EBOOK On-Site SEO Made MSPeasy Everything you need to know about Onsite SEO
K SEO easy ut Onsite SEO What is SEO & How is it Used? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. The idea of SEO is to improve your website visibility on organic (non-paid) search engine results. There are two main forms of SEO, On-Site and Off-Site. Onsite is any practice that you do on your own website. Whereas Off-Site is anything that features on third party websites. This ebook will primarly focus on Onsite SEO. You can find everything you need to know about Off-Site practises in our next ebook. Before we start explaining the world of SEO there are a few things that you need to know... 1. No one can guarantee you a position on Google (if they do RUN AWAY) 2. There are no shortcuts to good SEO asy bout Offsite SEO & Google Algorithms 3. It takes time, both to do SEO and for it to take effect 4. Doing little and often is better than doing all your SEO in one hit 5. You can t do SEO in only one hit! It s an ongoing project
Why is it Necessary? In short, SEO is vital to a websites success. The best way of thinking about SEO and your website is to think of your website as a physical shop. The art of SEO is in a sense, a way of moving your website from the side ally shops to appearing on the high street. It s great having a fantastic website, but if no one knows you exist then it s not worth anything! In 2016 it was reported that Google yielded 2 trillion searches per year. How many people are searching for your business? By taking interest and control of how your content is found and consumed, you can increase the number of new prospects who come across your website. Here s how to get started with SEO!
Lets Start With The Basics! So, with SEO there is only one place to start and that is with your own website. However, before we get into the technical aspect of things, there are certain phrases that you need to know in order to understand SEO and how to make it work for you. META TAGS These are a few lines of code that sit right at the start of your website and are a rapid way of telling search engines and people what your webpage is all about. They also appear on Google within the search results. KEYWORDS It sounds obvious however, these keywords are not actually limited to single words. You should be thinking bigger. Think of phrases made up of only 2 or 3 words to describe your webpage or website e.g. Ransomware protection service not just Ransomware
Choosing Your Keywords One of the most important steps in building an effective SEO strategy is to do extensive research on trigger keywords / phrases. Create a list of keywords to target through your organic content and paid advertisements. Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo will crawl your site to find relevant web pages for each search query. Some helpful keyword research tools: Moz Keyword Explorer Google Adwords Keyword Planner keywordtool.io SEMrush Keyword Research Tool Top Tip! When choosing keywords get everyone in your team to write a list of 5 phrases they would put into Google to find your company. There will be a large number of variations, however this is exactly what you want and where the tools above come in. With these tools you can see how popular the phrases are and more importantly how competitive they are. Competitive words will take longer, cost more money and time to see rank improvement but will likely reap bigger rewards. Sometimes going for less competitive keywords can be more beneficial in the short term.
Page URLs Choosing your page URLs is something you need to do logically. You ll need to try to include some of your chosen keywords/ phrases however, you don t want to choose something too long. Example: Weak: /about Perfect: /about-business-continuity To Long: /about-business-continuity-and-disaster-recovery-solutions-by-datto The three examples above show one is too short and from reading it you would have no idea what the page is about. The second is just right, it gives you enough insight as to what the page is about. However, the third option contains a lenghty description and is not useful. Top Tips: - URL length max = 75 characters, 3 subfolders - Use keywords no more than once in the URL - Hyphens allow search engines to read the URL as separate words - Page URLs should use only standard characters: letters, numbers and dashes (-)
Making Use of Meta Tags Meta tags are the snippets of text which describe the content that appears on the page. They will not appear on the page itself, but they will be visible in the code. They only exist in HTML. Meta stands for meta data which describes the type of data the tags will provide. It s all about the data which features on your page! There are 3 main Meta tags when it comes to SEO. These are: The page title, the page description and a list of the page keywords. Below is a screenshot of Datto s Ransomware protection page meta title and description. In the modern world of SEO, Meta Title tags are still key as it gives you control over what shows up on Google. You should be looking to include your keyword in the title and description. The use and importance of meta descriptions has been widely debates as in one case you can take control of what appears on search engines. However, is some cases it can be more beneficial to have no meta description and allow search engines to choose what to display. In short, page title is a must, Meta descriptions are optional and keywords are irrelevant. Top Tips: - Use your keyword no more than 3 times - Meta description also appears on Facebook and Google+ results when shared - Maximum meta description length = 156 characters - Use exact keyword at least once in title - Use Keywords at beginning of page titles - Title length max = 60-70 characters (512 pixels) - Don t use duplicate titles across pages
Headings & How to Use Them Headings are vital to any page when showcasing new content on your website There are different tiers which highlight the importance of each heading. In a standard word document you will have three main heading choices; 1,2 & 3. Number 1 is your main heading, which will appear at the top of your page. Number 2 is your sub-heading. You can use these as many times as you like but the suggested amount is 2-4 times per page. Number 3 is used to direct your visitors to useful links and other relevant sources. Using the headings in this order will make the information on your page appear more clear and consise. Remember, Google will read your page in order of important tags. If your customers find your page easy to digest, so will Google! Keep it simple yet effective. Be wise and use your headings to create impact and showcase your content!
Be Unique - Writing Your Content When writing any content it s important to make sure that your content is unique and that it says something new! Google s big thing over the last few years has been relevancy, aka do your links, images, and tags all match up and more importantly are they all unique? Website s such as http://www.copyscape.com/ allow you to check your webpage against others to ensure that your text is one of a kind. If it s not, it will show the areas which have been duplicated so you can amend it. However, text content is not the only thing you need to be aware of. If you have an article talking about data backup and you upload an image called screenshot-2017-01-03.jpg that s not going to help. If you call it datto-data-back-up.jpg that will help, improve ranking and will increase your chances of showing up on google images too. Keyword Spam Website s such as http://www.copyscape.com/ allow you to check your webpage against others to ensure that your text is one of a kind and if it s not it will show your areas that it sees as duplicated so you can amend it. Now, this is something that you need to be careful of. Using keywords is vital to success however, using them to much will do more harm than good. A good rule to work by is to ensure that every page contains at least 300 words for search engines to recognise your website. Within that, try to use the key phrase around 4-7 times. However, if it starts to sound repetitive take it out or use another phrase and link it to seperate article. Example: You don t want to be writing Datto is a great backup solution company and can really help you with your backup solution. Why wait get your backup solution in place today and to be sure your data is secure with Datto s backup solution. Over using your keyword will start to sound repetitive and will lead to information overload! If it sounds too much for you, it will be too much for Google!
Webpage Links When creating links don t write click here or read more, try to think a little outside the box. Write things such as, If you re looking to find out more about our business continuity plan, then check out our template!. A bigger link not only gives people a better chance of seeing it but give Google more of an idea about what the link is for. However, for major call to actions like form submits and pdf downloads it s still important to use traditional buttons, otherwise you end up affecting user experience. Cross Referencing When writing articles and pages try to link to other relevant pages and posts, using long links that are descriptive. This will help to improve content continuity and will also help to keep the user engaged longer. Although this may not be an SEO tip, it is a good best practice tip. Using Images Naming & Alt Tags Using alt tags and title tags are great for describing images, as these show up when the image cannot load, and even when you hover over an image. A good tag might look something like Data Backup Solutions - Datto has a great choice of backup solutions and technical support that will keep your business running. This is something that can take time and is very often over looked.
Sitemaps When creating a new website or starting out on an SEO project, ensure that a new sitemap is submitted to Google so it knows about all your pages on the website. This process can take 2-4 weeks for Google to update its record and to index the website. So remember this when submitting a sitemap. How do I do that? I hear you ask, First you need to ensure that you have a Google webmasters account: https://www.google.com/webmasters. From there you can submit a site map to Google and see more vital stats around your websites ranking, pages index and errors on the site. These webmaster tools also exist for Bing and other search engines. Structured Markup Structured data is not a tool and in fact is more about the way you actually code your website. It s mainly used for set types of website pages such as blogs, team bio pages, products, events etc. Structured data is a common style of coding that the search engines have all agreed to. For more information check out http://schema.org/
Datto SEO Made MSPeasy
Conclusion So now that you have read through this SEO guide for On-site optimisation you should have a good idea of where to start, but to summarise... 1. Start by checking your Meta Tags and improving your content structure. 2. Implement structured data and check your image names & Alt tags. 3. Create you Google webmasters account 4. Submit your sitemaps to Google & other Search Engines. Want to know more? Download Now: OffSite SEO Made MSP Easy: www.datto.com/uk/resources/
About Datto Datto protects business data and provides secure connectivity for tens of thousands of the world s fastest growing companies. Datto s Total Data Protection solutions deliver uninterrupted access to business data on site, in transit and in the cloud. Thousands of IT service providers globally rely on Datto s combination of pioneering technology and dedicated services to ensure businesses are always on, no matter what. Datto is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut and has offices in Monroe, Rochester, Boston, Portland, Toronto, London, Singapore, Sydney, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam. Want to know more? Visit www.datto.com/uk EMEA Headquarters Datto, Europe Ltd 250 Longwater Avenue Green Park, Reading RG2 6GB, United Kingdom Global Offices USA: +1 888.294.6312 Canada: +1 877.811.0577 EMEA: +44 (0) 118 402 9600 Australia: +61 (02) 9696 8190 Singapore: +65-31586291 2017 Datto, Inc. All rights reserved.