seo - what matters and what to do about it
TRANSCRIPT
Agenda
Is SEO dead?
Keyword research
Website speed
Advanced Link building techniques
Implement Authorship
Utilize schema markup
Avoid duplicate content
Redirection
Actionable landing page optimization
Is SEO dead?● Google frequently updating its search algorithm
Recent updates:Feb 4, 2015
December 22, 2014
December 10, 2014
October 21, 2014
October 17, 2014
September 23, 2014
August 28, 2014
August 6, 2014
● Conventional SEO tactics like backlinks, and meta tags, keyword-stuffed content
are not as significant as they were.
● Google is replacing old SEO tactics with new principals mainly driven by social
media reputation, quality of content, history of authors, search hygiene etc
● Now, ‘Google’ works better. So, it’s difficult to beat it.
Is SEO dead?
● Old SEO principles will be replaced by new principles with
the advancement in internet based platforms (social media,
articles, video content, pictures, behavior) and devices
(mobile devices, apps, maps); so Google will integrate and
put these technologies and diverse sets of data sources to
good use to make their business profitable and index
relevant results keep spammers away.
● SEO can never be your only source of traffic, neither it ever
was. So don’t put all eggs in one basket and diversify your
marketing channels and be adaptive to organic mediums.
Keyword research
- Basic Tools- Google Keyword Planner
- Google Suggest
- Google Trends
- Ubersuggest (http://ubersuggest.org)
- http://keywordtool.io
● better conversion rates, lower bounce rate
● drive users to relevant info
● build relationship with future prospects
Why user-intent?
Keyword research & implementation
● Drive strategy by user-intento Navigational (e.g. web hosting companies, web hosting malaysia)
o Research (e.g. types of web hosting, difference b/w vps and cloud
host)
o Transactional (e.g. buy linux hosting with paypal, 1 usd web hosting)
o Comparison (e.g. shared hosting comparison, ABC vs XYZ, ABC XYZ
comparison)
o Q&A (e.g. Is Linux hosting better than windows hosting?)
o Branded (e.g. ABC services, ABC online store)
Why?
● “60% of buying decisions are made before
contacting a sales rep”source: http://www.executiveboard.com/marketing-blog/the-most-important-number-in-b2b-marketing/
● High ROI
● Decrease bounce rate
● Subscription for future conversion
What?
● Landing page CTA: o Try before you buy, moneyback etc
o Online Chat, Request a call-back
o Email Subscription option
o Free demo, free delivery
● Other factors:o Fast page load
o Relevant & quality content that differentiates you
o Less distractions (other irrelevant products, info etc)
Most common mistake
- Quality vs Quantity
- Low quality links are like stones attached to
a hot air balloon
- High quality links help your balloon reach the
user
What defines quality links?
- Page/Website Relevance
- Trusted
- Website credibility (receives quality links
internally)
- Lesser outgoing links
- Original content
How to get quality links?
- Analyze your competitors backlinks for
keyword you are optimizing for
- Checkout Pagerank of blog pages that can
get you backlinks. Aim for high PR.
How to get quality links?
- Make sure your links reach the maximum
relevant social media channels (facebook
shares, tweets); social bookmarking (reddit,
stumbleupon etc)
- Find bloggers who blog about content
roundups on others. Get them to cover you
on weekly round, or monthly top 10 etc
Why?
● Allows to Associate author's Google+
account to website
● Verified authors rank higher in search results
● Builds trust
● High future value
How?
● Authors must have Google+ account
● Add a link containing rel="author" on every content
page on your blog or website to author's Google+ page
● Add site URL to profile
● If multiple content writer produce for you, you put
separate tag for each author.
● If you write content for other sites, like guest posts; you
can simply add the tag under ‘author bio’.
Website Speed or Page Speed
- Why is website speed important?
- What is the way to measure speed?
- How speed can be improved?
Why?
- Google’s algorithm loves fast loading pages
- You rank well for your pages
- Your get more conversions because most
people are impatient
- Reduces bounce rate
- People explore more pages
What?
- Use Google page speed service
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespee
d/service
Verify your domain and it’s ready to go
Google PageSpeed service
● Is Free of charge
● Setup requires you to change DNS entry
● Rewrites web pages dynamically with Fast-
performance implementation.
● Serves optimized pages via Google servers
to reduce page load time
What?
Other tools
Google Analytics
Moz Crawl Testhttps://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test
Yslowhttps://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/YSlow/
How?
● Enable compression
● Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
● Leverage browser caching
● Improve server response time
● Use a content distribution network
● Optimize images
Avoid duplicate content
- What duplicate content needs to be fixed?
- Why avoiding duplicate content is important?
- How to save your self from duplicate content
issues?
What?
● Same content two different pages
● E.g. about, archives, tag-archives, page
snippets, pagination.
Why?
● Google will include all results
● Your rankings suffer
● You lose traffic
● Users less-frequently see relevant results
How?
Add rel=canonical tag.<link href="http://www.example.com/canonical-version-of-page/" rel="canonical" />
The rel=canonical tag passes the same amount of link juice (ranking power) as
a 301 redirect, and often takes up much less development time to implement.
Original page: http://example.com/a/about_me
Duplicate Page 1: http://example.com/a/about_me_1
Duplicate Page 2: http://example.com/a/about_me_2
By implementing the rel="canonical" tool on the 2nd and 3rd instances pointing back to the 1st URL, the search engines
would know to treat all of those pages as if they were URL #1.
How?
Add noindex, follow<head>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />
</head>
● Add "noindex, follow" on pages that shouldn't be included in a search
engine's index.
● Allows the search engine bots to crawl the links on the specified page, but
keeps them from including them in their index.
● Works well with pagination issues.
Why?
● Because you don’t want to miss potential
customers, readers, revenue
● It tells Google that the page has been
permanently relocated
● Good for future
Webmaster tools
If there are any links pointing to these pages, the
votes are split.
Make sure there’s just one not multiple type of links for the same
page.
Busted Links
Google Webmaster
Make sure there’s just one not multiple type of links for the same
page.
How?
● 301 redirect to new URL where the page is
now located
● You can do it from .htaccess page (free tool:
http://www.htaccesseditor.com/en.shtml#a_r
edirect)
● Plugins available for all popular CMS
(WordPress, Magento, Joomla…)
Utilize Schema Markup
● Why you should be using it?
● What Schema should you be using?
● How to implement?
Why?
● Helps classifying your content e.g. person,
place, review etc
● Helps increasing CTR
● Produces rich results in SERPs
What?
● Schemas supported by Google & Bing○ People: contact information, title/role, email address etc
○ Products: Name, price, image, offer, seller, warranties,
condition, and use
○ Reviews: Item reviews, ratings, name of reviewer
○ Events: Summary, location, start date, end date,
duration, event type, photo, tickets
○ Breadcrumb navigation
○ Restaurants: Branch, menu, business hours, price range
etc
Knowledge-Based Trust
(KBT)
The word first came out in 2012 that Google has been working on
knowledgebase for years.
KBT relies on correctness of factual information provided by the
source
Source with fewer false information considered more trustworthy
Extraction process to compare the facts it finds on web pages to
facts that are stored in a knowledge base (think Knowledge
Graph/Knowledge Vault)
About
- Abdullah Khan
- PPC and SEO specialist
- Clientele: E-commerce, Inquiry driven
websites (booking, quotation etc), SaaS
(software as a business)
- Email: [email protected]