Uploaded byHugo Fonseca
Search Engine Optimization
The document discusses search engine optimization (SEO) and provides tips to improve a website's visibility on search engines. It recommends technical improvements like optimizing page speed, adding alt text to images, and using proper HTML tags. It also stresses the importance of high-quality, unique content and suggests tactics like blogging, allowing user comments, and targeting long-tail keywords. Additionally, it advises link building through social media sharing and quality backlinks from authoritative sites to help rankings. The overall message is that SEO requires an integrated approach considering technical elements, content creation, and link development.
Search Engine Optimization
- 1. Search Engine Optimization(SEO) Hugo Fonseca – Technical Lead Thursday 5th February 2015
- 2. What Is SearchEngine Optimization (SEO)?“it’s pointless having a website if no-one can find it!” SEO is a way of creating more visibility on Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing! by ranking websites higher in results, which in turn lead to more click-troughs and conversions.
- 3. WHAT CAN IDO TO IMPROVE SEO? • Technical Improvements (Code) • Content • Links/Social
- 4. Technical Improvements –Why should I Care?
- 5. CASE-STUDY – SHOPCADE.COM Afterimplementing most of the technical improvements, the site went from 34K indexed pages to 85M on Google in a year
- 7. CRAWLERS / SPIDERS Crawler-basedsearch engines have three major elements. First is the spider, also called the crawler. The spider visits a web page, reads it, and then follows links to other pages within the site. This is what it means when someone refers to a site being "spidered" or "crawled."
- 8. TECHNICAL IMPROVEMENTS –WHAT CAN I DO? • Setup the “robots.txt” to allow “crawlers” to index your pages Improper configuration might prevent the pages to be indexed • Improve site speed Slower sites will be penalised • Every image should have an “alt” attribute This helps the automated “crawlers” understand the content of the images • Every page should have a canonical URL and make use of pagination meta tags The Canonical URL is the owner of the content, even if there are multiple URLs that serve the same content. This avoids penalization for content duplication. <link rel=“canonical” href=“http://example.com/page-a”> • Make use of http redirection (301) when necessary to avoid duplicate content e.g., http://www.example.com, https://www.example.com, http://example.com,
- 9. TECHNICAL IMPROVEMENTS –WHAT CAN I DO? • Make use of the HTML5 semantic Tags Use tags like article, section, aside, summary, … • Use H1-H6 in order to demonstrate hierarchy H1 being the most important to H6 the least • Add a Meta Title tag This should be relevant to the actual content of the page. Should not be longer than 50-60 characters, as Google truncates the rest in the search results. Avoid duplicate meta titles • Add a Meta Description tag This should be relevant to the actual content of the page. Should not be longer than 150-160 characters, as Google truncates the rest in the search results. Avoid duplicate meta descriptions • Avoid broken links and have a helpful 404 (page not found) error page
- 10. TECHNICAL IMPROVEMENTS –WHAT CAN I DO? • Add Social Meta Tags (Facebook Open Graph, Twitter Cards, and Google Publisher) These tags, help understanding the content of the website, and allow those companies to better represent the content of the page on a snippet. Google Publisher will eventually add more credibility to the site, by showing your latest posts and profile on the top right side of the search results page • Submit sitemaps regularly Submitting sitemaps helps the Search Engines to be aware of your latest pages, updates, etc • Make use of rich snippets by using Microformat, Schema.org, … By using this special markup, “spiders” will be able to better understand the content and provide rich snippets on the search results. Available formats can describe a Product, a Person, Comments, Reviews, etc
- 11. TECHNICAL IMPROVEMENTS –WHAT CAN I DO? • Think Mobile Optimize the website for mobile, by creating a specific mobile website when possible. Search results vary if made from a desktop or from a mobile device • Use Google Analytics (GA) and Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) They provide very insightful data about how is your site performing. GWT also provides SEO recommendations • SEO friendly URL structure Which one is sexier? http://example.com/page.php?p=918726 or http://example.com/awesome-article The URL string is also searchable, which helps your page to be findable
- 12. ALL DONE –IS THAT IT?
- 13. HOW DO IKNOW MY SITE IS BEING INDEXED? Getting your site indexed is just one of the steps. You can verify that your site is being indexed by searching for “site: www.sitename.com”
- 14. OK, so whatshould I do next? “Content is king…”
- 15. CONTENT – WHATCAN I DO? Now that we’re sure our site is being indexed, we need to rank higher than our competitors for the selected keywords. About 85% of the users find what they’re looking for in the 1st search results page.
- 16. CASE-STUDY – SHOPCADE.COM Thiswebsite by implementing a series of non-technical improvements, consistently started to rank even higher than the actual brand that also sold the products, consequently improving the click-through rate by 50% - 80%.
- 17. CONTENT – WHATCAN I DO? • Content is King Quality, well written, fresh, unique content,. One of the most important factors for SEO. Sell through content • Start a Blog Use the blog to keep users engaged and add more content. Use the blog to cross-sell some products / articles • Inform the client Users who are informed are more likely to buy. As an example, we have the eBay Buying Guides, that explain what to look for in a certain product. They also use it as an opportunity to cross-sell by suggesting a few products • Tweak the page title to provide more information about the product e.g. simply prepending “35% Off” Product Name, made the users click this site instead of others
- 18. CONTENT – WHATCAN I DO? • Allow users to add comments / reviews Not only it adds unique content and freshness, it also helps other users to make the purchase / keep engaged. Be aware of spam comments and links (we should add “nofollow” to those links) • Use Google Trends and other similar tools Find out which keywords are trending and create content around it to try to capture a few more users into your website and then convert them • Use Google Webmaster Tools Find out how your users are discovering your website and try to explore it even further. Either by creating content around it or by doing more of what is currently converting better • Target long tail queries Easier to rank due to less competition. The more specific the higher the intention. E.g. “Adidas Originals ZX Flux” as opposed to “adidas running shoes”
- 19. Anything else? “Each linkback to your site is a vote…”
- 20. LINKS / SOCIAL– WHAT CAN I DO? • Social Media Share your articles / content in Social Media accounts and allow users to share and spread the word. Consider owning a #hashtag. Create competitions to keep users engaged and go viral • Link Building / Establish Relations Engage other users to write content / reviews about your product (should be natural and not paid) • Link Quality Authority website links will count more than regular and “spammy” websites • Link Without Any Conditions All links should feel natural. Having links to other websites, is like voting for those websites. Avoid linking to spammy websites and don’t impose linking back
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- 22. USEFUL LINKS • GoogleSearch Engine Optimization Starter Guide http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.co.uk/en/uk/webmasters/ docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf • Basic SEO Presentation http://www.slideshare.net/namtrok/hope-seo • How To Improve Your Site’s SEO http://thenextweb.com/lifehacks/2013/08/21/how-to-improve-your-sites-seo/
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Editor's Notes
- #3 Visibility and Reputation lead to sales / engagement There is no Silver Bullet about SEO, just recommendations through experience. Google doesn’t share. Folow Google guides I’ll say many times Google, but in fact I mean Search Engines (Yahoo is bigger in US compared to UK, Baidu in China)
- #4 I’ve split in 3 main areas. I’ll try not to be very boring on the Tech side, but there are improvements require the technical side to be in place, rely on actual content. Title tags… Code has little impact on the overall, but is required as a first step. Code – 10% Content – 45% Links/Social – 45%
- #6 To make your website visible / indexed, discoverable So, Shopcade is a social e-commerce website, Facebook meets Amazon. With a catalog of 100M products. You can clearly see when they were implemented by looking at the graph Usage in conjunction with Google Analytics, by adding a comment every time we improved something
- #7 Have I got your attention? To make your website visible / indexed, discoverable You can clearly see when they were implemented by looking at the graph Usage in conjunction with Google Analytics, by adding a comment every time we improved something
- #8 Image titles are worse, make use of alt tag. We can clearly distinguish the big titles, the importance. On the left, how humans see and perceive On the right how Crawlers see Since crawlers/spiders are robots, we need to help them to understand the content, by using the correct meta tags, semantic tags, alt attributes
- #9 Crawlers and spiders are robots, we need to tell them where to get the information Amazon reported a 1% increase in conversion rate per 100/ms site speed reduced Pagination meta tags - <link rel=“next” …> and <link rel=“previous” …> . Wordpress as an example Avoid User-Agent Cloaking – By showing different content depending on User-Agent the site is Penalized Alt Attribute – Alternative Text to display
- #10 Semantic tags and title tags might be used by the people who write articles 301 allow link juice to be kept Broken Links are a bad User Experience, therefore penalized.
- #11 Google makes use of that information as well. Also make use of Google Now Cards by using schema.org for email (airline ticket, bills, …)
- #12 URLs – Avoid making them too deep, and if it takes many clicks to get there, then the content is less relevant or important. Also, if we make categories like http://example.com/product/product-name, http://example.com/product/ should also be available as a page, that contains products… URLS are also case sensitive, avoid duplication Memorable URLs Market Target. US: Bing Russia: Yandex China: Baidu
- #13 So, I’ve implemented all those improvements, now it’s time to see if they’re working.
- #14 So, I’ve implemented all those improvements, now it’s time to see if they’re working.
- #16 Where do we want to be? Goal – to be on top of the search results More than 85% We should clearly define which keywords are relevant to our content e.g. Lucozade as a keyword vs energy drink or feeling down…
- #17 So the website was indexed, but performing poorly. Our goal is to be on top of the search results! E.g. Adidas products, versus Shopcade offer products
- #18 Buying guides also link back to the products, increasing the importance. Cross-sell One website created a very interesting and engaging blog, that led users to go to the main website. Link Juice – Some people don’t believe in keeping users engaged as it might drive away the user from the Conversion / Sale perspective. See Buying Guides… Create lists about your products, Create articles like Who the famous “TV SERIES” Are you? – Target keywords to drive traffic.
- #19 Caution with the benefits of having comments. It might imply an overhead due to moderation, risk of being bullied, … E.g. affiliate feeds, all content is the same, duplicate. They make your page unique. Google Trends, target the right keywords with content. Them sell! The same for GWT E.g. Super Bowl, Create an article or a product list targetting, and them try to convert the users. Long tail queries – users who are specific clearly show interest / buying intention
- #21 Word of Mouth – Discoverability, e.g. Sainsbury’s Dare to Share got immense exposure (300K indexed pages) in 3 weeks live. Establish a Network of Bloggers, partners Quality Links have much more value