SEO : Improve Your Website's Visibility

using Search Engine Optimisation

Duncan Colman18th March 2015

Introductions

Search Marketing Overview

An introduction to SEO• What is fact or fiction?

• What is possible & what is impossible?

• How to carry out great SEO in-house

Defining SEO

‘An application that searches for & identifies items within its index in ranked fashion that corresponds to topics, concepts, keywords or characters specified by the user, used especially for finding particular digital content on the Internet; relating to www & mobile applications.’

Defining SEO

Natural vs paid results

Search Engine Market share

SEO campaign risks

• Your proposition isn’t compelling enough and Google on the whole ‘ignore’ your web pages.

• You are attempting to move into a saturated online space where there is a lot of best practice SEO / high authority websites involved in the top 10 positions.

• Server issues mishandled can lead to indexation issues and a dampening in rankings

• You opt for outsourcing and a company use manipulative techniques that lead to (Penguin and/or Panda) penalisation.

Exercise: Make your own search engine

A great way to form your own views about SEO is to think how you’d make a search engine.

So when you ‘google’ something, what is important to you in terms of the results that you see?

List 15 elements of things that a website user considers as important when accessing the World Wide Web, in particular with relation to product & service enquiring / buying.

Google search – key developments

Universal search

What is it? Launched in 2007, Google Universal Search blends results from Google Images or Videos into its search engine results pages (SERPs).

Why is it important? For the webmasters that have image and / or video content, this gives you more SEO opportunity to name images in a clear, relevant way and videos hosted on YouTube to be clearly named with target keywords inputted when you upload to Google’s video channel.

Local search

What is it? Launched in 2005, Google Maps is now a widely used application for virtually anything but finding businesses led to the directory style listings now residing within ‘Google+ Local’. The localised area of search now has quite similar ranking algorithms to the national web SERPs, with elements such as domain authority and click through rate being strong signals.

Why is it important? Your business strategy is either local, national or international – developing powerful localised content might well be the thing that you need to do.

Personalised searchWhat is it? In 2009, Google launched personalised search which changed SERPs based on your historical searches and click through data in relation to your Google account.

Why is it important? Are your listings attractive in relation to the key search terms in your space? We’ll go on to talk about the components of web pages that make up your listings which is one area that is related to personalised search. Other than that, there’s no major practical SEO takeaway from this other than create a compelling user experience with powerful content and people will keep coming back. One big thing is rank checking – if you are searching for your own website then what you see might well be skewering the picture of where you are in SEO development path.

Google Knowledge GraphWhat is it? In May 2012, Google launched the Knowledge Graph, for Wikipedia style factual presentation. This is a compilation of over 3.5 billion facts and more than 500 million objects and helps the user find the right thing, get the best summary, or delve deeper into related facts.

Why is it important? 1 in 5 search results now include Knowledge Graph information. Answer boxes are now providing your knowledge i.e. scraping content from your page and citing your website URL

Google Knowledge Graph

Semantic searchIn this example, if what you did related to flying to a location e.g. a motel or tourist park, then you might want to extend your content into the area of flying to the location to show relevancy to any other ‘long tail’ searches

Semantic search

SEO Campaign Strategy &Planning

SEO Campaign Strategy &Planning

Keyword ResearchIt’s always great to start with keywords. Getting a measurement of opportunity size in relation to your target territories and keywords. Here’s how you can use another fantastic free Google tool for the bulk of the work:

Exercise: Keyword research

Exercise: Keyword research

Exercise: Keyword research

Keyword difficulty

Keyword targeted click through ratehttp://searchengineland.com/got-seo-basics-5-tips-boost-organic-ctr-189253 -  Pos 1: 17% CTR (2014)

 

http://searchengineland.com/organic-click-thru-rates-tumbling-study-97338 -  Pos 1: 18 % CTR (2011)

 

http://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-optimisation-seo/seo-analytics/comparison-of-google-clickthrough-rates-by-position/  - Pos 1: ~35% CTR (2012)

 

Most recent one done by Moz -  http://moz.com/blog/google-organic-click-through-rates-in-2014  - Pos 1: ~30% CTR (2014)

Google Analytics top line trackingGoogle Analytics – top line tracking

Once you have installed Google Analytics on your site (how to do this: http://bit.ly/1wjvks1) you can drill down by acquisition > keywords > organic to see session / user data in relation to natural search engine results.

Pro tip: use Google Chrome extension ‘Google Tag Manager’ to test for correct code implementation.

Manual rank checking with Google Chrome

[Safari, choose Safari > Private Browsing]

Authority checking with Moz.com

[http://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar]

URLs

URLs are a visible element of your listing on search results and simple URL paths are easier for search engines to access and index. Google provides an example (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76329?hl=en):

Liken the URL choice process to selecting a new domain for a website. What is simple, concise and descriptive?

Page titles and meta descriptions

Description

Title

What is keyword stuffing?

This is an example of dodgy keyword stuffing. You’ll have no doubt seen this type of thing as a search engine user:

‘<SEO>, <SEO> Services <SEO> Consultant, <SEO>, <Search Engine Optimisation>’

This approach is likely to be both unsuccessful and risky

Design & efficient coding

For coding, why not run your website through a W3C mark-up check: http://validator.w3.org/

The key evidence for coding in relation to ranking signals is page load speed.

Page load speed

Use Google’s page load speed tool: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ - are your competitors faster than you?

This information also extends into Mobile user experience – again, how usable is your site in all device types? It is a great process to run the page load speed tool every time you change something about your website and periodically check (perhaps monthly).

User metrics

The key top line user metrics that you can observe in relation to SEO are:

Your click through rate (CTR) from search results to your website by search query [Google Webmaster Tools > Search queries]

Pages per visit, bounce rate and average time on site can all be seen [Google Analytics > Audience > Overview]

These factors are important to measure and optimise on as Google is interested in the user journey – how appealing is your website from end to end.

User metrics scenarios

CTR from search engine results – make your page titles and descriptions more clicky. Look at the AdWords text ads in relation to your target phrases and you’ll get lots of good ideas.

Bounce rate in isolation doesn’t necessarily depict a good or bad user experience. For instance a blog might have a high bounce rate where people read content, dwell on it for a long time (over 5 minutes is quite long) and then leave which is a bounce. However, how are you showing related content and are the next steps explicitly clear to the user?

Be critical of your own pages!

Exercise: page load & w3c testing

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

http://validator.w3.org/

Collate your results for actionable developer tasks

Free Search Engine Tools & Services

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is another free application for SEO management that is constantly being improved by the Google anti-spam team.

Sign up here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

The two popular methods of getting Google Webmaster Tools live would be via Google Analytics (as long as you have the latest version of their code on your website) or via the Google verification tag that you place on your homepage with some basic developer knowledge.

You can then see important information in relation to

1. Your website appearance in SERPs2. Overall visibility by search term / page3. Index status4. Crawling (are pages in the index and are there any pages creating errors?)

Maintaining successful SEO performance is an important competency and this involves regular (perhaps fortnightly or monthly) monitoring of statistics within these four areas.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing.com has managed to claw back a minor amount of market share in the UK but with any inbound marketing there is potential value in any highly relevant visits. To manage the same elements of visibility, pages crawled and indexation progress/issues is simple enough. To create your website profile, follow the steps at: www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster.

• Upload XML sitemaps

• Check out SEO reports and analyses

Keyword / content research

Google Keyword PlannerMentioned above for keyword research, this tool is purpose built for Google AdWords planning but for years has been used by SEOs to see search impressions levels for traffic targets at a keyword level.

Ubersuggest.orgA great tool for getting ‘long tail’ search ideas.

CopyscapeGet your spelling and grammar tip top for users and search engines alike.

301 redirect internet officer

When moving from one website to another, or changing a pages URL you need to redirect the page with a 301 status code (for non-developers – this is a basic level developer task that you can delegate). This prevents any of your web pages that rank well from breaking and over time losing those positions. The 301 internet officer is testing tool for you to see if the redirect has been correctly implemented – simply submit your old URL and 301 internet officer does the rest.

Earning links

Earning linksWhen site A links to site B….

Earning links

Earning linksThe first part of the process is finding relevant, authoritative sites to approach for guest posting or content placement opportunities. Here are some ideas for resources that again should be future proof for you to find places for potential visibility:

Technorati.com Blogarama.com Google.co.uk/blogsearch

When you find ‘link prospects’ think carefully about the probability of getting exposure on a website. For example, if a company follows you on Twitter and/or is someone you’re on first name terms with then prioritise any quick wins because cold link prospecting can be very difficult work.

Earning links

Content

Content quality has increased over recent years as a prominent ranking signal. Google in particular has become cleverly aware of the user’s journey and a key part of this is how well received the content that you provide in relation to any particular tranches of search terms.

ContentA great place to start with content development is to create a persona based content plan. This isolates the different stages of the buying process in relation to personas.

Exercise: create your content development plan for one key persona type

Bad SEO myths

Bad SEO

Hidden textThis is an old black hat SEO technique of stuffing pages within containers on a web page that can’t be seen immediately (or at all) by the user but can by the search engine spider. This is now easy for Google to penalise you for.

Bad SEO

CloakingThis is serving up content differently for users and search engines in an attempt to optimise your positions with more keyword specific content for the search engine spiders. Even if the intent isn’t to manipulate the SERPs, you could well get penalised for this.

Duplicate content

Duplicate contentOver the years, Google has struggled to deal with duplicated content across your web pages but also multiple sites. Sometimes duplicate content has been used to try and ‘farm’ in SEO traffic – but also it makes life difficult for the engines to understand what is the originator of the content.

Duplicate content

Bad SEODoorway pagesThis term relates to pages that have been manually but in a lot of cases systematically created to farm in traffic related to search phrases without the correct depth of content to back up what someone needs when they are conducting their search.

For example, the user searches for a job in London. A new recruitment agency have no job ads in London but still create tens of pages around the different London boroughs, with no useful job content or guidance – just a signup option. These pages would have a high risk for Penguin penalisation.

Bad SEO

Paid link activityHere’s an SEO rule of thumb: don’t pay for links and don’t allow any outsourced agencies to do so. The search engines (particularly Google) can identify links that you’ve arranged with incredible accuracy – you’ll go against the latest algorithms and you could end up with a penalty of some severity.

Paid link activityHere’s an SEO rule of thumb: don’t pay for links and don’t allow any outsourced agencies to do so. The search engines (particularly Google) can identify links that you’ve arranged with incredible accuracy – you’ll go against the latest algorithms and you could end up with a penalty of some severity.

Paid link activity

Digital Project Management

Creating a development set upYour website development process needs to fit with your online business goals and potential return on investment. For example, if you are a start-up local lead generation website, having a system that you can easily manage as a non-developer might save you thousands.

Choosing appropriate systems/platformsLead generationWordPress makes up over 19% of the internet and is easy to use. It’s easily hackable which is its biggest challenge but for many there are enough plugins and password security ideas to keep it secure.

Digital Project Management

Implementing basic agile project management principlesRegular content changes that are helpful, attractive and up to date can in many ways be viewed as favourable.

Using some very simple principles of agile project management, try structuring any design and content into fortnightly ‘sprints’ of activity.

Then annotate any changes you make within Google Analytics so that you can monitor any potential uplift in traffic.

How to Annotate Google Analytics

Summary

Form your own theories and approaches to content led SEO

Appreciate the wider picture of marketing development

Accept that there are no short cuts to long term SEO success