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Understanding SEO in 2018 by Steve Mortiboy
- 1. SEO for Business Owners By Steve Mortiboy
- 2. Understanding Search We use Google every day to search for content relevant to a search term and we expect Google to understand that search term and return the best, most relevant results based on the content on sites in their index
- 3. Quality Content - Pages • Create pages for topic you want to rank for • Every service or product should have a page focused just on that specific topic • Pay attention to which words or phrases your audience uses to search for your content by using Google Search Console (Search Traffic > Search Analytics) • Structure your pages and use good slugs to build meaningful URLs • Don’t duplicate content • Don’t create useless pages designed purely for SEO
- 4. Quality Content - Posts • Write high quality original content • Use great titles that will catch your visitor’s attention • Make your content easy to read • Post regularly and as often as you can but remember quality and regularity is more important than quantity • Check your Permalink Settings (Settings > Permalinks), use the “Post name” setting • Use categories and tags to organize your posts but don’t go crazy with them
- 5. Linking Strategy – Internal Links • Build a path through your site for your visitors to follow • Posts should link to the relevant page, posts must not be a dead end • Make sure your links are easy to see or use buttons to encourage visitors to click • Have a good nav menu that matches your page structure • Monitor problems using Google Search Console (Crawl > Crawl Errors) • Regularly check for and fix broken links and images https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/
- 6. Linking Strategy – External Links • Don’t pay for backlinking services • Use good online marketing for your business to get good quality, relevant backlinks • Backlinks cannot be manufactured, they should happen naturally • Make it easy for visitors to share your content with their friends on social media • Monitor backlinks in Google Search Console (Search Traffic > Links to Your Site) • Disavow bad backlinks
- 7. SEO Titles and Descriptions
- 8. SEO Titles and Descriptions • Create good descriptive SEO titles and descriptions • Every page of content on your site should have a unique SEO title and description • Monitor the lengths of your titles and descriptions and fix any that have the dreaded ellipses in search results • Brand your SEO titles • Follow Google’s quality guidelines https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624 • Monitor for problems in Google Search Console (Search Appearance > HTML Improvements)
- 9. Crawling and Indexing – XML Sitemap • Your site must have a dynamically generated XML Sitemap • It must be submitted to Google Search Console (Crawl > Sitemaps) and check for any issues
- 10. Crawling and Indexing – Robots.txt • WordPress dynamically generates a robots.txt which is fine for most sites – https://mydomain.com/robots.txt • Make sure your robots.txt is correct • Make sure you’re allowing access to JavaScript, CSS and AJAX that affect the rendering of each page on your site • Use Google Search Console to test your robots.txt (Crawl > robots.txt Tester) • Use the Fetch and Render tool in Google Search Console to make sure your site renders correctly (Crawl > Fetch as Google)
- 11. Crawling and Indexing – NOINDEX • Set the NOINDEX meta tag on any content that should not appear in Google • Exclude any content with the NOINDEX meta tag from your XML Sitemap • Check your index by using the site search in Google (site:mydomain.com)
- 12. Mobile Friendly (Responsive) • Use a mobile-friendly theme • Optimize your site so that it looks great on all screen sizes • Make sure your content loads quickly on mobile devices on 3G, 4G, etc. • Check for problems using Google Search Console (Search Traffic > Mobile Usability)
- 13. Secure Your Site (SSL) • Make sure your site has a valid SSL certificate • Force your site to use HTTPS https://semperplugins.com/documentation/setting-up-https-ssl/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/ssl-insecure-content-fixer/ • Make sure there are no problems with loading content https://www.whynopadlock.com/
- 14. Caching and Performance • Make sure each page of content on your site loads fast (less than 3 seconds) • Optimize your images to cut down their filesize https://wordpress.org/plugins/ewww-image-optimizer/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/tiny-compress-images/ • Use a good caching plugin that works with your hosting provider’s server configuration • Consider using a CDN service • Monitor page load times using tools such as Pingdom
- 15. Google AMP • Consider using a AMP for your blog posts https://wordpress.org/plugins/amp/ • Test your AMP pages using Google’s AMP Tester https://search.google.com/test/amp • Monitor for problems in Google Search Console (Search Appearance > Accelerated Mobile Pages)
- 16. Additional Reading • Google Webmaster Central Blog https://webmasters.googleblog.com/ • Google Webmasters YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp/videos • Respected SEO sites https://moz.com/blog/category/basic-seo http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-seo
Editor's Notes
- Welcome Introduction
- To understand SEO, first you need to understand search We rely on Google to return links to the best quality content that matches our search term We no longer search by key words, we search by terms Google understands the meaning our term and our intent without placing emphasis on any specific key words in the term Mobile devices mean that conversational search is on the increase and Google has responded with the way their algorithms work
- First of all you want to create separate web pages for each topic you want to rank for If you sell different services or products then each one should have a page Know what your audience searched for, they may call your service or product something different to what you do and you want to use those terms on your site Google Search Console will show you what search terms people used to find your site Create good page structure, don’t create 40 top level pages, all services should be underneath a services page This should create good logical URLs that show structure and which mean something to Google Do not duplicate content, one topic - one page Don’t be tempted to create useless content that’s purely for search engines A good example is location pages where you have a page for each city or location your business services and where the content is the same but you’ve just changed the name of the city
- You have to market your business and the primary method of doing that on your site is your blog Write great original content that shows you are an expert in your field and that answers questions that people may be asking Google Use great catchy posts titles, headlines to grab your visitor’s attention Make your content easy to digest, don’t have small text and lots of long paragraphs that will deter your visitor and make them go back to Google to find a quicker easier answer to what they want to know Write regularly but not to the detriment of quality If you can write weekly then do so, but if you struggle to come up with good things to write about then write less often But if you commit to writing every two weeks then stick to it Make sure your permalink settings in WordPress are set to Post name Be careful about changing this on an existing site as it could break things so take a full backup first Categorize your posts and tag them with important words that visitors might want to use to find related posts Don’t go crazy, you shouldn’t have 100 categories and 400 tags
- Use good internal links on your site to build a logical path for your visitors to follow A blog post should link to the relevant service or product page and not be a dead end that loses your visitor Links should be easy to spot, a different color from the text that encourages someone to click the link Use buttons and play with colors of buttons to see what results in a higher click through rate Make sure your main menu has all your important pages, don’t make it too big If you have drop down menus then make sure they match your page structure You can use Google Search Console to monitor for crawl errors and fix them as soon as they occur Use the Broken Link Checker plugin to find and fix broken links before Google finds them
- External links are links from other web sites to your web site, they are often referred to as back links Most important here is don’t pay for backlinking services, most are bad and do more damage You cannot manufacture a good quality back link, they come from others wanting to link to you because they know you or you wrote something relevant to them that they found worth linking to Visitors should be able to share, tweet, like content on your site, when they share content with their social networks it tells Google they liked you enough to share it with their friends Monitor your backlinks in Google and disavow excessive bad backlinks
- SEO titles and descriptions are what we use to tell Google about our content and so that hopefully they will use them in search results It’s important to know that Google doesn’t have to use your SEO titles and descriptions and you cannot force them to But SEO titles and descriptions are a very important part of SEO so it’s something you must do Here we see a Google search result with a good quality title and description This should ensure we get good click through rates on this blog post
- Google has some very important quality quidelines you must follow for your SEO titles and descriptions They must be descriptive Every page of content on your site must have an SEO title and description, this includes posts, categories, tags, etc Make sure you comply with their rules on length and check search results for titles and descriptions that get cut short by ellipses Brand your titles with your business name Check for any problems by doing a site search on your domain and within Google Search Console
- Your site must have an XML sitemap This is an essential file Google looks at every time they crawl your site We strongly recommend using an SEO plugin such as our All in One SEO Pack which dynamically creates the sitemap every time its requested Submit your sitemap once to Google via Search Console and make sure you don’t see anything reported in the Issues column
- Your site should have a robots.txt that tells search engines where they can and cannot go WordPress generates a default robots.txt that is good for most sites but may not be for yours Make sure that the search engine bots can crawl directories that contain code that renders your pages Test your robots.txt use Google Search Console and use their Fetch and Render tool to make sure all your pages render correctly
- Use the NOINDEX meta tag to stop Google indexing pages that should not be in search results There’s no reason to have a Thank You page or a Shopping Cart page or your privacy policy appear in Google search results Exclude any content from your XML Sitemap Use the site search to check what’s showing up in Google for your domain Type site colon and your domain with no spaces to do this
- We all use our tablets and phones to browse the web and so do your customers We all hate it when we get a website that looks like crap on our phone and is hard to navigate You must have a mobile friendly theme on your site, often referred to as responsive themes You must optimize your site for all screen sizes so you can be sure your visitors are having a good experience You must think about page load times, phones on slower networks are going to take longer to load your site so test this You can use Google Search Console to check for mobile problems
- If you haven’t seen the news recently, Google is striving hard to make the Internet safer for all One way they’re doing this is by promoting secure sites in their rankings over insecure sites If you don’t have an SSL certificate then now is the time to get one Talk to your hosting provider, most are providing them for free now using services such as Lets Encrypt Once you’ve got an SSL certificate installed on your web server you’ll need to force your site to use HTTPS only for browsers Here are two free resources to help you Finally check that all your content loads correctly using HTTPS by using why no padlock or other free tools
- Page load times are also extremely important now and Google promotes fast sites Google wants to see your pages load in three seconds or less Stay away from bad hosting providers with shared hosting services that are cheap but slow Make sure your image file sizes are as small as can be, here are two plugins that will do this automatically for you but you still need to get into the habit of making sure you check the file size of an image before you upload it to WordPress Keep files below a few hundred kilobytes Use a good caching plugin but be aware that it may conflict with your server configuration so ask your hosting provider what they recommend and what specific configuration you should use in the plugin You may want to consider a CDN service and your hosting provider may recommend one Use tools such as Google Chrome or services such as Pingdom to monitor your page load times
- Google AMP is a great way of getting your blog posts to load faster and appear better in Google Consider using the official WordPress AMP plugin to enable AMP for your blog Make sure you test your AMP pages for errors and monitor for problems in Google Search Console
- Here’s some useful links to blogs that provide up to date information on SEO