Top 10 MUST Do’s

in the

Ever-Changing World of SEO

Martin Laetsch

September 13, 2012

Proprietary & Confidential

Today’s Agenda

SEO Overview

Write For Your Audience

Speak the Searchers Language

Optimize Site Content

Get Quality Links

Custom 404 page

Set a Canonical URL

Navigation

Sitemaps

Microdata/Schema

Responsive Design

Proprietary & Confidential 2

What is Search Engine Marketing?

“Putting content in front of people who overtly and explicitly express a desire, via keywords, for a particular product, service or piece of information.”

– Search Engine Optimization (SEO): the process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.

– Paid Search Marketing (PPC): a type of search marketing where advertisers pay a set amount every time their ad is clicked by a prospect.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the combination of

both3

Paid vs. Organic

#1Write For Your Audience!

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Write For Your Audience

• You are creating content for your customers and prospects.

• Search engines make money by recommending the best content for any given search.

• If you base your marketing decisions on what is best for your customers, you will likely rank well in the search engines.

• If you try and game the system to rank, you will eventually fail.

Panda – Detect low quality and duplicate content

Penguin – Devalue link spam

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#2Speak the Searchers Language

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Develop Initial Keyword List

Compile a definitive list of keywords or phrases that customers should find your content with:

• Analyze existing search engine referrals

• Research external keyword databases

• List product names (and their generic equivalents)

• Ask customers how they would find a specific product or category

https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__c=1000000000&__u=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS

Google Keywords tool 8

Develop the Searcher Profile/Persona

Who is the searcher? Who would be looking for this information? Someone who…

• Is looking for a general category of information?

• Is looking for a specific solution?

• Has one of your products and needs help?

• Is an IT manager looking for a corporate solution?

• Is a college student writing a research paper?

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Define the Searcher Mindset

Why are they searching? They want to …

• Purchase a product or solution

• Learn about a product or solution

• Solve a specific problem

• Understand a product category

10

Keyword Mapping

Map your important keywords to pages on your site:

• Look at each page in your site –what words do you think each is relevant for?

• Now look again at the pages –are you actually using these words?

• Try searching your own site for these words. If you can't find them, search engines won't.

TIP: Use Google to search your site

11

#3Optimize site content

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Writing for SEO

• Choose 1 keyword phrase that is targeted for each page.

• Include each keyword phrase 3-4 times each within your copy — more if it makes sense.

• If your text sounds awkward to you, slice your keyword phrase usage or use synonyms.

• Use the exact term – ―symptoms of diabetes" is not the same as ―diabetes symptoms"

• Don’t over optimize. Use natural language to communicate your message (synonyms, varying word order, etc.)

• Longer copy provides a better opportunity for keyword placement that sounds good and allows you to provide more information to you visitors.

• Page length should be dictated by the message you want to communicate, but 250 words is a good target.

Just write good marketing copy that's focused!13

• Title Tag

• URL

• Headlines and sub-headlines (H1 & H2 tags)

• Call to action links (hyperlinks)

• Main body text copy, top to bottom

SEO copywriting helps your writing be more specific. It’s just changing how we ―see‖ and write copy!

Put Keywords in…

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#4Get Quality Links

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Why people link

• Compelling content they want to share

• Had a great experience with the brand

• Had a terrible experience with the brand

• They are a friend of the brand and want to promote it

• Reciprocity – Site linked to them and they want to respond in kind

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How to get links

• Write great content

• Provide helpful information

• Article marketing – Share your content

• Guest posts – providing and receiving

• Constructively contribute to other blogs

• Network – people are more likely to link to people they know

• Speakerships, sponsorships, events, etc.

• Social media

Create compelling content and let people know it exists

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Create Content People Want to Share

People like to share interesting information

• Builds their own credibility (they are in the know)

• Consistently sharing good information increases their audience

• Helps their visitors

• White papers

• Case studies

• Fun facts

• Educational material

• Research results

• Thought provoking blog posts

• How to articles

• Top 10 lists

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#5Custom 404 page

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Custom 404 Page

• Helps people understand where they are if they get lost

• Reinforces brand

• Expose important content to lost visitors

• Provide links back to the main domain, ensuring users and search engines can access other pages on your site.

Link to key content

• Important/popular pages

• Articles/videos

• Contact information

• Sign up for a demo

• Link to sitemap

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#6Set a Canonical URL

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URL’s - Canonical

• There should only be one canonical version of each page. The non-canonical version should 301 redirect to the canonical.

• This is extremely important since inbound links help determine how a site ranks. If people are linking to both www.example.comand example.com, link juice will be split between the two sites.

• 301 redirects pass full link juice so the canonical version would get full value.

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#7Navigation

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URL’s – URL Hacking

• Subdirectories should resolve with URL hacking. This is a common way to navigate a site.

• Provides additional deep links to important content

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Navigation – Breadcrumbs

• Breadcrumbs provide a trail for site visitors to easily navigate to higher levels in the site hierarchy.

• Helps both site usability and search results

• Breadcrumbs are a representation of the path a visitor took to get to the page. It is a representation of where the page lives in the hierarchy and an easy way to navigate to higher levels of the hierarchy.

• Google believes breadcrumbs are important to help visitors understand the structure of the site and how the specific page fits into the site hierarchy. They will include breadcrumb navigation in search results when they can.

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#8Sitemaps

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HTML site map

• Easy way for visitors to locate pages they care about.

• Another way for search engines to locate pages.

• If you have a large site, list the main pages (category pages) of the site which takes you to a sub site map with links to pages within that category.

• For a small site, just one site map will be fine.

• Include a link to your site map on every page.

XML Sitemap

• Easy way for search engines to locate every important page on a website

• The Sitemap must:

• Begin with an opening <urlset> tag and end with a closing </urlset> tag.

• Specify the namespace (protocol standard) within the <urlset> tag.

• Include a <url> entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag.

• Include a <loc> child entry for each <url> parent tag.

• All other tags are optional.

• All URLs in a Sitemap must be from a single domain, such as www.example.com or store.example.com.

http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

Image Search

• For each URL you list in your Sitemap, add additional information about important images on that page.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns=http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9

xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1">

<url>

<loc>http://example.com/sample.html</loc>

<image:image>

<image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>

</image:image>

<image:image>

<image:loc>http://example.com/photo.jpg</image:loc>

</image:image>

</url>

</urlset>

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=178636

Video Sitemap

• Video content includes web pages which embed video, URLs to players for video, or the URLs of raw video content hosted on your site.

• Each URL entry must contain the following information:

– Title

– Description

– Landing page URL

– Thumbnail URL

– Raw video file location and/or the player URL (SWF)

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472

Video Sitemap Example

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#9Microdata

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Schema Markup

• HTML tags that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search engines.

• Used to help search engines and other applications identify structured data and understand what it means.

• Makes it easier for people to find the content they are looking for by providing richer search results.

• For example, <h1>Avatar</h1> tells the browser to display the text string "Avatar" in a heading 1 format. However, the HTML tag doesn't give any information about what that text string means—"Avatar" could refer to the hugely successful 3D movie, or it could refer to a type of profile picture—and this can make it more difficult for search engines to intelligently display relevant content to a user.

http://schema.org/docs/gs.html

Structured vs. Unstructured HTML

• Structured data that helps search engines understand what web content is about.

VS

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Microdata Suggestions

• Videos

• Images

35

Microdata Suggestions

• Events

36

#10Responsive Design

37

Mobile

Source

Responsive Web Design

• Responsive web design is a technique to build web pages that alter how they look using CSS3 media queries. There is one HTML code for the page regardless of the device accessing it, but its presentation changes using CSS media queries to specify which CSS rules apply for the browser displaying the page.

• It keeps desktop and mobile content on a single URL, which is easier for users to interact with, share, and link to and for Google’s algorithms to assign the indexing properties to your content.

• Google can discover your content more efficiently.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/06/recommendations-for-building-smartphone.html

This is Google’s recommended way to code for mobile sites

Responsive Web Design - Sphero

http://www.gosphero.com/40

Responsive Web Design - Sphero

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Responsive Web Design - Sphero

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Q & A

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