This document provides an overview of search engine optimization (SEO) fundamentals in 30 minutes or less. It discusses key SEO concepts like on-page optimization through keywords, titles, descriptions and content; off-page factors like link building and earning links; and how Google's algorithm updates like Panda and Penguin targeted low-quality content and manipulative linking practices. The goal of SEO is to optimize websites and pages to rank higher in organic search results.

1. SEO 101 IN 30 MINUTES [OR LESS]
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2. • SEO or search engine optimisation is the process of
affecting the visibility of a website or a web page
within a search engines natural or organic search
results
• In short, the higher in Google you are, the more
visits you will receive
• This is done using off and onsite techniques
• 90% of all internet session begin with a Search
query
• Google currently has the greatest market share over
other search engines
• Position 10 on Google will get you more traffic than
position 1 on Yahoo
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WHAT IS SEO?
UK Search Engine Market Share
2.78% 1.92% 2.59%
77%
3.04%
12.67%
Google.co.uk
Google.com
Bing.com
Yahoo UK
Search
Search.Yahoo
Other

3. • Paid search results shown in red
• Organic listings in green
• Paid search results cover the majority of a search
results page
• These make Google $$$
• Paid search will gain more visits quickly at a cost
• Organic search will take longer but ROI is higher as
there is costs involved to Google
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PAID VS ORGANIC SEARCH

4. • Why is keyword research important?
• These are the words / phrases which connect people
to your content using a search engine
• What is your site about?
• How would you find out what your site is about if you
had to?
• Lots of tools to help you expand your keywords
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KEYWORDS

5. RANKINGS
Rankings are essential to SEO as these drive traffic to your website. There are 200+ factors which feature in
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Google’s algorithm to determine rankings!
Content
Domain
Age
Server
Location
URL
Structure
Internal
Linking
In &
Outbound
Linking
Sitemaps
&
Robots.txt
Page Load
Speed

6. 6
ONSITE SEO

7. • When Google’s search bots are crawling your
site they are looking for vital information about
the pages on your website
• They want to know what your page is about
• We have to send signals within the sites HTML
so they can index pages for your selected
keywords
• We can help webcrawlers by adding some
information to the site such as:
• Robots.txt
• Sitemap.xml
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OPTIMISING A WEBPAGE – CRAWLING A SITE

8. • Using your chosen keywords there are three
places it should be included within the:
• Title tag
• Pages URL
• H1 tag
• Body Copy
• The example shows that the page is optimising
for the phrase ‘wine book club’
• Each page should also include a meta
description
• Doesn’t affect rankings but is a selling point to
the page within search results page
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OPTIMISING A WEBPAGE – THE FUNDAMENTALS

9. • Beyond the fundamental elements of onsite
optimisation other factors will should come into
play:
• User experience
• Navigation, design, page render speed
• Unique content
• Page usefulness, cool video, images
• Accessible to search engine bots
• Static urls, JavaScript links
• Built for sharing
• Descriptive URLs, sharing buttons
• Mark up implemented for meta data, schema
and rich snippets
• Hreflang, schema mark-up
• Multi device
• Compatible for every browser
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OPTIMISING A WEBPAGE – ADDITIONAL ELEMENTS
Image Credit: //moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization

10. • Panda first introduced in February 2011
• Introduced and sought to lower rankings of sites which
had:
• Duplicate content
• Thin Content [low code to text ratio]
• This update was thought to have affected 12% of all
search queries
• Enforces need for websites to have highly relevant
[and unique] content for users
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GOOGLE ALGORITHM UPDATES – PANDA

11. 11
OFFSITE SEO

12. 12
LINK BUILDING – OLD PRACTICES & METHODS
Comment
Spam
Keyword
Stuffing In the past SEO’s used a number of link
Content
Scraping
Link Farms
Exact Match
Anchor Text
Directories
acquisition methods referred to as black and
grey hat [think cowboy films] in order to
‘game’ the search rankings

13. • Penguin was a link based algorithm update
• This update was first updated in April 2012 and
continues to roll out
• Focussed upon links acquired which went against
Google Webmaster Guidelines
• In short, people who were manipulating the number of links
pointing to pages to game the rankings
• Link building which was acceptable 5 years ago is now
a ‘black hat’ practices and will be penalised
• This means as marketers we need to be smarter and
EARN links rather than BUILD links for clients
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GOOGLE ALGORITHM UPDATES – PENGUIN

14. • Content is now more important than ever
• Creation of resources [or linkable assets] is key to
creating a successful SEO campaign
• Creating and hosting these assets on site also helps
avoid any issues with aforementioned Panda updates
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SEO OFFSITE STRATEGY

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ANY MOTHER FLIPPING QUESTIONS?