doherty white seo quick guide v2

Search Engine Optimization Quick Guide

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Digital Marketing and PRGrowing sales through more effective marketing

Contents What is SEO?

The main elements of SEO

A step-by-step approach

1. Choose your keywords

2. Revise your site design

3. Index your site

4. Optimize each page

5. Check internal links

6. Encourage external links

7. Analyze your performance

Continue the improvement process

Useful resources

What is SEO?

Advertising – (Pay-per-

click)

Natural or ‘organic’

search results

What is SEO?

Most people start their search for a product or

service on the Web using a search engine like

Google

You want to ensure that someone searching for

your kind of product or service will find you

Source: MarketingSherpa

What is SEO? You can pay to appear using Pay-per-click

(PPC) ads

You can also appear for free because you

naturally come out near the top in the search

results – the ‘organic’ or natural results

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the

process and tools you use to rank higher in the

free or ‘organic’ search results, with the aim of

getting near the top of the 1st page

Getting the basics right can drive double-digit

traffic growth


Google and other search engines use two

main factors to decide how high a page

appears on search results:

Content - how relevant is the content

of the page to the search term

Link Popularity – how many other

sites link to this page


So SEO focuses on

1. Optimizing your web content (web-

pages, documents, text, images) to

ensure it’s relevant to your target

audiences and can be seen by search

engines

2. Encouraging other sites to link to you

by providing great information they

find useful

On page Off page

1. On Page – the content you write/put on your web-site

plus how you structure your site

2. Off Page – links from other people/sites to you

WWW

WWW

WWW

WWW

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Two sets of ‘things to do’ for SEO

A step-by-step approach

1. Choose what terms you want to be found for –

keywords

2. Review the structure of your web-site

3. Get your site indexed

4. Optimize each page on your site for particular

keywords

5. Check internal links

6. Encourage external links

7. Analyse your performance

Step 1. Choose keywords

Which words and phrases do people use when looking for

you, your products, your services?

Looking for keywords that are (a) relevant and (b)

popular search terms

But want to avoid words that everyone is competing for –

try to find phrases that you can come out on top for

To start, brainstorm all the words and phrases you can

think of

Check your web-server log files to see what visitors

search for

Step 1. Choose keywords Next, ask your customers what they would search for if

looking for you and your kind of product/service

Check how popular these terms are using Google Insights

Then, look at the keywords your competitors focus on

Use keyword tools – Google Keywords, Wordtracker

Step 2. Revise site design

Some fundamentals for good SEO site design

Check out Google SEO Starter Guide for tips

Simple, flat structure, easy to find content, good

internal linkage to relevant content from home page

Good naming of URLs i.e. intelligible to humans, not

too long or complex, avoid non-alphabetic characters

Simple navigation: make content easy to find

Good usability: don’t be heavy handed in use of

graphics, tag any graphics you use, name all buttons

and boxes in plain language

Step 2. Revise site design

Aim for each page on your site to target one keyword

phrase – try not to have 2 pages optimized for the

same topic as they’ll compete for ranking

Review your site structure accord to these principles,

moving, adding or deleting pages as necessary

Use 301 redirects when you move pages around or

delete them – you want to avoid missing links

Step 3. Index your site Create an html sitemap (lower-case s)

This is just a page with text links so human visitors to

your site can easily see the navigation

Create an xml Sitemap (upper-case S) to submit to

search engines

Google’s webmaster Help Center provides a guide to

Sitemap files

They also provide a Sitemap generator

And check out Google’s page on sitemaps

Submit your site to the search engines e.g. using

Google’s Webmaster tools

Step 4. Optimize each page

Focus each page on a particular keyword phrase

Then review the URL, page title tag , header tags,

your text, internal links, use of bold, page description

textPage Title

Header tags

URL

Text, internal links, bold

Description text

Step 5. Check internal links

Internal linkage affects page rank

Create a natural flow

Make sure your home page links through to your most

important internal pages

Have internal cross-links where it’s appropriate

Avoid complex webs of navigation links e.g. every

page linking to every other page

Use text for navigation i.e. a link that says “benefits of

SEO”, rather than “click here” (known as anchor text)

These descriptive links should ideally use your chosen

keywords

Step 6. Seek external links

You want to attract links from high-authority external

sites

Content is the primary means of obtaining links –

have interesting, valuable stuff on your site people

want to see

You can also offer links to others

Check out LinkingMatters for their free guide to link

strategy

Step 6. Seek external links Prepare a Link Strategy and execute an Inbound Link

Campaign

First, identify a target list of sites you’d like to link to you

Who links to you now

Who links to your competitors

What sites are top for the search terms related to you

Use tools like Check Your Link Popularity

To get links, provide information/content that people think is

valuable and should be shared

What will you offer to make people want to link to you? Quality

content (e.g. white papers or guides), or a useful tool (e.g. RoI

calculators) or information (e.g. resource links)


Don’t ignore free links - you should ensure you’re listed in

local business directories, linked to from partner sites,

from customers, colleagues, trade associations –

anywhere reputable with a web presence that will link

back to you

Decide what outbound links you’ll have on your own site

Set objectives e.g. % increase in web visitor traffic

Contact your target sites asking for links, stating why it’s

of benefit to them


Use Web 2.0 and social media as a way to generate links

Entries on your blog that connect to content on your web-

site

Online PR – press releases that have links back to your

site

Twitter – regular business updates linking back to your

content

…. all of which still comes back to content

Think of creating a ‘content strategy’, outlining what you

want to say, and your schedule for production, and how

you plan to repurpose content for different media and

channels e.g. break up a technical paper into chunks on

your blog, summarise it in a powerpoint on Slideshare etc.

Step 7. Analyze performance

You can’t manage what you can’t measure

Decide what is important to measure and “baseline”

your performance

Then begin cycle of:

Set targets

Make changes to your site to achieve those

targets

Monitor whether the changes have the desired

effect

Repeat

When you’re confident in your ability to measure and

analyze, start “benchmarking” yourself against

competitors


What should you measure?

Where is your website traffic coming from – direct visits to

your URL, from search engines, pay-per-click, social media,

referring sites?

What’s the split between the different sources of traffic i.e.

which produces most / least visitors?

Which traffic generates more conversions / engagement /

leads?

Inbound links: number, quality, age

What keywords were used to find your site?

Which pages are accessed the most/least?

How long does someone stay on your site?

What are your top entry and exit pages? Why?


What action should you take based on analysis?

What are your goals? Increased site traffic, more B2C direct

sales from your site, or more B2B lead generation?

E.g. if you want to generate more ‘conversions’ (e.g. a visitor

registration or a direct sale), then identify which pages have

the best / worst rates of conversion and compare to find out

why

Look at which keywords are most likely to produce a

conversion

Look at which traffic sources are producing most traffic today

and think about how to augment this

Resources

www.pandia.com

www.marketingsherpa.com

www.marketingprofs.com

www.b2bmarketingzone.com

www.wdfm.com

www.raintoday.com

www.seomoz.org

www.hubspot.com

www.forrester.com

www.dohertywhite.com

Here are some useful links for search engine optimization There are also more free guides available from

DohertyWhite

www.webworkshop.net

www.linkingmatters.com

www.seobook.com

Google SEO Starter Guide

Thank You

DohertyWhite

Email [email protected]

Slides slideshare.net/dohertywhite

Twitter @michaelgwhite

Mobile +353 86 383 8981

www.dohertywhite.com

doherty white seo quick guide v2

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