Girl Develop It Philly: Intro to SEO

Intro to SEO: Rocket Your Site to the Top of Search ResultsEmma Still

5.9.2016 & 5.11.2016

Welcome!Girl Develop It is here to provide affordable and accessible programs to learn software through mentorship and hands-on instruction.

Some “rules”- We are here for you- Every question is important- Help each other- Have fun

Tell us about yourself!

Who are you?

What do you hope to get out of class?

What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?

EMMA STILLTeam Lead @ SeerInstructor @ Girl Develop It@mmstll

Seer Interactive• Agency: Analytics, PPC, & SEO

• 1 office in Northern Liberties

• 1 office in San Diego

• ~100 full time employees

• Philly 100 & Philly Best Places to Work

• @seerinteractive

What we’ll cover today:On page optimizationTechnical SEOLink buildingSocialMeasuring Success

What to expect:A break(s)Wide range of topicsHave fun! Deck online after classAdditional resources onlineFeedback survey

You are…

… looking to grow your websitesales/ form submissions / registrations / traffic

SEARCH LANDSCAPEPAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

Structure, Accessibility

• Businesses started to understand that they could reach their customers on search engines

• Thus marketing where people were searching happened

• SEO impacts the “free” (or organic) section

Search Engines & Marketing

Gaining visibility is becoming more complex

• Knowledge graph – try it out!

• “Bagel vs. English muffin”

• “Famous jazz composers”

• “Britney Spears Toxic”

• Devices

• Personalization

• Local – try it out!

• “pizza places”

• “senior living facilities”

The Present

Gaining visibility is becoming more complex

The Present

“future-proofing” your strategy

• User-first

• Long-term mindset

• Integrated marketing

• Proactive

• Understand search engine goals

The Future

• One of the most popular online activities

• Key in the purchase process

• Always going to be king (glasses, mobile, desktop, etc.)

• “…the first interaction point for many of your current and prospective users”

Search is…

Understanding how it worksHow do search engines rank a website?

SEARCH ENGINE GOALS

SEARCH ENGINE GOALS:GOOD USER EXPERIENCE

Elements of a good user experience:RELEVANCY – fresh, unique, quality content

Elements of a good user experience:RELEVANCY – fresh, unique, quality contentQUALITY – technical, mobile, URL structure, load times

Elements of a good user experience:RELEVANCY – fresh, unique, quality contentQUALITY – technical, mobile, URL structure, load timesAUTHORITY – links, citations, mentions, social

How does a website become relevant, quality, and authoritative?

3 Primary Factors

On-page

In-pageOff-page

Keyword Research

Optimize

Build Authority

Measure

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEOThe things that will help Google find your website

On-Page SEOCan be summarized, in its simplest form, as:

KEYWORDS

CONTENT

META DATA

Keyword Research

Optimize

Build Authority

Measure

• The words people are searching for to arrive on your website

• The foundation of optimizing a website

Keywords / Content / Meta Data

Try it out! Write down what you would type into Google to find the items above.

Mid ring

Midi ring

Knuckle ring

Mid knuckle ring

Half finger rings

Champagne glass

Champagne flute

Wine glass

Sparkling wine glasses

Champagne stemware

Glass champagne flutes

Keyword research: branded, non-branded

• Branded: containing branded terms (company names, product names, etc.)

• Higher likelihood for conversion

• Non-branded not containing any reference to a brand; general queries

Keyword research: long-tail vs. head terms

• Try it out!

• How do search results change as your query becomes more specific? (i.e., long tail)

• Try “shoes”

• Try “blue shoes”

• Try “blue women’s shoes”

• Try “blue women’s shoes size 8”

• Try “buy blue women’s shoes size 8”

Keyword research: trending

• Try it out!

• Google.com/trends

• Try “lemonade”

• Try “cancer”, then “breast cancer”

• Try “sales training”, then “sales enablement”

• Try “fall foliage”

Keyword research: brainstorming and ideation

Take these into consideration

• Relevance• Search Volume• Competition• Seasonality• Intent

• Offer• Supply• Revenue

Business

• Ranking• Content• SERP Landscape

Status

• Try it out!

• Choose a page from your website, gather list of 10 keywords that may be relevant. We’ll use these later. • Remember tools like Ubersuggest, Google trends, and Google suggest

KEYWORDS + CONTENT

Clarifying what “content” means:Words on a page

Videos

Infographics

Blog posts

White papers

Calculators or widgets

Images

Optimizing content

• Where to put keywords

• Title tags / meta data (we’ll get to this next!)

• Page/article heading

• At least once in the main copy

• Early, evenly, often

• Additionally…

• Alt attributes for images

• Synonyms

• Customer language > jargon

Optimizing content

Don’t do this…

…or this

Do more like this…

…and this

Content: Search engine’s preference

• Videos: search engines don’t know what a video is about

• Images: search engines don’t know what an image is

• Text: search engines can read text

• E-commerce Example: RevZilla

• Images Example

• “See” like a search engine: Chrome Web Developer Extension

• Title & description

• H1

• Alt text

• Body copy

• Linking/URLs

• Title & description • (strong ranking signal)

• Character limits

• Wordpress Plugins: Yoast, All in One SEO Pack

description

• Title & description

• h1 (h tags)• Commonly the title of a blog post, page, or article

• Reinforces topical relevance

• Alt text (“alternative text”)• Describes images

Image optimization: file names, alt text, descriptive text

• Save files with descriptive text

• Always use alt text (logos, headers, product images, etc.)

• Try it out!

• Body copy• Use keywords throughout the

• Semantics

• Comprehensive, useful, relevant; not “keyword-stuffed”

• Linking/URLs• Employ empathy, shorter is

better, keywords, hyphens

• Linking absolutely vs. relatively

source

Linking: absolutely vs relatively

source

Welcome back!(Open Google Analytics if you have access to an account)

On-page SEO regroupKEYWORDS – research; head terms vs. long tailCONTENT – keywords on a page; user experienceMETA DATA – titles, descriptions, URLs, etc.

• Try it out!• Write a title tag, description, and h1 based on your keyword research brainstorm

• If you could re-write your page’s URL, keeping keywords, length, structure in mind, would you? If so, how?

Try it out!(10 min)

- Choose a page from the website you’d like to optimize

- Choose a keyword you think the page is relevant for (ubersuggest, google suggest, Google trends)

- Write a title tag (Preview: http://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool)

- Where else might you insert that keyword on the page? (Alt text? H1? Within the content?)

In-Page SEO

In-Page SEOThe code on your site that search engines use to determine relevance

Keyword Research

Optimize

Build Authority

Measure

• Crawling & Indexing

• Robots.txt

• Sitemap.xml

• Mobile

• Duplication

• Structured data

In-page SEO: Basics

• Crawling & Indexing

• Robots.txt

• Sitemap.xml

• Mobile

• Duplication

• Structured data

In-page SEO: Basics

Reminder:

Your CMS should default to the proper settings for most of these

basics!

Article in resources that shows how to set these up for success.

Start with Google Search Console • Try it out!

• Google and other search engines “crawl” your website

• To see the last time Google has visited and indexed your site, check the cache date.

• Check index status in Google Search Console

Basics

• Every website should have a robots.txt file

• Block search engines from crawling parts of your website

• Meta robots: index, follow

• Most CMSs default to correct setup

Basics – robots.txt

• Every website should have an xml sitemap

• Tell search engines about all pages on your site (no 301s, 404s, etc.)

• Different than an HTML sitemap

• Most CMSs default to correct setup

Basics – sitemap.xml

• Google recommends responsive web design• Easier for users to interact with,

share, and link to

• Easier for search engines to index

• No redirects needed (reduces load time)

• Saves resources for site and search engine crawlers

Basics – Mobile

• Page Speed• The slower your pages load, the

fewer of them are indexed

• User experience• 40% of visitors abandon a site if

loading takes longer than 3 seconds

• Half of visitors expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less

• All things equal, the site that loads quicker has higher propensity for ranking

• Google Page Speed Insights

Basics – Mobile

Keyword Research

Optimize

Build Authority

Measure

• Common forms of duplication – Try it out!• www. to non www., /index.html, trailing slash, https vs http

• Parameters

• Casing

Basics – Duplication

• What to do if you have duplicate pages• Canonical

• 301 redirect

• So what?• Wasteful for search engines crawling your website

• Crawl budget

Basics – Duplication

• Helps search engines understand the code of your website in context.

• Some search engines display more robust information in search results, & social streams for certain types of structured data markup: “rich snippets”

Basics – Structured Data

Basics – Rich Snippets

• Authorship – discontinued support from Google

• Reviews

• Rich Pins/Twitter Cards/Open Graph

• Try it out! – “Structured Data Testing Tool” will verify if you have implemented the code properly

• Rich snippets: recipe• http://schema.org/Recipe

• Rich snippets: ratings & reviews• http://schema.org/Review

• Rich snippets: video• https://schema.org/Video

Object

• Rich snippets: Social – Twitter cards

• Rich snippets: Social – Facebook Open GraphBasics – Structured Data

In-page SEO regroupCRAWLING & INDEXING

ROBOTS.TXT

SITEMAP.XML

MOBILE

DUPLICATION

STRUCTURED DATA

Off-page SEO

Keyword Research

Optimize

Build Authority

Measure

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO“earned media” signals sent to search engines. Foundation of Google’s algorithm.

Off-Page SEOCan be summarized, in its simplest form, as:

LINK BUILDING

CITATIONS

• Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to your website.

What is link building?

Why is link building important?

Links connect the Internet

Link building = AuthorityAuthority = TrustTrust = RankingsRankings = ?

• When another website links to your website, google sees this as a vote of confidence for your website

Off-page SEO: Link Building

Quality of Links > Quantity of Links

Principles: why links are important

• Traditional: pass value in the eyes of a search engine

• Practical: provides users a way to easily navigate content on the web

Link building

Principles: how to get links

• Content

• Building relationships

Link building

Keyword Research

Optimize

Build Authority

Measure

Tactics: how to get links

• Testimonials

• Unlinked mentions

• Brand misspellings

• Media mentions

• Sponsorships

• Local citations

• Speaker bios

• Contribute content on other sites

• Linkable Assets

Link building

Tactics: testimonials

Link building

Tactics: unlinked mentions

Link building

Before

Tactics: brand misspellings

Link building

Tactics: media mentions

Link building

Tactics: sponsorships

Link building

Tactics: conferences/speaking

Link building

Tactics: conferences/speaking

Link building

Tactics: events/citations/media mentions

Link building

Tactics: contributing content

Link building

Tactics: content

• Example: rcs.seerinteractive.com/money

• 10k tweets

• 14k facebook shares

• 800+ websites have linked to this

Link building

Tactics: content

Link building

Tactics: content

Link building

Tactics: content

Link building

Tactics: content

Link building

Tactics: content

Link building

Tactics: content

Link building

Tactics: content

Link building

Tactics: relationship building

Link building

• Outreach

• Comments, social sharing

Try it out!Brainstorm value that your site, content, or employees have that could potentially earn you links based on some of the examples that were shared.

Backlinks beware

Link building

• Anchor text

• Link networks

• Remember where Google’s going…

• READ THIS: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

• Diverse backlink profile

Social Signals and SEO

Social Signals and SEODo tweets/likes/+1s affect rankings?

The short answer: NO

The longer answer:The impact of social engagement is still speculative, but projected to be a critical ranking factor in the near future.

• Increased visibility & awareness = links = rankings

• Increased positive reviews on G+/Yelp = increased visibility in local search

• Google+

• Posts are seen by Google almost immediately

• Using social influence to build relationships = links = rankings

• Audience analysis

How social [indirectly] affects SEO

Social Shares

Social Impressions

Influencer Impressions

Remember the relationships we’re supposed to be building?Identify influencers

Build relationships = awareness

Understand needs of others

• Identifying influencers

• Finding out what your audience likes; create content for them that they’ll want to share

SEO Benefits of Building Social Relationships

How to find influencers & earn engagement

• Buzzsumo• Influencers

• Who shares what

• Topsy• Find people who have shared content

• Klear• Find top conversations

• Likelihood for interaction

• Followerwonk• Influencer identification

Free Social Monitoring Tools

• Klear – SEMrush example

• Followerwonk – analyze your own followers; competitors

Off-page SEO regroupLINK BUILDING

SOCIAL SIGNALS

Measuring Success

Measuring SuccessHow do you know when you’re done?

Keyword Research

Optimize

Build Authority

Measure

• Traffic

• Conversions

• Microconversions

Setting Goals

• Traffic• What pages are you optimizing?

• Organic Traffic

• Referral Traffic

• Annotations

• Conversions

Setting Goals

• Traffic• Try it out!

• SEMrush.com

• Conversions

Setting Goals

• Traffic

• Conversions• Goals

• Ecommerce

• Your wallet/phone/lead capture

Setting Goals

Measurement regroupGOOGLE ANALYTICS – traffic, conversions

SEMrush

Please take the survey:bit.ly/seo-feedback

Additional resources & slides:emmastill.com/beginner-seo-resources

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TechWyse: Canada's Top Rated SEO & Internet Marketing Agency · Agency Growth Coach, Marketing & SEO Consultant at Mod Girl O /mandymodéièt 9 Sacramento, California Area Brian Dean