seo workshop for agile team at singtel march 2015

SEO WorkshopBY CLA RE HOA NG (CLA REH@SI NGTEL .COM)

MA RCH 2015

Agenda

Search Engine Landscape

SEO vs. SEM

SEO Ranking Factors ( 2014)

The 3C’s of SEO

Crawl-ability

Content

Connections

Search engine landscape in Singapore

Search

engine

Market Share

( 14-15)

Google 92.03%

Yahoo! 5.15%

Bing 1.88%

Ask 0.3%

Baidu 0.27%

Other 0.38%

Total 100%

How about e-Shop ?

March 14 – March 15

Channels Visits %

Organic

Search

1,811,674 19.35%

Direct 1,101,817 11.76%

Paid Search 1,039,909 11.10%

Social 70,318 0.75%

Overall site 9,366,585 100%

87.50%

8.98%

2.91%

0.36%

0.12%

SEO & SEM on SERP

SEO

Organic

Search

Results Area

SEM

Paid Search

Results Area

Eye Tracking Heat Map Research

Eye Tracking Heat Map Research

It’s important to be above the fold

The top 2 organic results receive

more than 50% of the clicks on the

SERP

Users read from top –down, and from

left – right ( F-shaped pattern)

~ 80% of searchers click on organic results

~ 20% of clicks on PPC

SEO/ SEM S.W.O.T SEO SEM

Strengths • High level of clicks and trust ( brand

value)

• More relevant ( more contextual)

• Long-lasting results

• Low cost

• Immediate results

• ROI-focused

• Google’s best friend

Weaknesses • Takes time to be on #1 page

• Hard to predict. Depends on competition

& Google’s Dance

• Less contextual Low clicks & trust

• High cost

Opportunities • Untapped huge reach potentials

• “Focus on the users, all else will follow” (

Google’s #1 philosophy)

• Google Product Listing Ads | Re-

marketing/targeting

Threats • Google updates search algorithm on the

whim

• > 200 ranking factors

• Negative SEO

• Google “Not Provided” Keywords > 90%

• Google disallows ads or bans accounts

• Intense competition: everyone has the

same tools, can’t think out of the box too

much

We cannot build a House in a Day…

SEO is not an overnight work. It takes 3-6 months ( even more) to see results

SEO must be done in line with Google standards

Never employ black hat solutions for quick fixes

SEO is a long-term investment yet long-lasting impacts

The Devil is in the Details

SEO Ranking Factors ( 2014)Factors Details

Content High quality/media rich, relevant

Technology Robust site architecture ( breadcrumb, clean URL, optimal linking

structure)

Short loading times

Presence of meta tags

Sitemap(s)

Backlinks/ Inbound Links Quantity & quality. Referring domains

Social Signals Indication of whether your content/website is of good quality

User Signals First time there is a relation between rankings and higher CTR, lower

bounce rates , and high time-on-site

Searchmetrics Study, Sep 2014

ContentHigh quality, Unique,

Relevant

The 3C’s of SEO

Connection

Links, Authority, Click-

ability

Crawl-abilityIndex-ability, Technical,

Sitemap(s)

SEO is the

combined effects

of all these

Copywriters,

Marketers

Who are Taking Part?

Bloggers, Links/

Email Outreach

Developers,

UI/UX

SEO is the joint efforts

of cross-functional

collaborations

internally & externally

The 3C’s of SEO

Crawl-abilityIndex-ability, Technical,

Sitemap(s)

Sitemap(s)

Robots.txt / Meta Robots

Tag

Website Architecture

URL Structure

Page Speed

Focus on the users, all else will follow ( Google’s #1 philosophy)

Crawling

Indexing

Ranking

Which pages are crawled by the search

engine?

What kind of pages are they?

Has the search engine indexed all of the

crawled pages ?

How does the search engine rank ?

Relevant

Useful

Crawl Efficiency Checklist

Ensure page load times aren’t slow to reduce number of pages crawled

Ensure server is responsive

Use compression

Return a 404 for not found content

Ensure each page has at least one link

No duplicate ( if possible )

Avoid infinite redirects and redirect loops

Ensure most important pages are linked from home page

No JavaScript redirects or meta refresh redirects (if possible)

Reasonable use of Google Webmaster Tools crawl setting

Many more…

Proper Redirects

Just use 301 Redirects

How to Improve Crawl-ability


The Index-ability Story

Indexing is like buying lottery tickets – without a ticket, we have no chance of winning

Do we have spider traps and barriers to indexing?

Improper redirects

Incorrect robots coding

JavaScript

Multiple dynamic variables & Session ID’s

Session ID’s or cookie restrictions

Inclusion Test


Indexing Instructions | Robots.txt

Primary used to tell search engines what to exclude, not what to crawl

Keep spiders from specific section of the site ( private, sensitive, user profiles)

Done wrong, can block bots from entire site

User-agent: * applied to all robots

Disallow: / what pages they shouldn’t visit, crawl

and index


Indexing Instructions | Meta robots tag


Page-level meta tag

Sits in the <head> part of page’s code

<meta name =“robots” content=“noindex”>

What For Note

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”><meta

name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow”>

Do not index this page (noindex,follow) is optional

Link juice flow through by

default

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”><meta

name=”robots” content=”none”>

Do not index this page

Do not follow the links on it

<meta name=”robots” content=”index”><meta

name=”robots” content=”index,follow”>

Index this page

Follow links from it

No need to set for this case.

Default condition for a page is

to be indexed and followed

<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow”><meta

name=”robots” content=”index,nofollow”>

Index this page

Do not follow links on it

“index,nofollow” is optional

Being indexed is by default

Note: meta robots can’t work if you’ve blocked a page from being crawled with robots.txt

Website Architecture : Flat vs. Deep

A clear structure is easy to navigate and crawl

Link Juice ( PageRank) flow through easily


singtelshop.com

singtel.com

3-click Rule

Link Juice Flowing The deeper the site structure is, the thinner the link juice is passed on

The flatter the site structure is, the greater chances of boosting ranking


How Link Juice is Passed

Every web page has a limited amount of link juice it can pass ( determined by PageRank)

Case 1: PR points = 20, 5 do-follow links

Each link gets 20/5 = 4 PR points

Case 2: PR points = 20 , link to 5 links, 4/5 have “nofollow” tag

Do-follow link gets full 20 points of link juice

Is this always the case to prevent link

juice dilution? The answer is Depends

rel=“nofollow”

To tell search engine NOT to follow this specific links No Link Juice passing on

Should we rel=“nofollow” all external links?

Should we rel=“nofollow” all external links?

Matt Cutts ( Google) says PR/ Link Juice is lost through

nofollow as it is through followed links

The web is no longer web

without links

URL Structure/ Naming Convention

SEO & user-friendly for both search engine & online users ( visitors purchasers)

Comply with SEO best practices

Consistency across pages

Standard practices for all teams dealing with online content


URL Structure

Let’s compare

https://www.singtelshop.com/mobile/phone-details.jsf?brandId=102&modelId=GNOTE4_CAT632GB

https://www.singtel.com/shop/phones/all-phones/samsung/galaxy-note-4

Recommended Practices for Dev


Page Speed One of Google’s ranking signals

How quickly do we deliver content? Dirty code

Unnecessary files

No Compression

Oversized images

Direct impact on user’s signals ( bounce rate, time spent on site)

PageSpeed Insights test ( link )

Don’t Waste the Spiders Time!

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=singtelshop.com

Increase Page Speed Checklist

What Actions

Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML Removing spaces, commas, code comments, unused codes

Reduced Redirects Reducing waiting time for users

Leverage browser caching Setting expiry date or maximum age in the HTTPs headers for static

resources to instruct the browser to load previously downloaded

resources from local disk rather than over the network

Improve server response time

Optimize images Properly formatting and compressing can save many bytes of data

Reference: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=singtelshop.com

Don’t Waste the Spiders Time!

Recap for Dev

Important SEO HTML tags

Title tag <head>

<title>keyword</title>

</head>

H1, H2, H3 <h1>Most important</h1>

<h2>Second most important </h2>

</h3>Third Most important </h3>

Bold, Strong <b>keyword</b>

<strong>keyword</strong>

Image <img src=”keyword.jpg” alt=”keyword” />

Hyperlink <a href=”http://www.website.com/page.html” title=”keyword”>keyword</a>

Hyperlink ( nofollow) <a href=”http://www.website.com/page.html” title=”keyword”

rel=”nofollow”>keyword</a>

Recap for DevSearch Engine Indexing Limits

Sitemap XML Protocol to inform the search engine of our pages / http://www.sitemaps.org/

Robots.txt Available at www.yoursite.com/robots.txt)

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Disallow: /go/

Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/google-sitemap-index.xml

Meta robots tag To give search engine instruction of page indexing and link(s) following

rel=nofollow Mainly used for low-quality websites that we link to or sponsored links

Clean folder/ file naming convention | Clean URL structure

No hyphen, upper case, minimize parameters

No duplicate A page can be accessed by many ways ( rel=“canonical”)

Redirect 301 only

http://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt

Crawl-ability Summary

Q&A

Sitemap(s)

Robots.txt / Meta Robots

Tag

Website Architecture

URL Structure

Page Speed

ContentHigh quality, Unique,

Relevant

The 3C’s of SEO

High-quality

Unique

Relevant *

Useful **

Sharable

Keyword Research

Relevancy

Ensuring that our pages are relevant to the query by :

placing keywords in location that send strong signals to the search engine

providing rich/ useful content that answers users’ questions

Optimal Keyword Placement


Optimal Keyword Placement

Heading tags <H1> , <H2>, <H3>

First paragraph: proper sentence wrapped keywords

Body Copy : keywords appearing throughout page content

Anchor Text: say NO to “ click here”. Anchor text should be contextual, providing a valid reason for users to click

Low-quality Content & its Impacts

Bad content

Thin

Spun/ Automated

Duplicate

Irrelevant

Bad User

Signals

Low CTRs

High Bounce Rate

Low Time on Site

Low amount of returning visitors

Bad Usability

Design, Layout

Navigation

Too many 404 errors

Flash

Website is indexed by Google still

But ranking gets hurt badly


Keyword Research is Crucial Search Demand

High Cost &

Competition

Low Cost &

Risk

Low

probability of

conversion

High

probability of

conversion

1-2 word phrases (

singtel, mobile phones)

> 3 word phrases. Specific &

descriptive (e.g. difference

between Samsung s4 and s5)

Low-hanging fruits for SEO

• content optimization

• CRO

Long tail | High KEI = Our Hanging Fruits

SOBC = Stage of Buying Cycle Awareness Interest Desire * Action **

KEI (Keyword Effective Index) = Search Volume/ Competitiveness

Competitive Ranking

100,000 : Easy 100,000 – 1M : Relatively Easy 1M – 10M: Moderately Competitive 10M – 100M: Competitive > 100M: Extremely Competitive

Content Summary

High-quality

Unique

Relevant *

Useful **

Sharable

Keyword Research

Q&A

The 3C’s of SEO

Connection

Links, Authority, Click-

ability

Quality/ Natural Links

Healthy Link Profile = High-Authority Website

Sharable Content =

Clickable = Conversion

Anatomy of a Link

3 types of Links

1. Internal

2. Outbound

3. Inbound/

Backlink

The Web is no longer Web without Links

Search Engine look for clusters of thematically similar content. To do this, they look at

Link Popularity : No. of links pointing to the site

Link Authority : Quality of links pointing to the site

Anchor Text, or Link Text : Keyword/phrase appearing in the title of page linking to your site

Think of inbound links as “ votes of authority” between sites

The “ Click Here” Story

How confident are you

to click on “ Click here”

link?

Click for a Demo

Photos of my trip are here, here, and here

You can download it right here

How about?

View Demo

Photos of my trip: at the beach, on a boat, and going fishing

You can download Spotify on Google Play Store

We have plenty of “ Click Here” too

Google’s View on Natural Links

Identify our audience ( persona) , their pain points, content they are looking for

Build Content Calendar

Write relevant, useful content that address the need of users. Make it sharable

#1.Focus on Audience, Build Content, not Links

How to earn Natural Links?

Help our customers. They will build links for us unconditionally

Find top influencers/ loyal customers online. They will be our brand advocates

Strengthen relationship with our partners : Cross-linking exchange

Unlinked Mentions

#2. Build Connection/ Relationships

Act without expectation ( Lao Tzu)

How to earn Natural Links?

Last but not least,

Thank you! FOR ANY QUESTION, CONTACT ME AT [email protected]

Glossary1. Search keyword ( or search query): the word/ phrase that Internet users enter into the search box

2. SERP: Search Engine Result Page

3. PageRank : a link analysis algorithm used by Google to determine the relative importance of a website (0-10 scale)

4. Link Juice: The transfer of PageRank points when links are linked ( internally and externally)

seo workshop for agile team at singtel march 2015

Documents