This document provides a summary of the top 10 SEO best practices that website owners should follow in today's ever-changing world of search engine optimization. It discusses writing content for audiences, using relevant keywords, optimizing site content with keywords, getting quality backlinks, custom 404 pages, canonical URLs, navigation, XML sitemaps, schema/microdata, and responsive design. The presentation provides details on how to properly implement each practice to improve search engine rankings and visibility.

1. Top 10 MUST Do’s
in the
Ever-Changing World of SEO
Martin Laetsch
September 13, 2012
Proprietary & Confidential

2. Today’s Agenda
 SEO Overview
 Write For Your Audience
 Speak the Searchers Language
 Optimize Site Content
 Get Quality Links
 Custom 404 page
 Set a Canonical URL
 Navigation
 Sitemaps
 Microdata/Schema
 Responsive Design
Proprietary & Confidential 2

3. What is Search Engine Marketing?
“Putting content in front of people who overtly and
explicitly express a desire, via keywords, for a
particular product, service or piece of information.”
– Search Engine Optimization (SEO): the process of
making a site and its content highly relevant for both search
engines and searchers. Successful search marketing helps a
site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.
– Paid Search Marketing (PPC): a type of search
marketing where advertisers pay a set amount every time
their ad is clicked by a prospect.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the combination of
both
3

4. Paid vs. Organic

5. #1
Write For Your Audience!
5

6. Write For Your Audience
• You are creating content for your customers and prospects.
• Search engines make money by recommending the best
content for any given search.
• If you base your marketing decisions on what is best for your
customers, you will likely rank well in the search engines.
• If you try and game the system to rank, you will eventually fail.
Panda – Detect low quality and
duplicate content
Penguin – Devalue link spam
6

7. #2
Speak the Searchers Language
7

8. Develop Initial Keyword List
Compile a definitive list of keywords
or phrases that customers should
find your content with:
• Analyze existing search engine
referrals
• Research external keyword
databases
• List product names (and their
generic equivalents)
• Ask customers how they would
find a specific product or
category
Google https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__c=1000000000
&__u=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS
Keywords tool 8

9. Develop the Searcher Profile/Persona
Who is the searcher? Who would be
looking for this information? Someone
who…
• Is looking for a general category of
information?
• Is looking for a specific solution?
• Has one of your products and needs
help?
• Is an IT manager looking for a
corporate solution?
• Is a college student writing a
research paper?
9

10. Define the Searcher Mindset
Why are they searching? They want
to …
• Purchase a product or solution
• Learn about a product or
solution
• Solve a specific problem
• Understand a product category
10

11. Keyword Mapping
Map your important keywords to
pages on your site:
• Look at each page in your site –
what words do you think each is
relevant for?
• Now look again at the pages –
are you actually using these
words?
• Try searching your own site for
these words. If you can't find
them, search engines won't.
TIP: Use Google to search your site
11

12. #3
Optimize site content
12

13. Writing for SEO
• Choose 1 keyword phrase that is targeted for each page.
• Include each keyword phrase 3-4 times each within your
copy — more if it makes sense.
• If your text sounds awkward to you, slice your keyword
phrase usage or use synonyms.
• Use the exact term – ―symptoms of diabetes" is not the
same as ―diabetes symptoms"
• Don’t over optimize. Use natural language to communicate
your message (synonyms, varying word order, etc.)
• Longer copy provides a better opportunity for keyword
placement that sounds good and allows you to provide
more information to you visitors.
• Page length should be dictated by the message you want
to communicate, but 250 words is a good target.
Just write good marketing copy that's focused!
13

14. Put Keywords in…
• Title Tag
• URL
• Headlines and sub-
headlines (H1 & H2 tags)
• Call to action links
(hyperlinks)
• Main body text copy, top to
bottom
SEO copywriting helps your writing be more specific.
It’s just changing how we ―see‖ and write copy!
14

15. #4
Get Quality Links
15

16. Why people link
• Compelling content they want to share
• Had a great experience with the brand
• Had a terrible experience with the brand
• They are a friend of the brand and want to promote it
• Reciprocity – Site linked to them and they want to respond
in kind
16

17. How to get links
• Write great content
• Provide helpful information
• Article marketing – Share your content
• Guest posts – providing and receiving
• Constructively contribute to other blogs
• Network – people are more likely to link
to people they know
• Speakerships, sponsorships, events, etc.
• Social media
Create compelling content and let people know
it exists
17

18. Create Content People Want to Share
People like to share interesting information
• Builds their own credibility (they are in the know)
• Consistently sharing good information increases their
audience
• Helps their visitors
• White papers • Research results
• Case studies • Thought provoking blog
• Fun facts posts
• Educational material • How to articles
• Top 10 lists
18

19. #5
Custom 404 page
19

20. Custom 404 Page
• Helps people understand where they are if they get lost
• Reinforces brand
• Expose important content to lost visitors
• Provide links back to the main domain, ensuring users and
search engines can access other pages on your site.
Link to key content
• Important/popular pages
• Articles/videos
• Contact information
• Sign up for a demo
• Link to sitemap
20

21. #6
Set a Canonical URL
21

22. URL’s - Canonical
• There should only be one canonical version of each page. The non-
canonical version should 301 redirect to the canonical.
• This is extremely important since inbound links help determine
how a site ranks. If people are linking to both www.example.com
and example.com, link juice will be split between the two sites.
• 301 redirects pass full link juice so the canonical version would get
full value.
22

23. #7
Navigation
23

24. URL’s – URL Hacking
• Subdirectories should
resolve with URL hacking.
This is a common way to
navigate a site.
• Provides additional deep
links to important content
24

25. Navigation – Breadcrumbs
• Breadcrumbs provide a trail for site visitors to easily
navigate to higher levels in the site hierarchy.
• Helps both site usability and search results
• Breadcrumbs are a representation of the path a visitor
took to get to the page. It is a representation of where the
page lives in the hierarchy and an easy way to navigate to
higher levels of the hierarchy.
• Google believes breadcrumbs are important to help
visitors understand the structure of the site and how the
specific page fits into the site hierarchy. They will include
breadcrumb navigation in search results when they can.
25

26. #8
Sitemaps
26

27. HTML site map
• Easy way for visitors to locate pages they care about.
• Another way for search engines to locate pages.
• If you have a large site, list the main pages (category pages) of
the site which takes you to a sub site map with links to pages
within that category.
• For a small site, just one site map will be fine.
• Include a link to your site map on every page.

28. XML Sitemap
• Easy way for search engines to locate every important
page on a website
• The Sitemap must:
• Begin with an opening <urlset> tag and end with a
closing </urlset> tag.
• Specify the namespace (protocol standard) within
the <urlset> tag.
• Include a <url> entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag.
• Include a <loc> child entry for each <url> parent tag.
• All other tags are optional.
• All URLs in a Sitemap must be from a single domain, such as
www.example.com or store.example.com.
http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

29. Image Search
• For each URL you list in your Sitemap, add additional
information about important images on that page.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns=http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1">
<url>
<loc>http://example.com/sample.html</loc>
<image:image>
<image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>
<image:image>
<image:loc>http://example.com/photo.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>
</url>
</urlset>
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer
=178636

30. Video Sitemap
• Video content includes web pages which embed
video, URLs to players for video, or the URLs of
raw video content hosted on your site.
• Each URL entry must contain the following
information:
– Title
– Description
– Landing page URL
– Thumbnail URL
– Raw video file location and/or the player
URL (SWF)
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer
=80472

31. Video Sitemap Example
31

32. #9
Microdata
32

33. Schema Markup
• HTML tags that webmasters can use to markup their pages in
ways recognized by major search engines.
• Used to help search engines and other applications identify
structured data and understand what it means.
• Makes it easier for people to find the content they are looking
for by providing richer search results.
• For example, <h1>Avatar</h1> tells the browser to display
the text string "Avatar" in a heading 1 format. However, the
HTML tag doesn't give any information about what that text
string means—"Avatar" could refer to the hugely successful 3D
movie, or it could refer to a type of profile picture—and this
can make it more difficult for search engines to intelligently
display relevant content to a user.
http://schema.org/docs/gs.html

34. Structured vs. Unstructured HTML
• Structured data that helps search engines understand
what web content is about.
VS
34

35. Microdata Suggestions
• Videos
• Images
35

36. Microdata Suggestions
• Events
36

37. #10
Responsive Design
37

38. Mobile
Source

39. Responsive Web Design
• Responsive web design is a technique to build web pages
that alter how they look using CSS3 media queries. There
is one HTML code for the page regardless of the device
accessing it, but its presentation changes using CSS
media queries to specify which CSS rules apply for the
browser displaying the page.
• It keeps desktop and mobile content on a single URL,
which is easier for users to interact with, share, and link
to and for Google’s algorithms to assign the indexing
properties to your content.
• Google can discover your content more efficiently.
This is Google’s recommended way to code for mobile sites
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/06/recomme
ndations-for-building-smartphone.html

40. Responsive Web Design - Sphero
40 http://www.gosphero.com/

41. Responsive Web Design - Sphero
41

42. Responsive Web Design - Sphero
42

43. Q&A

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