To kick us off on our useful seminars and training section, Dawn Anderson’s lecture on SEO and Choice Theory is a great place to start.

Dawn is an International SEO Consultant and her discussion looks at how and where conflicts can occur between web crawling and consumer choice.

Consumer choice theories suggest that as humans we naturally find choice hugely appealing in the first instance.

However, evidence now suggests that an overcrowding of choice is detrimental to sales in a consumer environment.

In short, humans find it appealing to have choice but find comfort in those choices being limited, with a limited choice, a consumer is more likely to decide on an outcome/service/product that is satisfying to them and produce the happiest outcome.

There are a number of additional elements to the theory of Consumer Choice, including things like the influence of elements of choice and processes of elimination and so forth.

Dawn looks into this theory closely and analysis how this evidence can assist in the world of E-commerce, in particular, how the parameters on filter functions add or detract from the consumer experience.

The lecture expands into an interesting area looking at how search engines operate and how they deal with aspects such as duplicate or near duplicate pages.

An extension of the way they deal Duplicate pages goes into looking at the difference between sampling and crawling.

By understanding how the search engines deal with duplicate content and make the most of sampling as well as the other techniques that Dawn Anderson’s lecture covers, it gives you a fantastic spring board for knowing where to invest your SEO resources on a site when developing.

For more info on the theories and how they can be applied in every day projects, take a look at the Vid above for the full lecture.