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SEO 101 IN 30 MINUTES [OR LESS]

• SEO or search engine optimisation is the process ofaffecting the visibility of a website or a web pagewithin a search engines natural or organic searchresults

• In short, the higher in Google you are, the morevisits you will receive

• This is done using off and onsite techniques

• 90% of all internet session begin with a Searchquery

• Google currently has the greatest market share overother search engines

• Position 10 on Google will get you more traffic thanposition 1 on Yahoo

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WHAT IS SEO?

77%

12.67%

3.04%

2.78% 1.92% 2.59%

UK Search Engine Market Share

Google.co.uk

Google.com

Bing.com

Yahoo UKSearch

Search.Yahoo

Other

• Paid search results shown in red

• Organic listings in green

• Paid search results cover the majority of a search results page

• These make Google $$$

• Paid search will gain more visits quickly at a cost

• Organic search will take longer but ROI is higher as there is costs involved to Google

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PAID VS ORGANIC SEARCH

• Why is keyword research important?

• These are the words / phrases which connect people to your content using a search engine

• What is your site about?

• How would you find out what your site is about if you had to?

• Lots of tools to help you expand your keywords

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KEYWORDS

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RANKINGS

Rankings are essential to SEO as these drive traffic to your website. There are 200+ factors which feature in

Google’s algorithm to determine rankings!

ContentDomain

AgeServer

LocationURL

StructureInternal Linking

In & Outbound

Linking

Sitemaps &

Robots.txt

Page Load Speed

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ONSITE SEO

• When Google’s search bots are crawling your site they are looking for vital information about the pages on your website

• They want to know what your page is about

• We have to send signals within the sites HTML so they can index pages for your selected keywords

• We can help webcrawlers by adding some information to the site such as:

• Robots.txt

• Sitemap.xml

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OPTIMISING A WEBPAGE – CRAWLING A SITE

• Using your chosen keywords there are three places it should be included within the:

• Title tag

• Pages URL

• H1 tag

• Body Copy

• The example shows that the page is optimising for the phrase ‘wine book club’

• Each page should also include a meta description

• Doesn’t affect rankings but is a selling point to the page within search results page

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OPTIMISING A WEBPAGE – THE FUNDAMENTALS

• Beyond the fundamental elements of onsite optimisation other factors will should come into play:

• User experience

• Navigation, design, page render speed

• Unique content

• Page usefulness, cool video, images

• Accessible to search engine bots

• Static urls, JavaScript links

• Built for sharing

• Descriptive URLs, sharing buttons

• Mark up implemented for meta data, schema and rich snippets

• Hreflang, schema mark-up

• Multi device

• Compatible for every browser

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OPTIMISING A WEBPAGE – ADDITIONAL ELEMENTS

Image Credit: //moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization

• Panda first introduced in February 2011

• Introduced and sought to lower rankings of sites which had:

• Duplicate content

• Thin Content [low code to text ratio]

• This update was thought to have affected 12% of all search queries

• Enforces need for websites to have highly relevant [and unique] content for users

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GOOGLE ALGORITHM UPDATES – PANDA

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OFFSITE SEO

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LINK BUILDING – OLD PRACTICES & METHODS

Comment Spam

Content Scraping

Link Farms

Exact Match Anchor Text

Directories

Keyword Stuffing In the past SEO’s used a number of link

acquisition methods referred to as black and grey hat [think cowboy films] in order to ‘game’ the search rankings

• Penguin was a link based algorithm update

• This update was first updated in April 2012 and continues to roll out

• Focussed upon links acquired which went against Google Webmaster Guidelines

• In short, people who were manipulating the number of links pointing to pages to game the rankings

• Link building which was acceptable 5 years ago is now a ‘black hat’ practices and will be penalised

• This means as marketers we need to be smarter and EARN links rather than BUILD links for clients

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GOOGLE ALGORITHM UPDATES – PENGUIN

• Content is now more important than ever

• Creation of resources [or linkable assets] is key to creating a successful SEO campaign

• Creating and hosting these assets on site also helps avoid any issues with aforementioned Panda updates

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SEO OFFSITE STRATEGY

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ANY MOTHER FLIPPING QUESTIONS?