Syed Ali

Current Role: NHS Choices
SEO Specialist

NHS Choices website is the biggest deployment of SharePoint in Europe with more than 25,000 pages and accounts for more than 8 million visits each month. I started working with NHS in Nov 09 and some of my responsibilities are,

• Performance measurement of the SEO project and to identify any issues and opportunities
• Keyword Prioritisation for SEO and Paid search
• Providing direction to editorial team as well as directly optimising editorial content for search engines
• Ongoing analysis for existing content and support for new campaigns (one a month)
• Creating automated rules to replace current URL structure, page titles, meta descriptions and h1's with optimised SEO elements
• Improve the quality of inbound links
• Exploiting Social media opportunities: e.g. Setup, design and maintenance of Healthy Living Facebook Fan page
  • More than 10,000 fans in 3 weeks after launching the page
• Maintenance of other social media accounts such as, NHS Choices (Facebook and Twitter) and Carers Direct (Facbook and Twitter)
• Recommendations to optimise and implement the mobile version of nhs.uk
• Improve NHS presence in universal search such as, news, maps, images, videos and widgets
• Use of Press release distribution to gain SEO benefits

SEO Projects
Agency and clients

Some of the interesting projects I worked on, in last 3 years,

Localisation

• Helped Vision Express, Fiat UK and KFC improve visibility in Google Maps by listing stores, dealers and franchises in local business centre
• All the above mentioned clients have more than 300 stores/dealers and franchises

Geo-Location Strategy

• Review of National Geographic Channel domains for each country and language
• Devised new strategy to optimise and synchronise existing domain structure

Keyword Prioritisation

• Analysis of more than 10,000 keywords for NHS.UK by using Google keyword suggestion tool, Hitwise, Top 100 PPC spend keywords and themed them according to the topics on the website
• Top 10 keywords under each topics were rank checked
• These keywords were sense checked against ranks, volume, expected organic traffic, costs and page relevancy
• This helped create a list of top 100 priority keywords
• This analysis resluted in reduction of current spend on terms and enabled us to reallocate budget effieciently