Travel Bloggers Unite - SEO Presentation

I’m mike and I’m a geek.
Hashtag : #TBU11
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In the Know SEO
Travel Bloggers Unite
#TBU11

Don’t worry about taking notes
Everything will be online next week
Sit back and relax

If I were a blogger…
and I wanted to develop a site to
get me free stuff
make some money
make friends
I’d choose SEO and here’s how I’d do it…

Did I say that…
I used blogs to
Generate an income
That paid for my wedding in Mauritius
Me, my wife, my wee boy
Full board holiday (and all spending money) at one of the worlds best hotels (Le Touessrok, Mauritius)
Wedding dress, rings, kilts everything
Using only SEO

My plan
Research
Get online
Develop content
Get links
Get social
Build positions
Iterate

Find out what people search for?
Google Keyword Tool
http://www.tinyurl.com/keywordtool
WordTracker
http://www.wordtracker.com

From this I knew
What were people searching for
Patterns of search behaviour
Modifier set
Cheap Vs Bargain
Sub groups of traffic for my niche
Traffic trends through the year

Find the long tail

Now I wanted to know my competition
Who are they
Use Google
Traditional search
Google blog search
Google alerts
What are they
Are they :
travel agents?
other blogs?
Is it affiliates/MFA sites?
Is it Google places?
Wikipedia

Getting myself online
Domain name
Keywords vs brand
Hosting
Get someone good
If my site goes down Google will trust me less
One Click Install Wordpress

Fix a small server issues
Non-www redirect
Remove duplicate content issues
Remove lost visitors
Did this through .htaccess
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond%{HTTP_HOST} !^www. RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

Configure WordPress Settings
Permalinks
Settings -> Permalinks
Nice keyword rich URLs
URLs that look better in the search engines
Improved click through

Make sure I’m pinging
Settings -> Writing
“update services”
Get the strong list I can find online anywhere
Search “WordPress ping list”
Paste services into the field

Allow access from my iPhone
Settings ->Writing
Check Remote Publishing

Get myself a theme
WordPress has some themes already
Appearance -> Themes ->Install themes
Download and Install themes I find in search results?
Beware
Some SEO’s may have placed links in these
Some themes contain malicious code

SEO’ing my theme
Themes may have aspects that I may need to fix
How are the HTML tags used?
<h1>…</h1>
Is the theme widget ready?
Can I easily change my logo?

Plugins to make SEO easy
I need plugins that :
Make my content better
Improve the “long tail”
Find Plugins
Plugins ->Install

Plugins I always use
WordPress SEO Plugin (Yoast)
Fuzzy SEO Plugin
UP Update Smart Pinger Plugin
Contact Form 7 Plugin
Twitter Stream Plugin
Feedburner Plugin
Web Ninja GA Plugin
Akismet

Developed great content
Created the Post title
Included keywords in post title (Yoast Plugin)
Keywords at the start
Brand at the end
Don’t overload the title
Developed meta descriptions!
Not going to help my rankings
But can improve my click through

Wrote post naturally
Write without thinking about SEO (much)
Then use keywords if required
Use “~” to find related keywords
Use headings to block out content
Headings give more relevance
Use the <!– more --> function for long posts
Ask visitors to comment
Reply to comments where possible

Added other indexable content
Videos
Hosted on Youtube (second biggest search engine)
Did some traffic research on YouTube
https://ads.youtube.com/keyword_tool

More indexable content
Images - Used the alt attribute

Even more indexable content
Created useful downloads if appropriate
PDFs
Word Docs
Excel
Image packs

Pushed the Button…

No rankings and no visitors

Great content gets rankings

Biggest SEO Myth
Great content gets rankings

Why?
Great content deserves rankings
BUT
Great content without links will fail
So I needed to start getting links

What’s a good link?
Website with related content
Strong HeartBeat
Regular content being published on the site
Regular tweeting
Facebook activity
Links to other related sites already

But what types of links did I want?
Anchor text
I use my keywords
I use my brand
I use my URL
Link Types
I want links in content
I want a few sitewidelinks (be careful)
Point to my homepage
I use my website name
I want profiles
I want domains not links

Link metrics
Links can be complicated
large scale development
short tail phrase optimisation
Have you heard of PageRank?

PageRank
Here’s the math…

“Magic Green Fairy Dust” @Google

There are lots of link variables…
MozRank
Domain Authority
Page Authority
TrustRank
SocialRank
Cache Frequency

But I didn’t need to worry
I’m in a niche
I’m not competing for the massive terms
I have friends (real and virtual)
I’m going to get links from them
I have RSS
So I can syndicate my content
I have directories/social profiles
So I can be seen in great places for free

I make friends with people offline
Guest post (and get a link)
Spoke to a journalist I know
Wrote for websites that love new content
Created/contributed to pages on wikipedia
Useful pages
Do not spam. Spam is the curse of the internet

Befriended people on Twitter
I’m going to get important people on my side
Located important people
Engaged with them
Ask important to people to guest blog on my site
Spoke to them honestly about what I liked& didn’t like
Be genuine & be yourself

I syndicated my RSS
Every time I posted
The post got a link
My title tag is the link (keywords)
I get noise about my content in the eyes of the search engines

I built real & useful social profiles

Tried online news sources
I tried Digg/Reddit
I wrote great content
Appropriate for my audience (on my blog and the news site)
Very little reward
But
If I had wrote great content
The community had voted on these
I may have got a front page for a category
Got thousands of visitors
Got some links

Now Google goes social & personal

If this had been available
Twitter would be even more powerful
Social friends would always see my content
I could have got even more links (hopefully)

I now had..
Rankings for my keywords & traffic
Friends helping me
People asking me to write for them
Bloggers ask to write on my site
Subscribers
Regular and frequent real comments

And every time I iterated
http://analytics.google.com
http://www.hittail.com
Things got better as I grew more long tail traffic

So how did I monetise this?
AdSense
Not too much , these can be a sign of low quality
Not above the fold if possible
Affiliate links
Masked links; these can be a sign of low quality
Advertising
Banners

And here I am
I made my money
I got married
Great wedding & honeymoon
I got a tan
I made new friends (real and virtual)

Thank You
Questions?
Site reviews tomorrow!
Stay in touch
Email : Michael.briggs@caliberi.com
My Twitter : @michaelkebriggs
Company Twitter : @caliberi

attributation
“Hi How are you image” - http://www.flickr.com/photos/an_agent/54106267/
Unhappy post it - http://www.shutterstock.com
PageRank Bar - http://www.clippingimages.com/blog/google-page-rank/
PageRank Formula - http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/905-PageRank-What-Is-It-And-How-Do-You-Calculate-It-
Yoda and PageRank – http://www.blaugh.com

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Travel Bloggers Unite - SEO Presentation

by Caliberi on Mar 28, 2011

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Travel Bloggers Unite - SEO Presentation — Presentation Transcript