Downloaded 23 times
Uploaded byTimothy Resnik
SEO is Not Magic - International Food Blogger Conference 2014 - Seattle Washington
This document outlines 10 tips for search engine optimization (SEO). The tips include starting with an SEO plan focused on content and audience, using WordPress as a content management system, prioritizing on-page elements like titles and meta descriptions, using analytics tools to understand site usage, doing keyword research, engaging influencers in your industry, owning more search real estate through structured data, continuing education on SEO best practices, and persisting with an SEO strategy over time. The overall message is that SEO requires ongoing effort but isn't magic; it involves understandable tactics like optimizing content and keywords.
More Related Content
Similar to SEO is Not Magic - International Food Blogger Conference 2014 - Seattle Washington
SEO is Not Magic - International Food Blogger Conference 2014 - Seattle Washington
- 1. IT’S NOT MAGIC, IT’S JUST SEO INTERNATIONAL FOOD BLOGGERS CONFERENCE 2014
- 2.
- 3. What is themost searched topic on the Internet?
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 12. OVER 7M POSTSPER DAY Courtesy Dr. Pete Meyers http://www.slideshare.net/crumplezone
- 13. 100 HOURS UPLOADED TO YOUTUBE PER MINUTE
- 14. “I’m not an SEO expert, I can’t do this”
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
- 24.
- 25. SEARCH IS ACRITICAL PART OF YOUR MARKETING MIX
- 26.
- 27. Brand New Terms The Rest 500,000,000 terms PER DAY are brand new, never search before on Google
- 28. • A lotof a little is OK
- 29.
- 30.
- 31.
- 32.
- 33. #1 START WITHA PLAN Audience Content Technology SEO Plan
- 34. #1 START WITHA PLAN 90% of your SEO effort should be focused on content and audience…
- 35. #2 YOUR BESTFRIEND IS YOUR CMS “(Wordpress) is a fantastic piece of software, it makes your site easily crawlable by search engines, solves some 80-90% of mechanics of SEO and is the first big step anyone can take towards creating a popular online business.” Via: http://www.howtomakemyblog.com/seo/googles-matt-cutts-wordpress-the-best-blogging-platform-for-seo/
- 36. #2 YOUR BESTFRIEND IS YOUR CMS http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/ - I also recommend the Yoast plugin “Wordpress SEO”
- 37. #3 PRIORITIZE ON-PAGEEFFORTS Title Headline META Description Links and Captions URL Body Content MOST IMPORTANT
- 38. #3 PRIORITIZE ON-PAGEEFFORTS HTML Title and META Description are Important for Search H1 for Google News
- 39. META Description <H1> <Title> The three major on-page focal points: Title, Description, Headline
- 40. <title>Food and WineMBA Scholarships Up for Grabs</title> <h1>Food and Wine MBA Scholarships Up for Grabs</h1>
- 41. <h1> <h3> BadH1 logic kills your chance in Google News
- 42.
- 43. #4 KNOW THYSELF • Tip #5: Google Webmaster Tools http://google.com/webmasters - can help you diagnose and repair issues w/ your site
- 44. #4 KNOW THYSELF http://google.com/analytics - track how visitors get to you and what they do on your site
- 45. #4 KNOW THYSELF http://feedburner.com – create RSS feeds and track your subscribers and clicks
- 46. #4 KNOW THYSELF http://bit.ly – great for determining which shares your fans/followers really enjoy
- 47. #4 KNOW THYSELF http://moz.com – great for bigger sites and more experienced SEOs
- 48.
- 49. #5 DO YOURKEYWORD RESEARCH THE DON’T HIT ENTER RULE* * Credit Wil Reynolds (@wilreynolds) with the catchy phrase
- 50. #5 DO YOURKEYWORD RESEARCH
- 51. #5 DO YOURKEYWORD RESEARCH
- 52. #5 DO YOURKEYWORD RESEARCH
- 53. #5 DO YOURKEYWORD RESEARCH WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHY, WHEN and HOW
- 54. #5 DO YOURKEYWORD RESEARCH WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHY, WHEN and HOW
- 55. #5 DO YOURKEYWORD RESEARCH WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHY, WHEN and HOW
- 56. #5 DO YOURKEYWORD RESEARCH All-in-one auto-suggest tool: www.soovle.com
- 57. #5 DO YOURKEYWORD RESEARCH • Extra Credit: Keyword Targeting http://www.google.com/trends/explore
- 58. #5 DO YOURKEYWORD RESEARCH https://moz.com/researchtools/keywords/
- 59. #5 DO YOURKEYWORD RESEARCH Less competition, similar popularity. Go with this one. https://moz.com/researchtools/keywords/
- 60. #6 FIND FRIENDSWHO REALLY CARE
- 61. #6 FIND FRIENDSWHO REALLY CARE Is ALL about wine A lot of followers Is a promoter Very active
- 62.
- 63.
- 64. #7 SURVIVE (NOTPROVIDED) 64
- 65. #7 SURVIVE (NOTPROVIDED) PAST FUTURE 65 Measure Efforts Exploit Opportunities
- 66. #7 SURVIVE (NOTPROVIDED) Search Referral Traffic to SEOmoz
- 67. #8 OWN MORESEARCH REAL ESTATE Dr. Pete Meyers http://bit.ly/IKcMh6
- 68. #8 OWN MORESEARCH REAL ESTATE
- 69. #8 OWN MORESEARCH REAL ESTATE Tell Search Engines about: • Articles • Events • Local Businesses • Restaurants • Products • Software Applications • Movies • TV Episodes
- 70. #8 OWN MORESEARCH REAL ESTATE Tell Search Engines about: • Articles • Events • Local Businesses • Restaurants • Products • Software Applications • Movies • TV Episodes Use these where possible
- 71. Own more realestate
- 72. • Tip #15:Highlighter and Schema Choose the URL for the content you want “highlight”
- 73. #9 READ UP http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
- 74. #9 READ UP http://moz.com/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet-2013-edition
- 75. #10 STICK WITHIT! Where Geraldine Started Her Blog
- 76. • Tip #20: Stick with it Where people usually give up.
- 77. • Tip #20: Stick with it 2.5 years in, she’s reaching 1000s of daily visits
- 78. RECAP 1. STARTWITH A PLAN 2. USE WORDPRESS 3. PRIORITIZE ON-PAGE ELEMENTS 4. KNOW THYSELF THROUGH BETTER DATA 5. DO YOUR KEYWORD RESEARCH 6. KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE 7. SURVIVE NOT PROVIDED 8. OWN MORE SEARCH REAL ESTATE 9. READ UP 10. STICK WITH IT
- 80. Upwar ds! Contact me: tim@moz. com @tresnik
Editor's Notes
- #2 Add image From Moz Product Strategist Been doing SEO for 10+ years I’m here to tell you you can do this (difference between a novice and an expert?) I have a lot of actionable content here. Here’s a link to the presentation.
- #4 We all know what it is
- #10 In a non-shocking development, I have concluded that people not only love food but, love to talk about, read about and share about FOOD That’s the demand-side, now let’s look at the supply-side
- #17 “I would rather spend $300 per month and just not have to worry about it”
- #18 End up hiring these guys
- #19 Who end up making promises they can’t keep
- #20 Your money ends up going here
- #21 Or worse, your site ends up going here. Jack’s story.
- #22 I am here today to tell you…It’s not that hard, you can do this. It just takes some hard work and patience.
- #23 Sure, Google is a black box. There is a lot that happens in this black box that decides to rank one web page over the other. No one knows exactly how they do it and they never will. As someone who publishes high quality content on the web you don’t need to know. You need ot follow a few best practices, create really good unique content and the rest will fall into place.
- #24 I am here today to tell you…It’s not that hard, you can do this. It just takes some hard work and patience.
- #25 And if you need something to make it go down easier, that’s fine too.
- #28 Redo John Wiley, Lead Designer for Google Search http://www.bloomberg.com/video/behind-google-s-obsession-with-perfecting-search-c6KcoGikT0m2KFqHuzYGoA.html Great opportunity, but no keyword data
- #29 Driving search traffic isn’t about optimizing around 2 or 3 really big juicy, high volume keywords (like travel)… Nearly 70% of all searches are only search upon by less than 10 people. Don’t Sweat the BIG STUFF!
- #34 #1 is Audience. Audience is all about building relationships and targeting: empathize with your audience to understand what content they are looking for. Then build that content, measure, adjust, optimize and create more. <according … to 1.5 million people per day talking about wine…there is an audience…find your niche> Content = the currency of SEO 1) information that you produce (the higher the quality, the usefulness and uniqueness the better search returns) 2) onpage elements, META elements that are in your control to tell the search engines what your content is about
- #36 Matt Cutts – has been with Google from the beginning of time, and is the head of the Webspam team. His team is responsible for ensuring quality of results, and he has become the defacto liason between search marketers and Google. He is mostly feared and search marketers typically hang to his every word. So in my opinion when he gives advice on technical SEO, we should listen. (although sometimes I think he sends us scrambling in the wrong direction…on purpose) Wow! Ok, I’m on Wordpress my job is done here…well not necessarily, WP helps with the mechanics (site structure, sitemaps, avoiding duplicate content, etc), your job lies in determining what to write about (making sure there is a market), narrowing your keyword targeting and crafting headlines and titles. In otherwords, there’s still a lot of work to be done.
- #37 Plugin allows you to edit several on-page SEO elements – Title, Description, keywords, etc, and will give you some inline recommendations.
- #38 What is on-page SEO. Simply put: it is the optimization of elements that are on your page. The good news is that YOU are in control. While they don’t carry as much ranking weight as external signals, like links that point to your page, they are important for couple of reasons:1) Google can match the relevance of your page with the searches intent 2) improves click through rate within the SERP 3) provides Google with context around non-text based content: videos, images, etc. This simple diagram shows hierarchy of what is most important, let me show you a few examples.
- #39 Here is what it looks like in your code. What is wrong with this H1/Heading tag?
- #40 The difference between Search and News So, why is this important. CTR. This is your one chance to tell the user why they should click your link instead of your competitors.
- #41 Where does the Headline <h1> live on this page? Where does the Title </title> show on this page? Where does the META description show?
- #43 Be honest with yourself. Make data-informed decisions. The good news is that there are many free tools out there. The challenge is having the discipline to do the proper level of analysis on the data before making decisions.
- #44 Critical – This is how Google sees your site. If they have issues, they will tell you (most of the time); crawl errors, penalties, crawl budget (how much are they crawling)
- #45 Critical – Google Analytics. Very rich data, but only as powerful as you make it. Take some time to learn how to use it. Google provides free training videos at the Google Analytics academy https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/explorer
- #46 Nice to have, but not critical. Track your subscribers and clicks to your RSS feeds
- #47 Nice to have, but not critical. Provides you a way
- #48 Optional, is not free, but for those looking to actively pursue an SEO campaign on your own it could be a good tool
- #50 If you have 3 minutes to perform keyword research, you must do this Deciding what to write about or narrowing in on a topic Choosing one key phrase over another
- #51 Deciding what to write about or narrowing in on a topic Choosing one key phrase over another
- #52 Deciding what to write about or narrowing in on a topic Choosing one key phrase over another
- #53 Deciding what to write about or narrowing in on a topic Choosing one key phrase over another
- #54 Deciding what to write about or narrowing in on a topic Choosing one key phrase over another
- #55 Deciding what to write about or narrowing in on a topic Choosing one key phrase over another
- #56 Deciding what to write about or narrowing in on a topic Choosing one key phrase over another
- #57 Amazingly simple and amazingly powerful Have only a few minutes, just don’t hit enter
- #58 When considering a keyword target there are 3 critical factors to consider: 1) People care 2) You care, and it relates to the context to your site 3) You can compete
- #59 Let’s not forget to take another very important factor of deciding what keywords to use into account…competition
- #62 Now you just need to figure out your angle and build a relationship
- #67 In the meantime, WMT is the only place that you can even get a sniff of your keywords…another reason to have GWT. Only 90 days of data Can’t dig deeper on what the clicks did when they got to your site Only 15,000 keywords Does show trending and average ranking, which is nice and hard to get
- #68 Remember what Google results looked like 10 years ago? It was just simply 10 blue links. There are now over 25 different search verticals. Each with their own logic and algorithms for ranking and display. It’s not just about writing a good piece of content and hoping it ranks. Google now gives you the opportunity to optimize within your rankings, by providing you tools like structure data markup like I just showed you. Here another example of something you should be taking advantage of immediately.
- #69 Rich snippets – the extra text and information that you see around the search results. It helps Google understand what your content is about and provides them It’s easy to implement; and is just a new set of tags in your HTML code http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/05/getting-started-with-structured-data.html
- #70 http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/05/getting-started-with-structured-data.html Here are some examples of what you markup
- #71 http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/05/getting-started-with-structured-data.html Rich snippets – what are they, why are they important, now easy to implement.
- #72 If I told you you could spend 5-minutes and own this much more real estate, would you? It’s practically free land, you just have to stake your claim to it.
- #73 http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/05/getting-started-with-structured-data.html Rich snippets – what are they, why are they important, now easy to implement. Mark-up helper
- #76 Most people get discouraged after a while
- #77 Those who stick with it can be rewarded
- #78 Those who stick with it can be rewarded
- #80 Finally, SEO is NOT magic, but sometimes it feels like this. Just continue to create awesome content that is relevant and STICK with it.