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#techtourism#techtourism
Stephen Whitelaw September 25th 2014.
Driving the Right Traffic to your Website
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Agenda
What is SEO?
Natural v Organic
SSL
Do’s and Don’ts
Webmaster Tools
Google Analytics
On-site and Off-site challenge
Timing, Catering, Toilets and Fire Alarm Info.
Please feel free to Tweet this morning
#techtourism#techtourism
Stephen Whitelaw 30+ years in software / web / internet / digital media. Consulting, workshops, seminars, keynotes
www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwhitelaw www.kimtag.com/stephenwhitelaw @toowist
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Introductions
Name
Business
Outcomes from Workshop?
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Aims for today
This workshop aims to give you a deeper understanding of the following:
• Website traffic
• How search engines work
• The importance of keyword research and fresh content
• How social media activities can help you on Google
• Improving search engine positioning
• Monitoring the health of your website
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What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ?
“The process of improving web pages so they rank higher in search engines for your targeted keywords.”
(Thus we need to understand what words and phrases are used by target audience)
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Why is it important 1 of 2?
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Why is it important 2 of 2?
The vast majority of clicks -- roughly 60 percent, go to organic listings.
Organic Clicks vs Paid Clicks
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Inbound Marketing
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Different Traffic sources exist
• Search traffic
• Direct traffic
• Referral traffic
• Campaigns
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Web search engines
• Search information on the World Wide Web
• Web pages, images, videos, information and other file types
• Automated process
• Complex algorithms to determine rankings
• Entire site searchable
• Updates to site should be picked up
Examples
• www.google.com
• www.yahoo.com
• www.bing.com
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How Search Works…
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs
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Have a friendly and easy to navigate website !
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbtf1oyNg-8
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Search Engines
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Search Engines
Top 3 tier-1 search engines are Google, Bing, Yahoo
Internationally many local/huge players exist:
China – Baidu (80% market share, & YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Google !)
Russian – Yandex (60% market share)
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Global List …
www.searchenginecolossus.com –
global list of local search engines.
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New Alternatives ..
DuckDuckgo
StartPage
Blekko
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Harder than ever to discover!
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The Filter Bubble
A distortion problem ….. “… people are exposed only to things they already agree with or are familiar with.”
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Scott’s Search
Daniel’s Search
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57 signals! Our Search History. Our location – verfied the browser we use. the browsers version The computer we use The language we use the time we need to type in a query the time we spend on the search result page the time between selecting different results for the same query our operating system our operating systems version the resolution of our computer screen average amount of search requests per day average amount of search requests per topic (to finish search) distribution of search services we use (web / images / videos / real time / news / mobile) average position of search results we click on time of the day current date topics of ads we click on frequency we click advertising topics of adsense advertising we click while surfing other websites frequency we click on adsense advertising on other websites frequency of searches of domains on Google use of google.com or google toolbar our age our sex use of “i feel lucky button” do we use the enter key or mouse to send a search request do we use keyboard shortcuts to navigate through search results do we use advanced search commands (how often) do we use igoogle (which widgets / topics) where on the screen do we click besides the search results (how often) where do we move the mouse and mark text in the search results amount of typos while searching how often do we use related search queries how often do we use autosuggestion how often do we use spell correction distribution of short / general queries vs. specific / long tail queries which other google services do we use (gmail / youtube/ maps / picasa /….) how often do we search for ourself
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sort by: Relevant
Important
Uncomfortable
Challenging
Other Points
of View
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Search engine market share
• Country specific
• 9 out of 10 searches in the UK are conducted on Google
Stats
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Relationships between search engines
• Sharing primary search results
• Sharing paid search results
• Commercial arrangements
Bruce Clay - bruceclay.com
• Search engine relationship chart
• Search engine relationship chart histogram
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Natural / organic vs. paid / sponsored
• Natural / organic – free
• Paid / sponsored – pay per click
• Preference for organic?
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Myths & misconceptions about SEO
• Free
• One-off task
• Black art
• Immediate
• Guarantees
• Meta tag keywords
• Keyword stuffing
• Advertising
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Is SEO cheating Google!
Don’t do (Blackhat): Hidden content, keyword stuffing, link farming, doorway
pages, IP cloacking. [Duplicate content]
Do (Whitehat/ethical) : Fresh up to date relevant content, inbound links, friendly
URL’s.
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Buying Traffic – be careful!
www.trafficzap.com
www.nicheprofitclassroom.com/index.html
www.blazingtraffic.com
www.buyhitscheap.com
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Search Engine Optimisation
Learn and keep up to date with:
www.searchenginewatch.com
www.searchengineland.com
www.seomoz.org
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Make connections secure
Secure Google https://www.google.com !
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EV SSL Certificate
Extended Validation SSL certificates – highest level of trust [Tells your customers the company is real and trusted]
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Google Panda & Google Penguin
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Google Panda
Penalise websites of low quality and
those with low quality content.
Introduced Feb 2011
Google Penguin
Bring down websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and use black-hat SEO techniques.
e.g.
excessive link building
keyword stuffing
cloaking, doorway pages
meaningless content
Introduced April 2012
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Launched about 30th August 2013. (On 15th Anniversary of Google)
Affected 90% of all websites.
The goal is to provide results that actually answer the question.
Resurgence of the Long Tail.
Conversational and more natural search.
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Useful SEO terms …
SEM = PPC and SEO
Backlink
PageRank
Anchor Text
NoFollow
Title Tags
Meta Tags
SERP
SandBox
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Dos and Don’ts for SEO
Don’t :
Directory submission
Guest Blogging
Compensated Links
Do:
Content Marketing
Blog
Create great content on your site and your social media assets
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Author Rank is no more !!! …
rel=author and rel=publisher
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SEO – getting started …
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Google – The Mission Statement
“Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Larry Page, Google co-founder and CEO, once described the “perfect search engine” as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”
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Duplicate content can be caused by:
• Same content different url • Data feeds • Scraper sites
The Solution to Duplicate Content:
• Update internally • Redirect • http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-
your-canonical.html
• <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/" />
Duplicate Content
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Duplicate Content on your site & another
• The Panda Update (released April 2011)
• Check “sample text“ into google
Use www.copyscape.com
Duplicate Content
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Duplicate Content
RBS Group has basically
set up two sites with
identical URL structure,
theming and content.
The cost of saving on
content is the loss of
valuable search traffic
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Discoverability Where crawling struggles:
• poor use of robots.txt
• broken links
• bad site structure
• server & redirection errors
• no sitemaps
• complex urls
• limiting access to content using: flash, javascript, dropdown forms & ajax
Make your site discoverable
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Discoverability Tips
• how to check if a single page is indexed:
insert cache:www.yourwebsite.co.uk into the search bar
• how to check how many pages are indexed insert site:www.yourwebsite.co.uk into the search bar
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Never buy fans, followers, likes etc..
www.buy-facebooklikes.co.uk www.buy-cheap-likes.com www.buzzoid.com www.twitteraddicts.com/buy-twitter-followers www.buy1000followers.co www.followers1.com www.buyplusfollowers.com/product/google-plus-ones www.99medias.com/product-category/fanpagewebsite-likes www.socialjuicepros.com/google-plus-ones www.socialpinger.net/google-plus-service www.devumi.com www.fastfollowerz.com
www.plusonefoundry.com www.plus1followers.com www.plusonefactory.com www.getsocialjuice.com
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Responsive Web Design (RWD) …
The beauty of this is that responsive design does not need to be code-specific to every device out there. It intelligently changes the content based on browser width. If it’s designed correctly, your user will no longer need to zoom in to find content.
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RWD also applies to emails !
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Richer Interactivity - RichUI
DeepZoom/SeaDragon/Silverlight
www.gigapixel.com/image/gigapan-canucks-g7.html
www.360cities.net/gigapixel/strahov-library.html
Very Hi Res images - http://bit.ly/cfvqBN
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Reviews – do they matter?
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www.reevoo.com
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www.feefo.com
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www.opinurate.com
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Trustpilot ..
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Google Analytics
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Google Analytics does NOT count spiders, bots and crawlers
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www.google.co.uk/analytics/
Measure the return on investment of your web-site:
•Number of visitors
•How long they stay
•Where they come from
•What they do on the site…
•And much more…
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Web Analytics Definition …
“Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage”
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• Visitors
o Characteristics Browser, new vs. return, location
• Traffic
o Origins Keywords, refers, pages
• Content
o Effectiveness Bounce rate, paths, navigation
summary
What is Google Analytics?
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When analysing data…
Review data e.g. look at one of your high level reports.
Do Segmentation e.g. drill deeper into the data.
Learn Something i.e. gain some insight(s)
Repeat above steps
You will NOT find some silver bullet inside your data then change it and have 5x revenue !!
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What is Web Analytics similar to?
The x-Ray machine is like the Web Analytics Tool
The patient is your website
The x-Ray machine will detect and display pictures of broken bones (skull, finger etc..) – however it will NOT end your pain or fix any of your problems – for that you need someone who can read and interpret the x-ray and then take action or tell someone to take action.
i.e. The best analytic tool in the world will not do it for you – you still need smart people to interpret the data and prioritise actions e.g. fix skull before finger etc..
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Some basic maths !
If 99 visitors to your site spend £0 and the 100th visitor spend £1,000
Question : What is the average visitor spend?
Answer : Average visitor spend is £10 i.e. £1,000/100 = £10 !
Technically it is true, so be careful with your interpretation of averages/numbers
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Top 10 Myths About Google Analytics ..
MYTH 1: "You get what you pay for." Google Analytics is free, which means the system is down a lot.
MYTH 2: Google Analytics is basic and doesn't have any "advanced" features or metrics
MYTH 3: Google Analytics only supports third-party cookies
MYTH 4: Google Analytics is not really accurate
MYTH 5: It's not possible to export your data from Google Analytics
MYTH 6: With Google Analytics you can't control your data
MYTH 7: There is no professional support for Google Analytics
MYTH 8: Google Analytics does not support A/B or multivariate testing and isn't well-integrated with other tools
MYTH 9: You can't segment data in Google Analytics
MYTH 10: You have to spend a lot of money to get "real" web analytics
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Google Analytics
Measure
Learn
Take action
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Google Webmaster Tools – use as well as GA
Tells you : The errors on your website e.g. 404 errors How often people link to a page How often a page appears in Google Search Results Information on how Google crawls your website Sitemaps information [You see nothing about Bing, Yahoo etc.. Only Google here!]
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Webmaster Tools
www.google.com/webmasters /
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How fast (or slow) is your website?
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How fast (or slow) is your
website? (www.pingdom.com)
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Google Pagespeed Insights
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
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The “Not Provided” value is due to SSL
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The Rise and rise of ‘Not Provided’
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“Not Provided” websites!
www.keywordtransparency.com
www.notprovided.co.uk
www.notprovidedcount.com
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URL Builder
http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1033867
• Email Campaigns
• Facebook Posts
• LinkedIn Advert
• Offline Campaign!
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The percentage of web site visitors who arrive at a web site entry page, then leave without going any deeper into the site.
If page is higher than average site bounce rate percentage, focus on changing
content on that page (blogs are different though):
Bounce Rate
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Bounce Rates – what is good/bad/normal ?
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Bounce Rate summary
0% Bounce Rate means that every visitor has visited at least 2 pages per visit, i.e. if your entry page does not equal your exit page for all visitors then you have an amazing site.
100% Bounce Rate means that all the visitors left your site on the page they arrived at. eg Contact Us page, Blog page, Customer Support.
[Sometimes a high bounce rate is good i.e. they clicked on an advert and left or clicked on a link and visited one of your other sites]
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Google search
• Every day Google answers more than three billion questions from people around the globe in 181 countries and 146 languages
• 15%+ of the searches everyday have never been searched before !!!! – how can this be true? – Discuss.
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Indexing
• Googlebot – Google’s web crawling robot • Deep crawling
• Follows all links
• Fresh crawls
• Google crawls through over 20 billion pages per day
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Processing a query
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Ranking factors
• Over 200+ factors considered
• Constantly evolving
• PageRank
• Increasing social signals
• Knowledge Graph
Google Search Ranking Factors [Infographic]
• tagseoblog.com/images/infographic-google-ranking-factors.jpg
Search Ranking Factors: Rank Correlation [Infographic]
• searchmetrics.com/media/images/ranking-faktoren/searchmetrics-infographic-ranking-factors-us-2013-.jpg
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Recent changes
Google Hummingbird – Sept 2013
• overhauled algorithm to better cope with longer, more complex queries
Google Penguin - April 2012 (Penguin 2.0 – May 2013)
• lower rankings for violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines • targeting black-hat SEO techniques
Google Panda – Feb 2011
• lower rankings for “low-quality” or “thin” sites • higher quality = more content and less advertising
Google Algorithm Change History – www.moz.org/google-algorithm-change
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PageRank
• Link analysis algorithm
• Numerical weighting measuring importance
• Links count as recommendations
• Quantity and quality of links to a page
Tools
• Chrome Extensions
• Firefox Add-ons
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ON-SITE FACTORS
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Indexable content
• HTML or text format
• Challenges with rich media files, images and video
• Text alternatives and descriptions where possible
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Link structure
• Follows available links to fetch all content
• Orphan pages
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Search Friendly URLs
www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/african-elephants
Single domain
Shallow folder structure with relevant words
Keywords in page name,
separated by hyphen
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Search UN-Friendly URLs
Xyz3.nationalgeographic.com/a/?q=31z&mg=vv7z&sd=8
Unnecessary
Subdomain Dynamic URLs don’t perform as well as static and engines recommend
against more than two parameters
No keywords in the URL string
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Google Knowledge Graph (GKG)
Used by Google to enhance
its search engines result with semantic search information gathered from a wide variety of sources. e.g. wikipedia, freebase
August 2014 – Google announced the Google Vault (which contains the GKG) – the Google Vault is an accumulation of facts from across the entire web – i.e. site scraping.
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Google Now
Googe Now is a personal digital assistant that is available within Google Search on:
Android devices &
Apple ios devices &
Google Chrome browser on desktops
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www.Schema.org
Schema markup makes it easier for Google to find and index information on your website.
See www.schema.org for schema generators e.g. restaurants can add opening hours, menus, prices, address, telephone number etc..
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Keyword research
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Keyword research
• To be found for “hotel edinburgh”, “hotel edinburgh” has to appear on your site
• You must understand what your customers search for
• Fixed content vs. fresh content
Tools
• Google Keyword Tool - adwords.google.co.uk/keywordtool (now Keyword Planner)
• Wordtracker - wordtracker.com | freekeywords.wordtracker.com
• Google Trends – www.google.com/trends
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Keyword research
• Search volume
• Competition
• High volume & low competition
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Keyword research
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The Long Tail of Keyword Demand
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Google Trends
Google Trends is a publically available Google tool that shows you
how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages.
Google Trends also allows you refine a search by region and time period.
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Page content
• Write for users, not search engines
• Make all content indexable
• Title tag
• Description tag
• Heading tag(s)
• Alt tag(s)
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Title tag
• Ability to specify page title
• <title>” … ”</title>
• Less than 70 characters
• Displayed on results page
• Optimisation vs. sales vs. call to action
• Page specific
• Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
• Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keyword
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Description tag
• Ability to specify page description
• <meta name="description" content=“ … " />
• Roughly 155 characters
• Displayed on results page
• Optimisation vs. sales vs. call to action
• Page specific
• Not a ranking factor since 2009
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Heading tag
• Ability to specify section / paragraph heading
• <h1>” … “</h1>
• <h1> to <h6>
• “Welcome” and “Homepage”
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Content
• Write for users, not search engines
• Write for the web
• <b> & <i>
• Primary and secondary keywords
• Keyword stuffing
• Readability
• Duplicate content
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Alt tags
• Ability to specify image description
• <img src=‘ “… “' alt=‘” … “' />
• Image search
• Image file name
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Page name
• Ability to specify page name / URL
• e.g. www.etag.org.uk/whats-on/etag-events
• Include content structure
• Readability
• Sharing
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The page overall
• Be hyper-relevant to a specific topic (usually a product or single object)
• Include subject in title tag
• Include subject in URL
• Include subject in image alt text
• Specify subject several times throughout text content
• Provide unique content about a given subject
• Link back to its parent page
• Link back to its homepage
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Creating content
• Fresh content
• Write for users, not search engines
• Blog, news, articles, guides, tips
• Demonstrate your expertise
• Unique content
• On-going task
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Writing for the web
• People read 25% slower on screen
• Be succinct
• Make your text scannable
• Headlines
• Bullet points
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Writing for the web
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Content
Fixed content
• Who we are
• What we do
• Contact details
Fresh content
• Blog
• Latest News
• Articles
• Guides
• Insights
Dynamic content
• Latest updates
• Tweets / Facebook updates
• Featured items
• Upcoming events
• Most popular
• Related items
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OFF-SITE FACTORS
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Backlinks
• PageRank
• Referring traffic
• Paid vs. free vs. organic
• Link building
• Share worthy content
• Anchor text
• On-going process
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Sources of links
• Blogs
• Forums
• Directories
• Spam links
• Social
Tools
• www.ahrefs.com
• www.majesticseo.com
• www.opensiteexplorer.com
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Google Disavow Links Tools
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Social signals
• Number of fans / followers
• Account activity
• Age of accounts
• Mix of messages
• Links
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Measuring SEO success
Keyword Ranking.
Website Traffic.
Increase in "Share of Traffic" per keyword.
Increased Revenue/keyword.
Increase in Impressions ( good for Publishers to show advertisers).
Lower dependence on Paid Search.
Lowering the cost per acquisition.
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Rel=nofollow – What is it ?
nofollow is a value that can be assigned
to the ”rel attribute” of an html a element to instruct search engines that the hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index.
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Rel=nofollow – How do you know ?
e.g. bbc website are follow links. e.g. wikipedia are nofollow links.
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Google+
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What is Google +
is a multilingual social networking and identity service owned and operated by Google Inc.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googleplus
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Google+ (July 2011)
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5th time lucky!
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How to access Google+
www.google.com/+ or
plus.google.com or
www.google.com/plus or
Use Mobile App …
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Why use Google+
Over 550 million online (many many business customers)
Helps with your SEO a lot!
Communities, Hangouts, Photos
Very easy to use and powerful
Superb privacy/security controls
Perfect for sharing content
Circles are a very powerful tool
Great mobile experience.
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Gender Breakdown …
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Age/Gender Breakdown…
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Time on the site …
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What does the average Google+ and average Facebook user look like?
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Google+ users by income …
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Something is missing … thank goodness
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Summary of Tools
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Additional tools
• Bing Webmaster Tools
• Page speed test tools
• moz.com/blog/100-free-seo-tools
• Inbound Marketing / Marketing Automation Tools
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Google Remarketing – what is it ?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2ihfnGZ6Fk
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Google Remarketing …
Some facts:
70% of visitors abandon their shopping carts
96% of visitors to a site leave without completing the action you want.
Remarketing allows you to re-engage with them as the surf other sites on the web (GDN) i.e. you have an opportunity to win back lost potential customers.
In order to use remarketing you must link Google Adwords with Google Analytics
You need to make 1 small (1 time) change to your Google Analytics code.
Google Analytics then allows you to create lists of users to use get back in front of and you are able to remove them from the list once they have been converted.
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Embrace User Generated Content (UGC)
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A Final piece of advice
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Create
Content
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www.linkedIn.com/in/stephenwhitelaw www.kimtag.com/stephenwhitelaw
@toowist
Thank You
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Before you go…
Feedback Forms – please complete
Slides will be available online at
www.etag.org.uk
Digital Quiz?
Keep in touch …@ETAG_UK
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etag.org.uk
@ETAG_UK
youtube.com/etaguk
linkedin.com/Edinburgh-Tourism-Action-Group
Please keep in touch…
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LeadForensics – Lead Generation Tool
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP-Ol1AfBoQ
#techtourism#techtourism
Yieldify – maximise revenue from visitors leaving your website !
www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHCt-6TAPXc
