Google are for the eBay domain name or eBay brand.

As for Google, the value of the lost advertising is estimated at $25 million, and eBay is Google’s largest AdWords customer.

So, big money is involved. As is usually the case money talks, and no doubt they will kiss and make up soon.

How do you feel about a “reverse psychology” or shock advertising for your Pay Per Click campaigns?

This Google AdWords advertiser describes his product as Rubbish and uses the strap line “Poor Service and Horrible Staff but Great Prices and Free Samples too!“

Your ad needs to differentiate you from your competitors, and catch the eye of your potential customer.

This is a sensational ad that might get clicks, but will it get the right clicks that then convert to sales?

This particular advert forms part of a series of Ad Variations that enables the advertiser to test the effectiveness of different ad styles. Ads might take the style of:

• benefits led copy: why your product is perfect for the customer
• testimonials
• discount offers
• free trial

Special thanks to Sharon Weston for bringing this ad to my attention.

Date: 14th June 2007

Derbyshire:  14 June

Leicestershire:  7 June

Thousands of small businesses in the UK are now using eBay to sell their products online. With almost 10 million users and 8.7 million visitors each month, eBay provides SMEs with a powerful tool for selling online. We will discuss the important issues you need to know about operating your business on eBay, and provide you with the tools and techniques to get you started selling online.

This half day workshop is designed to:

• Give you tips and techniques for improving your business performance on the web
• Help you to start selling on eBay

Who should attend?

Companies that are:

• Looking to start an ebusiness or expand upon an existing one
• Looking for an ecommerce web presence at a negligible cost
• In search of new target markets, whether domestic or overseas

The workshop is aimed at business owners or managers with a strong desire to grow their business using eBay. ”

Who is eligible?

To benefit from this FREE exclusive programme you need to become a registered member with eBusiness Club.   Once registered, your account will need to be activated before your booking if confirmed.

Learn more and book your place at the East Midlands eBusiness Club website.

Can an online business succeed without the assistance of the search engines?

What about if you deliberately exclude your site from the Google search engine results?

Jennifer Laycock is conducting an experiment whereby she is deliberately excluding her brand new web site from the search engine results. She wants to demonstrate it’s possible to grow a business, increase traffic and succeed online, all without the help of the search engines.

You go for it, girl!

Dependence on traffic from Google appears to be a fact of life for small businesses: nearly 80% of all searches in the UK taking place on Google. And at my workshops I’m always hearing small businesses moan that ranking well in Google is a Catch 22: “my business is new and small, so can’t rank well in Google, but if it doesn’t rank well, then it stays small or goes bust.”

So how can you succeed online if you can’t rank well in Google, or can’t afford (or won’t pay) the Pay Per Click Prices?

Jennifer has concocted her robots.txt file to tell the major search engine spiders to go away, and instead will be depending on the lesser search engines, link building, blogging, social networking, and other online marketing techniques.

And her underlying assumption is that by building good links and content, she will have a successful business model, and will rank well in the search engines anyway, eventually.

Follow Jennifer’s progress with her new online e-commerce venture Bento Yum on the Search Engine Guide website.

The debate rages regarding paying for inbound links in order to improve your Page Rank, and Google’s efforts to detect (and penalise) sites playing the paid-for-links game.

As a quick reminder, Google is absolutely clear that buying links to improve your Page Rank violates their quality guidelines; however, buying links as part of online advertising is confirmed as a kosher activity.

To this end, Google is actively soliciting us to report those nasty, nasty link selling cheaters in order to help them improve the Google algorithm or method to detect paid-for links.

If you’re worried about paid links (and you probably should be) then read Matt Cutt’s long but useful overview. In it he clarifies Google’s view of paid-for directories (if the quality is good, then they’re OK) and confirms that sites selling links are likely to lose the ability to pass their link value onto other pages (which means it just not worth buying the link, after all….)

Date: 8th June 2007

Time: 09:00- 17:30
This one day conference takes place at the Leicester Business School, and promises   “Find out how blogging by women and for women builds networks, improves customer reach, monetizes creativity and infuses your business with Web 2.0 goodness!”

It looks like a great group of speakers:

• Microsoft Technology Evangelist Eileen Brown
• Co-founder of Blog-her Jory des Jardins
• Meg Pickard, Guardian Unlimited’s  “Head of Communities and User Experience”

Susan Hallam will be facilitating a “Birds of a Feather ” session on Getting Found in Google:  Blogging and search engine optimisation.

You’re writing a great blog, and now you need to get more visitors. How can people find your blog? Search engines!

Search engine optimisation is the process of making your blog “findable” in Google, Yahoo and MSN, with the result of getting more visitors. This session will be led by Susan Hallam and we’ll discuss some basic optimisation tips and practical steps you can take to get indexed and found in the search engines.

There are bursaries available for small businesses in the East Midlands, covering conference fees.