Slides for Guardian Media Network seminar on Search Engine Optimisation

1. Understand and Master SEO
Optimising your web presence

2. What is SEO?
Search engine optimisation is the
process of improving the visibility of
a website or specific web page to a
search engine. This is done by
observing the rules used by search
engines to rank content, and
maximising a page’s potential
visibility.

3. Across the web
On the page

4. Things we will avoid
• SEO Spam: Hidden text & links,
keyword repetition etc
• Duplicate title tags
• Pages with multiple URLs
• Non optimised image & video
content

5. We will put maximum effort into:
• Planning with specific goals in mind
• Checking & improving content, user journeys
& appropriate tagging
• Perfecting on page optimisation
• Using analytics to perfect goal attainment
• Tracking & improving referral performance
• Courting & creating quality back links

6. Your personal SEO Plan
Learning & Planning

7. 1. Organisational Goals
Primary Business Goal eg. eCommerce Transaction
Additional Goal eg. Email sign up
Additional Goal eg.ePetition
Additional Goal eg. Awareness raising, content
sharing

8. Bringing traffic to your site isn’t
the same as achieving
company goals

9. Is your business ready for
traffic?
Running a very successful SEO campaign
can be brilliant for your bottom line if your
organisation’s products and services are
scalable.
If you run a small start up, ensure that you
have contingencies in place for a successful
campaign.

10. 2. Website readiness
• Does your site facilitate reaching
organisational goals?
• Are there specific paths that users can
take which lead to conversion?
• What does conversion look like?
• Where do visitors land?

11. The good news?
Good SEO practice is strongly aligned with
good accessibility and content practice. In
general, actions that assist SEO will also
help improve your site’s usability and
relevance.

12. How?
• Using text and detailed descriptions makes your
site more visible to search engines
• Carefully placed, appropriate keywords help guide
visitors to the most relevant content
• HTML descriptions of flash files and .gif images
assist screen readers and search engines
• More regularly updated content is good for visitors
and SEO
• Engines love strong site navigation

13. Exercise
Descriptions and Alt tags

14. <imgsrc=“img2756203.jpg” alt=“”>
VS
<imgsrc=“puppy.jpg” alt=“puppy”>
VS
<imgsrc=“puppy.jpg” alt=“dalmatian puppy playing fetch”>
DON’T DO THIS:
<imgsrc="puppy.jpg" alt="puppy dog baby
dog pup pups puppies doggies pups litter puppies dog retriever
labrador wolfhound setter pointer puppy jack russell terrier
puppies dog food cheap dogfood puppy food"/>

15. Task:
Provide good context for
your image on the page
Image file name:
Alt Tag:
Keywords to scatter through
copy:

16. 2. Website Readiness
Feature Exists Planned Rating
About Page / Org history
Product / Service Info
Purchasing / Donation
Customer Support
News pages / Blog
Contact / Lead form
Offline Contact details
Bricks & Mortar Business info
Links to other resources
Educational Materials

17. Who makes these changes?
• Editing HTML on all site pages
• Creating Robots.txt files
• XML site map
• Customer facing site map
• Converting graphics to optimised text
• Rewriting page text for optimisation
• Ensuring Flash files have alternative
HTML text

18. 3. Conversion Goals
Goal Target Conversion Potential
Conversion Audience Page Landing Page
Newsletter sign up Alumni Thank you page Latest news

19. Tracking & Improving
Goals & Conversions

22. Conversions as Goals

23. Collecting Keywords
• Put yourself in the mind of your target
audience – what search terms will they
use?
• Prevalent words on your site
• Your website statistics
• Industry media
• Internal searches
• Competitor’s website
• Related search results

24. wordle.net

26. What does it mean?
• Which keywords are creating the most visits?
• Are they also the words with the most Pages /
Visit? Average time on site?
• Which words have the highest bounce rate?
• Which landing pages are these words leading
to?
• How do these relate back to your conversion
goals?

27. Data collection time!

28. Relevance, Popularity &
Competition
Keyword (s) Relevance Popularity Competition
Digital High 74,000 Low
Switchover
Legal Support High 60,500 Medium
Strategic High 480 Medium
Business
Consultancy

30. Compiling your shortlist
• Combine to create long tail search terms
• Choose appropriate landing pages
• Value of keyword conversions
• Beware of single word groups
• Be discerning when deciding relevance
• How many sponsored listings are there for a
given term?
• Google allintitle:“keyword”

31. Ranking your shortlisted
Keywords
• Search your keywords on google/yahoo/msn
• Does your site appear within the top 30? Take a
note of the number
• Is the result Web / Image / Video / Directory?
• Look at organic searches only
This is a good time to note where competitors rank
for your chosen terms, as well as any potential
broken links to your site

32. Don’t forget Queries

33. Small note on Paid Promotion
• Use Google Analytics to tag URLs for
banner campaigns so that source data can
be tracked in your reports
• Use auto tagging for AdWords campaigns
• Link paid search through to named
conversions on Google Analytics to ensure
reliable tracking

35. Is your site indexed?
• Google / MSN site:yourdomain.com
• Take a note of how many links are listed
• Check to make sure there are no old
pages or pages you want to keep unlisted
• Search for URLs with “” to double check
each page has been listed

38. Keeping Search bots off your
site
• Robots.txt (see robottxt.org for more info)
• URL removal tool (Google Webmaster)
Not linking to a page will not ensure that it
can’t be found. For example if that page
became a referral page for another site, they
may list it at some point.

40. Set a baseline

42. Choose your metrics carefully
• Unique visitors / visits
• Page views
• Pages / visit
• Average time on site
• Bounce rate
• Referral URLs
• Traffic from search engines
• Geotargeting (webmaster tools)

43. B2B vs B2C
Advantages & Challenges

44. Business to Business
• Your target audience is much more well
defined and therefore more easily found
and targeted
• High %age of conversions which are
usually of higher value
• Large amounts of text on your website
which can be more easily optimised

45. Challenges
• High quality links can be harder to come
by due to the smaller audiences involved
• Campaigns can be harder to judge due to
the longer conversion cycle
• Dynamic, rich media content is not so
prevalent on B2B websites & therefore
less potential for sharing

46. Business to Consumer
• Access to wide and varied content raising
potential for sharing
• Potential for user generated content like
reviews
• Much more defined relationship between
sale value and SEO value
• Higher potential for quality back links from
large news websites

47. Challenges
• Varied audience with a range of online
skills (unpredictable)
• Who are your competition? Online is a
completely different landscape
• Less well defined sales process which
usually includes branding as one of the
goals

48. Organisation size
Being a large organisation can be great for
newsworthiness but detrimental when it
comes to the following:
• Large pay per click campaigns can be
unwieldy
• Brand continuity across departments
• Clarity of campaign message
• Old links and out of date content

49. Organisation size
Being a small organisation means you can
be more agile when it comes to web updates
and campaign tailoring. Challenges come in
the form of :
• Size
• Budget
• Resources

50. 4. Action your findings
Does this page have… Y/N
A unique HTML Page title?
Target keywords in the title?
At least 400 words HTML text?
Exact keyword phrases within the body text?
HTML text links from the homepage?
HTML text links from other site pages?
Images / Video with ALT tags and title descriptions?

51. Right click on any
page and click
“view source”

52. Meta descriptions
can be used by
search engines to
describe links

53. Writing content for SEO
On & off your own site pages

54. On Page
• Optimised content is a means to an end – it
has to appeal to your audience!
• Less is definitely more when it comes to
scattering keywords throughout your text
• Vary the versions of a keyword group, do not
replace every generic term to the detriment of
readability
• Split long tail terms with punctuation and line
breaks

55. Where should you include
keywords?
• Headlines
• Sub Headlines
• Image Descriptions and Alt tags
• Main article copy (conservatively)
• Link text
• Navigation links
• Calls to action

56. However, don’t get hung up on:
• Keyword density
• Keyword prominence
• Subparts / Stems (read, reads etc)
• Related terms
• Synonyms
• Modifiers (science fiction, supernatural
fiction)

57. These things are important but should be
used as part of your natural writing style.
Again, copy that is designed to appeal to
your users naturally lends itself to including
your keywords within the elements of a
page.
Google uses a multitude of metrics to
determine your page relevance and rank.
You will never truly know exactly how their
algorithm works!

58. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXJBzFd8z
XI&feature=my_liked_videos&list=LLPWfVtcW
1NLSmK_hDGnHDZg

59. Integrated Blog
• Is your CMS system SEO friendly?
• Plan & schedule updates from a range of
contributors including clients
• Don’t get hung up on your keywords when it
comes to blogging
• Make the content easy to share & available in
different formats (like video / text / PDF)
• Spend time on community engagement
• Remember links (especially internal)

60. Exercise
Contributor list

61. Blog Schedule
• Staff from different
Who do you have access to
who could provide quality
departments
contributions?
• Clients
What kind of content could
you easily produce?
• Potential clients
• Suppliers
• End users
• Sector bloggers

62. 5. Quality link planning
• Rediscover content you already have – can it be
syndicated?
• Make a list of potential blogs to connect with
• Do you comment on other blogs?
• Who do you send your press releases to?
• Offer to be a guest blogger / writer
• Spend time and resources creating content to
place on reputable sites with strong page rank

63. Requesting a link
• Who is linking to your top 3 competitors – can you
get in on the action?
• Do any of your top clients have websites?
• Which sites come up top in your keyword
searches – do they take submissions?
• Do any sites mention your company but do not link
to your pages?
• Are you a member of any business associations?
• Sympathetic campaigning sites for charities

64. Approaching bloggers
• Be familiar with their content, spend time
interacting on the site
• It’s about content that’s right for their
audience, not selling your website to the blog
owner
• Do your research and mention past posts
• Be polite – your letter could easily be
published
• If you would like a review, send a free sample
but accept that you have no control over their
opinions

65. Assess if a link is worthwhile
• Are your keywords within the article on the site or -
even better - do they perform the function of the
link?
• Are both sites aimed at the same audience?
• Is the link coming from a flattering article?
• Is it linking to the most appropriate page?
These are things that search engines are looking for
too, and it helps them assess both the link and your
site.

66. STOP! Don’t forget internal links
Every opportunity to link to content within
your site is another pathway for search
engines to find your content.
Avoid “click here” and use keyword rich text
for maximum results.

67. Directories
Generic:
• Dmoz.org (The Open Directory)
• Dir.Yahoo.com (Yahoo Open Directory)
• Google.com/Places (Bricks & Mortar Business)
Sector specific
• Be wary of directories that charge
• Are your competitors there?
• Check the site back links & indexed pages

68. Social Search
Where does social networking fit in?

69. Social networking
• The more your content is shared the better
it is for your SEO
• Make sharing easy by embedding share
options on your pages
• Encourage employees to get involved in
the sharing love
• Don’t forget social bookmarking!

72. EU Cookie Law
Help!

75. Early days
• Too early for any statistically relevant data
on how many users will “opt out”
• More important than ever to make sure
you use specific, traceable links in
advertising, link building and social media
(UTM)
• Use Cookiepedia.co.uk to help you put
together your own opt in options
• Show willing. Don’t panic.

76. Things to remember
• Have holistic SEO practices to ensure
you’re not caught out by changes in
algorithms and trends
• Don’t stop when you get to the top –
expand!
• Always take quality over quantity whether
it’s links, leads or keywords
• Promote your whole site, not just the
homepage

77. Useful resources
• Mashable.com
• TheNextWeb.com
• Technorati.com
• Reddit.com
• SocialMediaToday.com
• FastCompany.com
• BitRebels.com

78. Jennifer D Begg
@livefreerange
jennifer@livefreerange.com
www.livefreerange.com