SEO 101: Finding Yourself

What is SEO 01Topics not keywords 02

Into the SERP and On Page SEO 03Content 04

Technical SEO 050607Q&A

Links

What is SEO anyway?

Visibility

Relevance

Authority

Search Engines Explained

Crawling

Indexing

Ranking

RankBrain (2016)

Machine learning for relevance

Topics, not keywordsCreating Content for Users

Old way

My Dog

My dog’s name is Alfred. He’s a great dog. Some small

dogs are yappy. Not Alfred. He’s a total prince. Except

when he pees everywhere. And chases the cats. And wakes me up at 3am. Actually, sometimes I seriously

consider jamming him in the microwave. But that dog is so damned adorable I just can't wedge him in there.

New way

My Dog

My dog’s name is Alfred. He’s a great pup. Some small

breeds are yappy. Not Alfred. He’s a total prince. Except

when he pees everywhere. And chases the cats. And wakes me up at 3am. Actually, sometimes I seriously

consider jamming the mutt in the microwave. But he's so damned adorable I just can't wedge him in there.

Into the SERP

Search Engine Results PageOrSERP

Desktop

Mobile

Ads

Sold at auction

PPC

AdWords

Bing Ads

25% of all clicks

Knowledge Graph

Impossible to buy

Google decides

Organic

Local Pack Results

Organic

Requires Google My Business account

Organic rankings

Impossible to buy

1000s of factors

75% of all clicks

Title tag

Meta Description

URL

Sitelinks

Meta Data

On Page Elements

Title Tag

65 characters or less

Contains the target keyword or question

Meta Description

156 characters or less

Contains the target keyword or question

Encourage clicks

Image ALT Tags

Tools: Portent SEO Page Review Plugin

Content

Blog posts

Everything is Content

Informational resources (whitepapers, studies, infographics, etc)

Videos and images

On page content (About Us, What We Do, etc)

Tools: Answer the Public

Canonicalization/Duplication

Panda (2011)

“Thin” content devalued

Navigation and UX of Content Blank Sheet of Paper Test

Technical SEO

Site Speed

Tools: Webpage Test

Optimize Images

Use the right file format

Use JPG for photographs and photographic images

Use PNG for line art, logos, etc.

12 kb 22 kb

PNG JPG

Compress Images

Tools: ImageOptim

Compress before uploading

1.4 MB

266 KB

Response codesThree little digits that control your site

Good

PagePage

200

OK

PagePage

301

Page

Authority OK for now

But decays

I’m gone forever. Please

move on.

Not OK

PagePage

302

Page

I’ll be back.

Google passes no authority

Oy

PagePage

redirect

Page

Higgledy-piggledy

Page

redirect

A url that doesn’t exist

Server response

Tool: httpstatus.io

Good

Good

Good

Good

Bad

Links

Make use of what you have.

Google Search Console

Crawl Error Report

Find Broken URLS… Get New Links!

Penguin (2012)

Spammy links devalued

Tools and Resources: https://www.portent.co/finding-yourself

Q&A

thank you