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Have you invested in an SEO (search engine optimization) agency or worked to enhance your SEO efforts in-house? Or, are you just experimenting with search for the first time? Understanding the key elements to successful search optimization campaigns is crucial to ensuring that you are visible to your clients online. It not only helps to increase your site traffic and but can help you to increase sales and grow your business over time. This workshop by Francis Skipper teaches the 10 steps any marketer or business owner can take to ensure that their website is optimized for search. Content to include review of on and off-page ranking factors, Google Analytics, webmaster tools, and server logs.
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The 10 Step SEO Audit 10 Steps to SEO Success
Francis Skipper Executive Vice President
617-259-1605
francis@451marketing.com
linkedin.com/in/francisskipper
@fskip
www.451Marketing.com
National Public Relations, Social Media, and Search Marketing Agency Founded in 2004
Headquartered in Boston and representing Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, and Las Vegas
Recognized as a 2011, 2012, 2013 an award recognizing the fastest growing private companies headquartered in Massachusetts
About 451 Marketing
About 451 Marketing
What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of improving a website to make it more relevant to searchers and search engines.
AKA: • Natural search • Organic search
What SEO is NOT…
• Paid Search (but it’s also not free)
• Fast
• Guaranteed
• Fire & forget
Paid Results
Organic Results
Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
Search Query
search is how customers learn about your products
4,717,000,000 Per Day
Worldwide, 1,722,071,000,000 searches conducted on Google last year.
(Yes, that’s trillion)
(MarketShareHitsLink.com)
of users never scroll past the first page of search results
of searches from mobile by end of 2013
(SMX West 2013)
10 Steps to SEO Success
Visual Audit
Usability Audit
Content Audit
Technical Audit
Prepare
Before you get started, it’s important to prepare your browser to audit your site
• Know How To:
• Clear you Cache • Disable JavaScript • View Page Source
Prepare
Sign up/verify Google Analytics. Let GA run for two weeks before doing any SEO to determine a baseline
Visual
First Impressions
1. Visual Assessment - General
• First impression - will your website will be seen as reputable source?
• If visual appearance drives people away, no amount of SEO will help • Google looks at bounce rate from organic clicks for rankings
1. Visual Assessment - Flash
Is the bulk of your site in flash? If so, your site isn’t friendly to search engines. Also, may deter users.
• View site in Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari.
• Remember to do this on Mac and PC
• View site on mobile phone (iPhone and android )
1. Visual Assessment - Browser
Usability
Removing Roadblocks
2. Site Navigation/Information Architecture
• As few clicks as possible for user to get to content • The easier it is for users to get around your site,
the easier it is for search engines • Google loves a clear path from home page to product
2. Category/Subcategory Pages • Make sure there is
enough content on these pages to be useful as a search result alone
• Analyze the amount of extraneous links on the page
• Take notes on how to improve the anchor text used for the subcategories/content pages
3. Responsive Design?
Content
Relevant Content and Context
5. Keywords What are the top keywords for your site?
5. Keywords Does the copy on your site reflect the keywords you want to rank for?
Optimized Titles and Headings These are the strongest on-page indicators to the crawlers of what your content is about.
Title Tag
Heading (H1 Tag)
6. HTML Tags
View Source
Right click web page and select view source Primary objectives should be accomplished from the homepage
6. HTML Tags
Title Tag
Title tag is main text that describes an online document. It is the single most important on-page SEO element (behind overall content) and appears in three key places
I. Browser II. SERP III. External Websites
(esp. social media sites)
6. HTML Tags
Title Tag
Optimal Format Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name or Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keyword
Best Practices Less than 70 characters, as this is the limit Google displays in search results
6. HTML Tags
Meta Description
Meta Descriptions, provide concise explanations of the contents of web pages. They are used by search engines on search result pages to display preview snippets for a given page
6. HTML Tags
Meta Description and Tags
The meta description should employ the keywords and create compelling description that a searcher will want to click Direct relevance to the page and uniqueness between each page’s meta description is key Best to keep meta descriptions between 150-160 characters
6. HTML Tags
H1 Tag
At a minimum, make sure that your primary keyword or phrase for the page is enclosed in an H1 tag
6. HTML Tags
Meta Keywords
The meta tags are the main keywords for the page
6. HTML Tags
Search Friendly URLs http://www.451marketing.com/services/search-marketing/
7. URLs
Optimized URL
Short, descriptive urls are optimal.
It is very important the url for your webpage contains your keyword phrase and is no longer than 100 characters.
7. URLs
Search UN-Friendly URLs
7. URLs
SEO Friendly URL - Solutions • Wordpress: Turn on “pretty permalinks”
• Drupal: Install URL alias plugin
• Magento: Install SEO Links
• LAMP/WAMP: use .htaccess and mod rewrite*
• IIS 7.0: URL Rewrite extension*
*Get your developer to do it
7. URLs
Address and phone number on every page as text
Company Name Street Address City, State Zip 555-555-5555
8. Contextual Content
Up-to-date copyright
8. Contextual Content
Technical
Is Your Site Technically Sound?
9. Indexing
Use the “site:” command on Google, Bing, & Yahoo. If site is not indexed, need to find what is preventing search engines from crawling.
Are you indexing?
Robots.txt What is Robots.txt? The robots exclusion protocol (REP), or robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct robots (typically search engine robots) on how to crawl & index pages on their website.
http://www.451marketing.com/robots.txt
9. Indexing
Robots.txt
Best way to insure blocking by spiders? <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Block all spiders and bots: User-agent: * Disallow: /
Block a specific spider from a folder: User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /uploads/
9. Indexing
Public and XML Site Maps
9. Indexing
10. Troubleshoot
10. Troubleshoot
Visual Audit
Usability Audit
Content Audit
Technical Audit
1. Visual assessment and browser compatibility
2. Site navigation 3. Responsive design 4. Loading speed 5. Keywords 6. HTML tags 7. URLs 8. Local content 9. Indexing 10. Webmaster tools and server
logs
Takeaways:
Questions?
The 10 Step SEO Audit The 10 Step SEO Audit
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