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SEO Strategies for

Your Blog

Jennifer Osborne President

October 20, 2012

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THE DIGITAL

OPPORTUNITY

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

- Thomas A. Edison

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Search is How Things

Get Found.

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Search = Discovery

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Discovery Leads to Sharing

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Sharing leads to monetization

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SEO = free traffic

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“Advertising is a tax for being unremarkable!”

Robert Stephens, founder of Geek Squad

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If you don’t want to pay for traffic then your content

needs to be remarkable

(or at least pretty damn good)

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HOW DOES SEO WORK?

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Get Found!

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Somebody is looking for something…

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The Search Engines Crawl and Index your site

• They keep this “index” in their databases so that every time a search is done, they can compare what the searcher is looking for with what they have in their databases

• This means that your blog must be built using code that is SE readable

• The more you add unique content to your site the more SE spiders will visit it

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AKA what you tell Google about your pages

• Keywords in Title tag, h(#) headings

• Keyword use in omain name, subdomain/folder/page name

• Keyword use in first 50-100 words

1. Search Engines depend on “cues” to determine if your

web page is relevant to the query

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2) If there are many pages that are relevant to the query, Search

Engines use Authority & Trust to determine ranking

AKA what others tell Google about your site

Authority | Off Page SEO

1. Anchor Text, Link Relevancy

2. Quality not Quantity of Links

3. Quantity of Sites Linking In

AKA what friends tell Google about your site

Trust | Social Signals

1. Tweets, Likes, Shares

2. Activity in the Blogosphere

3. Signals content popularity

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Tips on driving traffic with

do-it-yourself SEO tactics

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Keywords

are the Foundation

Get Found!

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Tip: Use the Google Keyword Tool

(it’s free)

Get Found!

It will tell you how many people are searching for your content

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Get Found!

Make sure your keywords are not too Competitive

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you’ve written a killer post

you know what words people are

using when they search for my

content

Now put tags (so the Search Engines associate my post with those words)

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Make sure you’ve got keywords in your Title tag

Put Keywords in your headings h(#) headings

Make sure you use some keywords in the post; ideally in the first 50-100 words

Don’t forget about your file naming structure: subdomain/folder/page name

Image Credit: SEO Moz

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Tip: People often use the title of your

blog post as the link. If you put

keywords in the title of your blog you’ll

be building anchor text links which

help the Search Engines to know that

your site is authoritative for that topic.

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Ever hit a

boy to get him to

notice you?

23

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… I want the Canadian Tire account

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Title Tags <meta content='Canadian Tire' name='title' />

Meta Description Tag

<meta content='Home - desc | Canadian Tire' name='description' />

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Tip: Word Press SEO Plug in makes it

easy to do

• xml sitemap

• webmaster tools verification

• RSS Optimization

• Social integration

• rich snippets

• alt tags

• Have you written a meta description?

• And so much more

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It doesn’t matter if you

rank if nobody ever clicks

Image Credit: Sheknows.com

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Improve your CTR

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Rich Snippets can help differentiate your

search results from your competitors

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Links your content to your Google Profile

Create a Google+ account

Edit profile of your Google+ profile page and add a photo

Click on "Contributor to" and the box will open up

Add the title of the website or blog

Add the link to the page. Be sure it is formatted with the http://www. (see example below)

Save and repeat by clicking on "Add custom link"

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/howto-rel-is-author-tag.html

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Which one is unlikely to get the click?

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Build Site Authority

Image credit: asthmastudio.tumblr.com

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Links are like votes

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Key Considerations:

• Anchor Text

• Quantity of Links

• Quality of Links

• Quantity of Sites

Anchor Text example:

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Create quality content that powerful sites

will link to. This can drive a tremendous

amount of additional traffic…

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Building Site Authority

1. Use social media to help your target audience find your content

2. People will refer to your awesome content when they post (creating a Link)

Image credit:SeoMoz

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How do we know links matter?

In general, Webmasters can improve the rank of

their sites by increasing the number of high quality

sites that link to their pages

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Just how powerful are links?

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Links are still important

But you have to attract them not build them

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Social Media Optimization

Entice readers to:

a. subscribe to an email newsletter, RSS feed, Twitter

Profile, LinkedIn profile

b. queue readers to share the content they’ve read with

their networks

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But that’s just the start

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Google bots love freshness

So blog often

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I know what you’re thinking…

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Is it possible to keep

the post great …when you’re trying for SEO?

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YES!

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Write from the heart

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…and then go back and Optimize it

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Get Found!

Herein lies the

Window of Opportunity for Bloggers

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Don’t’ give up

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:

Blogging takes time

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Quick Recap

1

2

4

3

Make sure that you incorporate Keywords that people are searching

for into your blog titles

Build site Authority by encouraging links. Help

your target market “find” your content by putting it where they link to hangout

Blogging takes time

Add Tags so the Search Engines know what your content is about.

Don’t forget to optimize it to get the click using meta description + rel=author tag to get author snippet

© 2011 Search Engine People, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Thank you!

Questions?

@jenn4sep @senginepeople

Jennifer Osborne

facebook.com/ SearchEnginePeople

www.searchenginepeople.com