SEO is easy when YOU know how
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SEO involves several key components: conducting keyword research, optimizing on-site elements like metadata and URLs, creating unique blog content, and building high-quality backlinks. While SEO requires ongoing work, it is not as difficult as some claim if you understand the basic strategies like focusing on relevant keywords and providing valuable content for users. Proper monitoring and reporting is also important to measure SEO performance over time.
SEO is easy when YOU know how
- 1. SEO isn't that difficult when YOU know how By @georgeioannou Head of Agency
- 2. Introduction • Don’t believe anyone that says SEO is difficult and you can’t do it • There is no silver bullet or quick wins • It’s a discipline, you have to prepare and train for it. • Search engine optimisation is a pretty large subject • Like anything there are different opinions on execution • Hopefully each of you will find a couple of take-aways to put into practice.
- 4. SEO • If you talk to people about SEO, some have this a8tude that it’s a secret dark art…This is so far away from the truth! • Google likes happy users and wants to give their users the best matching relevant content to their search • If you have honest, relevant, fresh and unique content you will rank • In addiEon to you wanEng to get higher rankings and compeEtors being placed higher that yourself, it maybe the case that you need to look at SEO if you have other sites with negaEve comment/content about your brand which rank higher. You would deal with these in the same way in terms of opEmisaEon and try to rank higher on a number of pages for the keywords they appear on so that you push them down the ranking and hopefully onto page two and beyond.
- 5. We are going to cover: • 5 Key components to successful opEmisaEon • Workflow for SEO • Useful tools and links to use • QuesEons
- 6. Interes=ngly enough… 52% of companies carry out SEO entirely inhouse, while 17% use an agency exclusively. 29% report they use both an agency and in-house resources for SEO. Source:
- 7. Interes=ngly enough… Just over a third of companies (35%) are spending £5,000 or less on SEO per year Some 65% are spending more than £5,000 on SEO each year 14% of companies are spending more than £100,000 on SEO annually, and this includes 3% who are spending more than £1 million on SEO annually. Source:
- 8. Interes=ngly enough… To track ROI from SEO: Over two-thirds of respondents (68%) are using clicks / visitors Over half (53%) use position Under half (42%) are using the number of sales Just under a third (30%) use the value of sales. Source:
- 9. The SEO marketplace is estimated to be worth £436.4m in 2010, up 26% from £376m in 2009
- 10. 5 KEY COMPONENTS TO SUCCESSFUL OPTIMISATION
- 11. 5 Key components to successful optimisation 1. Do Keyword Research 2. Fine Tune your Site and Sitemap 3. Create a Blog 4. Add Unique Content 5. Build Backlinks
- 12. Keyword Research
- 13. Keyword Research • The most important element, does take some time, knowledge and understanding but that’s not to say it can’t easily be learnt. • These are the phrases and keywords you wish to target and rank for in order to drive traffic • Differentiate between which phrases/keywords are: • Money makers and which are for Vanity • Money makers are those which are relevant to your business, which are typically long tail • Long tail search is a longer more descriptive phrase. • Vanity ones can be words which have a high traffic but don’t give you an ROI. • It’s the difference between long terms strategy and easy pickings which bring money in. • For example: We could optimise for “Wine” which is high volume, but hard work or we could go for ”White wine” which is more relevant. Even better would be to also optimise for “Old Vines Chenin Blanc 2010”, there’s obviously less traffic but users on the hand know exactly what they want, so we would say these are more likely to convert phrase. • We tend to keep these in a spreadsheet or CSV format as most tools allow you to upload easily.
- 14. Keyword Tools Google Adwords SEOmoz
- 16. Fine Tune your Site and Sitemap • The first stage of natural ranking is to make sure the site is doing all you can in terms of it’s setup and configuraEon. • Key elements to look at are: Meta data such as Meta Titles, Meta DescripEon, alt tags and image Etles • Google makes us of This is semanEcs search and wants to know which pieces of informaEon are important to you, and therefore will determine this by looking at Htags H1, H2,H3 also bold, underlined and so on. • And the locaEon of copy within the html is becoming important, trying to achieve page consistency, page load speed and just good pracEce coding. • URL’s or website addresses should be clean and free from strings and parameters where possible, which are characters like “?” And “=“ URL rewriters should be used in this case. Urls should also have keywords within them as part of the structure.
- 17. Onsite Checking Tools SEO For Firefox Google Pagespeed
- 18. Create a Blog
- 19. Create a blog • Preferably on your Site Domain, which will increase number of pages and give your own domain the relevance. • Creating a blog on your domain allows: – You to talk more about the products or service than you can on key pages of your site. – Ensures you write fresh, unique relevant content. – Gives you an opportunity to write about your industry topic or product. – For example let’s take wine again: There’s only so much you can write on an ecommerce site regarding wine and it’s producers. – But on a blogs: - Recipes, food and Wine matching - About the producers / interviews - Imagery of the vineyards - Wine tasting tips - Events • All thee give you a competitive advantage and gives you opportunities to talk about your products and have relevant phrases in your content. • Blog posts are more likely to be linked to which is an important part of SEO, which we’ll talk about later.
- 20. Blogging plaHorms Wordpress Blogger
- 22. Adding unique content • Unique content is vital to a search opEmisaEon strategy. Content can be copy, imagery, video and so on. • If you use pre‐posted content form another source, no credit is given to your own site, so there’s no SEO value • The value is given to the site page which first indexes that content. • Unique content is also your chance to put your own stamp on things. Showing your creaEvity, experEse and if the content is helpful or relevant to that person you potenEally secure future visits also. • If you don’t have Eme to create content yourselves, then it’s worth creaEng a network of freelancers.
- 23. Checking for Unique Content Copyscape Plagium
- 25. Building Backlinks • Back link are another key and important component to SEO • Back links are when an external site other than yours links to your page. • Every backlink poinEng to your website is equivalent to a vote FOR you, and the more votes you have ‐ the more exposure you will receive from the major search engines • Part of the Google algorithm gives each page a Score, which is assembled with a mixture of factors, this is called PageRank find it’s a numeric score ranging from 1‐10 • You might have heard of a Penguin update, this isn’t a refresh at London Zoo it’s the latest update from Google, they have given less significance to just placing directory backlinks and so now only quality links and relevance is being given a heavier weighEng. So it’s beier to have 100 good quality links than 1000 bought generic links. • Some tradiEonal link building exercises include other blogs, news and syndicaEon sites, directories and social plajorms and bookmarking, adverts, business links, and reviews.
- 26. Backlink Helpers Link Diagnosis Linkdex
- 28. Monitoring and Reporting • When you are optimising for search is vital that you record the benchmark keyword stats. • That’s the only way you’ll know how your activity is performing • As well as just reporting on rankings you should monitor: – Visits via non paid search results – Number of keywords found for (Brand & Non-Brand terms) – Number of entry pages – Revenue by keyword
- 29. Monitoring and Repor=ng Google AnalyEcs AnalyEcs SEO
- 30. Workflow for SEO Keyword Research Monitor and Onsite Report OpEmisaEon SEO Content Create SyndicaEon Content
- 31. Some useful links to note • http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools • http://www.google.com/analytics • http://www.ignitionone.com • http://www.webceo.com • http://www.linkdex.com • http://www.analyticsseo.com • http://www.seomoz.org • http://www.linkdiagnosis.com • http://www.peopleperhour.com • http://www.copyscape.com
- 32. Summary
- 33. Summary • Now that SEO has been handed on a plate… • It’s about in insource or outsource and each of you will have a different target, budget and preferred method of working. • If I can be of help please get in touch.
- 34. Thank you! Feel free to follow me on twitter: @georgeioannou Or email me: george@digitalandwise.com
- 35. We Are Digital & Wise Follow us at: @digitalandwise Or email us at: info@digitalandwise.com