Increase traffic to your website - part 1: SEO Basics
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Understand what SEO (search engine optimization) is all about. Learn what's important to the search engines, how to optimize your website content, and how to get more visitors to your site...for great online results!
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Increase traffic to your website - part 1: SEO Basics
- 1. Increase Traffic to your website [session 1]
- 2. mass media trends • TiVoTV • SubscriptionRadio • ElectronicNewspapers • Do Not Call RegistryTelemarketing • Recycle BinDirect Mail • Spam, opt-outEmail
- 4. how to get results Website SEO Link strategy Social Media
- 6. 2009 Search Engine Market Share Yahoo! Bing Ask 15% 9% 3% Source: seoconsultants.com
- 7. how does Google work? Google is a very, very complex computer program that: – Finds a link to a page, requests that page – Indexes each page for keywords – Ranks pages according to relevance and importance Takeaways: • Sites are indexed page by page. • No link? Google won’t find the page on its own. • Flash or images? Google has trouble reading them.
- 8. Google wants to know… 1. What is this page about? Keywords – url – title & meta tags – headings, font emphasis – content 2. How important is this page? Links – in-bound links – anchor text – authority/trust of domain – traffic
- 9. SEO starts with keyword choices Smart Keyword Choices On-Page Keyword Placement Content Creation Link Building (on- and off- page)
- 10. Example We are starting up a company that will sell high quality loose leaf green tea products… and we need to create a website!
- 12. keyword choices Green Teas? Green Tea? Loose Leaf Green Tea? Organic Green Tea? ???
- 13. Free… • Google’s keyword tool • Wordtracker’s keyword questions tool • Your own traffic logs your tools Paid… •Wordtracker •Keyword Discovery •Omniture
- 14. what to consider • Search volume – Is this a keyword/phrase that people actually use? • Competitiveness – Will you be competing with millions or hundreds of websites?
- 19. Exercise What might someone type into Google to find the products or services you sell?
- 20. where do I put my keywords? Keyword Strategy for EACH PAGE URL Page Title Description Tag Keyword Tag Header Subheads Anchor Links Content Density
- 22. Example Page Title: Page Description: Keywords: Green Tea Harmony Your source for quality organic green tea products. Home Products Products Products
- 23. Example Page Title: Green Tea Benefits | Green Tea Harmony Page Description: Green tea benefits your health in fabulous ways! Buy some today… Keywords: Green Tea Benefits Green Tea Harmony Your source for quality organic green tea products. Home Products Products Products
- 24. Example Page Title: Green Tea Benefits | Green Tea Harmony Page Description: Green tea benefits your health in fabulous ways! Buy some today… Keywords: Green Tea Benefits Green Tea Harmony Your source for quality organic green tea products. Home Products Products Products Green Tea Benefits Your Health!
- 25. Example Page Title: Green Tea Benefits | Green Tea Harmony Page Description: Green tea benefits your health in fabulous ways! Buy some today… Keywords: Green Tea Benefits Green Tea Harmony Your source for quality organic green tea products. Home Products Products Products Green 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….
- 26. Example Page Title: Green Tea Benefits | Green Tea Harmony Page Description: Green tea benefits your health in fabulous ways! Buy some today… Keywords: Green Tea Benefits Green Tea Harmony Your source for quality organic green tea products. Home Green Tea Matcha Green Jasmine Tea Green Tea Bags Green 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….
- 27. Example Page Title: Green Tea Benefits | Green Tea Harmony Page Description: Green tea benefits your health in fabulous ways! Buy some today… Keywords: Green Tea Benefits Green Tea Harmony Your source for quality organic green tea products. Home Green Tea Matcha Green Jasmine Tea Green Tea Bags Green 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
- 29. Wordtracker’s Keyword Question Tool
- 31. what is this page about?
- 32. Google understands this page much better…
- 33. what is this page about?
- 34. this is exactly what I’m looking for!
- 35. Google loves consistent links!
- 36. Google loves clear page titles and descriptions
- 38. (some) components of Google Ranking 1. What is this page about? Keywords – url – title & meta tags – headings, font emphasis – content 2. How important is this page? Links – in-bound links – anchor text – authority/trust of domain – traffic Approx. “weight” of link popularity to Google search algo Multiple sources
- 39. Link Building
- 40. not just any links • Links from trusted domains • Links from popular sites • Links from authorities in your topic Note: Avoid schemes promising thousands of links. Now, it’s trusted links that count.
- 41. where to get them • Blogs (your blog, other blogs, twitter, technorati.com) • Article directories (ezinearticles, bestmanagementarticles, isnare, goarticles) • PR (industry news sites, local sites) • High trust directories (google, yahoo etc, retail directories, yellow pages listings, industry directories) • Event sites (depends on your business) • Associations, partners, affiliations (Chamber, synergistic businesses) • Coupon sites • Social media
- 42. Website Contact Info Ad Rates Column 1 Notes Tour Brokers viator.com Called 866-648-5873 (number listed on website). Was told to send email to product@looktours.com to find out pricing to list company information. Lists and books tour information for cities around the world. Well-organized website - Chicago is not clearly listed on the home page, but if you search for Chicago, several attractions, including segway tour options, appear. chicagtours.us work through a broker - Alcatraz Media they work through Alcatraz Media; great site segwaysightseeing.com 408-754-5328: TourCorp.com Inc. 165 Jefferson Street Suite 2E San Francisco, CA 94133 Phone: 408-754-5346 can book online with one competitor for $65. worldwide glide is a tour operator with suppliers. go card Michelle Craig; 312-282-4555 user gets 15% off by showing card smartdestinations.com this site just links to the GOCard groupon see http://www.groupon.com/deals/steves-segway- tours?utm_campaign=steves-segway- tours&utm_medium=email&utm_source=n ewsletter priceline isango.com Surbhi Bansal - surbhi.bansal@isango.com 20% margins; pay by wire transfer great-looking site. Global reach Paid Listings hereschicago.com Jim Grillo chicagofun.com Nora Anderson: 630-665-0300 Yearly listing for $445 up and coming site cctb added more categories miles media ( part of cctb svc) contracted for upgraded listing, banner ad conciergepreferred.com left msg with VP advertising, Jim Gilligan, 312-360-1769, cell 312- 401-0541 all access pass to attractions, dining, nightlife,shopping, entertainment; for either Chicago or St. Louis Free Listings enjoyillinois.com state of illinois travel site explorechicago.org free city of Chicago toursim site sightseeingchicago.com Please contact your sales consultant at 708-567-9848 or by email at Jim@SightSeeingChicago.com also have free listing free lisitng - but major tab on home page for tours links to Viator ettractions.com Kirby Palait <kpalait@ctmmedia.com> more features/content can be posted and optimized ofr mobile display for $299/yr. same guy who does the rack cards chicagotraveler.com Tour operators can submit information for posting at: http://chicagotraveler.com/submit- your-site.htm To advertise and get an advanced listing, need to submit information to Sales@ChicagoTraveler.com Nicely organized site - has a listing specifically for Segway tours: includes a description of the tour (five currently listed). citydiscovery.com online form good, solid site; already has a Segway company listed chicago.metromix.com Submit information via email only. Instructions at: http://chicago.metromix.com/page/g et_listed Listing is free - advertising available for a fee. Seems to be focused on restaurants and special events, but a search for "segway tours" does yield a few results. Since this is a popular site, think it would be worthwhile. gochicago.com contact@gochicago.com; Stanton, Michelle [Michelle.Stanton@illinois.gov] Chicago and Illinois Toursit Office site; front page has link to Bike Chicago's website segwayguidedtours.com online form to update nice listing - easy to follow Blogs and Feedback sites 10best.com/chicago,il Bill_Drolet@timeinc.com nice-looking site; no Segways listed; travelers can post recommendations tripadvisor.com no way to submit directly they get a live feed from their commerce partners chicagonow.com/ they offer paid advertising blog site for Chicagoans daily email to subsribers; edgy, somewhat irreverant There are a multitude of sites on which to list your business. Some are free, some carry an advertising fee.
- 44. how to get them: publish • Unique, valuable content (tips, lists, expert info, articles, white papers, slides) • Freebies (icons, white papers, videos…) • Software, tools, widgets, themes, embeddable content, quizzes • Books and ebooks • Reviews (amazon) • Comments • Leverage social media services – Photos, presentations, videos, podcasts, PR…
- 46. measure along the way Traffic Rank: Alexa.com Page Rank: Google toolbar, PRChecker.info Site traffic stats: Google Analytics, your hosting company Inbound Links: siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com “PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms” - Google
- 49. Action! One thing I’ll commit to apply from today’s session
- 50. how to get results Website SEO Link strategy Social Media
- 51. leverage what you have Your website Press releases Slides Images Blog Video Articles
- 52. post content on the Web Your website Press releases Slides Images Blog Video Articles
- 53. Thank you! Our next session: Social Media Marketing Will be held on Friday, April 30th 7:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m (check naperville.net for location) Pat Price Pat@ThePriceGroup.biz 630.717.8332 Beth Carter Beth@FreelanceWritingSolutions.com 630.330.9825
- 55. the challenge
Editor's Notes
- Open: analogy to remodeler Kudos to the group Introductions: name, company, skill level, and what they’d like from today
- First, set some context Let’s look at trends in mass media and our responses (review)
- Do what the big guys do. Ad dollars are shifting from push to pull. And here’s what I mean by that. In recent years there’s been a shift in marketing. (review slide)
- The good news is that the Internet is a much more cost-effective medium than traditional mass media. But, we need to keep up with the competition and the times. It used to be that we’d put up a website and figure we’re good to go. That’s fine if we have an online brochure. But if you want to be found, you have to do more. This chart shows what else has to happen. You’ll see that results for just posting a website are limited. If you add in SEO, it gets better. Focus on build links, better yet. And if you engage in SM, that’s when things can really take off. What do we mean by these things? Well, that the focus of our presentation today. We’ll belooking at ways to optimize your website through these first two and a half methods. And our next session will continue with the last piece – SM. We’re going to focus on making our site “attractive, searchable” to search engines. Because if you can come up high in an organic search, you’re in!
- Defn of organic search; Importance of the number one organic result. That’s what we’re all looking for. Everything else is a detour on the way. Yes, top sponsored results get high visibility and a reasonable number of click throughs, but more often than not, it’s because they happened to catch our attention while we were looking for the top organic listing. With rare exceptions, we’re not looking for a sponsored result. The Golden Triangle (eyetracking study)and the Google Effect In looking at the Golden Triangle, there’s an important point to keep in mind. The Golden Triangle exists more because of the effectiveness of Google rather than the searcher’s preoccupation with position. In the end, the number one factor in precipitating a click through on a particular listing was relevant words in the title, with relevant words in the description being second most important. Position came in after these in significance. So why the Triangle? Why the overwhelming number of click throughs on the number one listings in two different studies we’ve conducted. It appears that the predominance of click throughs on the number one listing comes more from a conditioned behavioral response due to a natural pattern in how we assimilate information
- Today’s talk we’ll focus on Google – Why? They’re the biggest
- So we’re going to take a minute to get really basic here and talk about how Google works. Take away here – Google considers your website on a page-by-page basis. So it behooves you to consider your search engine optimization strategy on a page-by-page basis as well.
- When Google finds your 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 it’s 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, I’d like to focus on that #1 up there, because when you’re talking search engines, that’s where it all starts.
- The results you’re going to see on the search engines are really all about the keywords you choose to use on your webpage. Everything else you do will depend upon your keywords. So how do you find those keywords?
- Explain about Teaquilibrium… When you create a website, it’s fun to talk with the web designer about colors, and I want it to look like this and do that…and that’s all important. But if you want people to be able to find your website on the search engines, then before you write one word of content for your site, you need to know what keywords you will use.
- What you have to figure out, as PRECISELY as you can, is…
- Throw out example of web site designer?
- There are a lot of free tools out there that will measure keywords and tell you what might be good keywords for you. My personal favorites are a tool that Google created and one created by a company called Wordtracker. Also, if you have a website already, a good place to look is your own traffic logs. I’d 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.
- We’re going to look at some of those keyword tools, but first I want to explain what you’re 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 you’re 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. I’m betting that “green tea” is probably pretty popular with searchers. But I’m 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, that’s not going to get me anything. It’s fine to want to go after highly competitive terms like “green tea”, but it’s important to know that they are competitive terms so that you can adopt a very aggressive strategy.
- Keywords Local Search Volume = by country for the most recent month Global Advertiser Competition – refers to “pay-per-click” or paid search engine results; gives you a rough idea of the relative competitiveness of a keyword
- I just wanted to show you for a minute what I like about Wordtracker, which is a paid tool that many copywriters use. Now, the Searches column is slightly different than Google’s tool, because it uses an amalgamation of other search engines to come up with an approximate figure. What I’m paying attention to, though, is not the absolute figure, but rather the relative position of any keyword, relative to other keywords. But the “In Anchor and Text” column is what I really like about this tool. This column shows me how many websites are actively competing for that keyword. The two KEI columns refer to Keyword Effectiveness Index, which essentially is a formula that compares the number of searches to the number of competing websites. A higher KEI means indicates a more favorable opportunity for me. So first of all, right off the bat, I can see that my fears about the competitiveness of the keywords “green tea” were right. There’s a lot of search volume every month, but way too many websites competing for those keywords. I just don’t have the budget or the time I’d need to really and truly compete with all of them. So what’s next on my list…”green tea benefits.” It’s interesting to compare that to the fourth item, “benefits of green tea.” It’s close, but it looks like slightly more people use “green tea benefits” over “benefits of green tea.” But look at the difference in the competition; 1600 websites use the phrase “benefits of green tea” while only 455 use “green tea benefits”. That’s fantastic to know – and guess which phrase I’d rather use for my website?
- So because these two tools use different ways to measure search volume, there’s some discrepancy among the actual numbers. Google shows a bunch of other keywords in between Green Tea and Green Tea Benefits, but we can still make a few basic decisions on our keyword strategy. First of all, I’m going to avoid worrying too much about “green tea” because there’s just too much competition for me to mount a really effective strategy around that word. Second, green tea extracts and green tea diets aren’t really what I’m going after with my business. But I like the idea of green tea benefits, and that phrase ranks highly on both of the tools I’ve looked at. That gives me a good start, an option that might work well on my home page. And this list can give me some ideas to think about as I start adding additional pages, too. Green Tea Bags, for example. Green Tea Matcha looks like there’s less competition than Matcha Green Tea or Green Tea Powder (which is what Matcha really is). I might also consider using Green Jasmine Tea over Jasmine Green Tea, too. And so forth and so forth. LET’S 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.
- So now that we’re 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. It’s very smart to stick with one topic per page – since that way you’re 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 don’t need to stuff the page with the keyword (Google doesn’t 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.”
- 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 what’s actually on the page. Google loves seeing keywords in the page title and the page description. It’s one of the first places Google looks when it’s 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 don’t have the orange-ish background, are the organic results, which these websites get through their search engine optimization.
- Okay, so let’s get back to our example. We’re 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 let’s start with our meta tags. I know I like the phrase “green tea benefits,” so that’s what I’m going to base my homepage on.
- So now I need to consider the content. I start with the header.
- 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.
- 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 doesn’t 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. I’m going to need to create some additional pages for this site, preferably one page per product, but what should I call the pages?
- And maybe we’ll want to add some visual interest to get people to click through to the other product pages, and of course we’ll use our keywords as the text for the link. So now our homepage is really starting to come together. We’ve 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.
- 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, we’ve got to build a site worth noticing, and that means adding a lot of content. But rather than adding content willy nilly, let’s be smart about it and build a content strategy.
- This is one of my favorite free keyword research tools. … All of these research tools will help you not only build a solid base for your website, but as you grow your website, they’ll help you grow in a smart way.
- So we’ve covered on-page elements, now let’s talk about the off-page elements Why? Two-thirds…
- Defn: links, internal and inbound links
- How is authority developed?: - from great, themed content on the site - links from sites with a high trust or backlinks with related keywords and phrases All of the “impressions” add up to creare trust. It’s about links AND about proximity and how concentrated your content and keywords are.
- Review page Blogs – link to your site – blog entries show up well in search engines; you can search blogs, specifically Online directories - rank well in search engines and are spidered regularly – Yahoo!local; Bing: craigslist, merchantcircle;local.com;yellowpages.com - focus on quality and relevance hint: check the pagerank; Action: create a list of directories where you can get listed
- Here’s a portion of the sites that one client is listed – or seeking to get listed –on. These are places that her prospect would go to look for her type of business. What can you do? Do a search for xxxxxx industry directories. The ones that come to the top are the ones you want! Or do a search as a prospect would. Many times you’ll get directory listings. Again, those are the ones you want.
- Content: stick to your main topic – if all over the place, lose ability to define self as an authority – loses relevance score Review slide E-books: to the right aurdience promotes referrals and “viral” effects action>: create an inventory of what you can post; and what you’d like to post
- Examples of sites where you can list, join, publish etc.
- How do you know how you’re doing? Measure against yourself and your competitors. By the way, you can get most of this info for any site – yours and others. These are three measures that I find extremely useful. (There are so many more – but to start, these are good.) (You can also measure grow Alexa traffic rank – measures millions of sites: based on a combination of the number of page views and users; a lower ran k is better PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects Google’s view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance. Listed on a scale of 1- 10, where 10 is the best Inbound links: and here’s an example of what that looks like…
- Just to give you an idea of what some of those external links look like (review a few)
- No need to take notes – these are in your handout
- But let’s create some leverage. We talked about posting things to your site, Then optimizing the content and keywords, And this last section discussed ways to increase incoming links. To really accelerate your online presence, online social media presents a huge opportunity. Never have we been able to reach so many, so quickly, with so little investment.
- Let’s take it up a notch. On your website you might post things like this…
- To keep the slide clean, I didn’t list the many, many more sites that are out there! Now, your content can be found more easily, by many more people.
- Let’s carry this offer to a bricks and mortar analogy. Think of the search results page as a shopping mall. Think of the eye activity as foot traffic. In a mall, you have anchor tenants who attract the majority of traffic. Usually, malls try to have 2 or 3 anchor tenants distributed evenly around the perimeter of the mall so foot traffic is generated moving from anchor tenant to anchor tenant. All the other tenants take advantage of this by catching the attention of the foot traffic as they walk by. The Google search results page has one anchor, and it’s usually in the upper left corner. The anchor is the number one organic result. That’s what we’re all looking for. Everything else is a detour on the way. Yes, top sponsored results get high visibility and a reasonable number of click throughs, but more often than not, it’s because they happened to catch our attention while we were looking for the top organic listing. With rare exceptions, we’re not looking for a sponsored result. Let’s go back to our analogy. What would happen if a mall had only one anchor in a corner of the mall that every single shopper went to see? You would see a flurry of foot traffic in this corner of the mall and little everywhere else. The further you got from the anchor, the less traffic you would see. That’s the Golden Triangle. And in this case, the anchor is very easy to see. It’s firmly established in the upper left corner of the search results page. That’s where our eyes first go to see the top organic listing. We may have to reorient ourselves from that orientation point, but that’s where we’ll start. The Golden Triangle and the Google Effect In looking at the Golden Triangle, there’s an important point to keep in mind. The Golden Triangle exists more because of the effectiveness of Google rather than the searcher’s preoccupation with position. Let us introduce you to the Google Effect. One of the advantages we had that led to us to being able to separate out the importance of position from other factors was a study that was being run at the same time as the eyetracking study we conducted with the University of Tulsa. In this study, we did a structured conjoint analysis of all the factors that lead to search searchers clicking through on a particular listing in a given page of search results. We looked at position, presence of trusted brands, presence of trusted URLs, relevant words from the search queries in the title, relevant words from the search query in descriptions and the presence of words like “review” and “consumer information”. In the end, the number one factor in precipitating a click through on a particular listing was relevant words in the title, with relevant words in the description being second most important. Position came in after these in significance. So why the Triangle? Why the overwhelming number of click throughs on the number one listings in two different studies we’ve conducted (this eye tracking study and the Business to Business study done in October, 2004)? Obviously, position is important. It appears that the predominance of click throughs on the number one listing comes more from a conditioned behavioral response due to a natural pattern in how we assimilate information
- Prospects are changing their behavior – (newspapers filing bankruptcy, magazines going out of business, etc.) With traditional marketing methods finding it more and more difficult to reach prospects -what’s a company to do!