HUG Atlanta had the honor of learning from HubSpot's Al Biedrzycki about the intersection of content marketing and SEO and how to use both to improve our inbound marketing efforts. Check out his slides here.
9. So, What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a
website or a web page in a search engine's unpaid results—often referred to as
"natural," "organic," or "earned" results.
Anything that humans or technology do to influence those results is considered
the practice of SEO.
11. Your Content Has to be Good
Criteria for good content:
1. One-of-a-Kind: Doesn’t appear anywhere
else on the web.
2. Relevant: Contains content that engines
can interpret as on-the-topic.
3. Helpful: Solves the searcher’s query in a
useful, efficient manner.
4. Uniquely Valuable: Provides information
that’s unavailable (or hard to get)
elsewhere.
5. Great UX: Is pleasurable to consume on
any device.
13. Your Content Has to Leverage
Keywords
Keyword research is still very important.
Researching the competition around
ranking difficulty will still be the first step.
Research around topics/themes rather
than direct keyword matching-- not just
the main keyword, but the related
keywords.
Use related keywords as “cast members”
14. Your Content Has to Be Helpful
When creating content, answer as
many questions as possible.
Google is trying to figure out what
your intent is, and answering
questions helps Google associate
your content to queries.
Use natural language and variations,
or “semantic keyword research
15. Your Content Has to Be Structured
1. Structure your content. Use
headers, paragraphs, lists, tables,
etc.
2. Most important content goes in
Header/Main Body tags.
3. Sidebars and footers are
weighted less.
4. Cite sources (if necessary) just
like you would in a college paper
16. Social Media Can Gauge Intent
Sites such as Facebook and
Twitter provide search engines
with important clues about which
web pages people are talking
about, or have shared with each
other.
Tip: Use social channels to drive
the dialogue!
17. Personalized Search Plays a Role
Search engines have been able to
use a logged in user’s Social
Network usage, and their previous
searches, to determine what is
more importantly to them
personally.
Data can be pulled from: Location,
device, search history, email and
calendar, Google+, browser history
and bookmarks
19. How Google Presents Data
What types of search results does Google returns for a
specific query?
1. News
2. Images
3. Local Businesses
4. Rated Results (e.g. stars)
5. Products
6. Videos
7. One-box / answer results
21. How Google Judges Queries
Rating Scale Description
Vital Essential to the search query
Useful A page that is very helpful
Relevant A page that is helpful for many or some
Slightly Relevant A page that is helpful, but not entirely
relevant
Off-Topic or useless A page that is helpful for very few users
Unrateable A page that cannot be evaluated for a
specific query
24. It’s All About Building Relationships
Remember that building links requires an “ask”
1. Social Media
2. Leaving insightful comments on
blogs/content
3. A friendly email
4. Advertising
“Links are a great side effect of awesome
relationships”
25. Link Building vs. Link Earning
Google doesn’t want to count links you
can “build”
1. Build relationships that earn
2. Use content to drive editorial links
3. Aim for resource pages and blog
rolls, no directories
4. Buy exposure that leads to links
Don’t just focus on the “big guys” when
link building. They’re overwhelmed with
requests and may experience “fatigue”.
26. Link Earning Tips: Avoid Spam
1. Link quantity is dying (or
dead)
2. You could get penalized for
spammy or “unnatural” links
27. Secrets for Link Earning
Tools for outreach:
● Conspire
● BuzzSumo
Tips for Outreach:
● Keep an organized spreadsheet of all your outreach targets.
● Know when “scale” and “spam” cross paths.
● Use SE operators to help identify if they have a submissions page or notes
on if they accept external communications
a. Go to Google
b. Type in site:www.domain.com “TERM” to see if that language is used
on their website.
28. Link Earning With Link Bait
Linkbait is any online activity that has the specific
goal of attracting links from other websites.
Types:
1. Infographics - (easy to embed & offer source
code for others to use/share on social
2. Ego Bait – Designed to be targeted at
specific influential individuals (i.e. 18 Startup
Founders Share Their Lowest Moments
Before Coming Out On Top)
3. How-To Guides / Resource style content
4. Interviews
5. Tools (Calculators, etc)
30. Crawling & Indexing
It’s important to ensure your website is
easily crawlable by creating an XML
Sitemap and being wary of barriers:
1. Javascript (it’s fine in HTML, but avoid
it in excess)
2. Flash
3. Frames / iFrames
4. Cookies (i.e. “smart” versions of pages
aren’t currently indexable)
31. Know Your Status Codes
● 200 - Everything is a-ok!
● 301 - Permanent redirect. New page is indexed. Link
equity is transferred from the old page to the new.
● 302 - Temporarily moved. Not removed from indexing,
but link equity is not preserved.
● 404 - The page no longer exists. The page will
eventually be dropped from the index.
● 500 - Server error exists and no content is accessible
to crawlers or search engines.
● 503 - A “temporarily unavailable” status. Tells crawlers
to come back later.
32. URL Construction
Every URL is constructed in four, and
optionally, more parts:
1. Protocol - HTTP or HTTPs
2. Subdomain - www or custom
3. Domain - your custom name
4. Top Level Domain (TLD) - .com, .org, etc
33. URL Optimization
URLs should be:
1. Unique
2. As short as possible
3. Keyword focused
4. URLs are best built using a separator
between the words in the slug. The
types of separators that are acceptable
are, in order:
a. Hyphen (ie. built-like-this)
b. Underscore (ie. built_like_this)
c. Plus (ie. built+like+this)
36. Why Did I Lose My Rank?
1. Manual Action - Someone at Google
manually removed you for breaking the
rules
2. Algorithm Updates - Panda, Penguin, etc.
3. Data/Index Updates - Your were beaten out
by the competition.
4. Filtered out - Copyright claims, excessively
similar results, etc.
The fundamentals of on-page SEO are still important (proper use of keyword within the document), however search engines are placing less and less importance on this strategy.
It’s important to ensure your keyword is used on the page, but it’s having a less and less of an impact on your pages ranking potential.
This is what happens when you do oldschool on-page seo and call it “SEO”
Myth: Is SEO being a crawl-friendly website, having good, relevant content, and doing your keyword research and targeting, that's all SEO is. Right?
Answer: No. Making your site easily crawlable and consistently creating good, relevant content is what you have to do in order to even attempt to do SEO, in order to attempt to be in the rankings to potentially get search traffic that will drive valuable visits to your website.
Answer: No. Making your site easily crawlable and consistently creating good, relevant content is what you have to do in order to even attempt to do SEO, in order to attempt to be in the rankings to potentially get search traffic that will drive valuable visits to your website
To have success in the long term, it's the content (or better, the topic) that matters, not the single keyword. That is why landing pages should be focused on comprehensive topics: 1 Landing Page = 1 Topic
To have success in the long term, it's the content (or better, the topic) that matters, not the single keyword. That is why landing pages should be focused on comprehensive topics: 1 Landing Page = 1 Topic
Theme-based keyword research: https://moz.com/blog/keywords-to-concepts
How to do semantic research: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-improve-your-rankings-with-semantic-keyword-research
Theme-based keyword research: https://moz.com/blog/keywords-to-concepts
How to do semantic research: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-improve-your-rankings-with-semantic-keyword-research
•Social Networking - Sites such as Facebook and Twitter provide the search engines with important clues about which webpages people are talking about, or have shared with each other. This has meant these clues (we call them signals) have provided additional information to the search engines, allowing them to change the ‘recipe’ for determining a site’s ranking.
•Personalised Search - Similarly, the search engines have been able to use a specific user’s Social Network usage, and their previous searches, to determine what is more importantly to them personally. This has meant that now different users searching for the same search phrase might see somewhat different results.
•
•Logged in visitors Google!!!
•Location
•Device
•Search History
•Email & Calendar
•Google+
•Visit History
•Bookmarks
•
Not Logged in visitors Google
Location
Device
Search History
Visit History
•Social Networking - Sites such as Facebook and Twitter provide the search engines with important clues about which webpages people are talking about, or have shared with each other. This has meant these clues (we call them signals) have provided additional information to the search engines, allowing them to change the ‘recipe’ for determining a site’s ranking.
•Personalised Search - Similarly, the search engines have been able to use a specific user’s Social Network usage, and their previous searches, to determine what is more importantly to them personally. This has meant that now different users searching for the same search phrase might see somewhat different results.
•
•Logged in visitors Google!!!
•Location
•Device
•Search History
•Email & Calendar
•Google+
•Visit History
•Bookmarks
•
Not Logged in visitors Google
Location
Device
Search History
Visit History
How a site gets used, might influence how it ranks
“Pogosticking”, click data, overall site engagement
Conspire: Can find anyone at a given company and/or specific person and how we’re connected
BuzzSumo - See who’s influential on what
Conspire: Can find anyone at a given company and/or specific person and how we’re connected
BuzzSumo - See who’s influential on what
Javascript – Google has a tough time crawling it. Links that are built in JS can’t be crawled (yet). Make it available to Google, but anything critical to being indexed should be in HTML.
Flash –It sucks, try to not use it. (Use HTML5 instead)
Frames/iFrames – Doesn’t offer SEO value*
Cookies – Watch out for “smart” versions of pages. Google can’t read them so only default version will be indexed.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/
Once you’ve cleaned it up, submit a reconsideration request via Google Webmaster Tools (be sure you’ve actually done a thorough job)