HOW TOoptimize your SEO

Fashion Technology Accelerator - Milanrepresents

2017

CONTENTS

Introduction

How do Search Engines work?

On-page optimization

Off-page optimization

Free and easy to use tools

Conclusion

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3-4

5-8

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INTRODUCTION

Everyone who has ever searched for something on-line has dealt with SEO. So you might already know more about it than you actually realize. Have you ever thought of how this works? You put a word or phrase into Google and you get an entire list of websites that have something to do with what you entered.

For everything you search; you want an answer, the search engine wants to lead you to the best answer and those companies providing the answers want you to find them. Matching all these wants is called Search Engine Optimization.

SEO professionals use all sorts of different techniques to try and get their websites higher up in the search, because if potential customers can’t find you there’s no point in being out there.

Google owns roughly 70% of the search engine mar-ket share, throughout this this report we’ll be there for referring to Google when necessary.

HOW DO SEARCH ENGINES WORK?

The two major functions of a search engine are “crawl-ing and indexing” and “providing answers”. Links allow search engines to crawl through the internet and find the best available path. Once documents or pages are found through this way they are stocked so they can appear later when needed.Once needed, the search engine will scan through the entire database and provide the searcher with the answers needed, ranking them according to their relevance and popularity.Google recommends the following things to get a bet-ter ranking in their search engines:

• Don’t mislead customers nor search engines by having different content from what you’re displaying.• Provide a clear hierarchy and links on your website• Create a useful website with rich content. Make sure your <title> elements are clear and accurate.• Use keywords.

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To perform better in search engine listings, your most important content should be in HTML text. Everything else is often ignored or devalued by search engine crawlers. Provide your images with alt text, supple-ment search boxes with navigation and crawlable links, supplement Flash or Java plug-ins with text on the page and provide a transcript for video and au-dio content. You can check how your website looks to search engines through Google Cache.

ON-PAGEOPTIMIZATION

A search engine finds information on a website by crawling it, so it’s up to the SEO to make it easy for the search engine to find and crawl your website. On-page SEO deals with mak-ing sure that Google can find your website and show them in the search results.

K e y w o r d s

The first step of optimizing your keywords is about dis-covering, researching and analyzing the right search engine keywords for your website. This process will have to be repeated throughout the entire business life, it’s not a one-time action.

Optimized keywords might help you: • Generate more visitors.• Analyze the potential online market.• Analyze how your customers think based on how they search and which keywords they use.

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T i t l e t a g

One of the most important parts of SEO is your ti-tle tag. It’s necessary to have a strong, relevant and clickable title in order to raise click-through rates and overall traffic numbers. The current character limit for Google is 70, use these characters wisely and it’ll have a major impact on your rankings.

Putting your most important keyword first will boost your ranking, putting your brand name first is one of the worst things you can do.

After putting your most important keyword(s) first you should put an action word, whether it’s informational or transactional. Make sure to add up to the promises you make through these actions or your bounce rate will go up.

A perfect title tag might consist of your primary key-word(s), an action verb, another relevant keyword and closing with your brand name. However, this is not a scientifically fact. You will have to try and find out what works best for your brand.

In order to really optimize your rank and connection with searchers, you’ll also have to include your opti-mized keywords in your:• Links• Content strategy:

• Images• URL• Meta Tags• Site structure:a great example of a fashion brand with a good site structure is newlook.com

Adding text to product pages is an excellent way of improving your optimization. Great examples here are missselfridge.com and topshop.com

H o w t o p i c k t h e r i g h t k e y w o r d s ?

Your first thought on this one might be to pick the most popular keywords out there. This however might not be the right strategy, because the more popular a keyword, the harder it’ll be to rank high for it. For a new website it might be better to go with less popu-lar keywords, because it’ll be very hard to compete with well-established mature websites. Startups of-ten have more success when using less popular key-words and integrating modifiers to create mid-to long tail keywords.

It’s critical to pick relevant keywords, there’s no use in going for popular keywords when they are not related your business.

To get to know the value of your keywords, you need to identify the intent of the searchers. Are people look-ing for information? Are they willing to purchase? Are they just browsing?

Keep in mind that consumers might not always be looking for the direct name of your product. Here for it is of huge importance to also use clear, yet ge-neric keywords. A great example of a company doing this in an excellent way is Boohoo.com.

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U s a b i l i t y , u s e r e x p e r i e n c e a n d c o n t e n t

Search engines can’t literally see or read anything that’s on your website, but they sure can find out how people interact with websites and pages. This pro-vides them insights into the quality of the pages them-selves.

Usability and user experience have an impact on search engine rankings. They provide a measurable effect to a website’s external popularity, which the en-gines can interpret as a high quality website. A nice-ly crafted, easy-to-use website will motivate people to return and even bookmark your website, which will only effect your ranking positively.

Qualitative content can be measured by the time peo-ple spend on your website after clicking on it. If it doesn’t provide the necessary content, they’ll bounce right back to the search page. Next to that, machines are learning how to judge websites like people do. Last but not least, links are great proof of a qualita-tive website. More about these links will be explained in the off-page optimization.

OFF-PAGEOPTIMIZATION

Off-page SEO is mainly about trying to get other websites to tell Google what your website is about and that it’s a relevant and qualitative website in the industry.

L i n k B u i l d i n g

When good, well-respected websites link to your web-site, it gives a sign to Google that you’re a good, qual-itative website as well. There for, you will be ranked higher. The more link to your webpage, the more im-portant your webpage seems to Google. Shouldn’t surprise you that Link building is one of the most im-portant things you can do in terms of off-page SEO.

Link building can come from simply asking for a link to social links to buying (which is not something I’d rec-ommend). One of the best ways to get links is creat-ing valuable content. Great content automatically at-tracts links when people visit and share of talk about it. One thing that’s important about links sharing is that it has to stay fresh, meaning that old links might be pushed back in the search engines after some times. Just like SEO’s on itself, link building is a con-tinuous job. Links on social media are not as strong as those on other webpages, but they will be noticed so it’s definitely worth investing time in.

A lot of brands, such as Booho prefer to establish re-lationships with fashion bloggers in order to increase their reach, promotion and of course build backlinks to their website.

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S o c i a l M e d i a

Social Media is an important part of SEO, especially for the fashion industry. Make sure to create profiles on the social media platforms that are relevant for your company.

Once finding the right channels, make sure to link all of them to your actual website. However, owning the pages won’t be enough, you’ll have to create a con-sistent social media strategy in order to post good content on a regular basis.

Herefor you might want to look into which platforms suits your product or service best. There’s no use in building accounts on all existing platforms if you’re customers nor product/service belong there.

FREE AND EASYTO USE TOOLS

S e a r c h e n g i n e T o o l s

Google PageSpeed Insights: https://developers.goog-le.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/Google Search Console: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=nlMoz Local listing score: https://blog.bufferapp.com/free-seo-toolsGoogle Analytics: https://analytics.google.com/ana-lytics/web/provision/?authuser=0#provision/SignUp/

Google Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlannerSEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool: http://tools.seo-book.com/keyword-tools/seobook/ Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/

Search Engine Journal: https://www.searchenginejour-nal.com/free-keyword-research-tools/8153/

Tools for keyword suggestions

Tools for keyword optimization

TO CONCLUDE

The first thing to do now is running your own website through the search engine tools and find out how well established your website is. SEO optimization if defi-nitely an ongoing process, but it’s worth every single minute. All the above steps can be used repeatedly over time.

Search engines were build to base their opinions on those of the people using your website. They will meas-ure different signals across the web to find out which websites people like most. Play it right and you’ll great.

We hope this eBook has cleared everything out for you, but in case of extra questions, you can always contact us at Milan@ftaccelerator.com.

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A final tip we’d like to share with you is that you just have to create a website that people love.

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