SEO for Beginners Feb 2020 - Bristol Media
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This document provides an overview and introduction to search engine optimization (SEO) for beginners. It discusses key SEO concepts like technical SEO, on-site SEO, off-site SEO, local SEO, and how Google works. Specific technical SEO topics covered include site speed, mobile usability, status codes, XML sitemaps, and more. Quick wins for SEO are also presented such as setting up Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools.
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SEO for Beginners Feb 2020 - Bristol Media
- 1. SEO for Beginners With Jon Payne Bristolmedia.co.uk @Bristol_Media
- 3. ORIGIN WORKSPACE THE POWER OF COMMUNITY COWORKING + OFFICE SPACE EVENTS + NETWORKING STARTUP SUPPORT MEETING + EVENT SPACE
- 6. LIKE TO KNOW MORE? GET IN TOUCH Caroline Hamilton BUSINESS MANAGER Gemma Menear MARKETING + EVENTS MANAGER Rob Hingston MANAGING DIRECTOR
- 7. LIKE TO KNOW MORE? GET IN TOUCH VISIT OUR WEBSITE ORIGINWORKSPACE.CO.UK OR CALL 0117 4400400
- 8. Bristol Media February 2020 | SEOTraining
- 9. 2 1 3 4 5 6 Technical SEO On Site SEO Off Site SEO Local SEO Intro How Google Works
- 10. 2 1 3 4 5 6 Technical SEO On Site SEO Off Site SEO Local SEO Intro How Google Works
- 13. @MrJonPayne
- 14. @MrJonPayne
- 19. Reporting quick wins Google Analytics installed and set up • Filter office visits • Goals set up • Filter spammers Webmaster Tools verified and set up • Geographic targets set up • Sitemaps submitted • Crawl errors and warnings heeded
- 20. Reporting quick wins Google Analytics installed and set up • Filter office visits • Goals set up • Filter spammers Webmaster Tools verified and set up • Geographic targets set up • Sitemaps submitted • Crawl errors and warnings heeded https://www.noisylittlemonkey.com/blog/topic/analytics https://support.google.com/analytics/?hl=en#topic=3544906
- 21. Where we were ish How Google Works
- 22. Search Engines
- 25. Google no longer looks like this
- 26. This means that • Context is everything • Your boss Googling things from his desk doesn’t prove anything. • There is no such thing as #1 • Even if you were “#1” you may conceivably be at the bottom of the page
- 27. Google wants to serve the best result for the query • Has this resource tried really really hard to optimise their site? • The most informative, best resource on a topic might be written by a wheezy old professor who isn’t a great web developer… • Think about the implications of that – in their perfect world, poorly optimised websites that are genuinely the correct result should be able to rank in spite of ignorance of SEO.
- 28. How do they do this without human bottlenecks? • Use of proxy metrics; for example: computers can’t discern whether a brand is a “household name” directly, but the number of citations from external sources might be a strongly correlated metric • Machine learning / deep learning / neural network decision making
- 29. What does this mean for you? • Through SEO best practices, you will be able to ensure that your website is ‘optimal’ for performance in search engines. • This means that you will be able to increase as far as Google might reasonably judge to be your “rightful place” in the rankings. • SEO cannot make a small, badly run business with a terrible reputation compete against a large, well run business with a great reputation. If you somehow con it into doing so, enjoy it while it lasts, that represents a fundamental problem with the search product.
- 30. SERP Paid for positions (Google Ads) Non-paid for positions or “organic” rankings Featured snippets Also called “position 0”
- 31. What is SEO? • Search EngineOptimisation • Making changes & improvements to your website pages in order to improve your site’s visibility or ranking for commercially important search terms, with the aim of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website. • Google wants to serve the best – most relevant - result for the user’s search query.
- 32. Determining Search Relevancy • What is the intent behind this search query? • What is the best resource for visitors with this kind of intent? • Of these; which sites do people historically seem to click on? • Of these; which sites are talked about a lot on the rest of the internet? • Does the resource display properly on the visitors device? • Is the resource geographically relevant? • Is the resource trustworthy? • Is the resource compromised with a virus? Content Technical Local SEO
- 33. Relics that no longer matter “Meta keywords” “Meta tags” “Keyword Density” Determining Search Relevancy
- 34. Relics that no longer matter Meta keywords Your Target Keywords Determining Search Relevancy
- 35. Relics that no longer matter Meta keywords Your Target Keywords Determining Search Relevancy
- 36. Implicit search signals (context) are also taken into account: • Location • Device • Search history Much more than a keyword match Determining Search Relevancy
- 37. ?
- 38. Where we were Technical SEO
- 39. Technical SEO • Anything to do with your server, host, databases, etc., that has an implication for Search Engines. • Improving your technical configuration won’t add value to your site – but technical issues can and will subtract value. • Very often, these are problems that you cannot see or are not immediately obvious; they are often pedantic. • In general, following web development best practices and Google’s Webmaster Guidelines as far as it is feasible for you to do so is sufficient.
- 40. Technical SEO • Site security & SSL certificates • Site speed • HTTP status codes & redirects • Sitemaps • Crawl budgets • Schema mark up • Mobile usability • Robots.txt • Canonical tags • URL parameter handling • JavaScript • And more …
- 41. Speed
- 42. 53% of mobile website visitors will leave a site if the page doesn’t load within 3 seconds
- 43. A 100-millisecond delay in load time can cause conversion rates to drop by 7%
- 44. 20% of users abandon their cart if the transaction process is too slow
- 45. Speed Tools
- 46. TTFB or Time To First Byte • Time taken from initial client http request until the browser receives the first byte of data from the web server • This is a ‘ranking factor’ • Noisy Little Monkey aims for around 0.3 secs as a benchmark TTFB
- 47. Full Page Load • Time taken for the content of a web page to be fully displayed. • This is NOT a ranking factor (some developers delight in explaining this) • However, it is closely linked with user experience and conversion rate. • Can be improved by: • File compression • Minification • Reducing redirects • Content delivery network
- 48. Speed WebPageTest • Different testing locations and browsers available.
- 49. Speed WebPageTest • Test results look like this:
- 50. Speed Number of requests being made to the server Time until page is fully loaded WebPageTest
- 51. Speed Images (indicated in purple) are usual culprits for slow page load times WebPageTest
- 52. Speed PageSpeed Insights • As a Google-owned product, the recommendations from this tool are important to follow
- 53. Speed PageSpeed Insights • Based on Google’s Lighthouse tool (lab data) and Chrome User Experience Report (real world data) • More advanced data is available from PageSpeed Insights. • Google breaks down “page load” into different metrics as page load is not a static event but rather lots of smaller milestones in the user’s journey on your website. First contentful paint Speed index Time to interactive First meaningful paint First CPU idle Max potential input delay
- 54. Speed PageSpeed Insights • Opportunities & diagnostics are listed in priority order
- 55. Mobile • Google doesn’t want to serve mobile unfriendly content to mobile users • Even if your site actually IS mobile friendly, you should check that Google agrees • There are technical issues which can occur which may interfere with this judgement. • https://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
- 56. Mobile • Click through on the error types to find the specific pages • Error means that the page is below a minimum mobile usability level • Users incompatible plugins • Viewport not set • Viewport not set to “device-width” • Content wider than screen • Text too small to read • Clickable elements too close together Search Console
- 57. • Stop your website from breaking by regularly crawling the site to find internal 404s and 301s. • Additionally, make sure that visiting a non-existent page gives a useful 404 page that salvages the user experience. Broken links are a sign of a poor user experience • Ensure that the 404 page actually sends a 404 status code Indexing Status Codes & Error Handling
- 58. • Search Engines won’t bother ranking your new page if you use a temporary redirect Indexing Status Codes • Permanent redirect • Use when the webpage has been moved permanently. • Google will remove old page from index • Example uses: • HTTP to HTTPS migration • Outdated/replaced URLs • New domain name • Temporary redirect • Used for when a webpage has been moved only for a short period of time / if you intend to bring the original page back. • Example uses: • During redesign/updates • Temporary redirect on the homepage to a promotional page 301 302
- 59. Indexing • Websites with heavy reliance on client-side rendering – such as React – have been known to affect visibility. • A quick check is to disable JS and see how much of your key content renders properly. • This is particularly important for sites with a high volume of products that change frequently JavaScript
- 60. Malware & Manual Action Penalty • Malware, hacking and manual actions can all affect your site’s visibility and ranking. • Users are often met with an on-SERP safety warning from recently hacked websites. • Notification of a manual action can be found in Search Console.
- 61. Malware & Manual Action Penalty Google issues a manual action against a site when a human reviewer at Google has determined that pages on the site are not compliant with Google's webmaster quality guidelines. Most manual actions address attempts to manipulate our search index. Most issues reported here will result in pages or sites being ranked lower or omitted from search results without any visual indication to the user. Google Search Console
- 62. Malware & Manual Action Penalty • User generated spam • Spammy free hosting • Structured data issues • Unnatural links to and/or from your site • Thin content • Cloaking of content or images • ”Sneaky” redirects, incl. mobile redirects • Pure spam • Hidden text/keyword stuff • AMP content mismatch • Duplicate content
- 63. XML Sitemap Best practice is to have a complete XML sitemap submitted to Google via Search Console. This is especially important for new websites, large websites, and websites that host a lot of archival content that has poor internal linking. HTML sitemaps are only for humans and are designed for the purpose of helping “lost” users find what they are looking for. However, you should focus on having an easy to navigate website rather than building an HTML sitemap.
- 64. Housekeeping • Broken links are a sign of a poor user experience • Search Engines (probably) won’t bother ranking your new page if you use a temporary redirect
- 65. Housekeeping
- 66. Use a spider to root out issues
- 67. Error handling • Let’s try to stop your website from breaking, but if it does, make sure we’ve got it configured. • Make sure that visiting a non-existent page gives a useful 404 page that salvages the user experience. • Make sure that the 404 page actually sends a 404 status code
- 68. Wider Reading • Getting your website into “best practice” shape can be complicated. • Google knows that not everyone is a computer whizz. That’s fine. Trying to grapple with this may not be a solid ROI. • However, if you want to learn more, here are some starting points: • https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015 • https://moz.com/blog/seo-cheat-sheet • http://schema.org/docs/gs.html • https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-guide/ • https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
- 69. ?
- 71. 2 1 3 4 5 6 Technical SEO On Site SEO Off Site SEO Local SEO Intro How Google Works
- 72. Where we were On site SEO
- 73. • URL: domain & slug • Page Title • H1 • Images & alt text • Page content: quality and volume • Meta description* • Keyword density Determining Search Relevancy
- 74. URLs https://noisylittlemonkey.com/p=dfg24-123 VS https://noisylittlemonkey.com/what-is-seo • Include the keyword you are targeting in your URL • Keep your URLs clean, simple and “intelligible to humans” • Standard practice and Google recommendations are to use hyphens between words in URLs, not underscores • Avoid special characters • No capital letters as this can cause duplicate content issues • Future proofing: build a URL structure that you can scale as your business grows.
- 75. • URL: domain & slug • Page Title • H1 • Images & alt text • Page content: quality and volume • Meta description* Determining Search Relevancy
- 76. • URL: domain & slug • Page Title • H1 • Images & alt text • Page content: quality and volume • Meta description* Determining Search Relevancy
- 77. • URL: domain & slug • Page Title • H1 • Images & alt text • Page content: quality and volume • Meta description* Determining Search Relevancy
- 78. • URL: domain & slug • Page Title • H1 • Images & alt text • Page content: quality and volume • Meta description* Determining Search Relevancy
- 79. • Meta descriptions do not affect your SEO or ranking, but they are the first point of contact you have with your potential visitors so they are important. Determining Search Relevancy
- 80. Internal Linking Structure • An internal linking strategy is vital; demonstrating the relationships between content across your site is important for both search engines to understanding your content and to keep users on your website. • Contextual links • Related posts sections • Navigational links
- 81. Keyword Stuffing • Unnatural repeated use of a keyword on a webpage in a bid to improve visibility for that keyword (“keyword density”). • Using white text on a white background to hide copy from users whilst still being visible to search engines. • Writing overly long, clunky and keyword stuffed alt text that does not accurately describe the contents of the image. We sell custom cigar humidors. Our custom cigar humidors are handmade. If you’re thinking of buying a custom cigar humidor, please contact our custom cigar humidor specialists at custom.cigar.humidors@example.com. • Keyword stuffing is different in both presentation & intent from responsible keyword optimisation. • If the copy sounds robotic and forced, consider rewriting it. “Keyword density” Natural, human language
- 82. Keyword Research
- 83. Keyword Research Google Ads Keyword Planner Answer The Public
- 85. Remember: Search engines want to serve the most relevant results to a user
- 86. Remember: Your prospect is likely looking for solutions to a problem, not searching for industry jargon
- 87. ?
- 88. Where we were Off site SEO
- 89. What is off page SEO? Off page SEO is the actions, practices and efforts that you undertake outside your website to improve its visibility or ranking. Google and its algorithm must approximate the “Real World” importance and reputation of a brand, using various trust, link and authority signals. Off page SEO practices aim to contribute to building this reputation. Aside from backlinks, most off page SEO elements are not considered to be direct “ranking factors”, but their importance in building your brand’s online presence cannot be denied. • Backlinks: quality, number, and relevance • Social media: especially the engagement rate of social content • Brand mentions* and branded search volume
- 90. Backlinks Backlinks are another way in which Google can begin to “understand” and contextualise your website. DO NOT PAY FOR THEM or participate in link farming. Sponsored content is different. Ensure you use the appropriate link attributes: • rel="sponsored": Use the sponsored attribute to identify links on your site that were created as part of advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements. • rel="ugc": UGC stands for User Generated Content, and the ugc attribute value is recommended for links within user generated content, such as comments and forum posts. • rel="nofollow": Use this attribute for cases where you want to link to a page but don’t want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another page. Tools like Majestic & Ahrefs can help you identify your backlink profile. Your referring domains & backlinks need to be relevant, authoritative and error-free (no 404s).
- 91. Backlinks
- 92. Backlinks
- 93. Branded Search Volume Branded search volume can be indicative of your off site SEO & branded awareness. Google Trends and Google Autosuggest can provide useful insights here.
- 94. ?
- 95. Where we were Local SEO
- 96. “Snack Pack” and Organic Results • Prime position for “near me” type searches • Most frequently displayed SERP feature • As well as SEO factors, proximity also plays a role in what appears in the local pack as well as relevance and prominence – or how well known your business is in the ‘real’ world.
- 97. Local Citations Name Address Postcode Opening Hours Logos Profiles (Social) Consistency
- 98. Google My Business Bing & Apple Maps too Your business (or businesses) need fully completed, verified Google My Business & Bing Places profiles, with consistent NAPOLP.
- 99. Local Content & Schema • Local Business schema is necessary for local businesses • It’s easy to set up and helps contextualise your content for search engines.
- 100. Reviews • Google Reviews are a particularly important component to your local SEO • Respond to all of your reviews, especially the bad ones
- 101. ?
- 102. Where we were Fin