A SEO Master Class in the frame of the FrenchTech.

1. MASTER CLASS SEO
Contact: quentin.jeandel@gmail.comJuly, 05 2017

2. AN INTRODUCTION TO SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION
BASICS OF SEO

3. ENVIRONMENT 3
What is SEO?
SEO stands for "Search Engine
Optimization". It's the process of
getting traffic from the "free",
"organic", or "natural" search
results of search engines.
In other words: It’s a way to optimize
your content for the users AND the
bots and make it easily findable 
79.4%
2.3M
Number of
searches on
Google every
second!
Worldwide Google
market share on
June 2017!
53%
of connexions
are from
Mobile.

4. ENVIRONMENT
• Goal of search engines is to provide accurate answers to
users queries.
• To achieve this in the best way possible, they
want unique, high quality content to appear in the search
results that meets users intent.
• Google or Bing define "High quality" by over 200 ranking
factors.
4
Search Engines and Goals

5. ENVIRONMENT 5
Ranking Factors
The Google algorithm is top secret and
the ranking factors are supposed to be a
black box (and now they change
constantly). However some important
ranking factors have been unveiled
through ongoing tests and case studies.
Ranking Factores are classified in:
• On-page elements (On-site SEO)
• Off-page elements (Off-site SEO)

6. ENVIRONMENT
On-Site SEO vs. Off-Site SEO
On-site:
Optimization of your own
site (technical and content
wise)
Off-site:
Gaining popularity on the
web (Links & Social Media)
6
SEO
RANKING
FACTORS
Both aspects are equally important in achieving the goal of higher
rankings!

7. On-Site
SEO

8. ENVIRONMENT 8
“
”
On-site SEO begins and ends with the user. No one should
build a site for search engines. We build sites for people. After
all, search spiders won’t write a comment, subscribe to your list
or buy your product. Only your users can do that.
On-Site SEO
“
”
On-site SEO consists of those activities that directly affect the
content, pages and architecture of the site – in other words, all
of the internal factors that make a site useful for the visitor and
well optimized for search engines.

9. ENVIRONMENT 9
ARCHITECTURE OF THE
WEBSITE
DESCRIPTION OF IMAGE
ALT & TITLES TAGS
SITE SPEED
ON-SITE
SEO
ELEMENTS
The following on-site elements do influence ranking of a site in the search results of a search
engine (among others):
QUALITY AND
UNIQUENESS OF THE
CONTENT
RELEVANCY OF USED
KEYWORDS
INTERNAL LINKING ON
YOUR WEBSITE
META TITLES &
DESCRIPTION, RICH
SNIPPETS, SCHEMA DATA
USER FRIENDLINESS OF
URLs

10. ENVIRONMENT 10
Technical SEO
Aspects
• The On-site SEO starts with website
architecture
• Is the site accessible for the Search Engine?
• How "clean" is the code
• How long does it take to load elements (html,
js, css…) and tags (Site speed)
• Is the site mobile friendly?
• Is the site secure (https)?

11. ENVIRONMENT 11
Content SEO
Aspects
• Optimizing the actual content on
the site
• How valuable and unique is the
content?
• Keyword relevancy and usage
• Are your pages well formated (for
users and crawlers)?
• How good is UX and engagement
on your site?

12. ENVIRONMENT 12
Position,
Frequency and
Distance
How the keyword phrases are
organised on a page greatly
influences how crawlers extracts
relationships and determine topics
for a page.
Using the concept of position,
frequency and semantic distance
can strentgthen these relationships.

13. ENVIRONMENT 13
MAKE SURE BOTS ARE ALLOWED TO CRAWL AND INDEX RELEVANT PAGES
USE (LONG & SHORT-TAIL) KEYWORDS WISELY AND PREFERABLY AT THE
BEGINNING OF TITLES, HEADINGS…
FOCUS ON USER INTENTION RATHER THAN SINGLE KEYWORDS
USE SYNOYMS AND RELATED KEYWORDS THROUGHOUT THE TEXT
INTERNALLY & EXTERNALLY LINK YOUR CONTENT TO RELEVANT AND
HIGH QUALITY SITES.
Long Tail vs Short Tail?
Short tail keywords are 3 words or less.
Short tail keywords are also known as
“head” terms.
Long tail keywords are more than 3 words.
They are definitely a lot more targeted and
not as broad.
You may not bring in as much search traffic
from long tail keywords but the traffic you
do bring in is the kind you are looking for.
ON-SITE SEO BEST
PRACTICES

14. Off-Site
SEO

15. ENVIRONMENT 15
THE NUMBER OF QUALITY
BACKLINKS
ENGAGEMENT ON
SOCIAL MEDIA
CHANNELS (LIKES,
SHARES, COMMENTS)
OFF-SITE
SEO
ELEMENTS
The following off-site elements do influence ranking of a site in the search results of a search
engine (among others):

16. ENVIRONMENT 16
Backlinks to
your site
• Backlinks are links that are directed
towards your website (also called inbound
links)
• In general the number of quality backlinks
is an indication of the popularity or
importance of the website.
• When search engines calculate the
relevance of a site, they consider the
number of quality inbound links to that site.
• Building quality backlinks is one of the most
important factors in off-site search engine
optimization.

17. ENVIRONMENT 17
Search engines use many metrics to
determine the value of the external links.
Some of these metrics include:
• The authority of the linking domain/page
(Trust Flow & Citation Flow @ Majestic
SEO or Domain Authority & Page Authority
@ Moz)
• The popularity of the linking page
• The relevancy of the content between the
source page and our page (and domain)
• The anchor text used in the link
• The amount of links to the same page on
the source page
• The amount of domains that link to your
page
• The amount of variations that are used
as anchor text to link to the target pages
VALUE OF
LINKS
AMOUNT
OF LINKS
RELEVANCY
POPULARITY
AUTHORITY
ANCHOR TEXT
AMOUNT
OF DOMAINS
AMOUNT
OF VARIATIONS
Value of Backlinks
When building links, it’s better to have 1 high quality authority backlink than 100 low quality backlinks.

18. ENVIRONMENT
Follow vs. Nofollow Links
Follow:
Follow link count as a
point and boost page rank
and help a page’s
placement in the SERPs.
Nofollow:
A no follow link is a link that
does not count as a point in
the page’s favor, does not
boost PageRank, and does
not help a page’s placement
in the SERPs.
18
SEO
LINKS VALUE
This is theory but it really depends of the site authority and sometimes it’s
better to have a nofollow link on a High Authority website than a dofollow
link on a Low Authority website.

19. ENVIRONMENT 19
OFF-SITE SEO BEST
PRACTICES
If you buy links make them « no follow » (that applies to
affiliate links, paid blog posts, give aways on 3rd party
sites,...).
If you want to link to a website with « dofollow » link make
sure that:
• there is a small number of links (1-2)
• anchor text has variations (for example: pallets,
1001pallets.com, pallet furniture)
• there is good content on the linked page justifying linking
• links are not going only to the homepage, but to content
pages/categories…

20. REAL WORLD EXAMPLES – NOT THEORY
PRACTICAL SEO

21. SERP
Results

22. ENVIRONMENT 22
Google SERP 1/3
1
2
3
1 SEM: 15% of the clicks on the
page!
2 Shopping Results (included in
the 15%)
3 SEO: As of February 2017, the
first five organic results account
for 67.60% of all the clicks and
the results from 6 to 10 account
for only 3.73%. Page two and
three only get 5.59% of clicks
and all the other links after
pagre three get only 8.08% of
the clicks.
The conclusion? You simply must be in the top 5 results to see the
traffic your website deserves!

23. ENVIRONMENT 23
Google SERP 2/3
1
2
1
Position #0 or Featured Snippet:
Intoduced 2 years ago, it can
produce up to 114% CTR boost,
even when they already held
the #1 organic position.
You have to phrase your
content to match the « answer »
Google want for a search query.
2
People Also Ask: This is the
new machine learning process
by google. Not enough data at
this point on CTR boost but it
means that your content is good
and reply to the user question.
The conclusion? Write your content for the final users by replying to
a question in the best way possible.

24. ENVIRONMENT 24
Google SERP 3/3
Google My Business: If you own a local
business, this is really a feature you
should use as it can drive a lot of real
customers into your business (and also
to your website) which means $$!

25. ENVIRONMENT 25
67.6%
MORE INFO
15%
MORE INFO
% OF CLICKS RECEIVED BY
ALL THE RESULTS AFTER
PAGE 1
13.7%
SERPs in 3 Numbers
% OF CLICKS RECEIVED BY
THE FIRST 5 RESULTS
% OF CLICKS RECEIVED BY
SEM RESULTS

26. On-Site
SEO

27. ENVIRONMENT 27
On-Site SEO on SERP
Title (Keywords in Title Tags)
Description (Keyword in META
Description)
Main Categories with meta description
(when your site has enough authority)
Domain name in post title and
keywords (pallet bar, ideas, inspiration
and number…users love numbers!)
Ratings Rich Snippets to increase
google CTR and increase position
Keywords in URL + https

28. ENVIRONMENT 28
Rich Snippets & Rich Cards
Rich snippets with product example.
Rich snippets in search can increase
click-through-rate by 30%!
With a better CTR on SERPs, your
rank will have more chance to
increase!
Rich cards: Launched in 2016, they
appear in a carrousel on the top of the
Google SERP. The info are directly
taken from the schema.org structured
markup to display content in an even
more engaging and visual format, with
a focus on providing a better mobile
user experience.
You can’t tell to Google to display rich cards of your
content but you CAN set-up everything on your
website to have a chance to be featured in the rich
cards for a specific search request!

29. ENVIRONMENTThe Dark Side 1/2
Title of the page - Displayed in Google SERP
Meta Description - Displayed in Google SERP
Facebook Open Graph Protocol - set of tags
that allows to give major social networks
(Facebook, Google +, Twitter, Linked in...)
detailed information about the page. Impact in
SEO: Positive
Publisher & Author Meta Description
Meta Description – Tag Keywords, Category,
Published & Updated Date (Signal for Google)
OGP – Featured Image for Social Sharing
Twitter Cards - attach rich photos,
videos and media experiences to
Tweets.
Structured Data Testing Tool / More on Structured Data

30. ENVIRONMENTThe Dark Side 2/2
Image Meta Title Description
Image Meta Alt Description
Image Size (improve content
rendering -> speed)
Images Meta Data are importants in term of SEO as
actually no bot could analyze and interpret an image,
so you have to help them by adding correct
descriptions (Title & Alt & File name) to your images.
Google recently changed the way images are displayed
in SERP and now they bring nearly zero traffic compared
to before, but it’s still a good practice to work on the
description of your images. Who knows the future?

31. On-Site
SEO
Resume

32. ENVIRONMENT 32
ON-SITE SEO
STRUCTURED DATA
CONTENT QUALITY
SITE SPEED
Always optimize the speed of your
website!
Optimize the sizes of your images.
Speed will have a major role for your
users but ALSO for Google Bots!
Page render should be < 4sec for the
primary content.
STRUCTURED
DATA
01
CONTENT
QUALITY
02
SITE SPEED
03
Title & subtitles tags
Google Rich Snippets
Schema.org
Twitter Cards
Facebook Open Graph
Meta Description inspires interest & click-through rate
(CTR) from SERPs and Socials.
Forgot Meta Keywords, they are completely dead!
Content is the KING
Your content should be written with
the user in mind!
Articles should have a minimum of
500 words
Organize your content:
Title: Main Keyword
<H1>: Main Keyword + Semantic
variation
<H2>, <H3>…: Variations of
Keywords in the same semantic.
Main technical aspects of On-Site SEO 1/3
Duplicate content was once an easy cheat to getting content so search engines would see more
stuff, but duplicate content is now easily found by search algorithms and penalizes the culprit.
+

33. ENVIRONMENT 33
ON-SITE SEO
DESIGN & UX
FRESHNESS
CRAWLABILITY
Crawlability refers to the ability of a search
engine to crawl through the entire content
of your site, easily navigating to every one
of your webpages, without encountering an
unexpected dead-end.
Site Structure
Interlinking of your content
Robots.txt does not block crawler access
Content loads in html and not AJAX,
Javascript, iFrame…
DESIGN
04
FRESHNESS
05
CRAWLABILITY
06
Design of a website is the first thing a user will see.
A nice and functional design will impact the overall
user experience (bounce rate, time on site,
pageviews…) and so your SEO score.
Steve Jobs knew that design isn’t just “how a device
looks” but also about “how it works.”
The percentage of content, within a
site, that remains fresh, has an effect
on the site’s rankings.
Do not hesitate to update your
content on a regular basis and display
the « updated date » to users and
bots!
Main technical aspects of On-Site SEO 2/3

34. ENVIRONMENT 34
ON-SITE SEO
MOBILE-FRIENDLY
AMP READY
URL STRUCTURE & SITEMAP
You should avoid as possible dynamic URLs
and instead use clean & static URL with no
dynamic parameter.
You should provide to Google and other search
engines an XML Sitemap of your site.
MOBILE
FRIENDLY
07
AMP READY
08URL
STRUCTURE &
SITEMAP
09
You should include responsiveness as one of your on-
page SEO factors to pay attention to, now the majority of
your users will access your site from their mobile
devices. (71% for 1001Pallets.com on June, 2017 for
Mobile + Tablet).
Test your site with Google Mobile Friendly Tool
Ever tried to load your site on mobile?
Are you happy with the load speed?
The latest Google research shows
that 53% of people will leave a site
that fails to load in three seconds or
less.
This is why Google has launched the
AMP standard to speed-up websites
rendering on mobile devices.
The sites that will benefit the most
from AMP are content focused sites.
Google give a boost on mobile search
to AMP ready websites.
Main technical aspects of On-Site SEO 3/3

35. Off-Site
SEO

36. ENVIRONMENT 36
“
”
"Off-site SEO" (also called "off-page SEO") refers to actions
taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings
within search engine results pages (SERPs).
Off-Site SEO
“
”
While we don't know the full algorithm Google uses to rank
content, data from Search Engine Ranking Factors study show
that off-site SEO-related factors likely carry more than 50% of
the ranking factor weight.

37. ENVIRONMENT 37
Natural links are editorially given
without any action on the part of
a page owner. For example, a
food blogger adding a link to a
post that points toward their
favorite produce farms is a
natural link.
NATURAL LINKS MANUALLY BUILT LINKS SELF-CREATED LINKS
Manually built links are acquired
through deliberate link-building
activities. This includes things like
getting customers to link to your
website or asking influencers to
share your content.
Self-created links are created by
practices such as adding a
backlink in an online directory,
forum, blog comment signature,
or a press release with optimized
anchor text. Some self-created
link building tactics tend toward
black hat SEO and are frowned
upon by search engines, so tread
lightly here.
Main-Type Links

38. ENVIRONMENT
Regardless of how links were obtained, those that offer the greatest
contribution to SEO efforts are generally those that pass the most value.
There are many signals that positively contribute to the value passed,
such as:
• The linking site's popularity
• How related the linking site's topic is to the site being linked to (A link
from a site in the same domain is better)
• The "freshness" of the link
• The anchor text used on the linking site
• The trustworthiness of the linking site
• The number of other links on the linking page
• The authority of the linking domain and page (Citation Flow & Trust
Flow or DA & PA)
38
Links and Off-site SEO

39. ENVIRONMENT
While earning links from external websites is the most commonly practiced
off-site SEO strategy, almost any activity that a) occurs outside of your
own website and b) helps to improve your search ranking position could
be thought of as "off-site SEO." These include things like:
• Social media marketing
• Guest blogging
• Linked and unlinked brand mentions
• Influencer marketing
39
Non-link-related off-site SEO

40. ENVIRONMENT 40
Social metrics and
SEO
While any answer to this question is highly debatable,
social signals have an impact on organic search
rankings. Impact comes from:
• Number of people that like your brand on Facebook
• Number of Facebook shares
• Number of Facebook comments
• Number of Twitter followers
• Number of tweets mentioning your brand name or
including a link to your website
• Number of Pins of your content on Pinterest
• Number of people that “have you in their circles”
(Google+)
Every piece of your content shared, liked or
commented on social networks benefit to your SEO
Rankings!

41. Tools,
Reports &
metrics

42. ENVIRONMENT 42
Let’s check the tools you can use
to start your SEO strategy:
• Google Search Console
• Google Trends
• Google Adwords Planner
SEO FREE TOOLS SEO REPORTS & METRICS SEO PAID TOOLS
Report examples done by an
SEO expert to help us in our SEO
Optimisations & Strategy.
To give you the three best paid
SEO tools available on the
market.
Tools, Reports & Metrics

43. ENVIRONMENT 43Google Search Console 1/4
Search Console Link
Crawl Errors by Google Bot: DNS,
Connectivity, Robots.txt
1 3
2
4
1
2
Search Analytics: Number of Clicks on
Google SERPs over the last month.
3 Sitemap.xml state
4
Structured Data report with all the
structured data found on your website and
erros if any.

44. ENVIRONMENT 44
Search Analytics page is one of the most useful
page in term of SEO optimisation.
It gives you the Google SERPs main requests that
bring traffic to your website over the last 90 days.
In this example (1001Pallets), what we can see
over the last 90 days:
• The request that send us the more traffic is
« Pallet Furniture » with 4,681 clicks over
91,017 impressions, a CTR of 5.14% for an
average position of 1.6 in the SERPs results. =>
not bad 
• If we order this table by Impressions, we can
see some work we have to do. For example,
« Pallet bed » is the search request with the 3rd
more impression (43,559), we have an average
position of 8.2 and a CTR of 0.69% => Really
bad  we need to rework our content to
increase our position and then rework our meta
description to increase our SERP CTR.
Google Search Console 2/4

45. ENVIRONMENT 45
The Crawl Errors page give you a good way to
follow broken links on your website, 404 errors,
501 errors etc…
You should check this page once a month to see if
the number of errors increase or not and do the
adequate corrections (Redirect a broken links to
another page for example) in order to decrease the
number of errors seen by Google Bot. Google and
other bots hate errors on your website, there
loosing their times by following dead links!
Google Search Console 3/4

46. ENVIRONMENT 46
The Crawl Stats page give you some informations on:
• The number of pages crawled by Google bot each day
• The Kilobytes downloaded by Google bot each day
• The Time spent downloading a page each day.
We had an increase in the number of pages crawled each day
starting on April, 30. This is normal as we made the transition from
« http » to « https » this day. It took approximately one week to
google bot to reindex all our content.
Accordingly the kilobytes downloaded per day has a huge
increased linked to the number of pages crawled due to the
transition from « http » to « https »
The time spent downloading a page increased after the transition
from http to https, this is normal as « https » (due to the way it is
implemented) sites are slower than « http » sites.
Crawl Budget: Google bot has a crawl budget that depend on the size of your site and
the speed of your site. For example, having many low-value-add URLs can negatively
affect a site's crawling and indexing. Google interpret problem of crawl budget as
« poor-coded website », « On-Site Duplicate Content », « Soft Errors », « Hacked
Pages », « Low Quality Content » or « Spam Content ». You should take care if your
site start to be BIG!
Google Search Console 4/4

47. ENVIRONMENT 47Google TrendsGoogle Trends Link
Google trends shows how often a particular search-term is
entered relative to the total search-volume across various
regions of the world, and in various languages. The horizontal
axis of the main graph represents time, and the vertical is how
often a term is searched for relative to the total number of
searches, globally. allows the user to compare the volume of
searches between two or more terms.
1
2 1
2
This is where you can enter several keywords to
analyze
3
In this test (I took main words from the homepage of
Tarot Analytics) we can see that the volume of search
for the term « Delivery cost » is far above the other
terms but this terms is not present in their homepage.
A simple SEO optimisation is to add this term in Titles,
meta description… or write some articles on how
Tarot Analytics could lower the delivery cost with their
route optimisation tool.
But the concurrence is certainly higher on this term!
3
Google Trends also give you related topics & queries
around your initial request.

48. ENVIRONMENT 48
Google Keywords PlannerGoogle Keywords Planner
The Keyword Planner is a Swiss Army knife of different
keyword research tools. Here are the three main tools within
the Google Keyword Planner that will land you a fantastic
list of keywords for your SEO campaigns.
• Search for New keywords using a phrase, website or
category
• Get search volume data and trends
• Multiply keyword lists to get new keyword ideas
We will not enter in the details of Google Keywords Planner,
free tutorials are available online to help you use this free
tool!
Check out the tutorial at backlinko.com that will show
you step-by-step how to use Google Keywords
Planner:
http://backlinko.com/google-keyword-planner

49. ENVIRONMENT 49
This monthly SEO dashboard
help us to see how our main
SEO metrics was on the
previous month.
MONTHLY DASHBOARD MONTHLY ACTIONS
This monthly SEO actions
gives us the main actions to
perform on our website
following the SEO strategy
validated with our specialist.
Feuille de calcul
Microsoft Excel 97
SEO Reports Example
Feuille de calcul
Microsoft Excel 97

50. ENVIRONMENT 50
SEMRush was one of the first
competitor-based keyword
research tools to emerge, and it
quickly became a popular choice
among SEO’s in the community.
SEMRUSH AHREFS MOZ
Ahrefs is an established
competitor-based research tool
that - as of recently - also offers a
robust traditional keyword
research tool as part of the
package.
Moz Pro is well-established
player in the SEO market offering
a suite of SEO-based tools. One
of those is a traditional keyword
research tool, called the 'Moz
Keyword Explorer’.
3 Best SEO Paid Tools

51. ENVIRONMENT 51
Any questions?
Contact: quentin.jeandel@gmail.com