Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)From expand-marketing.co.uk

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What is SEO?Search Engine Optimisation, (or SEO as it is commonly shortened to) is the optimising of a website, through various technical and non-technical means, in an attempt to influence how it performs in the organic or natural rankings of search engines.

SEMPPCSERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)

Types of Search MarketingPPCQuick way to the top of search resultsBid on selected keywords in an auction with other biddersPay every time your ad receives a clickTurn on and off like a tapHas no impact on organic search rankings

SEO the ‘holy grail’Due to high costs of PPC - SEO seen as ‘holy grail’ of search marketing

Common knowledge that appearing at the top of Google for your chosen keywords equals more website traffic and more customers/leads

SEO equals ‘free’ traffic - much more desirable than paid traffic

SEO can still costDiffers from paid traffic in that you don’t bid on keywords and pay per click

Parts of your SEO strategy may involve financial costs. May need an agency to help, or may need website redesign as design and function of website can be factors in organic ranking

Be wary of agencies that make promises (what keywords?)

Keyword competition (short/long tail)SERPs are a highly competitive space

Only totally unique products/services have no competition for their money keywords

Short tail keywords - more competitive - hard to rank for when starting out e.g. “weber bbq”

Long tail keywords - easier to rank for, less search volume, need to optimise pages for these keywords - e.g. “weber genesis e310 gas bbq comparison”

Robots/Crawlers/Spiders travel the internet, following links, and indexing all of the content

A lot of things influence the ranking of pages for given search queries

Google takes all these things into consideration in a secret algorithm which they use to present the search results.

Factors affecting ranking can be split into on-page and off-page

How do Search Engines Rank Pages?

On-Page FactorsKeyword usage in copy - Important throughout - more-so in first paragraph, first 100/150 wordsExtremely important that any keyword usage is natural. No keyword stuffing - does not help - is negative

Related content - Important that content on rest of page matches the keywords you are trying to optimise for.

Page A - contains “brake pads” 96 times, as well as multiple mentions of “buy brake pads”, “compare brake pads”, “best brake pads” as well as numerous other variations of brake pads.

Page B - contains “brake pads” 8 times, as well as multiple mentions of “wheels”, “axle”, “car”, “jack”, “discs”, “tyres”, “screw”, “unscrew”, “nuts” etc.

Which page is more likely to be useful for the search query “how to change brake pads on a car?” Google knows what other words should be appearing on pages about a certain keyword.

Keyword Usage On-PageTitle Tag

Heading Tags <h1> <h2>

Keyword closer to start of these tags = more positive

Using things like “best”, “review”, “reasons” “top 10”, “tips”, “how to” in your titles helps to rank for long tail queries as people search for these kind of things e.g. “Top 10 reasons to switch to a Mac”

Title tag is what usually appears as the clickable link to your site in search results - therefore you should give its content some thought. 40-70 characters

Heading TagsH1, H2, etc. down to H6

<h1>This is a top level heading on a page</h1>

These tags signify headings to readers and to search engine crawlers

Just like people, crawlers will skim your headings to quickly determine what your content is about - extra significance given to content in these headings

Using your keywords in these headings can have an SEO benefit, as long as it is done naturally. Only one h1 on a page - represents most important heading. h2 and so on can be multiple - less important subheadings

Keyword usage in other areasIn your url e.g. www.mykeyword.com or www.example.com/my-keyword

Use hyphens to separate wordsNo more than 3 sub directories

Use your keywords naturally and sensibly in image alt tags

Alt tag describes to search engines what an image depicts, and is used in place of image when it can’t be displayed.

<img src=”http://www.mysite.com/uploads/labrador.jpg” alt=”labrador dog chasing ball” height=”100” width=”100”>

Meta tagsThese do not influence rankings

Meta keywords used to be used - but was open to abuse, much too simplistic way to rank websites

Meta description still used - provides snippet in search results, but does not influence ranking. Keywords in this snippet are bolded and is important as affects click through

Web Design and UsabilityDesign and usability of site has an impact on search engine rankings due to bounce rates

User clicks on google result, immediately bounces back and continues looking - signal to Google that the result was not helpful. Happens often = lower rankings

Improve design/usability - also include interesting content with images that complement the copy, and copy that is broken up nicely with subheadings and is easy to read. Less likelihood of bounces

Improve page load times -

Flash/Animations - take time to load, are unfamiliar to users, have to learn how to navigate, content inside is hidden to crawlers

Thin Content & Fresh ContentWell written content - flesch-kincaid readability score

Thin content - less than 300 words - not good. Not likely to be useful

Over 1,000 words - good, 1,500 - excellent. Much more useful - more likely to get inbound links

Google starting to prefer long form content (over 1,500 words) because not as easy to do!

Fresh content - Google likes sites that update regularly - if robot comes back and no change - no positive ranking update. Importance of blogging regularly - interesting content

Each blog post can target one keyword - not advisable to try to fit keywords where they don’t go naturally

Duplicate ContentDuplicate Content kills rankings, on-site or off-site

On-site - remove offending pages, or “no-index” them, or make sure they all redirect to one main page - 301 redirects, rel=”canonical”

Off-site - Change your content. If you were the originator then Google should be able to work that out. If it can’t work out who was the originator, both sites penalised

Google publisher/authorship markup can help here - sends signal to Google whenever you publish new content, so they know you created it

If you copied the content, you should probably delete the pages and start again. Copying content is a very bad idea if you want to rank well in Google

Internal Linking, SitemapsInternal links are links to pages on your site, from other pages on your site.

These help search engine crawlers to discover more of your site and also work out which pages are more important

Site following logical structure will have a link to the homepage on most pages (navigation bars count) - signal that this is the most important page. A minor blog post will have one or two links. Other important pages will also have more links.

XML Sitemap files are also important tools that search engines use to learn about your site.

Help search engine crawlers to find all pages. XML Sitemap can tell robots the priority of pages to crawl, and roughly how often they update.

Crawlers will cross check their index with sitemap, to determine which pages exist that they have not crawled before - when they last crawled other pages and when they were last updated - time saver

Robots.txtTells crawlers location of xml sitemap file

Tells crawlers which areas of site they are allowed to access and which they are not

Can get complex

Sitemap: http://www.example.co.uk/sitemap.xml (Tells robots the location of the xml sitemap)User-agent: Google (Following instructions apply only to Google Bot)Disallow: /wp-admin/ (Do not access any of the pages in this directory)Disallow: /wp-includes/Disallow: /category/Disallow: /documents/

Off Page FactorsHuge part of Google’s ranking algorithm

Google uses all the factors already discussed, along with the off-page factors to determine their rankings

Off-page factors generally mean links from other websites, and social signals such as likes, shares, tweets and +1s

External linksExternal linking is a huge part of SEO

Each link to a page from another page on a different domain, is like a vote, or endorsement, of that page from the linking website.

Not all votes are equal. A link from bbc.co.uk, or cnn.com is going to carry far greater weight than one from a random website that nobody has heard of

Links from authority websites count for more. All sites have a Domain Authority, and all pages have a PageRank (DA measured out of 100, PR out of 10). Both are largely determined by the number and importance of links from other websites.

PageRankPR flows down links

If a page with PR 10 links to 4 other sites, 10 is split 4 ways.

Those 4 sites then have a PageRank which is 2.5, plus whatever PageRank is being passed on by other sites.

In short, PageRank is a measure of a page’s importance, as determined by the importance of all the links pointing to it from other sites

This flow goes on - as the importance of the sites pointing to a page is determined by the importance of the sites pointing to them, and so on.

Link BuildingPeople optimising their websites became aware of the need for links - led to widespread manual linkbuilding as a practice - still in practice today

Importance or credibility of links used to be not important - just purely the number of links

This has now changed totally. The importance is much more important than the number. Sites with 100,000 links can be outranked by sites with 10 links if those 10 links are from high authority websites, versus 100,000 meaningless links

When Google updated their algorithm to reflect this change in the importance versus the number of links, websites plummeted in their rankings overnight.

This update was known as the Google Penguin algorithm update

Bad practice linkbuilding (black hat) techniquesThese techniques used to work to get sites to rank well in Google. Some stopped being legitimate tactics long ago, others were killed off by the Penguin algorithm update.

Google does not like it to be easy to manipulate their rankings - they don’t want people to be able to use what they see as tricks to get sites to rank for keywords when they are not necessarily the most useful or relevant results

Pointing lots of links from low authority sites (too easy to do - so google made it black hat)Links from lots of directory sites, forums, totally unrelated sites and sites that are written in a different language to the site linked to are all bad signals you do not want Google to connect to your siteAnchor text optimisation - e.g. buy cheap paint (not natural) versus click here or john’s paint shop (much more likely to represent a legitimate link by a real person) - this used to be a good way to rank for the keyword in the anchor text - now it is very bad if you have a lot of links like this!

rel=”nofollow”No follow links are links that do not pass any PageRank or SEO credit

A link can be made no follow by adding rel=”nofollow” into the html code for that link

Lots of high authority websites where it is easy to submit links to your own site use nofollow links by default - so you can’t just point links to your site from Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter etc. and gain credit - these links do not count towards your ranking

They may however provide you with extra traffic from people clicking the links - so not completely worthless

ReadingMoz.com - beginners guide to SEO http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo highly recommended

pagerank explanation - http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/courses/BIB/pagerank.htm

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