Newcastle University

By Soujanya Nagarajarao MSc Ebusiness 2010 student

It was on a cold Saturday morning, 27^th of November 2010, with the whole of Newcastle covered in white snow, we started SEO workshop headed by Mr. Pascal Fintoni, Chief Executive from The Centre for eBusiness. The workshop was kindly sponsored by the NB Group.  

SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’….. But what is it all about? With the Internet as omnipresent as never before, the search engines have actually become the tool for effectively marketing any business. If it is an E-Business, it becomes more imperative that the business is highly visible on any standard search engine.

This workshop was intended to be an opportunity to learn how a search engine works, the unique methodologies and critical aspects to adopt while designing any website to suit the techniques search engine adopts in searching for any webpage.  

The official website, being the core ingredient for an E-Business, it demands for a well designed and developed webpage which allows enough scope for the search engines to show up this website within the first few search results. The topics covered were very relevant and gave excellent insights into the working of a search engine and introduced simple but effective tools which can be used to our advantage. These concepts were practically demonstrated considering 4 of the major search engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask as examples. The flow in introducing the various topics covered was indeed commendable which helped us to quickly understand and learn the different techniques for optimising search engine results for any website. 

This workshop not only introduced us to the working world of SEO but it also was very successful in generating interest and motivation to learn more about it. When we are discussing so much about ICT and its implications in today’s world, I feel as a student of E-Business it is essential to know how search engine works and its optimisation techniques to market web applications to reach large number of its users effectively when they searched for it using the internet.  

All in all it was an interactive and practical session on SEO. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed learning from it and it was a wonderful experience.  I would like to specially thank our program director Dr. Savvas Papagiannidis for providing us with the opportunity to learn from this informative workshop.