Have you invested in an SEO (search engine optimization) agency or worked to enhance your SEO efforts in-house? Or, are you just experimenting with search for the first time? Understanding the key elements to successful search optimization campaigns is crucial to ensuring that you are visible to your clients online. It not only helps to increase your site traffic and but can help you to increase sales and grow your business over time. This workshop by Francis Skipper teaches the 10 steps any marketer or business owner can take to ensure that their website is optimized for search. Content to include review of on and off-page ranking factors, Google Analytics, webmaster tools, and server logs.

1. The 10 Step SEO Audit10 Steps to SEO Success

2. Francis Skipper
Executive Vice President
617-259-1605
francis@451marketing.com
linkedin.com/in/francisskipper
@fskip
www.451Marketing.com

3. National Public Relations, Social
Media, and Search Marketing Agency
Founded in 2004
Headquartered in Boston and
representing Los Angeles, New York,
San Diego, and Las Vegas
Recognized as a 2011, 2012, 2013
an award recognizing the fastest
growing private companies
headquartered in Massachusetts
About 451 Marketing

4. About 451 Marketing

5. What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process
of improving a website to make it more relevant
to searchers and search engines.
AKA:
• Natural search
• Organic search

6. What SEO is NOT…
• Paid Search (but it’s also not free)
• Fast
• Guaranteed
• Fire & forget

7. Paid
Results
Organic
Results
Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
Search
Query

9. search is how customers learn about your products
4,717,000,000 Per Day
Worldwide, 1,722,071,000,000
searches conducted on Google last year.
(Yes, that’s trillion)

10. (MarketShareHitsLink.com)
of users never scroll past the
first page of search results

11. of searches from mobile
by end of 2013
(SMX West 2013)

12. 10 Steps to SEO Success
Visual Audit
Usability Audit
Content Audit
Technical Audit

13. Prepare
Before you get started, it’s important to
prepare your browser to audit your site
• Know How To:
• Clear you Cache
• Disable JavaScript
• View Page Source

14. Prepare
Sign up/verify Google
Analytics.
Let GA run for two
weeks before doing any
SEO to determine a
baseline

15. Visual

16. First Impressions

17. 1. Visual Assessment - General
• First impression - will your website will be seen as reputable
source?
• If visual appearance drives people away, no amount of SEO will help
• Google looks at bounce rate from organic clicks for rankings

18. 1. Visual Assessment - Flash
Is the bulk of your site in flash? If so, your site isn’t
friendly to search engines. Also, may deter users.

19. • View site in Mozilla Firefox,
Internet Explorer, Opera,
and Safari.
• Remember to do this on
Mac and PC
• View site on mobile phone
(iPhone and android )
1. Visual Assessment - Browser

20. Usability

21. Removing Roadblocks

22. 2. Site Navigation/Information
Architecture
• As few clicks as possible for user to get to content
• The easier it is for users to get around your site,
the easier it is for search engines
• Google loves a clear path from home page to product

23. 2. Category/Subcategory Pages
• Make sure there is
enough content on these
pages to be useful as a
search result alone
• Analyze the amount of
extraneous links on the
page
• Take notes on how to
improve the anchor text
used for the
subcategories/content
pages

24. 3. Responsive Design?

25. 4. Loading Speed
http://loads.in/

26. 4. Loading Speed
http://tools.pingdom.com

27. Content

28. Relevant Content
and Context

29. 5. Keywords
What are the top keywords for your site?

30. 5. Keywords
Does the copy on your site reflect the keywords you
want to rank for?

31. Optimized Titles
and Headings
These are the strongest on-page
indicators to the crawlers of
what your content is about.
Title Tag
Heading (H1 Tag)
6. HTML Tags

32. View Source
Right click web page
and select view source
Primary objectives
should be accomplished
from the homepage
6. HTML Tags

33. Title Tag
Title tag is main text that describes an
online document. It is the single most
important on-page SEO element (behind
overall content) and appears in three key
places
I. Browser
II. SERP
III. External Websites
(esp. social media sites)
6. HTML Tags

34. Title Tag
Optimal Format
Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keyword
Best Practices
Less than 70 characters, as this is the limit Google displays in search results
6. HTML Tags

35. Meta Description
Meta Descriptions, provide concise
explanations of the contents of web
pages.
They are used by search engines on
search result pages to display preview
snippets for a given page
6. HTML Tags

36. Meta Description and Tags
The meta description should employ the keywords and create compelling
description that a searcher will want to click
Direct relevance to the page and uniqueness between each page’s meta
description is key
Best to keep meta descriptions between 150-160 characters
6. HTML Tags

37. H1 Tag
At a minimum, make sure that your primary keyword or
phrase for the page is enclosed in an H1 tag
6. HTML Tags

38. Meta Keywords
The meta tags are the main keywords for the page
6. HTML Tags

39. Search Friendly URLs
http://www.451marketing.com/services/search-marketing/
7. URLs

40. Optimized URL
Short, descriptive urls are optimal.
It is very important the url for your webpage contains your
keyword phrase and is no longer than 100 characters.
7. URLs

41. Search UN-Friendly URLs
7. URLs

42. SEO Friendly URL - Solutions
• Wordpress: Turn on “pretty permalinks”
• Drupal: Install URL alias plugin
• Magento: Install SEO Links
• LAMP/WAMP: use .htaccess and mod rewrite*
• IIS 7.0: URL Rewrite extension*
*Get your developer to do it
7. URLs

43. Address and phone number on every page
as text
Company Name
Street Address
City, State Zip
555-555-5555
8. Contextual Content

44. Up-to-date copyright
8. Contextual Content

45. Technical

46. Is Your Site
Technically Sound?

47. 9. Indexing
Use the “site:”
command on Google,
Bing, & Yahoo.
If site is not indexed,
need to find what is
preventing search
engines from crawling.
Are you indexing?

48. Robots.txt
What is Robots.txt?
The robots exclusion protocol (REP), or robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to
instruct robots (typically search engine robots) on how to crawl & index pages on their
website.
http://www.451marketing.com/robots.txt
9. Indexing

49. Robots.txt
Best way to insure blocking by spiders?
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Block all spiders and bots:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Block a specific spider from a folder:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /uploads/
9. Indexing

50. Public and XML Site Maps
9. Indexing

51. 10. Troubleshoot

52. 10. Troubleshoot

53. Visual Audit
Usability Audit
Content Audit
Technical Audit
1. Visual assessment and
browser compatibility
2. Site navigation
3. Responsive design
4. Loading speed
5. Keywords
6. HTML tags
7. URLs
8. Local content
9. Indexing
10. Webmaster tools and server
logs
Takeaways:

54. Questions?

55. The 10 Step SEO AuditThe 10 Step SEO Audit