Business Forum Mid Devon. Optimising your place on search engines

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1 Optimising your place on search engines

2 What do I know? Professional copywriter since 1996 Words inform Google and Bing Content is now king on Google Work on SEO campaigns for clients

3 Who are Oxygen?

4 Who are Oxygen?

5 Who are BFMD?

6 Why is SEO important? Average percentage of clicks: No 1 on Page % No 2 on Page % No 10 on Page %

7 What is SEO? SEO doesn t exist Modern SEO is so broad in its reach; it no longer exists as a specialism. It s more of a mind-set, or awareness, rather than an individual task and requires many business activities to contribute. Management Today, November 2012

8 Let's understand Google

9 What's Google? The leading search engine Since searches per day More than 4.7 billion searches per day In 2009 there were 2.6 billion searches per day Reliable search results keep them in business

10 What does Google do? It FINDS your content It CRAWLS your site It INDEXES your pages It RANKS them in the greater index Google's goal: To match each search query with the best, unique content

11 What does Google want? Sites that are helpful and informative Make content user-friendly fonts, colours, links, images, video Write for users, not search engines blandness is your enemy Make key information easy to find think about the navigation Check spelling and grammar typos affect keywords If it works for Google it will also help your conversion rate

12 What does Google want? Sites that are recommended and talked about Get involved in social media talk about your business Share your thoughts to show you're an authority Be good to your customers, so that they recommend you on social networks Appear in all the directories that are relevant for your customer base local, industry, complementary services Show you're a good business and you should get good SEO

13 Wait - what does Google hate? Panda algorithm 2011 Google addressed sites that offer a poor user experience Page layout algorithm 2012 Focused on information above the fold for search results Penguin algorithm 2012 Google addressed keyword stuffing, link schemes, deliberate duplicate content and more

14 Google isn't just 'everything' Think about what your site does and which of Googles services it can appear in Everything Images Places Blogs Think of content as: Words, pictures, video and tags

15 Content Content is king... Toshiba doesn't come top for a search featuring its own name. Amazon is seen as having the best content.

16 Getting ahead on Google Let's think like Google...

17 Keywords and phrases

18 Keywords and phrases Think about what a user is going to type. Matt Cutts, Head of webspam, Google

19 Keywords and phrases Think about the queries YOU want to target How realistic is it? How relevant is it? Will your target customers search for it? Is there enough volume for it? Is it already too competitive? And who are the competition?

20 Keywords and phrases

21 Keywords and phrases Build a keyword portfolio Try using Google's keyword tool

22 Keywords and phrases

23 Keywords and phrases Build a keyword portfolio Try using Google's traffic estimator

24 Keywords and phrases Ad groups ideas

25 Keywords and phrases Ad groups ideas drill down

26 URL, tags and meta

27 Your domain name Not as relevant as you may think Small amount of the ranking algorithm Should be easy to remember and spell Locations can help local business

28 Your URL Minimise fluff in your URL have key words that reflect content and headers Try and retain short URLs, because they put more weight on keywords Both of these URLs relate to NHS jobs in Devon:

29 Your tags Search: edible xmas card Result: page 1 of Google since 2009

30 Your tags Keep URL, header and titles as consistent as possible URL: A-festive-treat-The-greetings-card-eat-Christmas-table.html Page Title: A festive treat: The greetings card you can eat at the Christmas table H1 tag: A festive treat: The greetings card you can eat at the Christmas table Opening paragraph: If the traditional Christmas dinner doesn't fill you up this yuletide, a company has come up with a novel alternative - eat the Christmas cards.

31 Your tags Images appear in Google's core search and in Google images Alt tags help describe an image Keep the description relevant to the page alt="tasty idea: Steve Lodge and Malcolm Buttel tuck into their edible Christmas card" alt="edible Christmas cards"

32 Your sitemap Good for lots of content Good for regularly updated content Good for dynamic pages

33 Blogging and social media

34 Technologies (Wordpress) is a fantastic piece of software, it makes your site easily crawlable by search engines, solves some 80-90% of mechanics of SEO and is the first big step anyone can take towards creating a popular online business. Matt Cutts

35 Blogging Blogs are liked by Google valuable content fresh content An opportunity to promote selected keywords Allows people to share your content Blogs such as Wordpress can be added to an existing website Wordpress has a wide range of SEO plugins available Good content means better conversions

36 Social media Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, and more Google results change as new media is introduced and changes Facebook 'shares' tend to directly correlate with higher Google rankings Google treats them the same it treats retweeted links Google+ can help rankings

37 Links to your site Links are still relevant but can be dangerous Google still looks at: Power how strong is the site that links to you? Relevance are the pages topically relevant, and what does the anchor text say? Don't link solely to your home page

38 Google's online tools

39 Google's tools Webmaster tools Analytics Places To access these, you need to register with Google

40 Google's tools Webmaster tools Healthcheck for problems crawling Submit sitemaps Check basic traffic analytics keywords, visitors Submit to Google's index Other optimization tools

41 Google's tools Analytics Put a special code on your site Where do people come from? (control campaigns - platforms) What keywords are they using? (control search and targeting) What path do they take? (control leads and conversions) How long do they stay? (control engagement and decisions) Establish KPIs

42 Google's tools Places / Maps Also known as Google+ Local Pages Changes occurring right now Set up Places page Complete the page as much as possible...

43 Google's tools Places

44 Google's tools Places

45 Summary - what does Google want? Sites that work with no errors Check your code be W3C compliant Check your site links broken links are bad, 404 not found is worse Check your site structure tags, semantics Check spelling and grammar typos affect keywords

46 Track your progress Keep up to date with where you're ranked - Use Analytics to check your keyword results Try and analyse competitors' rankings especially those on page 1 Monitor and reduce your bounce rate Decide on free tools or paid tools for tracking

47 Finally Google is always right