SEO 101: How to Get More People to Your Website

PowerPoint Presentation

SEO 101:How to get more people to your website

I know youre expecting me to start with bullet points, but Im going to start with a challenge instead. A woman I know a friend recently started selling high quality looseleaf green tea. Really good stuff, and because new studies keep coming out about the health benefits of green tea, theres a growing demand for her products. A big part of her business plan is to sell her products online.

But to sell her products online, she has to attract enough high-quality customers to her website. She has a website, but shes not getting a lot of hits. She knows something needs to change, but its overwhelming and she doesnt know where to start.

Today, were going to put ourselves in my friends shoes, and together were going to walk through the process of optimizing her website so that she gets a ton of traffic each month and the phone doesnt stop ringing!

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the challenge

We have a website

but its not getting any traffic.

So to recap, heres the challenge we have to solve.2

the desired result

Our website gets a ton of traffic that keeps our phone ringing and orders pouring in.

And heres what we want to happen.

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quiz

But first a quick quiz. Who knows how many websites are on the Internet?4

quiz662 million web sites

As of May 2012, there are 662 million websites on the Internet.

So weve got a lot of competition. It used to be that you could put up a really simple website like an online brochure and youd be just fine. And if youve got other forms of marketing, maybe thats still okay for you.

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quiz662 million web sites

1 billion searches

Quiz number 2: How many searches are made on the Internet each day?

Google says that it receives more than 1 billion searches EACH DAY.

Thats a huge potential for your business.

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How do you stand out?

But how do you stand out? How do you compete against those 662 million websites for your chunk of those 1 billion searches each day?7

Follow this simple formulato get search engines and customers to love your website.

All it takes is knowing what to do. And Im thrilled to say its not rocket science its as easy as t-2-3. You just need to follow three steps to get the search engines and your customers to love your website.8

The perfect search engine should understand exactly what the searcher means and give the searcher back exactly what he wants.

This quote is from an executive at Google but its really only half true. Search engines dont exist to make searchers happy. They exist to make their advertisers happy.

You probably all know that businesses can pay to place ads on search engines. This is called cost-per-click advertising the business pays the search engine when someone clicks on their ads.

So these businesses these advertisers want their ads to appear for the best possible customers. They dont want to waste their money on customers that click on the wrong ad, or on searchers who are really looking for something else.

So search engines put a ton of time and resources into figuring out how to improve the process of returning the right results when someone searches on a term.

So how do they do this?9

SEO Success

Our first step is to understand how search engines work. What happens when someone searches for something?10

how do search engines work?

Very, very complex computer programs that spider through the world wide web.

Index each page for keywords

Search engines are very, very complex computer programs that spider through the world wide web. When the computer program finds a link to a web page, it pulls up that web page, and it indexes that page for the words it finds there. You can imagine this index is huge over a trillion web pages.11

search engines want to knowWhat is this page about?Keywordsurltitle & meta tagsheadings, font emphasiscontentHow important is this page?Linksin-bound linksanchor textauthority/trust of domaintraffic

When Google finds a web page page, it asks itself two things: What is this page about, and How important is this page? It answers the first question by analyzing the keywords it finds on your page. It looks at your website name and the page name, what words are you using in the title, what words have you bolded or made bigger (which therefore must be more important), what words show up throughout the page? Then, because its a computer and not a real person, it looks at who else is linking to this page, to help determine if this is an important page or not. Today, I will touch on links and Pat will go into more details. But right now, Id like to focus on that #1 up there, because when youre talking search engines, thats where it all starts.12

how does the search engine rank these web pages?

So when someone types something into a search engine to conduct a search, the search engine goes back to its index and looks for two things on all of the web pages in its index.

First, is the web page relevant to the searcher?

And second, is the web page credible?

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Links

Is this web page important? Do other websites link to this web page? Does the overall website have any authority? How popular is this website?

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So now that we know how websites work, lets look at our example.

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KeywordsWhat words will people type into the search engines to find what were selling?

Were going to start by considering the keywords. What will people type into Google to find what were selling?

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keyword choices

Green Teas?Green Tea?Loose Leaf Green Tea?Organic Green Tea????

Throw out example of web site designer?17

FreeGoogle Adwords keyword toolBing keyword research toolYour own traffic logsyour toolsPaidWordtrackerKeyword DiscoveryOmniture

There are a lot of free tools out there that will measure keywords and tell you what might be good keywords for you. In fact, Google has a very nice tool thats completely free. Also, if you have a website already, a good place to look is your own traffic logs.

Id also like to point out that there are tools that require a paid subscription that professionals frequently use, like myself, that give you more information than the free tools.

But the free tools will do just fine for today.

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what to considerSearch volumeIs this a keyword/phrase that people actually use?

CompetitivenessWill you be competing with millions or hundreds of websites?

Were going to look at some of those keyword tools, but first I want to explain what youre looking for. First of all, all of the tools (both free and paid) will give you a good idea of the search volume for the keywords youre researching. They will all help you compare how many people type organic green tea into Google, versus how many people type just green tea. But competitiveness is important to consider, as well. Im betting that green tea is probably pretty popular with searchers. But Im also betting that there is a ton of competition among those websites. Am I prepared to work hard to enter that competition? Because if there are millions of websites going after the first page of Google for green tea, and all I do is slap the word green tea on my website a few times, thats not going to get me anything. Its fine to want to go after highly competitive terms like green tea, but its important to know that they are competitive terms so that you can adopt a very aggressive strategy.19

This is what Googles free keyword research tool looks like. Its really designed to help businesses decide how to create their advertisements, but it will help us figure out how to select the right keywords, too.

KeywordsLocal Search Volume = by country for the most recent monthGlobalCompetition this shows us how many advertisers compete for these phrases. Youll notice that a lot of the specific product references face a lot of competition. This makes sense jasmine green tea is pretty specific, and it sounds like the person searching has a pretty good idea of what theyre looking for and theyre probably ready to buy so this would be an attractive phrase for an advertiser selling jasmine green tea.

So how do we translate this data into a strategy? First of all, Im going to avoid worrying too much about green tea because although theres a lot of search volume, theres also a fair amount of competition, too. I really like benefits of green tea theres a lot of volume, and not so much competition.

So maybe I want to target benefits of green tea and in fact I can start a list of keywords that Id like to target.

LETS TAKE A MOMENT HERE, AND PULL OUT YOUR PENCILS, AND THINK ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS AND THE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES YOU SELL, AND WHAT KEYWORDS YOU THINK SOMEONE MIGHT TYPE INTO GOOGLE TO FIND A BUSINESS LIKE YOURS, THAT YOU CAN RESEARCH WHEN YOU GET BACK TO YOUR OFFICE.21

where do we put our keywords?

So now that were starting to grow our list of keywords, we need to know what to do with them!You need a keyword strategy for EACH PAGE of your website. For every page on your website, you need to choose a really strong keyword. Its very smart to stick with one topic per page since that way youre making it as easy as possible for the Google computer program to figure out what your page is about. Put that top keyword in your page title, your page description, the heading on the page, use it in anchor links to that page elsewhere on your website, and add it several times throughout the content of the page. You dont need to stuff the page with the keyword (Google doesnt like that), you still have to create a page that sounds good to the ear, but use the phrase as often as you can without it sounding off.22

I also want to make sure that everyone understands how page titles and page descriptions work? Every time you add a page to your website (or every time your web designer does), you have to give the page a title and a description. When Google brings up the results to a search engine query, the page title is what it shows in the large blue underlined letters. The page description is what it shows below, the little snippet from the page that gives the reader more information about whats actually on the page. Google loves seeing keywords in the page title and the page description. Its one of the first places Google looks when its trying to figure out what your page is about. So this screen shot shows the results I got when I typed Green Tea Benefits into Google. The first spot, for Lipton, is paid. The next slots, that dont have the orange-ish background, are the organic results, which these websites get through their search engine optimization. 23

ExamplePage Title: Page Description: Keywords:

Green Tea Harmony Your source for quality organic green tea products.Home

Products

Products

Products

Okay, so lets get back to our example. Were going to start creating our website, and we may as well start with the home page. Here is sort of a rough layout of what my page is ultimately going to look like, and we can start filling in some of the blocks. So lets start with our meta tags. I know I like the phrase green tea benefits, so thats what Im going to base my homepage on.24

ExamplePage Title: Green Tea Benefits | Green Tea HarmonyPage Description: Green tea benefits your health in fabulous ways! Buy some todayKeywords: Green Tea Benefits


Products

Products

Products

So now I need to consider the content. I start with the header.25



Products

Products

ProductsGreen Tea Benefits Your Health!

My meta tags are pretty good, but I need a header for the page, and I need that header to include my keyword. Ideally, I want to put my keyword as close to the beginning of the header as I can, so that Google absolutely understands what my page is about.26



Products

Products

ProductsGreen Tea Benefits Your Health!Blah blah blah green tea benefits blah blah blah.blah blah blah blah blah green tea. Benefits include blah blah blah.

I need at least a little bit of copy to introduce my site, and I want to make sure I include my keyword at least a couple of times to round out the page. One little side note for any wanna-be copywriters out there, Google doesnt pay attention to punctuation. So Google sees that last use of the keyword phrase simply as green tea benefits, but it could be a handy way to include the keyword phrase without sounding weird.The next thing to consider is my navigation menu. Im going to need to create some additional pages for this site, preferably one page per product, but what should I call the pages?27



Green Tea Matcha

Green Jasmine Tea

Green Tea BagsGreen Tea Benefits Your Health!Blah blah blah green tea benefits blah blah blah.blah blah blah blah blah green tea. Benefits include blah blah blah.

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Green Tea Matcha

Green Jasmine Tea

Green Tea BagsGreen Tea Benefits Your Health!Blah blah blah green tea benefits blah blah blah.blah blah blah blah blah green tea. Benefits include blah blah blah.

Green Tea Matcha from Japan

Green Jasmine Tea

Green Tea Bags

And maybe well want to add some visual interest to get people to click through to the other product pages, and of course well use our keywords as the text for the link. So now our homepage is really starting to come together. Weve still got a long way to go before we can be confident that this page will show up on the first page for the keywords Green Tea Benefits, but this is a good, solid start that we can build on.29





So now that we know how websites work, lets look at our example.

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Links


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To make search engines notice your site, you must build a site worth noticing.

There are a few pages that we need to create for this website, like pages for each of the products we sell. But if we want to make Google notice this site, weve got to build a site worth noticing, and that means adding a lot of content. But rather than adding content willy nilly, lets be smart about it and build a content strategy.

Think about blogging.

Create reports, surveys, expert interviews.

Use keyword research for ideas.32

recipe book

What if we created a recipe book that listed unique recipes that use green tea?33

press release

And what if we published a press release that announced the recipe book, and what if a local newspaper saw our press release and wrote an article about it, and their article was also posted online with a link to our website?34

blog

And what if we created a blog that included posts on all the different aspects of green tea, that kept people coming back to our website again and again?35

social media

And what if we posted updates about new blog posts and our recipe book on our facebook account?36

LinksIs this site important? Is this site authoritative? Is this site popular?


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Follow this simple formulato get search engines and customers to love your website.

All it takes is knowing what to do. And Im thrilled to say its not rocket science its as easy as t-2-3. You just need to follow three steps to get the search engines and your customers to love your website.38

toolsKeyword research:google.com/sktool/ https://adwords.google.com/select/keywordtoolexternal http://www.bing.com/toolbox/keywordshttp://www.vretoolbar.com/keywords/SEO:Google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverviewGoogle.com/analytics/homealexa.com/siteinfoSiteexplorer.search.yahoo.comBlogs:Seomoz.org/beginners.phpGoogleblog.blogspot.comMattcutts.com/blogSeomoz.org/blog.phpReading:Search Engine Optimization for Dummies

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SEO 101:How to get more people to your website

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Technology

SEO 101: How to Get More People to Your Website