UK magazine Direct Response said his impact on UK direct marketing was “unlikely to be matched by any other individual.”

In short, when Drayton Bird offers advice, it’s wise to listen and take heed.

Some time ago he wrote a paper for The European Academy of Direct and Interactive Marketing on how to get a better job. The advice and tips given are some of the most useful and insightful ever written and apply equally to an Engineer or Teacher as they would to an SEO or Online Marketing Executive.

If you’re looking for a job in SEO or Online Marketing, do yourself a BIG favour and read every last word of his brilliant article:

How To Get a Better Job by Drayton Bird

Factors influencing online purchasing decisions

The survey, published by Eccomplished looked at the buying habits of 2,000 respondents and came to the following conclusion:

Just under a quarter (23%) of online purchasers claimed they talked to friends and family in order to help them make a purchase, yet significantly more – nearly a third (31%) – cited having read product reviews or endorsements online. So the opinion of a stranger would appear to be more useful than that of a friend or family member when making an online purchase.

The importance of peer-to-peer word of mouth is compounded further by more shoppers citing having read comments on an online article (18%) than reading an article itself (14%) to help them make a purchase decision.

And providing further evidence of the power of ratings and reviews, four in ten (39%) of our shoppers claimed they would be likely to complete an online rating or review after making an online purchase, which is more than would make a recommendation to friends/family (35%).

Below are a few of the best free SEO analysis tools which we have found over the years to be useful and effective:

Reaction Engine

This is an instant, free and no-registration tool to analyse the SEO performance of a website (or specific page within a website) for a given keyphrase. Reports include a variety of useful information and structured recommendations to improve overall effectiveness. Try a few reports and judge for yourself.

SEOMoz Term Target

Helps determine how targeted a particular page is for a specified keyword by analyzing a variety of factors.

Web SEO Analytics

Creates detailed SEO reports for the pages of your website.

DN Fame

Provides a report about your domain or web site, including factors such as Google Pagerank, Alexa, Compete and DMOZ, site speed and status, backlinks in the search engines, domain analysis, CSS validation, graphs, RSS, social bookmarks and many more.

Click on the image below to view the larger image:

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO as its commonly known, has many definitions.

SEO expert Michael Gray, aka Graywolf, provides a fairly basic, but neat SEO definition:

Search Engine Optimization: The process, of building, designing, creating, or updating a website, or it’s contents, with the goals of increasing visibility within search engines, and improved placement on search engine results pages, for a desired set of keywords terms or market segment.

But, while this definition may be suitable for “on-site” SEO processes and strategies, it is too narrow to be a modern definition as it excludes the strategies and tactics which need to be employed “off-site” in order to optimise Search Engine visibility.

A broader, more exhaustive definition is provided by he esteemed Rand Fishkind of seomoz.org. He sums up SEO as follows:

SEO is the combination of tactics and strategies, including, but not limited to, optimization of information architecture, usability, content focus, audience targeting, design, development, keyword research, keyword placement, link building, social media marketing and any other online or offline branding/marketing elements that support the goal of receiving more traffic from search engines.

Both onsite and offsite seo tactics are essential to accomplishing your purpose of enhancing the rank of your website in the results pages of search engines.

In onsite SEO, you are working with internal elements of your website such as the keywords, meta tags, layout, page load time and, of course, content.

Another vital onsite SEO item is the keyword density or the percentage of the recurrence of your targeted keywords and phrases on a web page when compared to the total number of words. However, make sure that you do not focus only keyword density because this may make your content difficult to read. Also, search engine algorithms have been provided with a way to counteract the technique of overstuffing an article with keywords and phrases and that is to impose a maximum permissible keyword density.

The page theme, layout and loading time are also important factors in onsite SEO. The loading time is important because a site visitor may leave prematurely if it takes too long for the page to load. There is also the possibility that the browser will stop loading the page if it is taking too long to load. Also connected to this are the background, graphics, images, and color on the web page. The technique is to find out the preferences of the people who are likely to buy your products or services when deciding on these factors.

The offsite SEO techniques usually involve building (quality) back links and this could be achieved through article submission to the various directories, article marketing, and being involved in blogs, bookmarking sites, and social networking sites. It should be mentioned that back links from high ranking websites with relevant, high quality content should be the holy grail of any offsite SEO strategy, while back links from low quality sites that are not in any way relevant may harm and degrade your site’s rank.