SEO Presentation - The 42nd Estate - BRA - City of Boston

Search Engine Optimization: How To Get Targeted Traffic Via Search Engines By Adam Pieniazek – Cofounder – The 42 nd Estate
Presentation Outline:
What is SEO?
Create a Website in 5 Minutes
Content Is King
Optimizing Code for Speed & Structure
Digital Networking for Link Building
Empowering Your Fans/Customers

What is SEO?

SEO Is NOT
Keyword Spamming
Buying Ads (Adsense)
Black hat Magic
Guaranteed #1 ranking!!!
Tricking Search Engines
A Digital Ponzi Scheme
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jepoirrier/2046188221/

SEO IS
Producing quality content
Quality Link Building
Optimizing code for speed and structure
Internal Navigation
Digital Networking
Empowering your fans
Usability
http://www.flickr.com/photos/palomagomezg/3431433137/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattsearles/2703757588/

Business Objectives
Is your website the destination or a guide?
Sell products/services?
Educate readers?
Promote a physical event/store?
Generate Ad Revenue?

Create a Website in 5 Minutes
Use Wordpress.org
5 Minute Installation
Easy to use
Free!
SEO Friendly
Huge Community
Lots of Plugins & Themes
Matt Cutts Approved
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-for-bloggers/

Picking a Domain Name
Use .com, DO NOT use .net, .org, .me etc.
Use relevant keywords
Good: wintercoats.com
Bad: stuffforlowdegreetime.net
Worst: things-123.us
Use Google Keywords Tool: http://bit.ly/kwdtool

Google Analytics
Great for tracking trends
Can make unique tracking codes per link
Utilize Traffic Sources
Link to other pages from high traffic pages
Expand

Content is King
Content is the #1 factor for SEO
Your content needs to be:
Useful
Easy to Read
Relevant

Blog!
Blogging produces fresh content
Google loves blogs (because they love fresh content)
Threadless T-shirt from http://bit.ly/TweetALot

Producing Quality Content
79% of web readers scan a page.
16% read word for word.
Users stay on your site for 4.4 seconds for each additional 100 words.
Make your content easy to scan!
Stats from:
How Users Read on the Web http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html
How Little Do Users Read? http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html

Structure Content for Scanning
Photos
Headings and sub-headings
Bold & Italics
White Space
Lists
4-600 Words
Keywords at start of sentences / paragraphs / pages.

Optimizing Photos
Compress file size.
Save with descriptive filename (use hyphens to separate keywords).
Use “alt tags” to describe photo.
<img src=”/big-dog.jpg” alt=”A big dog runs in the park” />
Surround with text.

Headings
HTML headings take the form of:
<h1>This is a heading</h1>
H1 should be used only once per page.
H1 should be highly relevant to on page content and meta title.
Use H2 and H3 for content sub-headings
Use H4, H5, H6 for secondary content (sidebars, footer, etc.)

Bold & Italics When writing content that spans multiple paragraphs, heading and sub-headings help give structure to the document. Bold and italicized words call attention to the reader. They are also used by search engines as a guide. Use bold [ <strong></strong> ] for most important keywords.

White Space Good use of white space (empty space) brings readers attention to your content.

Lists
Great form of link bait.
Search engines & humans love lists
Easy to scan.
Gives editorial review.
Humans naturally search for lists.

Less is Better
Be succinct.
Less words = more keyword density.
Past 500 words, exponentially less chance of readers reading.
Content higher/earlier is valued more than content lower/later.
Eliminate filler to improve scanning.

Location, Location, Location
Humans and search engine robots place higher value on earlier/top content.
Make your most important points at the start of sentences/paragraphs/pages.
U.S. Visitors read left to right, place content on left, sidebar/extra info on right/bottom.
List your location in meta title, about page, homepage.

Quality Link Building
Produce link bait (lists, tutorials, reviews)
Connect with bloggers/webmasters in your niche
Analyze quality site with PageRank, Traffic, and Your Eye
PageRank Toolbar
Compete.com, Quantcast.com, WebsiteGrader.com
Content, Design, Community

How To Get Quality Links
CNN.com
Guest Blogging
Produce lists
Tutorials
Contests
Google Reader Shares
Comments

Optimizing Code for Speed & Structure
Use CSS for styling/layout
Avoid Flash
Use Caching
Meta Tags
Semantic HTML
Anchor Text
Test, iterate, test, iterate, test, iterate.

Meta Tags
Meta Title
Appears at top of browser window
<title>Your Meta Title</title>
Should be similar/exact to H1
Meta Description
May appear in search results.
160 characters or less.
High relevancy to H1/title and content.
Meta Keywords – Don't Bother

Digital Networking
Email lists (newsletter)
RSS Feeds
Social Media
Instant Messaging
Blogs
Message Boards
Find your audience and push your message to them.

Internal Navigation
Your homepage is (likely) your most powerful page.
Link to important pages from homepage.
Make sure all pages are linked to
At most 2-3 directories deep
Use keywords in anchor text

Empowering your Fans
Share on Social Media Buttons
Promote Your Fans
Connect with your Fans on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Find out where they are and join them there.
Comments (respond to them!)
Ask them how to improve (polls, emails)

Usability
Have text for non-text elements (CSS Image Replacement)
Describe videos/images with text (publish transcripts).
Degrades gracefully when CSS/Javascript/Images turned off
Check in a text browser (Lynx)

Search Engines are... Blind

Additional Resources
The 42 nd Estate's SEO Posts http://www.the42ndestate.com/tag/seo/
Google's SEO Webmaster Page http://bit.ly/GooWebSEO
Google's SEO Starter Guide (.pdf file) http://bit.ly/GooSEO
Yoast's Wordpress SEO Guide http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/
Wordpress's SEO Guide http://bit.ly/SEOwp

Even More Resources!
http://www.seomoz.org/tools
http://www.seomoz.org/articles
http://tools.seobook.com/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
http://websitegrader.com/
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
http://www.wordtracker.com/

Contact Me
E-mail: [email_address]
Office: (617) 326 7402 Cell: (617) 418 1055
Skype: the42ndestatellc
Twitter: @The42ndEstate / @AdamPieniazek
LinkedIn: linkadam.com
Facebook: bit.ly/42fbook / fbadam.com

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SEO Presentation - The 42nd Estate - BRA - City of Boston

by The 42nd Estate on Oct 24, 2009

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SEO Presentation - The 42nd Estate - BRA - City of Boston — Presentation Transcript