A look into the wonderful, and sometimes daunting, world of SEO. In this presentation, I cover why you need SEO, what it takes to rank in search engines, what actually goes into it, considerations for a CMS platform, how to determine success and some key takeaways for success. Be it that I presented this at the Melbourne Travel Massive event to a beginner level audience and within a limited time frame, I had to make the scope relatively broad, but you can find a much more in-depth version of this presentation over at: http://www.slideshare.net/holidaypointau/the-se-os-guide-to-making-a-website-michael-jones Please feel free to ask any questions in the comment box below, email me at info@holidaypoint.com.au, or if you live in Melbourne, come to the dedicated SEO Meetup at http://www.meetup.com/Melbourne-SEO/

1. Michael Jones - Holidaypoint.com.au

2. About Me

3. 13 years of search engine marketing experience,
worked with many large organisations in Australia
(both in-house and agency side), in a broad range
of industries including: shopping, classifieds and
service websites.
Specialising in SEO, but have experience in:
- SEM - Analytics - Social
- Local - Reputation Management
- Email Marketing
A network of 9 travel websites; managing everything from:
- Search Engine Optimisation - Social Media Marketing
- Video & Image Creation - Content Editing
- Web Programming - Website Building
- Affiliate Marketing - AdSense
- Web Analytics - Keyword Research
Now: Senior SEO Account Manager
Soon: Web Search Strategist

4. What I will Cover
Why SEO?
So how does one rank
So What do I need to do
• Define Your Goals
• Do your research!
What You Need
• Web Hosting
• Content Management Systems
• Themes
Bringing it all together…
• Basic SEO
• SEO Functionality / Plugins
Bringing it all together…
• Basic SEO
• SEO Functionality / Plugins
Content Marketing / Distribution
Determining Success
• How to Track
• What to look at
Maintenance Tasks
Considerations / Take Aways

5. Why SEO?

7. Why SEO?
Website Revenue
Organic Search vs Total Website Traffic
SEO is perhaps the most cost-effective form of marketing,
often returning the highest ROI of any advertising channel.
Unlike paid advertising sources, SEO traffic doesn’t cease
to exist if you reduce budgets and runs 24/7.

8. So how does one rank?

9. Ranking in Search Engines
Technical
Eliminating any roadblocks and
opportunities to SEO success
(Duplicate content, redirection
issues, schema markup, broken
links)
Offpage
(The quality and
quantity of links to
your website – on
both a domain and
page level)
Onpage
(Website content,
tags, internal
linking, etc.)

11. Ranking in Search Engines
Approximately
40% Link
Authority
Based

12. So What do I need to do?

13. Define Your Goals

14. Define Objectives / Requirements
1. What are your goals?
Sales, leads, signups, social followers, traffic, UBs
2. How will you achieve this via your website?
Quoting Engine, Shopping Cart, AdSense, Signup Form,
Content
3. Where will you source traffic?
Organic search traffic, SEM, social media, referral traffic, email
4. What is your target audience (demographic).
B2C? B2B? State, Age, occupation?
5. Research your competition and their websites
Check to see how they acquire leads and what contain they
have on their website

15. Do your research!

16. Content Research
When it comes to content for your website, it should fit usually into 3
categories:
- Content to attract organic traffic
- Engaging content that attracts social sharing / discussion
- Pages necessary for website UX
Content that has
a demonstrated
search demand
Content that is
likely to attract
social shares
Content that is
important for users

17. Content - Keyword Research
Content that has a demonstrated demand in
search engines
Use the Google Keyword Planner and the Auto-Suggest box to research
possible content ideas – all with actual search data!

18. Content – With / Without Keyword Research
An example of what a piece of content can do with proper research and
planning…
Content with little search demand
Content that was researched and ranks highly in search engines

19. Content – Research Past Performance
Content that is likely to attract social shares
If you are lost of where to start, look at your website analytics on past
performance and also seek inspiration from your competition.

20. Content – Analyse Past Performance
Review your past content in your website analytics and analyse average
time on site and bounce rate metrics, as well as look at social media
shares and post engagement.

21. Content – Analyse Competitor Performance
Another idea for content generation ideas is to study the content that
was success for them.
Simply crawl their website in Screaming Frog to harvest a list of blog
post URLs.

22. Content – Analyse Competitor Performance
Once you have the URL list, use something like “SEO Tools For Excel”
to scrape the total amount of social shares for the main 3 social media
platforms.

23. What You Need?

24. Web Hosting
There are infinite options when picking a company, so do your research and
make sure it has all the features you need.
I have found that a decent web host can save you a lot further the line;
especially when it comes features that improve your SEO and maintenance
(e.g. caching, 1-click backups, staging environments)

25. Content Management Systems
According to W3Techs, the three most popular content management systems
are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal and collectively own 74% of the CMS
market (with WordPress accounting for over 60%)
When choosing a CMS, refer back to your original Objectives and
Requirements, as many of these CMS may already have the solutions right
out of the box (reducing development costs)

26. Themes
If you go down the Wordpress route (or another CMS that uses themes),
check out premium theme websites and try to find an already created theme
that has the main layouts and functionalities that your website needs. This
will help you save time and money on the finished product and will offer
support and free upgrades in the future.
Try to stay away from free themes or torrenting a paid theme – there might
be hidden links in the templates or security issues.

27. Bringing it all together…

28. Basic SEO
You need to go from page to page and implement the following on page tweaks:
Page URLs: Make sure the site's URLs are clean, and try to utilise the keywords that
the page is trying to target within the file name. Use hyphens as separators and don’t
keyword stuff – more than1-2 keywords will start looking spammy.
Page Titles: Write a unique title tag for each page, using a combination of the target
keywords you’ve assigned to that page. Make sure the tag reads well, entices
customers to click on it and try to include your business name at the end. Try to keep
the entire title tag under 69 characters.
Descriptions: Write a unique meta description tag for each webpage, trying to keep
the tag under 155 characters. Because meta descriptions are commonly used on
search engine result pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given page, it is
recommended that you try include your chosen keywords, whilst creating 1-2 sentences
that is attractive for a user to want to click on.
Title
Description
http://www.wotif.com/hotels/landmarks/australia/warner-bros-movie-world-hotels.html

29. SEO Functionality / Plugins
Without going into a fully detailed technical audit checklist, I’d suggest that
you ensure that the following is built into your website CMS:
- SEO Functionality: Control over every pages title, description and H1
tags, canonical tags, noindex tags, etc
- XML Sitemap: Automatic updates based on content updates
- HTML Sitemap: Automatic updates based on pages changes
- Security: Blocks malicious activity – Login attempts, comment spam, etc
- Broken Link Checker: Scans for website for outdated links
- Social Bookmarking: Allow users to easily share your content
- Open Graph / Twitter Cards: Ensure that your pages look attractive when
shared on social media
- Compression / Minify / Caching: On the fly changes to reduce page
weight / improve your page loading times

30. Content Marketing / Distribution

31. Content Distribution
With the way search engines are heading (i.e. looking to move away from using link
metric data and start looking at social signals), it is imperative that you have a social
media presence. The following are an absolute must:
Social media is a whole discipline in itself, but the thing to remember is you need to
give users a reason to want to follow you and you also need to share content that
they find engaging and want to share with others (i.e. not just your own, share other
people’s content).
Also make sure that you respond to users comments in a timely manner and I
encourage you to engage with other people and companies (you’ll be surprised
what you can get out of it).

32. Content Marketing
Because links have and will always be an important part of Google’s ranking
Algorithm, it is important that you seek to build links towards your website.
These days it isn’t a numbers game, so the focus should always be on quality over
quantity, and also seek to get links from relevant websites.
This again is a whole different area in itself, but some ideas of how you can obtain
links and not get hit manually or algorithmically by the search engines are (there is a
lot of info to sift through):
• Content marketing
• Online profiles (make sure you claim them)
• Fix broken links
• Brand / logo / asset reclamation
• Competitor research
• Run a competition
• Run specials / promo codes
• Infographic creation
• Interviews
• Product reviews
• Surveys
• Sponsorship

33. Determining Success

34. Success - How to Track
• Implement Google Analytics on every page of your website (made easy by
copying the code into your header file. Remember to define goals and use event
tracking so you can easily track conversions / your main website KPIs.
• Set up and implement Google & Bing Webmaster Tools. These give you a window
into how the search engines view your website, as well as being able to apply
different settings and resulting in a more efficient website crawl.

35. Success – What to look at
You need to ensure that you keep an eye on things to make sure nothing breaks
and things keep going in the right direction.
Analytics: In order to determine how your website is performing and measuring
how they are getting there, you need to regularly check your website analytics.
Things to check are your conversions, event tracking, acquisition sources, user
behaviour, etc.
Ranking Reports: Additional to the above, I recommend you keep an eye on how
your website is ranking within search engines for your targeted keyword list. This will
usually show movement before you see anything major in your analytics, you can
track your competitors success, as well as being able to establish traffic fluctuations.
Webmaster Tools: Make sure you check your webmaster tools accounts for such
things as broken links, duplicate tag issues, links pointing towards your website,
crawl stats, security issues and search queries you are showing for.
Link Check: Additional to checking the above, I recommend that you check all of
the links on your website with either a stand-alone tool or a plugin. You’ll find that
other websites may have changed their URLs, resulting in 404 errors.

36. Success – Most Importantly

37. Maintenance Tasks

38. Maintenance Tasks
Testing Functions – To ensure that nothing is broken and you aren’t losing money,
be sure to check if your contact forms & shopping carts are working. From time to
time there might be issues with old plugins or coding issues.
Software / Plugin Updates – Be sure to update your core CMS and plugin files
when they become available. A lot of the time these newer versions fix bugs &
security issues, but they also come with new functions / technology.
Backing Up Your Website – To make sure you don’t risk losing any part of your
website if something happens to your web host or if your website is hacked, I highly
recommend backing up your files and database to a cloud based storage solution
(e.g. Dropbox).
Monitor Website Outages – Use one of the many website monitoring services
(Pingdom) to keep an eye on the uptime of your website. A lot of the time you’ll get
an email if things go down, and you can promptly follow up with your hosting
company.

39. Maintenance Tasks
Website Speed – Use Webpagetest.org, the various browser extensions and
Google Analytics to monitor just how long different pages of your website are taking
to load. The longer a page takes to load, the higher chance you have of losing
customers – check the recommendations and try make your site load as quickly as
possible.
Moderate comments – If you have a blog, you need to moderate comments;
responding and engaging with genuine comments from users… and filtering all that
spam! Never set your website to auto-approve comments!
Website Content – In order to forever grow the keyword scope of your website and
to give existing customers a reason to come back, you need to create fresh content.
Now don’t be creating content blindly: Either create it based on keyword research so
it ranks in Google, or create content that is engaging and will likely attraction a lot of
social media love.
Reputation Management – Not really a SEO thing, but
setup Google Alerts and randomly do some searches on
Google for your branded terms to see how the internet
community views your brand. A lot of the time you can deal
directly with your customers and put out any fires before
they spread (people love complaining online)

40. Considerations / Take Aways

41. Considerations / Take Aways
• SEO is usually the most cost-effective form of marketing
• Ranking in Search Engines is more complex than ever and there is no simple
recipe for success
• Define your objectives and requirements in advance
• Research your content before you start writing
• Make sure you don’t scrimp on hosting or a theme – it can save you $$$ in the
long run
• Try to ensure that your CMS has the most important SEO functionality built-in or
available as a plugin / module
• You can’t just create links anymore
• Know what success looks like and how to track it
• Don’t let your website gather cob webs

42. Thank You – Any Questions?

43. Follow Me
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• http://www.youtube.com/user/HolidayPoint/
http://www.holidaypoint.com.au/