IntroductionWelcome| 00:04 |
The Internet has fundamentally changed
the way we live our lives since the first
| | 00:08 |
page popped up on the World Wide
Web, just two short decades ago.
| | 00:12 |
Next to email, what we do most with the
Internet is search, and that's because
| | 00:16 |
search is really the gateway
to everything else we do online.
| | 00:20 |
In this course we'll walk
through the fundamentals of Search Engine
| | 00:23 |
Optimization, or SEO for short.
| | 00:26 |
While SEO can become very technical, and
very complicated, very quickly, in this
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course we'll focus on the fundamentals.
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We'll talk about how to find and
research the keywords that you want your
| | 00:37 |
pages to rank for, how to come up with
an optimized content for those target
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keywords, and the importance of links
from other websites and social exposure.
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We'll look at the concepts and
we'll even dive into some code.
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And along the way, we'll
touch on e-commerce, local, and even
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international considerations.
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Last, we'll focus on measurement
strategies that can help you understand just
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what you're getting back from your
investment in search engine optimization.
| | 01:04 |
The Internet is now simply a part of our
everyday lives, and as consumers we rely
| | 01:09 |
on search engines to show
us what we're looking for.
| | 01:12 |
As a business it's no longer good
enough to just be online, these days you
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have to be found.
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| Using the Facilitator's Guide| 00:00 |
We have included a Facilitator's Guide
that all lynda.com members can download
| | 00:04 |
and use to follow along with this course.
| | 00:07 |
This guide includes discussion
questions and activities for those of you who
| | 00:10 |
would like to work on this course as a group.
| | 00:13 |
Now, let's get started.
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1. Overview of Search Engine OptimizationWhat is search engine optimization (SEO)?| 00:00 |
Plain and simple, Search Engine
Optimization is the process of making
| | 00:04 |
improvements on and off your
website in order to gain more exposure in
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search engine results.
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And more exposure in search engine
results will ultimately lead to more visitors
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finding you for the right
reasons and going to your website.
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In order to understand what
improvements will affect search engine results,
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let's take a step back and understand
the goal of the search engines themselves.
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At the heart of it all, search engines
are just trying to find and understand all
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the content out there on the Internet,
and then quickly deliver relevant and
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authoritative results based on any
phrase that a user might be searching for.
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First, let's talk about relevance.
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When a user searches for something like
California hotels, search engines want
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to show a list of results that are
relevant to the topic of California hotels.
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Search engines will analyze all of the
web pages that they've ever visited and
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pick out the pages that they believe are
the most relevant to California hotels.
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They determine this by evaluating lots
of different factors, including how your
| | 01:03 |
content is written and implemented in
code, as well as how other websites around
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the Internet are linking to you.
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And all of this stuffed into a
very big, very complex, and very
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proprietary algorithm.
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At the end of the day, and in a fraction
of a second, a search engine is then able
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to rank and display all of those web
pages in order of relevance to that phrase
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that the user just typed in, California Hotels.
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This is very important to
understand, because search engines make a very
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clear distinction between content
that's about California Hotels versus
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content relevant for other phrases, like
California resorts, or a phrase like beach getaway.
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Search engines are able to understand
quite a bit about semantic and thematic
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connections between words and concepts.
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Take another example: dog crates. A
search engine knows that pages selling dog
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crates are extremely relevant to that
search query, but it also knows that
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websites about pet
carriers are also very relevant.
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It also knows that a website promoting
things like pet food and dog toys might
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also be relevant to that
search query, but perhaps less so.
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The other factor that influences
search engine exposure is Authority.
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In other words, out there on the largely
lawless World Wide Web, where anyone can
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post anything, is your website a
trusted place on the Internet that the search
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engines would want to show to their users?
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One very common way that search engines
determine the authority of a web page or
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a domain is by evaluating what other
websites think of you, and this can be
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measured through the links out
there that are pointing to your website.
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You can think of a link
as a vote on the Internet.
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A web page linking to your website is
almost like saying, hey, I trust your
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content enough that I am wiling to
reference your page and possibly even send
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traffic to your site.
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It's a vote of trust, and the search
engines pick up on this as they scour the
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web reading, evaluating, and storing all
the data that they can find on all the
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pages of the Internet.
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But it's important to know right from
the start that this not just a popularity
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contest where you try to
accumulate the most votes on the Internet.
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Search engines have safeguards in
place to prevent this kind of abuse, and
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instead place an emphasis
on the quality of a link.
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For example, a search engine is more
likely to trust a link if it comes from a
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well respected or industry-related
site, like an industry leading blog or a
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nonprofit or government agency
that's involved in your field of work.
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A link coming from a one month-old site
that has nothing to do with you or your
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industry, right above some text that
says "I'll link to anything you want for five
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dollars" is not going to
be valued nearly as much.
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From the search engines' perspective,
some links are more effective than others
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in casting their vote to your website
and determining your site's authority.
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So you might think of this whole system
as a weighted democracy where some votes
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are worth more than others.
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Understanding how important both
relevance and authority are to a search
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engine, will help us to both
understand and improve these factors, and will
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ultimately lead to better search engine
exposure and more visitors to the pages
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of our websites.
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| Reading a search engine results page| 00:00 |
Before we dive into working on getting
your website to show up in the search
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results, it's important to understand
what those results actually look like.
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Although there a lot of search
engines around the world, and they all have some
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distinct differences, there are some
common characteristics that their search
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engine results pages, or SERPs, may have.
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One thing that we're probably
going to find, are some paid listings.
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Paid listings are very different
than the traditional organic or natural
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listings that we'll be
focusing on for our SEO efforts.
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These paid listings are actually
advertisements, and programs like Google's
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AdWords or Microsoft's adCenter allow
advertisers to bid on and place these ads
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in the search results page.
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A typical search engine results page
will have 10 organic results that link out
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to different web pages.
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Each result might look a little
different, but they'll all have at least a
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headline, a description, and a visible URL.
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It's important to know what these
components look like, because later in this
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course, we'll be modifying and
optimizing these particular elements that may
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appear for an individual result.
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One important thing to point out is
that the Internet has changed a lot since
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search engines first appeared, and
there's lot of content on the web beyond
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just text and web pages.
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Search engines have done a good job of
keeping pace, and while we still view web
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page results, they've also begun
returning things like video, images, products,
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and maps on a search engine results page.
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A common way of describing this would be
that we now have blended search results
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that include all kinds of different content.
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Sometimes the blended results will
have a group of video clips that match a
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user's search query, or it might show a
list of local businesses accompanied by a map.
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It could be a group of images and prices
for a particular product that you can buy.
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Social signals allow search engines to
return more personalized results, like
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news articles that your friends have
shared. These results can show up in a
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variety of different ways, based on what
the search engines think is relevant and
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appropriate to the user's search query.
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The important thing to remember is that
you have a lot of opportunities to have
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your content show up in the
search engine results pages.
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And the more you understand how
search engines decide to show results to
| | 02:10 |
users, the more you'll understand how
to get the search engines to show your
| | 02:14 |
content above the rest.
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| How SEO affects your business| 00:00 |
If you're a business, there are some
very real and very specific benefits to
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having a consistent, ongoing
Search Engine Optimization strategy.
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For the first time in the history of
marketing, users are offering up their
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actual intent through the words they
type into search engines, and more than ever
| | 00:16 |
before you can measure the results of
your SEO efforts as a marketing channel.
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While search engines don't charge you
for listing your web pages, planning and
| | 00:25 |
implementing SEO in your
organization is certainly not free.
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You'll need to spend the time, the money,
and the resources to do this the right way.
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The good news is that this can help
you obtain a tremendous marketing reach,
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attract more targeted visitors, and
measure the impact of your efforts in terms
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of a return on your investment.
| | 00:45 |
More and more content appears on the
web every second of every day, and your
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customers need search engines
to help make sense of it all.
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In fact, the bigger the web gets, the more
search engine usage keeps growing year after year.
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People search to find answers to
their questions, to buy products, to find a
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place to eat, to book travel, to get
news, just about everything we do online
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starts with a search.
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And it's not just done around the
family PC anymore. The explosion of connected
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mobile and tablet devices means that
we have access to search just about
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anywhere in the world.
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What people search for says a lot
about their intentions, or what actions they
| | 01:22 |
intend to take at a specific moment in time.
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And this has traditionally been
the holy grail of market research.
| | 01:29 |
If somebody searches for hiking
trails in California, or where to buy a
| | 01:32 |
digital camera, it's very easy as a
marketer to understand and react to what
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they're looking for.
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The role of search engines is to match
those user search queries to pages that
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match the topic, and if you sell cameras,
well, what that means to you is that
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you can create relevant content that meets the
needs of the searcher at exactly the right moment.
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Good SEO can essentially provide you
a stream of some of the most targeted
| | 01:57 |
intentional traffic you could possibly ask for.
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But more than that, one of the biggest
benefits of Search Engine Optimization is
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the ability to actually measure your results.
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You can use your website analytics data
to find out exactly how successful you
| | 02:11 |
are in acquiring search engine users, and
you can see if those users' actions are
| | 02:16 |
in line with your business goals.
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You can evaluate the effectiveness of
your content in attracting and advancing
| | 02:22 |
the users through your sales funnel,
and you can measure what they do, and what
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they don't do, on your website and beyond.
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By attaching real dollars and cents to
those actions that began with a simple
| | 02:32 |
search, you'll be able to truly
measure the return on investment from your
| | 02:36 |
SEO Channel.
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| Setting SEO expectations| 00:01 |
Search Engine Optimization is a
process that requires a lot of work, a lot of
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time, and a lot of patience.
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Throughout this course we'll dive
into more about how to do SEO, but before
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that, it's important to set some expectations.
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SEO is a bit different than most other
marketing strategies, and understanding
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these differences will help us to stay
on course for running and measuring a
| | 00:22 |
successful SEO campaign.
| | 00:24 |
Patience is a virtue and that
couldn't be more true than with SEO.
| | 00:28 |
Approach this as a long-term
process that builds long-term value.
| | 00:32 |
There's a reason that all of those
"ranked #1 in Google tomorrow"
| | 00:36 |
scams are called scams.
| | 00:38 |
It takes time to develop and
execute on your strategy, to research your
| | 00:42 |
keywords, to create new unique content,
to build more links and more authority,
| | 00:47 |
and to resolve any
technical issues with your site.
| | 00:50 |
It's a never-ending process,
there's always work to be done.
| | 00:53 |
SEO is not a one time project, it's a process
that you'll continue doing for the long haul.
| | 01:00 |
You also want to keep in mind that
search engines don't necessarily interact
| | 01:03 |
with your website immediately;
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it takes them time to discover changes
to your content, new links to your pages,
| | 01:10 |
and overall structure of your website.
| | 01:12 |
And it will take them more time to put
all those factors in their algorithms to
| | 01:16 |
reassess your relevancy and authority
before those changes are reflected in
| | 01:20 |
the search results.
| | 01:21 |
Being patient and true to your
strategy will help you stay focused on the SEO
| | 01:25 |
process that you've laid out.
| | 01:28 |
Another thing to expect with SEO is
change within the search engines, and it's
| | 01:31 |
important to realize and accept
that we have no control over this.
| | 01:35 |
Search engines are always trying to
improve their product to help deliver
| | 01:39 |
results that people want, and
they're always trying new things.
| | 01:42 |
Sometimes these changes are algorithmic,
other changes are more about features
| | 01:46 |
or different ways of presenting
different kinds of content to users.
| | 01:50 |
Search engines will keep making
changes to enhance the experience for their
| | 01:53 |
users, so it's in our best interest to
work with these changes as best we can.
| | 01:59 |
But one of the biggest expectations
for a successful SEO campaign is to
| | 02:03 |
realize that you're really optimizing for two
audiences, the search engine and real human beings.
| | 02:09 |
It's really easy to focus in on what
we think the search engines will like
| | 02:12 |
about our site, but the real audience that
generates business on your website is people.
| | 02:17 |
While they may never find us if we
don't show up on a search engine results
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page, it's people that drive the bottom
line, and the fortunate thing is that the
| | 02:25 |
search engines know that.
| | 02:27 |
Search engines have the ultimate goal
to generate search results that people
| | 02:30 |
find useful and helpful.
| | 02:32 |
If you build your authority and create
content that's interesting to people, and
| | 02:36 |
if you do it in a way that's friendly
to the computerized audience as well, the
| | 02:40 |
long-term and consistent goal of
the search engines is to reward that.
| | 02:45 |
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2. Keywords: The Foundation of SEOWhy you need a keyword research plan| 00:00 |
Before you can optimize your website, you
need to know what you're optimizing for.
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Finding the right keywords to focus
your SEO efforts on can be challenging, but
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fortunately, there's a lot of data out
there, and a structured approach that we can
| | 00:13 |
use for our keyword research.
| | 00:15 |
Keywords are what searchers
type into a search engine.
| | 00:18 |
Search engines like Google and Bing
will go out and fetch the most relevant
| | 00:21 |
results for your search query based on
everything they know about you and all
| | 00:25 |
the content on the entire Internet.
| | 00:28 |
But it's important to remember
that search engines have a hard time
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understanding what a user is
really after unless it's spelled out.
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This is why you've probably followed up
one search with another, more descriptive
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search more than a few times in your life.
| | 00:40 |
You try one keyword, but it doesn't
give you just what you're looking for, so
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you get more specific, or you try it another way.
| | 00:47 |
The bottom line is that people all
over the world are typing in all kinds of
| | 00:51 |
keywords every second of every hour of
every day, and it's important for us to
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understand what they type in so that
we can optimize our pages to be in the
| | 01:00 |
search results for those terms.
| | 01:02 |
Formal keyword research is the
foundational piece in SEO that will help you
| | 01:06 |
understand what people are typing into
search engines, how frequently they do
| | 01:10 |
it, how relevant those terms are to your
business objectives, and how competitive
| | 01:15 |
those terms will be to try to rank for.
| | 01:17 |
Let's take an example. Say you sell cars.
| | 01:20 |
You might think that the keyword 'car' is
something that you want to rank for, but
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after you've done a little keyword
research, you'll probably find that that
| | 01:27 |
won't make your list. Why?
| | 01:29 |
Well, even though that word gets typed
into search engines with a very high
| | 01:32 |
frequency, think about its relevance.
| | 01:35 |
How many reasons could someone type
the word car into a search engine?
| | 01:39 |
They might be looking for toy cars, or a
place to repair cars, or rental cars, any
| | 01:44 |
one of hundreds of things that have
nothing to do with actually buying a car.
| | 01:48 |
And think of all the people out there
that are also trying to rank for the word
| | 01:51 |
car in the search engines.
| | 01:52 |
This is an extremely competitive term.
| | 01:55 |
A phrase like, "buy used blue 2010
toyota camry" might not get typed in as much,
| | 02:01 |
but it's extremely relevant and
probably not that competitive.
| | 02:05 |
Keywords like this will very likely end up
on your list of keywords to optimize for.
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Now that we understand a bit more about
keywords and keyword research, it's time
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to talk about planning.
| | 02:15 |
An effective keyword research plan
involves having a sound and structured
| | 02:18 |
approach that will lead to the
discovery of keywords that you can use in the
| | 02:21 |
content of your website.
| | 02:22 |
Ultimately, a keyword research plan
will give you the data you need to make
| | 02:27 |
decisions about which keywords will
give you the biggest bang for your buck
| | 02:30 |
and have the highest likelihood of being
both relevant and profitable for your business.
| | 02:35 |
With billions of queries searched each
month, it's important that we understand
| | 02:39 |
the goals of the keyword research
process, what we're looking for, and how we
| | 02:43 |
collect and analyze that data
to make decisions on our website.
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| How to research keywords| 00:01 |
Everyone will eventually develop their
own approach and process to doing keyword
| | 00:04 |
research, and you'll ultimately need to
find something that works for you, but
| | 00:08 |
the most important part of keyword
research is to forget about you and your
| | 00:12 |
business, and put yourself in the
shoes of your potential customers.
| | 00:15 |
The process typically begins with
brainstorming and answering some key questions.
| | 00:20 |
This stage is important from an
organizational perspective, because it will
| | 00:23 |
force you to look at
different areas of your business.
| | 00:25 |
Start with answering, what services do you offer?
| | 00:28 |
Be as comprehensive as possible and list
out as many keywords and phrases as you
| | 00:33 |
can, but make sure that you do it
from the customer's perspective.
| | 00:37 |
As people who work in our businesses
day in and day out, we might have a very
| | 00:41 |
different way of explaining
our products and services.
| | 00:44 |
Take for example, a discount travel website.
| | 00:46 |
You might be tempted to write down
keywords like "high value air transport" and
| | 00:51 |
"G76 eligible discount ticket," but at
the end of the day no one in the world is
| | 00:56 |
typing that into a search engine.
| | 00:58 |
While those things make sense to you,
your customers are just looking for
| | 01:02 |
things like cheap flights.
| | 01:03 |
Well, brainstorming can get you started.
| | 01:06 |
We'll look at some tools that can find
and suggest similar keywords and expand
| | 01:10 |
your list of possibilities considerably.
| | 01:12 |
Once you've got that list of potential
keywords, the next thing you'll need to
| | 01:15 |
do is take a look at the search
volume metrics to see what kind of a demand
| | 01:18 |
there is for those phrases.
| | 01:20 |
As you do this you'll notice that a
handful of keywords will get typed in
| | 01:23 |
thousands and thousands of times a day,
but there are a whole lot more that
| | 01:28 |
don't get typed in nearly as often.
| | 01:29 |
These might be more descriptive
keywords or less common variations, but the
| | 01:33 |
important thing to note is that
these are known as long-tail Keywords.
| | 01:38 |
Long-tail keywords in SEO are incredibly useful.
| | 01:41 |
They let us go after a much larger
amount of less competitive keywords that
| | 01:45 |
tend to be extremely relevant to our
business objectives. And, while individually
| | 01:50 |
there's not a lot of search volume on each
term, they each do have some search volume.
| | 01:54 |
For example, if I were selling
iPhone cases, I may start looking into the
| | 01:59 |
keyword iPhone cases, a term that
gets typed into search engines a lot.
| | 02:03 |
It's extremely competitive, and it's
probably going to be very difficult to
| | 02:07 |
rank for. But I might also take a look at a
more long-tail keyword like blue iPhone 3GS cases.
| | 02:14 |
It's going to be extremely relevant,
less competitive, and easier to rank for at
| | 02:19 |
the expense of raw search volume.
| | 02:21 |
But here's the important part.
| | 02:22 |
You might be able to find hundreds or
thousands of these long-tail keywords that
| | 02:26 |
together have the potential to get
you more traffic than ranking for iPhone
| | 02:29 |
cases would have from the start.
| | 02:31 |
Finally, you'll want to add some
meaning and organization around the keywords
| | 02:35 |
that you've collected.
| | 02:36 |
You can do this by identifying themes or
topics to group your keywords around, a
| | 02:40 |
process known as keyword categorization.
| | 02:43 |
Back to the example with the blue iPhone case.
| | 02:46 |
We may want to create a group that
will be just about blue iPhone cases that
| | 02:49 |
includes all the different models of the iPhone.
| | 02:51 |
Alternatively, we could categorize these
not by phone model, but instead by color.
| | 02:56 |
There's no right or wrong way to do
this, only a way that works for you and
| | 03:00 |
allows you to manage these groups
of keywords as you optimize for them.
| | 03:04 |
Remember in the end that this is an
exploratory and discovery exercise.
| | 03:08 |
Everyone searches differently and
you'll find lots and lots of data as you
| | 03:12 |
dig deeper and deeper.
| | 03:13 |
Be open-minded, put yourself in the
mindset of your potential customers, and
| | 03:17 |
make sure to consider all of your
options as you evaluate your keyword
| | 03:20 |
performance over time.
| | 03:23 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Tools to help you analyze keywords| 00:00 |
Now that we understand the basics
around how we conduct keyword research,
| | 00:04 |
let's dive into the tools that will
help us find more keywords and collect all
| | 00:08 |
the data we'll need.
| | 00:09 |
While there are quite a few tools out
there, perhaps the one that gets the most
| | 00:13 |
use is the Google Keyword Tool.
| | 00:15 |
Not only does this tool provide a
good measure on search volume, but
| | 00:18 |
improvements on keyword suggestion has
made it a more favorable keyword research
| | 00:22 |
tool in the SEO community, and the
best part about it is that it's free.
| | 00:26 |
While you don't need to be an
AdWords advertiser to use this tool,
| | 00:30 |
if you do have an AdWords account,
you'll get access to all the bells and
| | 00:33 |
whistles of the Keyword Tool.
| | 00:35 |
So even if you have no plans to use
Google AdWords, you might consider signing
| | 00:39 |
up for a free account.
| | 00:40 |
From AdWords, you can access this tool
from the Tools and Analysis drop-down.
| | 00:44 |
Before we do a search, let's take a look
at some of the options that we can use
| | 00:48 |
by opening the Advanced
Options and Filters area.
| | 00:51 |
You can choose to see data for the
entire world or just the countries you
| | 00:55 |
select, and you can also choose
the language of your keyword results.
| | 00:59 |
Here, we've chosen the United States and English.
| | 01:02 |
Another important selection is the
devices that people are searching on.
| | 01:06 |
The kinds of keywords people type
into their mobile phones are often a lot
| | 01:10 |
different than the ones that they type
into desktops or laptops, and you can see
| | 01:13 |
the differences by using this
selection as you do your research.
| | 01:17 |
Last, you can choose to filter your
results for things like certain levels of
| | 01:21 |
competition or search volumes.
| | 01:24 |
Over on the left you'll want
to select a preferred Match Type.
| | 01:28 |
AdWords advertisers are
familiar with the three types:
| | 01:31 |
Broad, Exact, and Phrase. But for our
purposes, we'll make sure that there's a
| | 01:37 |
check in only the Exact match box, which
will ensure that we're getting data for
| | 01:40 |
only the keywords we're
looking at, exactly as they appear.
| | 01:44 |
Now we're ready to get started, and
there are a few ways we can do it.
| | 01:47 |
First, we can type one or more
keywords into the Word or phrase box by
| | 01:51 |
entering them one per line.
| | 01:53 |
You can also choose to enter a Website
URL, and the tool will go crawl the page
| | 01:57 |
to try and find relevant keywords.
| | 02:00 |
For now, we'll keep things simple and
just type in "iPhone cases" and click Search.
| | 02:05 |
As you can see, the Google Keyword
Tool is a great suggestion tool.
| | 02:09 |
From this one term, we start to
discover that people are also searching for
| | 02:13 |
things like best iPhone cases, cool
iPhone cases, and bamboo iPhone cases.
| | 02:19 |
Over on the right you can choose
which columns of data you want to see.
| | 02:22 |
While Global Monthly Searches
includes the entire world, if you specified a
| | 02:26 |
country in your settings, the Local
Monthly Searches will only show data for the
| | 02:30 |
countries you've selected.
| | 02:32 |
You'll also want to make sure that
Competition is checked, and the Local Search
| | 02:36 |
Trends column can give you some
interesting insights into seasonality.
| | 02:39 |
Right from this tool you can select
the keywords that you want to potentially
| | 02:43 |
include in your keyword list, and you
can download a list of the raw data in CSV
| | 02:47 |
format, where you can work with the
data offline in a tool like Excel.
| | 02:51 |
Remember that this tool was developed
for AdWords advertisers, and as, such there
| | 02:56 |
are more options that we haven't talked
about that have to do with AdWords
| | 02:59 |
and not necessarily SEO, but I'd
encourage you to spend some time with this tool
| | 03:03 |
and dig around for lots and
lots of keyword ideas and data.
| | 03:08 |
Another great tool to get even more
information about a keyword is Google
| | 03:12 |
Insights for Search, which can be
found at google.com/insights/search.
| | 03:17 |
This lets you type in different
keywords and see all kinds of information about
| | 03:21 |
how that keyword is being typed
into Google searches overtime.
| | 03:25 |
Over on the right you can filter this
data by type of search, geography, time
| | 03:29 |
period, and even Category.
| | 03:32 |
Let's stick iPhone cases in
here and see what we can learn.
| | 03:37 |
Here we see a graph of how this term
has been searched for over the years along
| | 03:41 |
with key pieces of news that can help
us figure out what might have caused
| | 03:45 |
certain spikes or troughs.
| | 03:46 |
While there's been a pretty good upward
trend over the years across the world,
| | 03:50 |
let's get a little more specific and
select just the United States for the
| | 03:54 |
last 12 months, and let's compare it to the
singular version of this keyword, iPhone case.
| | 04:01 |
Here we can see exactly when our
demand picked up, and we can see that more
| | 04:05 |
people are typing in the
singular version than the plural.
| | 04:08 |
Scrolling down, we can see state by state
interest through the heat map, and below
| | 04:12 |
that we can get even more keyword ideas
in the Top and Rising Searches section.
| | 04:18 |
Putting some of these back into the
Keyword Tool can start a whole new
| | 04:21 |
iteration of research.
| | 04:22 |
Using tools like the Google Keyword
Tool and Google Insights for Search
| | 04:26 |
allows us to discover new keywords and
understand just what people are typing
| | 04:30 |
into search engines.
| | 04:31 |
This exploration and data collection
is the backbone of our keyword research
| | 04:35 |
process, and can provide us with
wonderful insights and ideas around which
| | 04:40 |
keywords we'll focus on as
part of our SEO strategy.
| | 04:43 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding keyword attributes| 00:00 |
There's an enormous amount of data
available to us about the keywords people
| | 00:04 |
are typing in the search engines, and
it's important to be able to evaluate the
| | 00:07 |
different attributes of a keyword
before we decide whether or not to target
| | 00:11 |
one with our SEO strategy.
| | 00:12 |
There are three things you'll need to
consider when choosing your keywords:
| | 00:16 |
relevance, search volume, and competition.
| | 00:19 |
Let's start with relevance.
| | 00:21 |
The first thing you need to do when
you're deciding whether a keyword is
| | 00:24 |
relevant to your business, is to
ask yourself one simple question:
| | 00:27 |
Does the keyword you found accurately
reflect the nature of the products and
| | 00:31 |
services that you offer?
| | 00:33 |
If so, you've nailed it.
| | 00:35 |
The number one objective of a search
engine is to find and deliver the most
| | 00:38 |
relevant content to its
users for a given search term.
| | 00:42 |
The best way to understand your customer's
search behavior is to put yourself in their shoes.
| | 00:46 |
Remember the car example we
looked at earlier in this chapter?
| | 00:49 |
If you were in the market to buy a
car, how would you use a search engine?
| | 00:53 |
You probably wouldn't type the word
car in and click search. Instead, you'd
| | 00:58 |
use something very specific to what you're
looking for like "used blue 2009 toyota camry."
| | 01:03 |
Now, if you're selling 2009 used blue
toyota camrys and you have a page on your
| | 01:08 |
website dedicated to them,
then that is a relevant keyword.
| | 01:12 |
And the best part about relevant
keywords is that they're much more likely to
| | 01:16 |
drive conversion actions on your
website than more generic ones.
| | 01:20 |
The second item to look at is search volume.
| | 01:22 |
While "used blue 2009 toyota camry" might
be extremely relevant to your business
| | 01:27 |
and likely to lead to a sale, it's also not
typed into a Search Engine all that often.
| | 01:33 |
Search Volume is the number of searches
per month for a particular keyword, and
| | 01:37 |
if you use a tool like the Google
Keyword Tool, it's represented as the average
| | 01:41 |
number of searches for the last 12 months.
| | 01:44 |
Because this number is a rolling average,
seasonality and other trend patterns
| | 01:48 |
are not accounted for.
| | 01:49 |
If your business is seasonal, you'll
want to take a look at the Local Trends
| | 01:52 |
column in the Keyword Tool, or
even Google Insights for Search when
| | 01:56 |
analyzing your keywords.
| | 01:58 |
Now let's have a look at the
competition, and what we mean by this is
| | 02:02 |
essentially just how difficult it's
going to be for us to rank in front of our
| | 02:05 |
competition on a search engine results page.
| | 02:08 |
Unless you're introducing a new
product or technology to the market you're
| | 02:12 |
probably going to find content similar
to yours already on the Web, and we can
| | 02:16 |
look at things like the number of pages
about a given topic, authority, and trust
| | 02:20 |
of the websites competing with you,
back links to their websites, and more.
| | 02:24 |
One way to look at this is by
evaluating the keyword in the Paid Search, or
| | 02:28 |
Cost per Click markets.
| | 02:30 |
The number of search advertisers
actively bidding on a keyword can be a good
| | 02:34 |
proxy for just how difficult the
keyword is going to be on the organic side.
| | 02:38 |
And the Google Keyword Tool has a
Competition column that shows you this.
| | 02:42 |
The SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty
Tool can be another good source of
| | 02:46 |
keyword competition data.
| | 02:48 |
This tool will analyze keywords and
figure out how difficult it would be to rank
| | 02:53 |
well in search engine results based on
the strength of pages and websites listed
| | 02:57 |
in the search results.
| | 02:59 |
Let's tie it all together by going
back to our car example where we looked at
| | 03:03 |
"car" versus "used blue 2009 toyota camry."
| | 03:06 |
We might find that there are lots and
lots of these specific types of keywords
| | 03:10 |
that don't get a lot of volume but are
very relevant to our used car dealership,
| | 03:14 |
and not very competitive.
| | 03:16 |
Keywords like "used red 2009 toyota
camry," or "used blue 2010 toyota camry," or "used
| | 03:23 |
blue 2009 honda accord" might not give us
a lot of volume by themselves, but taken
| | 03:28 |
together, we could be attracting lots
and lots of relevant, likely-to-convert
| | 03:33 |
visitors to our website.
| | 03:35 |
So let your competitors go after the
word "car," and let your keyword research be
| | 03:39 |
your guide as you balance how to get
as much relevant search volume as you
| | 03:43 |
possibly can with the least competition.
| | 03:46 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding keyword distribution| 00:00 |
Keyword distribution is the process of
assigning keywords to specific pages on your website.
| | 00:05 |
This is an important step in the
content creation process, and results in the
| | 00:09 |
content on a page being aligned and
relevant to the keyword that you're
| | 00:13 |
targeting on that page.
| | 00:15 |
You can't have an optimized page unless you
know what keyword you're optimizing it for.
| | 00:19 |
Once you've identified all your target
keywords through the Keyword Research
| | 00:23 |
process, we found that working in
Microsoft Excel, or another spreadsheet program,
| | 00:28 |
allows you to create this mapping
of keywords to the pages in your site
| | 00:31 |
structure in an organized way.
| | 00:33 |
And it has the added benefit of
keeping a record of which pages are targeting
| | 00:37 |
which keywords to refer back to in the future.
| | 00:40 |
Of course, you'll be listing out all
the current pages of your website.
| | 00:44 |
But keep in mind that for many of your
target keywords, you won't yet have a page
| | 00:48 |
and you'll need to create one.
| | 00:49 |
By using a spreadsheet you can easily
see where in your site's architecture
| | 00:53 |
you'll want to put it, and define some
key pieces of information about it before
| | 00:57 |
you even start writing.
| | 00:59 |
Here is an example of a spreadsheet that
we've created for a fictitious sample winery.
| | 01:04 |
Feel free to format your
spreadsheets anyway you like.
| | 01:07 |
But there are some common
fields that you should include.
| | 01:10 |
Down the left-hand side, we like to use
cells or tabbing to show us the hierarchy
| | 01:14 |
of the various sections and pages of our site.
| | 01:17 |
As you can see, for each page we have a
column for the keyword we'll be targeting
| | 01:20 |
on this page, the URL of the page, the
title tag, the meta description,
| | 01:25 |
and the h1 header.
| | 01:27 |
We've even used Excel's Length function
to count our characters so that we can
| | 01:31 |
see how close we are to our general targets.
| | 01:34 |
Again, our targets of 65 characters
for a title and 156 characters for a
| | 01:39 |
description are not hard limits by any
means, but they're guidelines that will
| | 01:43 |
avoid search engines truncating this
information on the search engine results page.
| | 01:48 |
The first step is to populate the
spreadsheet with your existing web pages.
| | 01:52 |
Be sure to include every page of your
site, including your Homepage, About page,
| | 01:57 |
Location page, Contact page, and
other general kinds of content pages.
| | 02:01 |
Remember, search engines want to see
unique information for each and every page,
| | 02:05 |
and listing them all out here is a
good way to quickly spot any duplications.
| | 02:10 |
The second step is to take a look at
the keywords from your keyword list and
| | 02:14 |
find the most appropriate pages of
your site for each of the keywords.
| | 02:18 |
You should make sure to distribute one
keyword per page and try not to force anything.
| | 02:23 |
Remember, search engines
prefer unique and relevant content.
| | 02:26 |
So if you have a keyword that doesn't
match any page of your site, you'll want
| | 02:29 |
to create a new page.
| | 02:31 |
When you add a new page to your spreadsheet,
the good news is that you've got a blank canvas.
| | 02:36 |
You can define the SEO-friendly URL,
title, description, and header right
| | 02:40 |
here in the spreadsheet.
| | 02:42 |
Writing content when you know the
keyword you're optimizing it for upfront
| | 02:46 |
allows you to really dial-in on all of
the best practices of content writing for
| | 02:50 |
keywords that we'll be covering.
| | 02:52 |
Remember, the meat of each page is the
body copy, and you'll probably need to go
| | 02:57 |
back through your existing pages to
make sure that they're really optimized for
| | 03:00 |
the keyword you've defined as a target.
| | 03:03 |
Now that you've got your target
keywords in mind, now is a pretty good time to
| | 03:07 |
head over to one of the on-page
analysis tools that we'll talk about a little
| | 03:11 |
later in this course.
| | 03:12 |
The suggestions from these tools can
really help guide the changes you'll be
| | 03:16 |
making to your pages.
| | 03:18 |
Using a keyword distribution spreadsheet
will help you in a number of different ways.
| | 03:22 |
First, it gives you one place to
organize and document the content of your site
| | 03:27 |
that will support the
keywords that you're targeting.
| | 03:29 |
Second, it serves as an excellent
resource for your copywriters, and will help
| | 03:33 |
streamline workflows across all the
different members of your website production
| | 03:37 |
team. And treating this as a living
document will ensure that you can quickly
| | 03:42 |
adapt to the changing nature of the
search landscape and keep your content
| | 03:45 |
strategy on track month after
month and year after year.
| | 03:50 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Ongoing keyword evaluation| 00:01 |
Ongoing keyword evaluation is
critical to the long-term success of your SEO
| | 00:05 |
efforts, and it's really the last
step of the keyword research cycle.
| | 00:09 |
With all of the great keyword data that
we can look at, the one data point that
| | 00:13 |
we can't find out about those keywords
is how they'll actually perform for us.
| | 00:18 |
Once we start ranking for the keywords
that we've targeted, and we start to get
| | 00:21 |
traffic coming to our pages as a result
of those search engine rankings, we'll
| | 00:25 |
need to see if those keywords are
actually driving conversion actions and
| | 00:29 |
business objectives.
| | 00:30 |
Remember that blue 2010 toyota camry keyword
that we thought would be so perfect for us?
| | 00:35 |
Well it might turn out that everyone
typing that keyword into a search engine
| | 00:39 |
is looking for a place to take their
car to get fixed for free as a result of
| | 00:43 |
some product recall.
| | 00:45 |
All of our research told us
that this would be a good keyword.
| | 00:48 |
But it might turn out in the end
that it's not driving any car sales.
| | 00:52 |
The point is, we'll need to be able to adapt.
| | 00:54 |
You'll find that some keywords
just aren't producing results for you.
| | 00:58 |
And don't be afraid to swap in new
keywords in place of those that aren't working.
| | 01:02 |
And you'll only know this once you've
already got traffic coming to your site
| | 01:05 |
from those keywords.
| | 01:07 |
A quick way to do some
testing is through Paid Search.
| | 01:10 |
Using Google AdWords or Microsoft's
adCenter, you can buy the keywords that you
| | 01:15 |
want to evaluate for a short period
of time, and collect the data that will
| | 01:19 |
help you understand whether or not these
keywords are going to provide business value for you.
| | 01:24 |
While Paid Search clicks do tend to
behave a little differently than clicks on
| | 01:28 |
organic search results.
| | 01:29 |
This can be a good proxy, and potentially
save you months of work and lost opportunity.
| | 01:35 |
And don't forget that SEO isn't just a
one-time, set-it-and-forget-it project.
| | 01:40 |
It's a continuous process that has
to be maintained over the long term.
| | 01:44 |
This industry is constantly changing, and the
way people use search engines is evolving, too.
| | 01:50 |
The keyword research that you did a
year ago might not be valid anymore.
| | 01:54 |
So make sure that you're revisiting
this exploration a few times a year to find
| | 01:58 |
new opportunities that may have come up.
| | 02:00 |
By staying abreast of changes with
fresh research and focusing on how your
| | 02:05 |
target keywords contribute to your
website's organic traffic and business
| | 02:08 |
objectives, you'll be developing a
better understanding of your visitors, their
| | 02:13 |
search patterns, and how you can serve
them better with the pages of your site
| | 02:17 |
month after month and year after year.
| | 02:20 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Content Optimization: How Search Engines and People View Web PagesUnderstanding content optimization| 00:00 |
Content optimization is the process of
improving the quality and relevancy of
| | 00:05 |
your site's content.
| | 00:06 |
We'll discuss a number of things
about how both users and search engines
| | 00:10 |
interpret what makes good content.
| | 00:12 |
But first, let's go through a few
examples of how you and I, as human beings, might
| | 00:16 |
read a piece of content and
figure out what it's all about.
| | 00:19 |
Let's take a look at the
example of backpacking in California.
| | 00:23 |
Let's pretend that someone gave us a one-
page document, and they told us that the
| | 00:27 |
document was about backpacking in California.
| | 00:30 |
We read some text describing some landmarks
along the West Coast of the United States,
| | 00:34 |
we see some pictures of oceans and
beaches, and we read about parking regulations
| | 00:39 |
along the sides of highways.
| | 00:41 |
Now this might be about backpacking
in California, but reading the document,
| | 00:45 |
it's not very clear.
| | 00:47 |
You put the page down and
you're probably disappointed.
| | 00:50 |
Even if the exact phrase "backpacking
in California" was used in the text here
| | 00:55 |
and there, the narrative was all over the place,
and there's really no central theme to focus on.
| | 01:00 |
Both people and search engines expect
clarity and quality from your web pages.
| | 01:05 |
They want to know without any
hesitation what your content is all about. And
| | 01:09 |
even more importantly, they
want content they can trust.
| | 01:13 |
If I ask you to find me a resource on
backpacking in California, and you come
| | 01:17 |
back with a piece of paper with a few
mentions of the term and some text that's
| | 01:21 |
loosely related to landmarks and things
about the State of California, I'm not
| | 01:25 |
going to ask you next time.
| | 01:26 |
Or if I do, I'm not going
to trust you quite as much.
| | 01:29 |
On the other hand, if you give me
content that's truly remarkable, discussing
| | 01:34 |
how to backpack through all of those
California landmarks with maps and hiking
| | 01:38 |
guides, descriptions of California
flora and fauna that you might see while
| | 01:41 |
backpacking, and reviews of California
backpacking trips from other hikers, I'm
| | 01:46 |
going to come back to you with more
questions in the future, and I'm going to
| | 01:50 |
trust your answers.
| | 01:51 |
And in the online world, when people
find content that they like, they share it.
| | 01:55 |
Search engines can see a lot of this
sharing, and they view it as a sign of trust,
| | 02:00 |
and they'll reward you with
more search engine visibility.
| | 02:02 |
When we think about content optimization,
keep in mind that we're optimizing our
| | 02:06 |
content so that it benefits both users
and search engines, and we're focusing on
| | 02:11 |
both themes and building trust.
| | 02:14 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Optimizing for site structure| 00:01 |
As you focus on more and more
keywords and themes, you'll be developing more
| | 00:05 |
content on your website, and you'll start
to have a lot of pages to hold this content.
| | 00:09 |
It's going to be important to structure
all of these pages in a meaningful way,
| | 00:14 |
because in order for search engines
to return your pages to searchers in
| | 00:17 |
response to relevant search queries,
they need to understand how your pages
| | 00:21 |
relate to one another.
| | 00:23 |
Let's imagine that you're
visiting a bookstore for the first time.
| | 00:26 |
You're looking for a fiction book
written by an author whose name starts with
| | 00:29 |
the letter J. Since it's your first
visit, you don't know where anything is, and
| | 00:34 |
you're going to have to learn
the layout of this new bookstore.
| | 00:37 |
Fortunately, the bookstore has some
really good navigation to help you out.
| | 00:41 |
You look at the store directory to
find where the fiction section is located.
| | 00:45 |
Once you reach the fiction section,
you identify the specific shelf that has
| | 00:49 |
fiction books written by authors whose
names start with the letter J. You then
| | 00:54 |
look at that shelf, and you find the
specific book that you were looking for.
| | 00:58 |
Now imagine you keep going through
this process to learn the entire layout of
| | 01:02 |
the bookstore. You'll figure out all
the different sections and shelves,
| | 01:06 |
categories, and authors. And
eventually, you'll end up knowing about all of
| | 01:10 |
the individual books.
| | 01:11 |
This is exactly what a search engine
does, it crawls and navigates an entire
| | 01:16 |
website to learn what's there, how
it's organized, where exactly all of the
| | 01:21 |
content can be found, and what it's all about.
| | 01:24 |
Now imagine that instead of simply
visiting the bookstore, you now work at the
| | 01:28 |
bookstore. You've learned everything
about how the store is laid out and
| | 01:32 |
where specific books are.
| | 01:34 |
If a customer walks in the door and
says, hey, I'm looking for a fiction book
| | 01:38 |
written by an author whose name I
can't remember but I know it starts with
| | 01:41 |
the letter J, you'll be able to immediately
guide them to the book they're looking for.
| | 01:46 |
Now, you're the search engine.
| | 01:48 |
People come to you looking for
information, and you point the way to it. And you
| | 01:53 |
can do this quickly and efficiently
because you've understood the content and
| | 01:57 |
how it's structured.
| | 01:59 |
On the Web, a search engine will find
your homepage and start to navigate through
| | 02:03 |
your website, through your links.
| | 02:05 |
The way you link to pages within your
own site is important, and it's known
| | 02:09 |
as internal linking.
| | 02:11 |
If you're an online store, for
example, you might have a system of product
| | 02:15 |
categories that link to subcategories
that hold links to individual products.
| | 02:20 |
If you're an informational site, you may
be organized by topics and then dates of
| | 02:24 |
publication. Whatever structure and
strategy you choose, a clean site structure
| | 02:29 |
will really help search engines
understand your entire website, find your content,
| | 02:34 |
and help searchers find
what they're looking for.
| | 02:37 |
On the other hand, a bad site structure
can be detrimental to a search engine
| | 02:41 |
understanding your site.
| | 02:43 |
You might find websites that have
no navigation at all, or force you to
| | 02:47 |
scroll for hours through a single
page, single tier site map to find what
| | 02:51 |
you're looking for.
| | 02:52 |
You might see links that take users
down at dead-end path with no way to get
| | 02:56 |
back to where they started, or you
might click on links that go to pages that
| | 03:00 |
don't exist anymore.
| | 03:01 |
If a search engine can't understand the
layout of your site, or doesn't believe
| | 03:05 |
that the structure makes sense, or finds
all kinds of missing pages, they may not
| | 03:09 |
come back as much, and they certainly
won't be recommending you to other people.
| | 03:13 |
Because everyone's websites and
objectives are different, there's no right
| | 03:17 |
structure that works for everyone.
| | 03:18 |
The most important thing to remember is
that your site structure should be clear
| | 03:22 |
to you and it should be clear to people.
| | 03:24 |
Remember, search engines are just
trying to emulate human processes.
| | 03:28 |
So once you spend some time designing
and developing a site structure that's
| | 03:32 |
logical and easy for people to
understand and navigate through, you can feel
| | 03:36 |
confident that search engines will
understand your site structure as well.
| | 03:41 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Recognizing different types of content| 00:00 |
To understand the different kinds of
content that users in search engines
| | 00:03 |
can interact with on the Web, we're
going to be taking a look at the Explore
| | 00:07 |
California website.
| | 00:09 |
One of the most common forms of
content on web pages is text content.
| | 00:13 |
We see some text here on the Explore
California homepage that helps let us know
| | 00:18 |
what kind of information we
would expect to find on this site.
| | 00:21 |
When we click into the Resources
section we find more text content presented in
| | 00:26 |
a few different ways.
| | 00:27 |
There are some organized headings and
subheadings along with the paragraphs of body text.
| | 00:32 |
There's even a checklist at the bottom
organized by bullet points, and when we
| | 00:36 |
click on the FAQ link it takes us to a
page of content organized by a series of
| | 00:41 |
questions and answers.
| | 00:43 |
All of this different content is
formatted in different ways so that it's easier
| | 00:47 |
for both users and search
engines to understand the content.
| | 00:51 |
Another form of content
found on web pages is imagery.
| | 00:55 |
Images can often be more effective
than text in conveying a powerful message.
| | 00:59 |
For example, on the Mission page we
are immediately drawn to this image of a
| | 01:04 |
person standing on the beach, and it
helps me understand the experience of
| | 01:08 |
standing on a pristine California beach
watching the waves crashing. While the
| | 01:13 |
text of this page says the same thing,
| | 01:15 |
The feelings and emotions of this message
are much better communicated through imagery.
| | 01:20 |
Video is another form of content
we find on the pages of the Web.
| | 01:24 |
If we head back to the homepage and
scroll down a bit, we see a Featured section
| | 01:28 |
about the Ojai Olive Oil
Company, as well as a video clip.
| | 01:33 |
The rich sights and sound of video can
do what images and text alone cannot.
| | 01:38 |
Here, we get to see and hear from
people that are actually there.
| | 01:42 |
We can see the motion of the branches
against the wind, and we see a real person
| | 01:46 |
sampling a taste of the olive oil.
| | 01:49 |
It makes this content really tangible,
and allows us to almost experience it.
| | 01:54 |
There are other creative forms
of content out there as well.
| | 01:57 |
Audio clips, interactive animations, games,
and more abound across the Internet.
| | 02:02 |
The key is to think about what kind of
content will be effective, useful, and
| | 02:07 |
helpful for your specific audience.
| | 02:09 |
While the search engines are what
may bring visitors to your website,
| | 02:12 |
once they get there you'll need to
engage them and ultimately convert them on
| | 02:16 |
your business goals.
| | 02:18 |
And using a mix of the most
effective content types is sure to help the
| | 02:21 |
user experience.
| | 02:23 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Optimizing textual page elements| 00:00 |
The main goal of a search engine is to
guide people to content that is relevant
| | 00:04 |
to a certain keyword or
phrase that they searched for.
| | 00:07 |
We can fine-tune the relevance of
your page for a certain topic through the
| | 00:11 |
process of on-page optimization.
| | 00:14 |
The Explore California website has a
page focused on backpacking tours in
| | 00:19 |
California, and let's imagine that
through our keyword research we decided that
| | 00:24 |
we wanted to optimize this page for the
phrase "backpacking tours in California."
| | 00:29 |
Let's walk through how we might optimize
the different elements on this page for
| | 00:33 |
that particular search term.
| | 00:34 |
The first element we're
going to optimize is the URL.
| | 00:38 |
The URL is the location of the page
we're looking at, and you can find it up
| | 00:42 |
there in the address bar.
| | 00:43 |
You can think of it almost like a file
on your computer, and much like the path
| | 00:48 |
to any file on your computer, we can
follow some simple guidelines that allow us
| | 00:52 |
to create a good URL that can
be found and understood quickly.
| | 00:56 |
The URL length should be as concise as
reasonably possible, but at the same time
| | 01:01 |
it needs to contain some usable
information about the page itself.
| | 01:05 |
You might find that your website
structure uses a system of subfolders, and this
| | 01:09 |
can be goo, in that it
helps with site structure.
| | 01:12 |
Perhaps most importantly, you'll want to
make sure that the keyword phrase we're
| | 01:16 |
targeting is found in the URL.
| | 01:18 |
Here, we can pick out the individual
words of California, tours, and backpack,
| | 01:24 |
which is certainly helpful.
| | 01:25 |
But if we're targeting this page for
"backpacking tours in California," we can
| | 01:30 |
probably tighten that up a bit.
| | 01:32 |
Let's go ahead and change this page name to
| | 01:34 |
backpacking-tours-in-california.html.
| | 01:37 |
Of course, you'd have to actually update
this file name on your server and update
| | 01:41 |
the navigation that points to it, but
this is short, it's very descriptive of
| | 01:46 |
the page, and it matches the
keyword phrase that we're targeting.
| | 01:49 |
Also notice how we use hyphens
instead of spaces or underscores in the URL.
| | 01:54 |
This is important, and it helps the
search engines to break up words properly.
| | 01:59 |
The next element we'll look at is the
meta title tag, and here we're going to go
| | 02:03 |
into the source code of this page.
| | 02:05 |
If you're a programmer, you'll be
right at home here, and if you're not, it's
| | 02:09 |
still a good idea to keep watching, so
you'll be able to talk the talk when it
| | 02:12 |
comes time to implement
these items on your own website.
| | 02:16 |
This page's title tag is pretty
generic, and it doesn't really give a search
| | 02:19 |
engine any indication that this page
is about our target keyword phrase.
| | 02:24 |
Let's go ahead and change it to
Backpacking Tours in California -
| | 02:28 |
Explore California.
| | 02:30 |
We're keeping it fairly short, very
descriptive, and very targeted to the phrase
| | 02:35 |
we want to rank for.
| | 02:36 |
Notice that we didn't simply use our target
phrase by itself or just repeat it over and over.
| | 02:42 |
Here we included the
"- Explore California" at the end.
| | 02:46 |
One reason for this is that the meta
title tag is also the title that's used for
| | 02:50 |
the page's search engine result listing.
| | 02:53 |
Not only are we trying to optimize a
title so that search engines identify the
| | 02:57 |
theme of our page, we're also trying
to entice users to click on it when they
| | 03:01 |
see it in the search results.
| | 03:03 |
In this example, we believe that
mentioning the website name might reinforce
| | 03:07 |
the context of where this page lives
and help convince people to click our
| | 03:11 |
results over the others.
| | 03:13 |
But don't make the title too long or
detract too much from your target keyword phrase.
| | 03:18 |
A good rule of thumb is to
try to stay under 65 characters.
| | 03:22 |
Another meta tag that we can
configure is the meta description.
| | 03:26 |
Although optimizing this tag won't
improve your search engine rankings and is
| | 03:29 |
largely ignored by all the major search
engines in their ranking algorithms, it
| | 03:34 |
can improve your search
engine result's click-through rate.
| | 03:37 |
This is because this tag is often used
as the text that shows up under the title
| | 03:42 |
of a listing in the search results.
| | 03:44 |
You'll want to spend some time writing
compelling text that will lead people to
| | 03:48 |
click onto your site, and using
keywords in your description will help reassure
| | 03:53 |
users that this is exactly
what they're looking for.
| | 03:57 |
Next, let's take a look at the h1 header tag.
| | 04:00 |
This is typically the markup used for
the main visible headline of your page, and
| | 04:05 |
search engines know this.
| | 04:06 |
The purpose of using it is to give the
reader a clear idea of what the content
| | 04:11 |
below is about, much like
a newspaper headline does.
| | 04:15 |
The current header tag, Backpack Ca,l is
not very descriptive or specific to our
| | 04:20 |
target keyword phrase.
| | 04:22 |
You'd have to read through the text to
realize that this is actually the name of
| | 04:26 |
an organization, but most people
won't stick around long enough to do that.
| | 04:30 |
And think about how confusing
that must be to a search engine.
| | 04:33 |
While that might be important
information to include later in the content, it's
| | 04:37 |
probably a waste of a header, so
let's try to improve this element.
| | 04:42 |
"Backpacking Tours in California,
provided by Backpack Cal" not only clarifies the
| | 04:47 |
message, it also works in
our target keyword phrase.
| | 04:51 |
There are no defined character limits to
headlines, but much like the news world,
| | 04:55 |
it's more effective to be concise.
| | 04:58 |
Now at this point, if you were a search
engine, you've seen a URL, a title, and a
| | 05:03 |
headline that are all talking
explicitly about backpacking tours in California,
| | 05:08 |
and you're starting to get a pretty
good idea of what this page is all about.
| | 05:12 |
And now we have the content itself.
| | 05:14 |
The most important thing about your
content is that it needs to be optimized for
| | 05:18 |
people first and search engines second.
| | 05:22 |
Make sure that your content is written
so that it communicates to your target
| | 05:25 |
audience in a way that's really engaging.
| | 05:28 |
As far as the search engines go, there's
no magic formula for the perfect page.
| | 05:33 |
But what you want to remember is that
search engines are trying to emulate a
| | 05:36 |
human being reading something and
then figuring out what it's all about.
| | 05:40 |
Search engines are looking not only
for your target keyword, but also for
| | 05:44 |
variations of that keyword.
| | 05:46 |
It just makes sense that in a piece
of content about backpacking tours in
| | 05:50 |
California, words like backpack, trip,
outdoors, and vacation will popup here and there.
| | 05:57 |
Different word orders are also
likely to be part of the narrative.
| | 06:00 |
And if you were a search engine, you
probably wouldn't be surprised if words like
| | 06:04 |
tent and map show up in there as well.
| | 06:07 |
Search engines can get very
sophisticated trying to map the semantic and
| | 06:11 |
thematic relationships between words on a
page, which is exactly what we as humans do.
| | 06:16 |
So ultimately, writing the way that you
would write for a human is the best way
| | 06:20 |
to optimize for these algorithms.
| | 06:22 |
And while there are no hard and fast rules,
| | 06:25 |
you might use a general rule of thumb
of including your target phrase one to
| | 06:29 |
three times in the text, depending
upon the length of your content.
| | 06:33 |
Don't over think it, and don't overdo it.
| | 06:35 |
One last element to optimize
on this page are the images.
| | 06:39 |
Let's take a look at this first image.
| | 06:41 |
As human beings, we can look at this and
quickly figure out that those are some
| | 06:45 |
footprints next to the words Backpack Cal.
| | 06:48 |
But when a search engine looks at
it, all it sees is a bunch of dots
| | 06:52 |
in different colors.
| | 06:54 |
It can't tell that they're aligned
and colored in such a way to spell out
| | 06:57 |
words or pictures, so they rely on a few other
signals to understand what those images really are.
| | 07:03 |
Let's take a look at the code
behind this Backpack Cal logo.
| | 07:07 |
Inside this image tag, you
can see a few attributes.
| | 07:11 |
The first one is the source.
| | 07:12 |
This tells the browser where to find
the image so that it can be loaded.
| | 07:16 |
The alt text is reserved for a
description of the image for those people or
| | 07:20 |
browsers that cannot see the image itself.
| | 07:23 |
Both of these elements can be
optimized to accurately describe what the image
| | 07:27 |
is about, and also help support the
keyword phrase that we're trying to optimize for.
| | 07:32 |
Just like we changed the filename of
the page in the URL, we can change the
| | 07:36 |
filename of the image, and of course
rename the image file appropriately, to use
| | 07:41 |
the keyword phrase we're
targeting on this page, something like
| | 07:45 |
backpacking-tours-in-california.gif.
| | 07:48 |
We can then update the alt text to
something like Backpacking Tours in
| | 07:52 |
California by Backpack Cal, to be
more descriptive to both the humans that
| | 07:57 |
need this description, and the search
engines that are trying to figure out
| | 08:00 |
what the image is all about.
| | 08:02 |
While there are many more items on a
page that can be optimized, focusing on
| | 08:06 |
your URL, title, description, headers,
body text, and images will take care of a
| | 08:12 |
very big chunk of your on-page optimization.
| | 08:14 |
Of course, doing this from the
beginning is the ideal situation.
| | 08:19 |
But take a look at the existing
pages of your site after you've done your
| | 08:23 |
keyword research and mapped your
pages to your target phrases. You might be
| | 08:26 |
surprised that just how much
optimization there is to do.
| | 08:30 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Optimizing non-text components of a web page| 00:00 |
Search engines are generally very good
at analyzing and understanding the text
| | 00:04 |
content on web pages.
| | 00:06 |
But they have more difficult time
with other forms of content, like images,
| | 00:10 |
videos, and audio clips.
| | 00:13 |
Let's take a look at a few different
ways we can go about optimizing these kinds
| | 00:17 |
of content for our target keywords.
| | 00:19 |
One simple best practice is to use the
text surrounding the non-text elements to
| | 00:24 |
describe what it's all about.
| | 00:26 |
This makes perfect sense if you think about it.
| | 00:29 |
Having a paragraph of text describing a
particular video right next to the video
| | 00:33 |
itself is a very common practice.
| | 00:36 |
And images embedded in line with text
often have text titles under them, and they're
| | 00:41 |
typically very relevant
to the text on the page.
| | 00:44 |
Image slideshows or carousels often contain a
textual title and description of each photo.
| | 00:50 |
And an audio clip typically has a
description, and may even have a complete
| | 00:53 |
transcription as well.
| | 00:55 |
Search engines do analyze the text
that is in close proximity to the non-text
| | 01:00 |
components, making the assumption
that there is some topical correlation
| | 01:04 |
between those elements.
| | 01:06 |
On the Explore California
homepage, we can see this in action.
| | 01:10 |
The logo for Cycle California is an
image, and even though those pixels are
| | 01:14 |
arranged in such a way that humans can
quickly read 'Cycle California' and see
| | 01:19 |
that it's a logo, remember that search
engines can't. So while the search engine
| | 01:23 |
will look at the image file name and the
alt text, it will also look at the text
| | 01:27 |
nearby. And in this case, we can see
that it's all about Cycle California,
| | 01:32 |
telling search engines a
little more about that image.
| | 01:35 |
Aside from using the text that's near
the non-text elements, there's also some
| | 01:39 |
code that we can use to
help the search engines out.
| | 01:42 |
We've already seen how we can use the
image file name and alt text for an image tag.
| | 01:47 |
But another way we can optimize
code for non-text elements is to use
| | 01:51 |
micro-formatting from schema.org.
| | 01:53 |
This allows us to mark up our code
with some very relevant, very specific
| | 01:58 |
metadata, specific to a certain type of content.
| | 02:02 |
These are some of the properties that
you can define for an image object, and
| | 02:05 |
there are microformat
specifications for audio and video clips as well.
| | 02:10 |
Let's take the example of the
video on the homepage of the Explore
| | 02:13 |
California website.
| | 02:15 |
We can see that there's some code that
embeds the video, and right now there's
| | 02:19 |
not much that can tell a search
engine about the contents of that video.
| | 02:23 |
By adding in some special markup, we
can provide search engines with all kinds
| | 02:27 |
of rich metadata, and this will help them
really understand what this content is all about.
| | 02:34 |
Now, when a searcher types in
something like Explore California Olive Oil,
| | 02:38 |
we've positioned ourselves for this page or
even this video to pop up in the search results.
| | 02:44 |
Take a look through schema.org and you
can see all of the different properties
| | 02:48 |
and elements that you can
define for non-text data.
| | 02:51 |
Making sure to provide as much
information as you can to the search engines can
| | 02:55 |
only help your overall search engine visibility.
| | 02:58 |
For video content, you can also
make use of a video site map file.
| | 03:03 |
XML site maps are just files that use a
special syntax to provide search engines
| | 03:07 |
with a listing of all the pages and
content found on your website, along with
| | 03:11 |
some attributes that describe the content.
| | 03:14 |
There are different formats for
different types of content, and video site maps
| | 03:18 |
give us a way to inform search engines
exactly where our video content is, along
| | 03:23 |
with what it's about, using things
like title and description attributes.
| | 03:27 |
Here's an example from Google Webmaster
Tools support. And you can find all the
| | 03:31 |
specific supported
elements and syntax here as well.
| | 03:35 |
Using a mix of content types in your
pages can be a great way to engage with
| | 03:39 |
your visitors, and help
them down the conversion path.
| | 03:42 |
And just because a piece of content
doesn't use words, doesn't mean we can't
| | 03:46 |
help the search engine
understand just what it's all about.
| | 03:49 |
Through surrounding text, some code
elements, and site maps, you can open up all
| | 03:54 |
of your content to search engines, and
be well on your way to attracting new
| | 03:58 |
traffic to your pages.
| | 04:00 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Analyzing content quality| 00:00 |
We've covered how we can optimize a
page for a target keyword phrase using the
| | 00:04 |
URL, title, and overall content of a page.
| | 00:07 |
But determining just how well that
page has been optimized can be difficult to
| | 00:11 |
gauge, and we may want to isolate
more opportunities for improvement.
| | 00:15 |
To help us do this, we're going to use
the On-Page Report Card, a tool that's
| | 00:20 |
part of the SEOmoz PRO toolset.
| | 00:22 |
If you're going to get serious about SEO,
then you'll want to get an SEOmoz PRO
| | 00:27 |
account that will give you access
to a whole suite of tools designed
| | 00:31 |
specifically to help you
with search engine optimization.
| | 00:34 |
Let's go back and take a look at
the backpacking tours page on the
| | 00:37 |
Explore California website.
| | 00:39 |
We've already determined that we want
this page to be optimized for the phrase
| | 00:43 |
"backpacking tours in California," and
we've taken a look at many of the on-page
| | 00:48 |
elements that could stand to be
optimized in a previous video.
| | 00:52 |
But, we haven't actually made
any changes to this page yet.
| | 00:55 |
Let's run this page through the
tool to see what recommendations for
| | 00:59 |
improvements we can find.
| | 01:01 |
We'll start by adding our keyword phrase,
"backpacking tour's in California," and
| | 01:05 |
entering the URL of the
page we want to have analyzed.
| | 01:09 |
Then we'll click the Grade My On-page
Optimization button and let the tool go to work.
| | 01:14 |
As you can see, this page isn't very
well optimized currently, and there are a
| | 01:19 |
lot of things we can do.
| | 01:21 |
After we get over the initial shock of
our F grade, we can scroll down the page
| | 01:25 |
and see that this tool has just
provided us with a to-do list of all the things
| | 01:29 |
that might help this page be more
optimized for our target keyword phrase.
| | 01:34 |
The factors analyzed are grouped by
level of importance, and we can see that this
| | 01:38 |
first section provides us a scorecard of
how often our keyword phrase is showing
| | 01:43 |
up in various parts of the page.
| | 01:45 |
Here, our keyword phrase doesn't show
up in the title, not in the URL, not in
| | 01:50 |
the description, not in any of our
headers, not anywhere in the body, or
| | 01:54 |
anywhere bolded in text or
in any of our image alt tags.
| | 01:58 |
If you were a search engine, would you rank
this page for this keyword phrase? Probably not.
| | 02:04 |
As you scroll down the page, you can
see additional details about what the tool
| | 02:08 |
tested for and whether or
not your page has passed.
| | 02:11 |
You'll also be able to see if the
required action is considered an Easy,
| | 02:15 |
Moderate, or Difficult fix to put in place.
| | 02:18 |
If you're looking for a way to
quickly generate a fairly comprehensive
| | 02:22 |
evaluation of the pages of your site,
along with a list of recommended actions,
| | 02:26 |
then this is the tool for you.
| | 02:28 |
And following these recommendations to
clean up the on-page factors of your web
| | 02:32 |
pages is the first step to showing the
search engines what keywords your content
| | 02:37 |
has been optimized for.
| | 02:39 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exploring the benefits of user-generated content| 00:00 |
An important strategy for growing
search engine visibility is to continually
| | 00:05 |
generate new, unique, and quality content.
| | 00:08 |
But there's only 24 hours in a day,
and it can be pretty difficult to do that
| | 00:12 |
with your own resources.
| | 00:13 |
Fortunately, you can leverage the
interest and knowledge of your website
| | 00:17 |
visitors to create new content
for you, and this is better known as
| | 00:21 |
user-generated content.
| | 00:22 |
User-generated content is content that
normal website visitors create for your
| | 00:28 |
website, and given the right
circumstances, user-generated content can be a very
| | 00:32 |
scalable and cost-effective
means of content creation.
| | 00:36 |
So, what are some good
examples of user-generated content?
| | 00:38 |
Blog comments and forums are examples
where allowing people to simply express
| | 00:44 |
their views can help
generate new content for your site.
| | 00:47 |
Some websites take this to the next
level by cultivating expert comments
| | 00:51 |
and allowing users to vote or assign
weights to certain members of the user community.
| | 00:56 |
And allowing top contributors or other
experts from outside your organization
| | 01:00 |
to write guest blog posts and
articles can be a great way to post new and
| | 01:04 |
enticing content, and have others generate
comments and conversations around that content.
| | 01:10 |
If you sell products on your site, you
can allow users to leave reviews of your
| | 01:14 |
products as a means to
generate new and relevant content.
| | 01:18 |
Again, you can find ways to organize and
display these reviews, and you can work
| | 01:22 |
on ways to solicit more from your customers.
| | 01:25 |
In the business-to-business space, you
might ask your happy customers to work
| | 01:29 |
with you to create testimonials or
case studies. And keep in mind that content
| | 01:33 |
doesn't necessarily need to be textual.
| | 01:36 |
If users want to share interesting
information in the form of video clips,
| | 01:39 |
photos or other media
formats, by all means let them.
| | 01:43 |
For any form of content that can exist
on a website, there's the possibility of
| | 01:47 |
allowing your website
visitors to help create new content.
| | 01:50 |
And don't forget to take advantage
of user-generated content through
| | 01:54 |
social media outlets.
| | 01:55 |
A big reason for the explosive growth
of these social media services in recent
| | 01:59 |
years is that people have a natural
tendency to share interesting content with
| | 02:03 |
other people, and these
services make it easy to do.
| | 02:06 |
Remember, sharing content, whether
you've created it or your users have,
| | 02:11 |
provides even greater opportunity for
people and search engines to find and see
| | 02:15 |
your content as authoritative.
| | 02:17 |
Lastly, you'll want to make sure that
you have some kind of approval process in
| | 02:22 |
place if you're going to let your
visitors write or post whatever they want.
| | 02:25 |
Unfortunately, the world is full of
potty mouths, automated bots, and angry
| | 02:29 |
people that can and will take
full advantage of the ability to post
| | 02:33 |
inappropriate things on other people's websites.
| | 02:36 |
Make sure to read, watch, or listen to
anything that's going up on your pages.
| | 02:41 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Content Optimization: Technical SEOInterpreting the code behind web pages| 00:01 |
The end-goal of a search engine, when
it's crawling a page, is to try to determine
| | 00:04 |
what a web page looks like to regular people.
| | 00:08 |
But the search engine can't see a
page like we do. Instead, it sees the code
| | 00:12 |
that the web servers
send back to our browsers.
| | 00:15 |
And to help illustrate this,
let's take a look at the Explore
| | 00:18 |
California homepage.
| | 00:20 |
To us humans, we see a rich and
colorful web page with lots of content on it:
| | 00:25 |
pictures, text, menus, and videos,
in all kinds of colors and styles.
| | 00:31 |
It's visually appealing, and we know
how to absorb all this information and how
| | 00:35 |
to navigate through it.
| | 00:36 |
But to a search engine crawler,
the same page looks like this instead.
| | 00:41 |
This may not look like the same page
we were just looking at, but it is.
| | 00:45 |
All of this markup and code are
really just a bunch of instructions that
| | 00:49 |
our browsers can follow in order to render
a great-looking webpage onto our screens.
| | 00:55 |
And the important part is that this is
the code that search engines look at.
| | 00:59 |
Webpages are ultimately created with
HTML code and markup, and this code helps
| | 01:04 |
browsers figure out where to find all
the files that we'll need to produce this
| | 01:08 |
pretty page; where everything is visibly
placed in the page; how things are laid
| | 01:12 |
out, what fonts, colors, and sizes to use;
what side menus will look like; where
| | 01:17 |
links will point to; and where
content elements are going to be placed.
| | 01:22 |
You can see that there's a lot of stuff here
in the HTML that may not end up on the screen.
| | 01:27 |
And these items provide us with extra
opportunities to help search engines
| | 01:31 |
understand our content better.
| | 01:33 |
HTML is also responsible for loading
stylesheets, which are extra instructions
| | 01:38 |
that help to find the
visible attributes of a page.
| | 01:42 |
Font coloring, content sizing,
line spacing, background images, page
| | 01:46 |
conventions, all kinds of rules for the visual
representation of your page can be found here.
| | 01:52 |
And HTML is not the only
language that browsers can understand.
| | 01:56 |
These days, web pages are made more
interactive through the use of JavaScript,
| | 02:01 |
which is additional code that the
browser can read and execute, and it makes
| | 02:05 |
things like animation,
slideshows, and dynamic menus possible.
| | 02:09 |
Like style elements, this code
can be placed in line or referenced
| | 02:13 |
from different files.
| | 02:15 |
You can also find code that produces
different types of non-text content.
| | 02:19 |
For example, this is a block of code
that's responsible for rendering the video
| | 02:24 |
that we see on the homepage. While we
as humans can watch that video and hear
| | 02:28 |
its message, this block of code is
all that a search engine is able to see.
| | 02:33 |
While this isn't a course on web
design or programming, it's important to
| | 02:37 |
understand the perspective of the
search engine as we go through this course,
| | 02:40 |
and see what it sees.
| | 02:42 |
As you can probably guess, making
sure that your website's code is clean,
| | 02:46 |
efficient, and free from any coding
errors will help ensure that your pages are
| | 02:50 |
displaying properly to your users.
| | 02:53 |
But it will also save the
search engine some confusion.
| | 02:56 |
The cleaner your code, the easier it
will be for you to make adjustments to
| | 03:00 |
improve your on-page optimization, and
the more search engines will trust that
| | 03:05 |
your pages will be a good
experience for your users.
| | 03:09 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding how search engines index content| 00:00 |
It's important to understand how search
engines discover new content on the web,
| | 00:04 |
as well as how they interpret
the locations of these pages.
| | 00:08 |
One way that search engines
identify new content is by following links.
| | 00:12 |
Much like you and I will click
through links to go from one page to the next,
| | 00:16 |
search engines do the exact same thing
to find and index content, only they click
| | 00:20 |
on every link they can find.
| | 00:22 |
If you want to make sure that search
engines pick up your new content, an easy
| | 00:26 |
thing you can do is just make
sure you have links pointing to it.
| | 00:30 |
Another way for search engines to
discover content is from an XML site map.
| | 00:35 |
An XML site map is really just a
listing of your pages' content in a special
| | 00:39 |
format that search
engines can easily read through.
| | 00:42 |
You or your webmaster can learn more
about the specific syntax and how to create
| | 00:47 |
XML site maps by visiting sitemaps.org.
| | 00:51 |
Once you've generated your site maps,
you can submit them directly to the search
| | 00:54 |
engines, and this gives you one more
way to let them know when you add or
| | 00:58 |
change things on your site.
| | 01:01 |
Search engines will always try to
crawl your links for as much additional
| | 01:04 |
content as they can.
| | 01:06 |
And while this is generally a good
thing, there are plenty of times that you
| | 01:09 |
might have pages up that you
don't want search engines to find.
| | 01:13 |
Think of test pages, or members-only
areas of your site that you don't want
| | 01:17 |
showing up on the search engine results pages.
| | 01:20 |
To control how search engines crawl
through your website, you can set rules in
| | 01:24 |
what's called a robots.txt file.
| | 01:27 |
This is a file that you or your
webmaster can create in the root folder of
| | 01:30 |
your site, and when search engines
see it, they'll read it and follow the
| | 01:34 |
rules that you've set.
| | 01:36 |
You can set rules that are specific
to different browsers and search engine
| | 01:39 |
crawlers, and you can specify which areas
of your website they can, and can't see.
| | 01:45 |
This can get a bit technical, and you
can learn more about creating robots.txt
| | 01:49 |
files rules by visiting robotstxt.org.
| | 01:53 |
Again, once search engines discover
your content, they'll index it by URLs.
| | 01:58 |
URLs are basically the
locations of web pages on the Internet.
| | 02:03 |
It's important that each page on your
site has a single, unique URL, so that
| | 02:07 |
search engines can
differentiate that page from all the others.
| | 02:10 |
And the structure of this URL can also
help them understand the structure of
| | 02:14 |
your entire website.
| | 02:16 |
There are a lots of ways that search
engines can find your pages, and while you
| | 02:20 |
can't control how the crawlers
actually do their job, by creating links and
| | 02:24 |
unique and structured URLs for them to
follow, site maps for them to read, and
| | 02:29 |
robots.txt files to guide them, you'll
be doing everything you can to get your
| | 02:34 |
pages in the index as fast as possible.
| | 02:37 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with canonical URLs and redirects| 00:00 |
As search engines try to find and
index all the pages that they find on the
| | 00:05 |
Internet, they rely on unique URLs
as pointers to each piece of content.
| | 00:09 |
While there should be a single, unique
URL for each page on the Internet, often
| | 00:14 |
our web pages can introduce slightly
varied URLs for the same piece of content,
| | 00:18 |
resulting in duplicate URLs
in the search engine's index.
| | 00:21 |
A common reason for this is
the use of URL parameters.
| | 00:26 |
These are extra bits of data that are
appended to the end of URLs, and they can
| | 00:30 |
be used to do a variety of different things.
| | 00:33 |
Sometimes they can actually control
what content shows up on the page, and in
| | 00:37 |
those cases, the different
URLs actually are different pages.
| | 00:41 |
Other times though, they have
nothing to do with the content.
| | 00:45 |
They could be used for storing session
IDs or tracking parameters, and while the
| | 00:49 |
URL may be different, the content is unaffected.
| | 00:52 |
The problem is, search engines can't
assume which are important URL parameters
| | 00:57 |
for content, and which are not.
| | 00:59 |
One way to resolve this issue on your
site is to use the rel="canonical" meta tag.
| | 01:04 |
This tag is something that you add to
your page that acts as an instruction
| | 01:08 |
for search engines.
| | 01:09 |
It tells them that no matter what URL
might be showing up in the address bar,
| | 01:13 |
make sure to index this URL as
the primary URL for this content.
| | 01:19 |
Another way to clear up any confusion
about how your site uses URL parameters
| | 01:23 |
is to tell the search engines directly through
Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools.
| | 01:29 |
Here, you can instruct search
engines on whether or not they can ignore
| | 01:33 |
certain URL parameters.
| | 01:35 |
Another reason that duplicate content
may exist is because content may have been
| | 01:39 |
moved from one location to another on your site.
| | 01:43 |
The old location and the new
location could potentially be in the search
| | 01:46 |
engine's index at the same time.
| | 01:48 |
And to avoid this situation, whenever
you move content around, it's important to
| | 01:53 |
implement redirect rules.
| | 01:55 |
There are a few redirect types that
you or your webmaster can use, but let's
| | 01:59 |
take a look at two in particular.
| | 02:01 |
The first is known as a
302, or temporary, redirect.
| | 02:05 |
This should only be used for short-term
content moves, like when you want to show
| | 02:10 |
an alternate page while your
site's down for maintenance.
| | 02:13 |
It tells the search engine that the
page it's looking for isn't there now, but
| | 02:17 |
will be back very shortly.
| | 02:18 |
So, please don't do anything to your index.
| | 02:21 |
For long-term or permanent content
moves, which search engines are really
| | 02:25 |
concerned with, you will want to
use a 301 or a permanent redirect.
| | 02:30 |
These redirects tell a search engine
that although they may have indexed a
| | 02:33 |
previous URL for that content,
the old URL is no good anymore.
| | 02:38 |
The search engine should take
everything it knew about the old URL and apply it
| | 02:42 |
to the new one where that content now lives.
| | 02:45 |
Ensuring that the search engines know
which URLs your pages live, on and that
| | 02:49 |
you have unique URLs for each of them,
will help search engines index your
| | 02:53 |
pages properly, and this is a
building block on the path to the top of the
| | 02:57 |
search results.
| | 02:59 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Leveraging microformats| 00:00 |
Search engines do a good job identifying
what the overall content of a web page is about.
| | 00:05 |
But you may have parts of a web
page that contain very specific types of
| | 00:09 |
content, like product reviews, an
embedded video, or even a food recipe.
| | 00:14 |
Search engines can stand to benefit
from a little help in understanding the
| | 00:18 |
semantic focus of these bits of content, and
fortunately, we can give them some assistance.
| | 00:23 |
One universal code format
that will help us do this is the
| | 00:27 |
schema.org microformat.
| | 00:29 |
Microformats give us a special syntax
to use to help search engines identify
| | 00:34 |
very specific types of content on your pages.
| | 00:37 |
This not only helps search engines
identify these pieces of content, it also
| | 00:42 |
helps them identify very
specific attributes of your content.
| | 00:46 |
Here is an example of some recipe text.
| | 00:48 |
We can look at this quickly,
and identify it as a food recipe.
| | 00:52 |
But for a search engine, the short
sentences and many line breaks are a bit
| | 00:56 |
awkward, and they can't possibly
understand what each line really means.
| | 01:00 |
By augmenting the code behind this
recipe text using the schema.org microformat
| | 01:05 |
for recipes, you have the opportunity
to explicitly tell search engines exactly
| | 01:10 |
what this content is.
| | 01:12 |
You can see that there are properties
for ingredients, prep and cook times, and
| | 01:16 |
just about anything else that
you could think of for a recipe.
| | 01:20 |
If you think about this from the search
engine's perspective, knowing not just
| | 01:24 |
that this is definitely a food recipe,
but also knowing all of this metadata
| | 01:28 |
around the recipe, will help it to return
this content to users that are looking for it.
| | 01:33 |
If someone is searching for a
particular chef's recipes, or has an abundance of
| | 01:38 |
apples, and needs something to do with
them, the search engines will have a much
| | 01:41 |
deeper semantic understanding of what
this content truly is, and they can return
| | 01:46 |
it in the search results for an
array of relevant search queries.
| | 01:50 |
Head over to schema.org and browse
the various types of content that have
| | 01:54 |
supported microformats.
| | 01:56 |
Recipes are just one of many.
| | 01:58 |
You could use micro-formatting to
describe a book, with things like title,
| | 02:02 |
author, publishing date, and number of
pages, or you could use micro-formatting
| | 02:06 |
to identify an upcoming event by its
name, location, dates, or even pricing.
| | 02:12 |
If you have a brick-and-mortar
business, or you're doing ecommerce sales,
| | 02:15 |
make sure that you're using micro-
formats for your local business content or
| | 02:19 |
your product content.
| | 02:21 |
As a general rule, anytime you can
specifically identify content for search
| | 02:25 |
engines, you probably should.
| | 02:28 |
Explore the different formats to see
what may be relevant for the different
| | 02:31 |
types of content on your site, and
get started sharing all that great
| | 02:35 |
information with the search
engines and your visitors alike.
| | 02:39 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with server-side factors| 00:00 |
While content and links can affect your
website's search engine visibility, your
| | 00:04 |
web server can also play a big role in
how search engines view your website.
| | 00:09 |
The key here is to make sure that
you're serving up pages fast and you're
| | 00:12 |
serving them up reliably.
| | 00:14 |
Remember, a search engine is trying
to give its users the best experience
| | 00:18 |
possible, and sending them to a page on
a server that's down half the time, or
| | 00:22 |
that takes an eternity of load, is
not going to be a quality experience.
| | 00:27 |
First and foremost, a web server is
just a computer. And the performance of any
| | 00:31 |
computer relies in part on the hardware
and the resources that it has available.
| | 00:36 |
Things like the number and type of
processors, the amount of memory, the quality
| | 00:39 |
of the network, and the connection
to the Internet can all be important.
| | 00:43 |
You'll want to talk to the people
responsible for hosting and managing your
| | 00:46 |
web server to make sure the resources
are appropriate to serve pages quickly and
| | 00:51 |
minimize any downtime.
| | 00:52 |
The physical location of your Web server
can also affect your search engine visibility.
| | 00:57 |
As visitors interact with your website,
search engines will often collect data
| | 01:01 |
around how fast all the elements
of your pages are loading for them.
| | 01:06 |
If a visitor is in one country and
your web server is located on the other
| | 01:09 |
side of the world, the page may be loading
very slowly, which is a concern for search engines.
| | 01:14 |
This might seem crazy, but it
actually happens quite often.
| | 01:18 |
Hosting your site halfway across the
world might offer financial benefits, but
| | 01:22 |
it also might hurt your
ability to quickly serve pages.
| | 01:25 |
Generally, you'll want to make sure
that your Web server is geographically
| | 01:29 |
located where most of your
potential website visitors will come from.
| | 01:32 |
If you expect your visitors to be
coming from all over the world, you may want
| | 01:36 |
to consider a web hosting solution
that can help distribute requests for your
| | 01:40 |
pages across a global network of
computers. And even if you're serving up pages
| | 01:44 |
locally, you may want to consider
speeding things up by using content delivery
| | 01:48 |
networks, or CDNs, to help serve big
files, like images and videos, from these
| | 01:53 |
servers located all over the world.
| | 01:56 |
Another thing that will help
your pages load quickly is caching.
| | 02:00 |
Your website may be configured to
pull content and other information from a
| | 02:03 |
database on your web server every
time a user requests one of your pages.
| | 02:08 |
Content management systems like
WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, and more work this
| | 02:12 |
way, and virtually every product page
you've ever seen on an ecommerce site is
| | 02:17 |
being constructed from calls to a database.
| | 02:20 |
One way to minimize the time-consuming
database workload in these situations is
| | 02:24 |
to enable server-side caching.
| | 02:26 |
This is where your web server
interacts with your database only once in order
| | 02:30 |
to generate a given page. And then it
saves a copy of that content on the server
| | 02:35 |
for a period of time.
| | 02:37 |
Once that copy has been made, each
subsequent view of that page will load the
| | 02:41 |
content that's been saved on the server
bypassing any redundant database work.
| | 02:46 |
Many content management and ecommerce
systems have plug-ins or settings built
| | 02:50 |
in to help you accomplish this.
| | 02:52 |
Last, but not least, you'll want
to make sure that your web server is
| | 02:56 |
consistently running and
never experiencing any downtime.
| | 02:59 |
If your server is constantly down,
search engines will consider your site
| | 03:03 |
unreliable, and they won't want
to suggest it to their users.
| | 03:06 |
Remember, search engines are emulating
people, and they're trying to reward what
| | 03:11 |
we like and penalize what we don't.
And one thing that people don't like is a
| | 03:15 |
slow loading page or a
server down error message.
| | 03:18 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using Google Webmaster Tools| 00:01 |
Let's take a look at how to use the
very basics of Google Webmaster Tools to
| | 00:05 |
learn what information Google has about
your website, as well as provide Google
| | 00:09 |
with a few instructions
about how to index your pages.
| | 00:12 |
The first step is to go to google.com/webmasters
and sign in to your account.
| | 00:17 |
This requires a Google account, and if
you don't already have one, you can head
| | 00:21 |
over to Google.com/accounts to create one.
| | 00:24 |
Once you're logged in, you'll need
to submit the domain you want to manage,
| | 00:28 |
and in this case, we'll
use explorecalifornia.org.
| | 00:33 |
To protect your account and your
website, Google will need to verify that you
| | 00:37 |
actually own this domain and that
you're authorized to see some critical
| | 00:41 |
details of this website.
| | 00:43 |
There are a few different
verification methods that you can choose from, but
| | 00:46 |
you'll need to do this
successfully before continuing.
| | 00:50 |
The options that you or your webmaster
have include uploading a specific HTML
| | 00:54 |
file to your site, adding a specific
meta tag to your source code, or making a
| | 00:59 |
small change to your site's DNS record.
| | 01:02 |
Another helpful option is the Google
Analytics access method, which you can use
| | 01:07 |
if you have Google Analytics installed
and administrative access to the account.
| | 01:13 |
Once you've verified a website,
you'll see a listing for it in your main
| | 01:16 |
dashboard, with any important messages.
| | 01:19 |
Here, we can see that there are some
WordPress updates that should be installed,
| | 01:23 |
as well as some issues
with unnatural inbound links.
| | 01:27 |
Clicking into this website will bring
up a dashboard and a menu of all the
| | 01:31 |
different areas of Webmaster tools.
| | 01:34 |
You can see some high level
information here around Crawl Errors and Search
| | 01:38 |
Queries, and you can also get a
quick view of the number of URLs you've
| | 01:41 |
submitted through your site maps, and the
number of URLs that Google has indexed.
| | 01:46 |
You can drill into the Crawl Error
reports to look at what problems Google has
| | 01:51 |
had while crawling and indexing your site.
| | 01:54 |
Crawl Errors can hurt your
site in the Google Search Results.
| | 01:57 |
So it's important to identify the
type of Crawl Error that's affecting your
| | 02:01 |
different URLs and take the
appropriate steps to resolve those errors.
| | 02:05 |
This may include implementing
301 redirects or fixing some Web
| | 02:09 |
server configurations.
| | 02:11 |
You may also need to remove references to
pages that are no longer a part of your site.
| | 02:17 |
You can also click on the Search Queries
reports, which provide some interesting
| | 02:21 |
details about your organic search visibility.
| | 02:24 |
You can see impressions as well as
how many clicks you got for different
| | 02:28 |
keywords, and you can also see the
average positions your site was ranking in
| | 02:32 |
for different keywords
over a given period of time.
| | 02:36 |
You can also use filters to look at
specific search queries, different types
| | 02:40 |
of search, different countries, or only
queries that generated a certain volume of traffic.
| | 02:46 |
There are lots of reports and sections
of Webmaster tools to review, and I would
| | 02:50 |
encourage you to spend some time
going through each for your own website.
| | 02:54 |
The Configuration section includes
general settings, like what country your
| | 02:58 |
website is targeting, what URL
parameters are used on your pages and for what
| | 03:02 |
reasons, and who else has access to the
information in Webmaster Tools for your domain.
| | 03:08 |
We've already looked at the Crawl Errors
report, but the Health section contains
| | 03:12 |
additional functionality that lets you
block Google from seeing certain pages of
| | 03:16 |
your site, and also lets you
know if you've been hacked.
| | 03:19 |
You'll also want to check
out the Optimization section.
| | 03:22 |
This is where you'll be able to review
and submit your XML Sitemaps, as well as
| | 03:27 |
take a look at the HTML Improvements
section to identify potential problems with
| | 03:31 |
your site's content that
you can address immediately.
| | 03:35 |
As you can see, there are many other
features to Google Webmaster Tools that you
| | 03:39 |
should explore, and there are
always more new features coming out.
| | 03:43 |
Google has done a very good job of
letting you know how it views your pages and
| | 03:47 |
allowing you to provide input
into what it knows about you.
| | 03:51 |
Staying on top of Google Webmaster
Tools month after month is certainly an
| | 03:55 |
endeavor that will pay dividends.
| | 03:58 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using Bing Webmaster Tools| 00:00 |
Google isn't the only search engine
out there with tools, and another one that
| | 00:03 |
you'll want to get familiar
with is Bing Webmaster Tools.
| | 00:06 |
Much like Google Webmaster Tools, this
will allow you to learn what information
| | 00:10 |
Bing has about the pages of your site,
and it will give you a chance to provide
| | 00:14 |
Bing with a few instructions
about how to index your website.
| | 00:18 |
You'll need to have an account with a
Bing, and once you're logged in, you'll need
| | 00:21 |
to submit a domain to gain access.
| | 00:23 |
When adding a site you'll have
two quick options right off the bat.
| | 00:27 |
First, you can provide the URL to your
XML site map if you've got it, and if you
| | 00:31 |
don't, don't worry, you
can always do this later.
| | 00:34 |
You can also select what time of day
your site gets the most traffic, and if you
| | 00:38 |
do, Bing will try to crawl
your site during off-peak times.
| | 00:42 |
Your next step is to verify that you
own and control this website. You can do
| | 00:46 |
this by clicking on to Verify now link from the My
Sites page that you see when you first log in.
| | 00:52 |
In order to prove that you control this
domain, you can choose between uploading
| | 00:56 |
a specific file to your web server,
copying and pasting a meta tag into your
| | 01:00 |
default page, or making a small
change to your site's DNS record.
| | 01:05 |
Once you've verified a website, you can
click into it and you'll see a Dashboard
| | 01:09 |
containing statistics that can give
you an idea of your search visibility for
| | 01:12 |
clicks and impressions over time,
| | 01:14 |
as well as any recent crawling and
indexing trends. Scrolling down, you can view
| | 01:20 |
overviews of the Search Keywords and
Inbound Links reports, and clicking the See
| | 01:24 |
all links will take you into the full reports.
| | 01:27 |
The Search Keyword report shows clicks
and impressions for each keyword, as well
| | 01:31 |
as average rankings and click-through
rates over a given period of time.
| | 01:35 |
The Inbound Links Report displays a
graph showing the count of inbound links to
| | 01:39 |
your pages that Bing knows about over
time, and you can click into any of your
| | 01:43 |
pages to see who's linking to them.
| | 01:46 |
Another important report is the Crawl
Information report, which you can find on
| | 01:50 |
the left-hand menu under Reports and Data.
| | 01:52 |
Here, you can identify any Crawl Errors
that Bing has found, and if you see any,
| | 01:57 |
it's important to
implement fixes for those errors.
| | 02:00 |
You'll also notice data for any
redirects that you have on your website, so that
| | 02:04 |
you can ensure that your content
moves are being handled appropriately.
| | 02:07 |
While you should certainly take a
look at the other reports in the Reports
| | 02:10 |
and Data section, it's also important
to make sure that you're providing Bing
| | 02:14 |
with whatever information you can
about your site, and this is done in the
| | 02:18 |
Configure My Site section.
| | 02:20 |
Here, you can manage your XML site maps,
configure any URL parameter rules that
| | 02:24 |
will help Bing understand your URLS,
control how Bing crawls your site, tell it
| | 02:29 |
what pages it's allowed to see, and more.
| | 02:32 |
Last, don't forget to explore the
Diagnostics and Tools section, where you'll
| | 02:36 |
find a host of tools to help
you further optimize your site.
| | 02:40 |
The Keyword Research tool works in
much the same way as Google's, and can be a
| | 02:44 |
great way to find even more keyword ideas.
| | 02:47 |
Just make sure to remember that the
numbers you're seeing are from the Bing
| | 02:50 |
Search Engine, so you won't want to
compare these with the Google tool.
| | 02:54 |
You should also take some time to
play with the SEO Analyzer tool.
| | 02:58 |
This works quite a bit like the
SEOmoz On-page Report Card, providing
| | 03:02 |
you information about any errors or issues
you can fix for the page you've entered.
| | 03:07 |
Only this one does not take into account a
specific keyword like the SEOmoz Tool does.
| | 03:12 |
Although Bing's share of the search market
is certainly much smaller than Google's,
| | 03:16 |
it's still a very sizable group of
people that you can't afford to ignore. And not
| | 03:21 |
only do Bing's webmaster tools give you
the ability to optimize your Bing presence
| | 03:25 |
as best you can, they can also provide a
richer dataset and an alternative point
| | 03:30 |
of view for your overall a SEO strategy.
| | 03:32 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Long-Term Content PlanningOverview of long-term content strategizing| 00:00 |
With many businesses turning to online
as a medium to market their products and
| | 00:04 |
services, it's more important than
ever that business owners understand why
| | 00:08 |
having a content strategy will help
propel them forward and achieve success
| | 00:12 |
with their search objectives.
| | 00:13 |
A content strategy is the planning,
creation and management of usable content.
| | 00:19 |
Let's take a look at each of
these components individually.
| | 00:23 |
Before you begin writing content and
posting it or syndicating it across the
| | 00:26 |
web, you need to have a plan.
| | 00:29 |
This starts by understanding who your
target audience is and what their needs are.
| | 00:34 |
Think about content as bait,
and your audience are the fish.
| | 00:37 |
If you use the wrong kind of bait, or if
you throw the right bait in a pond where
| | 00:41 |
there aren't any fish,
| | 00:42 |
that's no good. You won't
catch what you're looking for.
| | 00:45 |
But understanding who your audience is,
where they hangout and converse online,
| | 00:49 |
and what they're talking about, will help
you to both find your targets and learn
| | 00:54 |
what's important to them.
| | 00:55 |
When you couple this with keyword
research, you'll have a strong understanding
| | 00:59 |
of the themes and the kinds of topics
that you'll want to produce content for.
| | 01:04 |
When it comes time for the actual creation,
there is no question that content is king.
| | 01:09 |
Creating content is a task that you're
going to need to factor into your online
| | 01:13 |
marketing plan whether you like it or not.
| | 01:16 |
If you're not writing content and
publishing on the web, you're losing out on a
| | 01:19 |
share of traffic to your site.
| | 01:21 |
Every way that you can think of to help
your potential customer that's relevant
| | 01:26 |
to the themes and keywords that you've
targeted and the audience that you're
| | 01:29 |
going after is an opportunity.
| | 01:31 |
And if you think about it, if you're
not answering the common questions that
| | 01:34 |
your customers are asking,
then your competitors will.
| | 01:38 |
Content creation involves writing
usable, relevant, and targeted content.
| | 01:43 |
The quantity of content is not nearly
as important as developing quality pieces
| | 01:47 |
that customers can always refer
back to and share with their networks.
| | 01:51 |
For SEO purposes, remember that it's
the content that attracts audiences and
| | 01:55 |
links, and relevant, high-quality pages
are then rewarded further with authority
| | 02:01 |
in the eyes of the search engines.
| | 02:03 |
Whether it's you, your team, or
outsourced help that's responsible for executing
| | 02:07 |
on this plan, you'll need to make sure
the content is being written on a regular
| | 02:12 |
basis for the keywords and
audiences that you're targeting.
| | 02:15 |
And once your content has been
created, it needs to be managed and
| | 02:18 |
maintained properly as well.
| | 02:20 |
A sound content management system
lets team members right, edit, post, and
| | 02:25 |
maintain content quickly and efficiently,
helping with workflow and encouraging
| | 02:29 |
a more collaborative environment that
each member of the team can be a part of.
| | 02:34 |
Going through the cycles of planning,
creating, and managing usable content,
| | 02:38 |
will have you well on your way to
executing a sustainable and successful
| | 02:42 |
content strategy.
| | 02:44 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Planning a successful content strategy and avoiding common mistakes| 00:00 |
Every organization is different. We all
operate in different environments, and we
| | 00:04 |
all have different goals.
| | 00:06 |
So everyone's ideal
content strategy will be unique.
| | 00:09 |
But in order for us to understand what
content strategies work and which don't,
| | 00:13 |
we can look at some of the core
components of content strategies that successful
| | 00:17 |
organizations share.
| | 00:18 |
The first is clearly
defining your goals and objectives.
| | 00:22 |
Knowing what keywords you've
researched and chosen to target, what your
| | 00:25 |
audiences are looking for, and
ultimately, what you want them to do when they get
| | 00:29 |
to your site, is the foundation
of everything that you'll do.
| | 00:32 |
These goals will help you with
reporting and measurement and put a realistic
| | 00:36 |
perspective on the results that you achieve.
| | 00:39 |
You can define lots of goals, from
things like more ecommerce sales, to more
| | 00:43 |
leads and phone calls, to more
followers on social networks.
| | 00:46 |
Goals can be anything, but they
should tie back to your bottom line through
| | 00:50 |
business objectives.
| | 00:52 |
Second, spend the time to really
understand your key audiences and their needs.
| | 00:57 |
Perhaps the cornerstone of a good
content strategy is to research your audience
| | 01:02 |
and then understand them well enough to
be able to market to them effectively.
| | 01:06 |
Knowing your customer's role in an
organization, their location, their
| | 01:09 |
demographics, their interests, and their
behaviors will help you step into their
| | 01:14 |
shoes and bring insights
into the planning process.
| | 01:17 |
Third is ensuring that everyone in
your organization is involved. This isn't
| | 01:22 |
something that you're going to be able
to tackle alone, and you'll need buy-in
| | 01:25 |
from your CEO, all the way down to your interns.
| | 01:28 |
If you're a smaller organization, you might
even consider outsourcing some of the work.
| | 01:32 |
Once you've found the people, an
involved group is one that's passionate and
| | 01:36 |
excited to spread knowledge.
| | 01:38 |
Getting the people in your organization
onboard is not an easy thing, but having
| | 01:42 |
a plan with a good thorough reasoning
and clear expectations around your goals
| | 01:47 |
can help persuade them to jump onboard.
| | 01:49 |
Fourth, you need to ensure that everyone
in the organization maintains a healthy
| | 01:53 |
respect for online reputation management.
| | 01:56 |
Whenever you put anything out there
on the web, it's there forever and it's
| | 02:00 |
there standing by your brand.
| | 02:02 |
You can't un-tweet something, and if you
publish something an error, odds
| | 02:05 |
are good that some server somewhere has
already captured and stored whatever it
| | 02:09 |
was that you didn't want up there.
| | 02:11 |
Many businesses today have well-crafted
and well thought-out policies for
| | 02:15 |
writing and publishing content on
behalf of the company, but many still don't.
| | 02:19 |
If you fall into the latter bucket,
you'll want to invest some time to
| | 02:23 |
define just what people can and can't post, and
what editorial procedures need to be followed.
| | 02:28 |
Always remember that anyone on the web can
read and find your content when it goes live.
| | 02:33 |
Ultimately, your reputation will
dictate whether customers want to do
| | 02:37 |
business with you or not.
| | 02:39 |
The last thing successful
organizations do with their content strategies, is
| | 02:43 |
spend time monitoring trends.
| | 02:45 |
The only thing that's certain about
the Internet is that the online marketing
| | 02:48 |
landscape is constantly changing.
| | 02:51 |
New competitors are popping up by the
minute, old competitors are doing new things.
| | 02:55 |
Your business environment is changing
faster than ever before, and your target
| | 03:00 |
audience is changing along with it.
| | 03:02 |
What this means is that what worked for you
today, won't necessarily work for you tomorrow.
| | 03:06 |
And you have to embrace the fact that
this is a moving target that requires your
| | 03:10 |
full attention if you want to stay ahead.
| | 03:13 |
Monitoring trends involves not only
keeping a pulse on your industry, but also
| | 03:17 |
things like renewing keyword research
and reviewing your content structure and
| | 03:21 |
strategy on a regular basis.
| | 03:23 |
Maintaining industry relationships,
having continuous contact with influencers
| | 03:27 |
and industry leaders to get the inside scoop.
| | 03:30 |
And finding new and creative ways to
relay those messages to your followers.
| | 03:33 |
While successful organizations tend to
exemplify these traits, this isn't by any
| | 03:39 |
means a complete list.
| | 03:40 |
Take a look at your own
organization and your own objectives, and then
| | 03:44 |
define your own success.
| | 03:46 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Defining your audience, topics, angle, and style| 00:00 |
Defining and understanding your
target audience is the first step to
| | 00:03 |
writing content for them.
| | 00:05 |
Attracting just anyone to
your website isn't so hard.
| | 00:08 |
It's attracting the right kind of
people and offering the right topics in the
| | 00:12 |
right tone and style
| | 00:13 |
that's a challenge.
| | 00:14 |
A good way to start is to simply ask
the question, who are the people that we
| | 00:19 |
want visiting our site and what
roles would they play in an organization?
| | 00:22 |
From here we can go through the
exercise of understanding how they're using
| | 00:26 |
online channels and where we might
be able to message or engage them.
| | 00:30 |
A great tool to start off with is the
Forrester Technographics Profile Tool.
| | 00:35 |
This tool can help provide
insight into how your end consumer uses
| | 00:39 |
different technologies today.
| | 00:41 |
For example, if we were targeting a
group of US males between the ages of 45 and
| | 00:46 |
54, we can see that the majority
of them are what we call spectators.
| | 00:51 |
This means that they often spend their
time on blogs, videos, podcast, forums
| | 00:55 |
and reviews, but they're reading,
and not necessarily contributing.
| | 00:59 |
Knowing this, we might tailor our
content to these formats, and we know we'll
| | 01:04 |
need to work harder to get any user-generated
content from these folks.
| | 01:08 |
Once we know what kinds of content our
target audience is consuming and we've
| | 01:12 |
identified who they are, we'll
need to dive in and look at our topics.
| | 01:16 |
Ultimately, users are typing
keywords into search engines.
| | 01:20 |
And keywords remain the
core and foundation of SEO.
| | 01:24 |
So when it comes to choosing topics,
we'll want to tie them to the keywords
| | 01:28 |
we've chosen, based on relevance,
search volume, and competition during our
| | 01:32 |
keyword research process.
| | 01:34 |
You'll also want to look at tools like
Google Insights for Search to monitor
| | 01:37 |
industry trends and understand
what's popular among your target audience.
| | 01:41 |
And what's being searched for and discussed.
| | 01:44 |
Matching your topics to what's popular
and being searched for will maximize the
| | 01:48 |
size of the potential
audience that you're catering to.
| | 01:51 |
Next, you can employ the
concept of filling in the gaps.
| | 01:54 |
Odds are good that someone else
already wrote something about your topic.
| | 01:59 |
And the last thing the Internet needs is
more pages talking about the same old thing.
| | 02:03 |
Instead, figure out what's missing
out there and fill in those holes.
| | 02:07 |
Monitor what your competitors are
writing about, but more importantly, monitor
| | 02:11 |
what they're not writing about.
| | 02:13 |
These are great opportunities for you to
offer unique perspectives and even more value.
| | 02:18 |
Once we've identified who we are
writing for and what we are writing about, the
| | 02:22 |
last thing we need to do is
define our content angles.
| | 02:26 |
This is really nothing more than the
approach to writing your content, and it
| | 02:30 |
should be consistent and appropriate
to the audience that you're speaking to.
| | 02:33 |
Are you writing technical articles for
rocket scientists to read, or lighthearted
| | 02:38 |
commentaries on the state of
the entertainment industry?
| | 02:40 |
There are very different tones for each.
And above all, remember that while we're
| | 02:45 |
doing all this to support our business
objectives and ultimately some kind of
| | 02:48 |
sales, no one wants to read a blatant
sales pitch. We need to offer up something
| | 02:53 |
of real value, content that's
compelling and useful to the reader.
| | 02:57 |
When you're deciding how to angle and
position your content, you will want to
| | 03:01 |
consider a couple more areas of importance.
| | 03:03 |
First, be original. Whatever you write,
take the time to make sure that it's
| | 03:07 |
unique and that it comes from your own voice.
| | 03:10 |
You want to bring something new to
the table that will excite your readers,
| | 03:13 |
that they can't find anywhere else.
| | 03:15 |
Whether you decide to be humorous or
put a creative twist to your content, it
| | 03:19 |
needs to keep them engaged or even
entertained from beginning to end.
| | 03:23 |
When they're done reading it, they
should be thinking, I now know something
| | 03:27 |
interesting that I didn't know before.
Or even better, they'll be thinking, I
| | 03:31 |
need to share that with my friends.
| | 03:33 |
From a format perspective, you'll
want to think about the style of content
| | 03:37 |
that you're putting together.
| | 03:38 |
Will you be writing a blog post or
informative-style articles? Are you taking a
| | 03:42 |
comparative style where you contrast
product A with product B? What about
| | 03:46 |
discussing a before and after
scenario, or a how-to walk-through?
| | 03:50 |
And remember that content isn't just text;
| | 03:53 |
pictures are worth a thousand words.
| | 03:55 |
And you can even use video to
capture sights and sounds to convey complex
| | 03:59 |
concepts or to make
something more tangible to a user.
| | 04:03 |
By understanding who you're writing
for, what you're writing about, and what
| | 04:07 |
style you are writing in, you'll be
cementing the foundations of thoughtful,
| | 04:11 |
unique, and relevant content that
will wow both human readers and search
| | 04:15 |
engines alike.
| | 04:17 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding different types of content| 00:00 |
You might think that content is just text on
a page, but these days that's not the case.
| | 00:05 |
Content can take many forms, including
presentations, images, infographics, and even video.
| | 00:12 |
Let's take a look at the different
types of content out there on the web.
| | 00:15 |
First, lots and lots of content
out there is in textual format.
| | 00:20 |
These are the words we read on pages,
blog posts, articles, and more, and as
| | 00:24 |
we've seen, the text we choose and how
it relates to the keywords we want to
| | 00:28 |
target with out SEO
strategy is extremely important.
| | 00:31 |
But don't forget about other file formats.
| | 00:33 |
PDF files, Word documents, and even
presentation slides are all forms of content
| | 00:38 |
we interact with day in and day out,
and they can all be published on the web.
| | 00:42 |
While you can usually bring the
content from document formats into an HTML
| | 00:47 |
format for the web, many people
don't think about their presentations.
| | 00:51 |
If you have a slide deck that you
recently presented, why not host it on the web
| | 00:55 |
and share it with the
audience after the session?
| | 00:58 |
More and more speakers and companies
are making a habit of uploading their
| | 01:01 |
slides to slide hosting services like
SlideShare, before they even give their talk.
| | 01:06 |
They can then provide a link to the
deck that can be downloaded, so that
| | 01:10 |
audience members can follow
along on their laptops and share the
| | 01:13 |
presentation with others.
| | 01:15 |
This can provide a catalyst for
sharing and buzz from content that
| | 01:18 |
you've already created.
| | 01:20 |
Using images can be a great way to
tell a story visually or to help readers
| | 01:24 |
envision exactly what the
text on a page is describing.
| | 01:28 |
And images are quickly evolving as their
own kind of content all across the web.
| | 01:33 |
Think of the popularity of sites like
Pinterest that are completely driven by
| | 01:37 |
groups of images arranged by and
commented on by people all over the world.
| | 01:41 |
And search engines are
indexing image content too.
| | 01:45 |
Head over to google.com and search
for your company or brand name in Google
| | 01:48 |
Image Search. Does it return
the results that you'd expect?
| | 01:51 |
While users expect images to be part of
the online experience, and you can help
| | 01:56 |
search engines understand pictures as
part of a page with the proper code,
| | 02:00 |
image search brings a new way of searching
for and discovering content in and of itself.
| | 02:06 |
Another popular piece of content
that is popped up is the Infographic.
| | 02:10 |
Infographics represent a concept or
a large set of data in a visual way.
| | 02:15 |
And they can help people absorb and
distill a lot of information in a meaningful
| | 02:19 |
way that can quickly be understood.
| | 02:22 |
Infographics are typically just image
files, and they're often found on pages
| | 02:26 |
with plenty of context around them,
so they can certainly be indexed and
| | 02:30 |
searched on in search engines.
| | 02:32 |
And well-designed and constructed
infographics on popular topics have the added
| | 02:36 |
benefit of getting shared around
and referenced from other sources.
| | 02:40 |
Just a few short years ago, you would
have been crazy to put video up on your
| | 02:44 |
web pages, because it would have
meant that your users needed to have a
| | 02:47 |
high-speed connection and have some
fancy plug-in installed in their browsers.
| | 02:51 |
These days, video is everywhere, and not
only do most of us have high-speed data
| | 02:56 |
connections to our computers,
| | 02:58 |
we also have them for
our phones and tablets too.
| | 03:01 |
Video production has never been more
economical, and telling a story with
| | 03:05 |
sight and sound can help you get across a
message that text and images simply can't convey.
| | 03:10 |
And remember that video content
can be optimized for search engines.
| | 03:14 |
By syndicating your video through
popular services and properly selecting your
| | 03:18 |
video title, description, tags, and
categories as you do, you can position your
| | 03:23 |
videos to be found in search.
| | 03:26 |
And don't forget to transcribe your
videos into text that can be used for closed
| | 03:30 |
captioning or subtitles, and
that search engines can read.
| | 03:33 |
YouTube is one of the most popular
video hosting services out, there and it
| | 03:38 |
allows users to upload and
share videos online for free.
| | 03:42 |
It also happens to be a Google
property, and you've likely seen YouTube videos
| | 03:46 |
showing up in search results.
| | 03:48 |
If you're producing video content,
then at the very least you'll want to make
| | 03:52 |
sure to get yourself a YouTube channel
and post your videos there, filling in
| | 03:56 |
all the metadata that can help your
content show up when your potential
| | 04:00 |
customers are searching.
| | 04:01 |
When it comes time for content creation,
it's important to keep in mind that
| | 04:05 |
text is not your only option.
| | 04:07 |
Different audiences will consume
different types of content, and search engines
| | 04:11 |
are capable of indexing and
returning all kinds of things.
| | 04:15 |
Knowing what types of content are out
there will not only help you think more
| | 04:19 |
strategically about what to publish,
but it will also keep you on your toes and
| | 04:23 |
above the competition.
| | 04:25 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Getting ideas for content| 00:00 |
Getting ideas for writing content can
be tough, and many people struggle at
| | 00:04 |
this stage of the game.
| | 00:06 |
While only you can figure out what
content will accomplish your search engine
| | 00:09 |
optimization goals, there are a few things
you can do to get the creative juices flowing.
| | 00:14 |
First, think of your website in terms
of some very broad themes, and then think
| | 00:19 |
of the different ways you might
be able to present those themes.
| | 00:22 |
Content can be classified in many ways,
and thinking about the style you could
| | 00:26 |
write in, may shake some ideas
loose and start you down a path.
| | 00:30 |
Here are a few broad types that you can
refer back to when you need that spark.
| | 00:35 |
Educational pieces can be used to
show your users how to do something or to
| | 00:39 |
teach them something that
they didn't know before.
| | 00:42 |
You could take a statistic fact or a
figure from your industry and expand upon
| | 00:46 |
it, offering value from the
perspective of an expert opinion.
| | 00:50 |
You can get technical and focus on
details or advanced topics that appeal to
| | 00:54 |
savvy users or other industry experts.
| | 00:58 |
Procedural content can be a step by
step how-to type of article that walks a
| | 01:02 |
visitor through a certain process.
| | 01:04 |
Informational content doesn't have
to be groundbreaking or Pulitzer Prize
| | 01:08 |
winning. Just putting up a page of
driving directions to your store or
| | 01:12 |
biographies of your key executive team
are both content opportunities that may
| | 01:17 |
be missing from your pages.
| | 01:19 |
News is simply an informational page
that references something that happened at
| | 01:23 |
a specific moment in time.
| | 01:25 |
This could be industry news that
you're reporting or commenting on. Or it
| | 01:29 |
could be company news about who you've hired, or
a recap of the conference that you just hosted.
| | 01:35 |
All of these can be applied to a broad
array of themes, and there are certainly
| | 01:38 |
many more not included in this list.
| | 01:41 |
It might help to have your target keywords
in front of you as you run through this list.
| | 01:45 |
The combination of specific phrases
and types of content can often be the
| | 01:50 |
source of a great idea.
| | 01:52 |
The second thing you can do as a source
of inspiration is scan your competitors
| | 01:56 |
to see if you're missing something, or if
there is a hole out there that you can fill.
| | 02:00 |
Do a quick search on some of your
keywords and click on some of your competitors.
| | 02:04 |
You can spend some time on their
sites and take a look at their blogs or
| | 02:08 |
their FAQ sections.
| | 02:09 |
What kinds of things are they writing
about? Are there categories that you can
| | 02:13 |
offer new, unique insights into? Are
there hot topics that you can expand upon, or
| | 02:18 |
burning questions that you can answer?
| | 02:20 |
You can also take a look at
your competition in social media.
| | 02:24 |
What are they tweeting and posting about?
Maybe they got the industry scoop that
| | 02:28 |
you missed, and that might be
something right for a commentary piece.
| | 02:32 |
Third, the people that you work with each
and every day can be hidden sources
| | 02:36 |
of fantastic content.
| | 02:38 |
Customers are often happy to leave
reviews and provide feedback if you ask them
| | 02:42 |
to, and there are lots of ways that you can ask.
| | 02:45 |
Calling up or having a face-to-face
conversation with your best customers can
| | 02:49 |
lead to a case study or a testimonial
that you can put up on your site that
| | 02:53 |
shows real customers having good experiences.
| | 02:56 |
For a search engine, that can
represent both good content and authority.
| | 03:01 |
You might ask a customer to do a
thorough review of one of your products or
| | 03:04 |
services for posting on your website,
or run a contest where customers
| | 03:08 |
write about their experiences for a chance
to win a sweepstakes or a prize of some kind.
| | 03:13 |
And don't stop with your customers. As
an organization, you have a network of
| | 03:17 |
people that you work with that could
all provide some kind of content for you.
| | 03:21 |
Call up your vendors and ask them to
write a joint case study that you can
| | 03:25 |
publish on your website.
| | 03:26 |
If your peers give you an award
or an industry partner gives you a
| | 03:29 |
certification, you can be
creating content around it.
| | 03:33 |
And don't be afraid to reach out to
your professional networks. Your industry
| | 03:37 |
contacts might just be willing to
author a guest blog post if you ask them.
| | 03:41 |
Coming up with content ideas can be hard,
but remember, that means it's hard for
| | 03:45 |
your competitors too.
| | 03:47 |
Looking at the kind of content
pieces you can write, taking stock of your
| | 03:51 |
competitors in your industry, and
leveraging the people you touch day to day can
| | 03:56 |
help you come up with the content that
might just attract your next customer.
| | 04:00 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with an editorial calendar| 00:00 |
An editorial calendar is perhaps one of
the most important parts of your content
| | 00:04 |
strategy, and without proper planning
you'll find it difficult to establish
| | 00:08 |
consistency or structure in the
content you're posting to your site.
| | 00:12 |
An editorial calendar simply maps out
your content development process, assigning
| | 00:16 |
writers and dates to the topics of
pages, posts, or other content that will be
| | 00:21 |
going up on your pages.
| | 00:22 |
Here is an example of an editorial
calendar, and while you can certainly use this
| | 00:26 |
format to get started, keep in mind
that there's no single editorial calendar
| | 00:30 |
that will fit every business.
| | 00:32 |
You'll want to update this to a format
and structure that you're comfortable
| | 00:35 |
working with and that fits the
unique needs of your content strategy.
| | 00:40 |
First, let's take a look over to the
right-hand side of the spreadsheet, where
| | 00:43 |
we've defined the different content
types that we want to build content
| | 00:46 |
around, things like product showcases,
news stories, how-to articles, and
| | 00:51 |
things of that nature.
| | 00:52 |
Yours will certainly be different,
but listing them out here along with the
| | 00:56 |
approximate frequency with which you'd like to
publish this kind of content will be helpful.
| | 01:01 |
Columns H and I list out the different
writers that we can pull from, along with
| | 01:05 |
the types of content that
they're willing and able to write.
| | 01:08 |
You might be lucky enough to have a
team of copywriters that you can call upon.
| | 01:12 |
But if not, keep in mind that these
folks can be anyone working with you.
| | 01:16 |
You may require your sales team to
write one piece of content per month, or maybe
| | 01:20 |
your management agrees to put
together one blog post every two months.
| | 01:25 |
Whatever resources you have to help
with content, listing them out here will
| | 01:29 |
help you see who's
available to write what, when.
| | 01:32 |
The left-hand side of the spreadsheet
includes a row for every day of the month,
| | 01:36 |
listing what day a specific content is
due, who's responsible for it, and where
| | 01:41 |
on the site it will be published.
| | 01:43 |
In this case we can see that there is
new content going up on this site five
| | 01:47 |
days a week, spread out over a company
blog, news pages, product pages, and a
| | 01:52 |
customer testimonials section.
| | 01:54 |
You can see that column E is reserved
for the headline of the content that's
| | 01:58 |
going to be written, and many editorial
calendars will go so far as to list the
| | 02:02 |
target keyword, title, and descriptions as well.
| | 02:05 |
Again, feel free to use this format
as a template for creating your own
| | 02:09 |
editorial calendar, but make sure to
add in whatever you feel is necessary for
| | 02:13 |
your own organization.
| | 02:15 |
And although this one has been done in
Excel, it's often a good practice to do
| | 02:19 |
this in Google spreadsheets so that the
document can be shared across your team,
| | 02:23 |
and everyone can collaborate on the
same document without having to pass around
| | 02:27 |
different versions of the same file.
| | 02:29 |
You'll also need to define how often
your planning will happen, and how far out
| | 02:33 |
you'll be making assignments.
| | 02:35 |
Some organizations work week by week,
while others will plan out months in advance.
| | 02:40 |
Whatever you choose, you'll need to make
sure that writers are given sufficient
| | 02:43 |
time to produce high quality output.
| | 02:46 |
We're not writing just for the sake
of putting more pages on your website.
| | 02:49 |
Remember that quality wins over quantity here.
| | 02:52 |
In the end, an editorial calendar will
only be as useful as the person taking
| | 02:57 |
charge of it, and the
people taking action from it.
| | 03:00 |
Building out a plan, assigning authors
and topics, and holding people accountable
| | 03:04 |
for delivering will ensure that you're
consistently putting up good content.
| | 03:09 |
And don't forget to
promote that content as well.
| | 03:11 |
Many organizations include their
social media and promotion plans right
| | 03:15 |
inside the editorial calendar,
indicating who will be sharing what on each
| | 03:19 |
channel, what hash tags will be
used, and who is responsible for keeping
| | 03:23 |
conversations going.
| | 03:25 |
Using an editorial calendar to keep
track of your content strategy can be
| | 03:29 |
a great way to put the structure
around this process that's needed for
| | 03:32 |
consistency.
| | 03:33 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Promoting your content with social media| 00:00 |
Social media can be a great way to let
the world know that your content is out
| | 00:04 |
there, and can even be a source of
referral traffic in its own right, helping
| | 00:08 |
potential customers find you.
| | 00:10 |
But social media is still pretty new,
and many businesses have jumped into it
| | 00:14 |
without really knowing
how to use it effectively.
| | 00:16 |
The first thing you'll need to do if
you want to leverage social media to help
| | 00:20 |
get your content out there is to make
sure that your company has a presence on
| | 00:23 |
at least the top social media networks.
| | 00:26 |
We're talking about the ones with the
largest number of active users, Twitter
| | 00:30 |
Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube.
| | 00:33 |
Every one of these networks is a
chance to get your content in front of more
| | 00:37 |
eyeballs, attract more links,
and encourage more sharing.
| | 00:41 |
Once you've established a presence on
these networks, you'll want to make sure
| | 00:45 |
that they are integrated on the pages
that host the content you're creating.
| | 00:48 |
Lots of companies maintain a blog with
an RSS feed, because it's a great way
| | 00:52 |
to get the word out to qualified visitors.
They're actively subscribing to your content.
| | 00:57 |
You can do a similar thing with
social media by placing the various share
| | 01:01 |
buttons on your pages, and these allow
users to quickly pass on content they've
| | 01:06 |
found useful to their own networks.
| | 01:08 |
That said, you'll want to choose
your social share buttons carefully.
| | 01:12 |
Don't fill your pages with 20 different
buttons that take two-and-a-half days to load;
| | 01:16 |
you'll want to pick the ones
that your audiences are active on.
| | 01:19 |
For example, if you've got a strong
presence on Twitter and Google+, make sure
| | 01:24 |
you put the Twitter and
Google+ buttons on your pages.
| | 01:27 |
If you're trying to grow your
Facebook or LinkedIn following, placing those
| | 01:31 |
buttons there might be a good idea as well.
| | 01:34 |
But if you don't have a MySpace or
Orkut page, and you don't target users of
| | 01:38 |
those social networks, you may want to
leave those off and make it simpler for
| | 01:41 |
your consumer base to make their selection.
| | 01:44 |
Keep in mind also that many of
these Share buttons are configurable.
| | 01:48 |
For example, you could optimize the
default tweet to include your Twitter
| | 01:52 |
username, to encourage
recipients of that tweet to follow you.
| | 01:56 |
On Facebook, you can control which
image thumbnails to use as a default.
| | 02:00 |
As you build and grow your presence on
social networks, you'll find topics that
| | 02:04 |
you relate to that are guiding
conversations in the social sphere.
| | 02:08 |
On Twitter and Google+, hashtags are
commonly used to tag certain conversations,
| | 02:13 |
and people that are interested in those
topics can choose to listen to tweets or
| | 02:16 |
posts that contain specific hashtags.
| | 02:20 |
You can find existing hashtags by
searching keywords on Twitter about
| | 02:23 |
your industry, or by following
influencers who tweet regularly, and seeing
| | 02:28 |
which hashtags they use.
| | 02:29 |
For example, the Web Analytics community
uses the hashtag #measure in their tweets.
| | 02:35 |
Many of the experts converse and
share interesting content with one
| | 02:38 |
another using this hashtag.
| | 02:40 |
So if you're creating content that
fits the bill, you can use that hashtag to
| | 02:44 |
get your content in front of a
very specific group of people.
| | 02:48 |
Remember though, this is a self-
regulating community. Your content must be
| | 02:52 |
useful and valuable to that group, and
if it is, you'll be rewarded with further
| | 02:57 |
shares and retweets.
| | 02:59 |
A good thing to do when planning
your content strategy is to identify how
| | 03:03 |
you plan to share that content across your
social network once it's been pushed live.
| | 03:08 |
Which networks will it go out on, what
will the message say, what hashtags will
| | 03:12 |
it use, who is going to do it, who
is going to monitor and respond to the
| | 03:16 |
activity and keep the conversations going?
| | 03:18 |
These are all questions to keep in mind
with each piece of content that you publish.
| | 03:23 |
Last, the popular social media
outlets of today are not likely to
| | 03:27 |
remain constant forever.
| | 03:29 |
Remember, Friendster, MySpace? How
about Netscape and AOL? In this industry,
| | 03:34 |
companies rise and fall faster than
ever before, and you'll need to keep an eye
| | 03:38 |
on the networks that matter for your
audience and respond to them accordingly.
| | 03:42 |
Whichever networks you choose, and
however you choose to leverage them, spending
| | 03:46 |
the time to get the word out about the
content that you've worked so hard to
| | 03:50 |
create will be well worth the effort.
| | 03:52 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Measuring content performance| 00:00 |
Measuring the performance of your
content is essential to determining the
| | 00:04 |
success of your SEO efforts, and to
help guide your content strategy.
| | 00:08 |
By looking at how your content performs,
you'll be able to understand what your
| | 00:12 |
visitors want, and provide
more of it to them in the future.
| | 00:16 |
When you evaluate your content's
performance, it's important to ask these
| | 00:20 |
questions: What content are our
visitors looking at? What's our most popular
| | 00:24 |
content? Are our visitors engaged with
our content? Are our visitors sharing our
| | 00:29 |
content with others? And, is our
content generating quality business results?
| | 00:34 |
If you haven't already, you can
install a free tool, like Google Analytics, to
| | 00:39 |
collect data that you'll need to help
you get the answers to these questions.
| | 00:43 |
If you're not familiar with Google
Analytics, then check out the Essential
| | 00:46 |
Training course, where you can learn
all about the reports and features that
| | 00:50 |
we're about to discuss.
| | 00:52 |
First, figuring out what our customers are
looking at can be measured by simple page views.
| | 00:57 |
In Google Analytics, you can head over
to the Content reports, and you'll see
| | 01:01 |
a list of the most popular pages of your
website for the date range you're looking at.
| | 01:05 |
If you want to find out which were your
most popular pages as Landing Pages, or
| | 01:10 |
the first page a visitor sees when they
come to your site, you can head over to
| | 01:14 |
the Landing Pages report.
| | 01:16 |
If you're an advanced user, you can
even use Custom Segments to look at only
| | 01:20 |
visits that came from organic
search, or even specific search engines.
| | 01:25 |
And while it's good to know which
pieces of content got the most page views,
| | 01:29 |
that doesn't tell us anything about
how well the content was received.
| | 01:33 |
Writing content is easy, but writing
content that will provide value and leave
| | 01:38 |
an impression on your visitors is much
more difficult, and that's where we're
| | 01:42 |
interested in finding out
about visitor engagement.
| | 01:44 |
There are three metrics that can help
you quickly tell how well visitors are
| | 01:49 |
engaging with your content: pages per
visit, average time on site, and bounce rate.
| | 01:55 |
Visitors are considered more engaged
the longer each of their visits to your
| | 01:59 |
website is, and this can be measured by
both average time on site, and the number
| | 02:04 |
of pages they view during their visit.
| | 02:07 |
The bounce rate is a measure of how
often a visitor lands on your website and
| | 02:11 |
then leaves without seeing
any other page of the site.
| | 02:14 |
Generally speaking, the lower the
bounce rate, the more your visitors were
| | 02:18 |
enticed by your content to
dive deeper into your site.
| | 02:22 |
Next, let's look at whether or not
our content is being shared online.
| | 02:27 |
Well you can use a slew of social media
tools to measure how often your tweets
| | 02:31 |
and posts and pluses and shares are re-
shared throughout your social networks,
| | 02:35 |
tools like Google Analytics can also
be configured to track interactions that
| | 02:39 |
are happening both on and off your site.
| | 02:42 |
Google Analytics can track how many
times people are clicking your social media
| | 02:46 |
sharing buttons, or leaving comments on
your blog, and it can even go out and
| | 02:50 |
find the public posts across a number
of different social networks that have
| | 02:54 |
been used to share content from your site.
| | 02:56 |
Of course, the flip-side of this is that
when content is shared via social media,
| | 03:02 |
the recipients of those tweets and
posts can come and visit your website.
| | 03:06 |
You can use campaign tagging and Google
Analytics Traffic Sources reports to see
| | 03:10 |
how many of your visits are
coming from all of the sharing.
| | 03:14 |
Perhaps the most important question of
all is whether or not all of this content
| | 03:18 |
production is driving our business goals.
| | 03:21 |
A properly configured web analytics
tool is focused not just on counting pages,
| | 03:26 |
but associating all of that
data with business outcomes.
| | 03:29 |
Do the visitors who came to our site as
a result of particular piece of content
| | 03:33 |
end up buying something? Calling us?
Did they submit a lead form or download a
| | 03:38 |
white paper? Did they sign-up for a
product demonstration? Did they follow us on
| | 03:42 |
a social network, or did they share our
content with others? Did they sign up for
| | 03:46 |
our newsletter? Each and every one of
these goals has a real business value.
| | 03:51 |
And by understanding what content drives
these conversion actions, we can answer
| | 03:56 |
the biggest question of all: What did
we get back for our investment in SEO?
| | 04:01 |
Whether you use Google Analytics or
any other analytics tool, monitoring and
| | 04:06 |
measuring the performance of your
content will help you understand the value
| | 04:09 |
you're creating and help you plan for
and continually improve the content you'll
| | 04:14 |
be focusing on next.
| | 04:16 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
6. Link-Building StrategiesUnderstanding the importance of links| 00:00 |
One of the most important aspects of
SEO is links, and this has traditionally
| | 00:04 |
been the backbone of how search engines work.
| | 00:07 |
As search engines scour the Internet
and crawl all the pages in the world, they
| | 00:12 |
find links pointing to other pages.
| | 00:14 |
You know that blue underlined text that
you see everywhere that you can click on
| | 00:18 |
and your browser takes you to some other page?
| | 00:21 |
You can think of each one
of those links as a vote.
| | 00:24 |
And not every vote is the same.
| | 00:25 |
Remember that some sites are
considered more authoritative and more
| | 00:29 |
trustworthy than others.
| | 00:31 |
In this weighted democracy, there are
really just two things that matter, the
| | 00:35 |
number of links you have pointing to
you, and the quality of those links.
| | 00:39 |
Generally speaking, you'll improve
your search engine visibility by increasing
| | 00:43 |
your link popularity.
| | 00:45 |
The more quality links you have pointing
to your website from other websites, the
| | 00:49 |
more authoritative your
site will be to search engines.
| | 00:52 |
If no other website was linking to
yours, it would be very difficult for search
| | 00:56 |
engines to trust your site enough
to return it in the search results.
| | 01:00 |
A search engine would much rather
show results from sites that have earned
| | 01:03 |
links and authority.
| | 01:05 |
But you can have all the links in the
world, and it won't matter unless those
| | 01:09 |
links are of high quality.
| | 01:11 |
One thing search engines look for to
determine link quality is how relevant the
| | 01:15 |
link is to the content on the pages.
| | 01:17 |
For example, if you run a recipe website,
and you end up with a food blog linking
| | 01:22 |
to you, the search engine has no
trouble at all with that relationship.
| | 01:26 |
It makes perfect sense that a food
blog would link to a recipe website.
| | 01:30 |
But if you went out and told your
friend who owns a gambling website to put a
| | 01:34 |
link on their site over to yours, that's
going to be a little harder to justify.
| | 01:38 |
A gambling site probably has no
business linking to your recipes.
| | 01:42 |
And since that thematic connection
isn't there, a search engine may not place as
| | 01:46 |
much value on that link.
| | 01:49 |
Search engines will also look at the
link text itself. The text that you can
| | 01:53 |
click on is what's known as the
anchor text, and if you think about it, that
| | 01:57 |
anchor text serves as a pretty good clue as
to what the destination page is all about.
| | 02:01 |
For example, if a link uses anchor text
like "california backpacking tips," that's
| | 02:08 |
a pretty strong signal to the search
engines that the page on the other side of
| | 02:11 |
that link is about California backpacking tips.
| | 02:15 |
A search engine doesn't even need to go to
that page and it already knows what to expect.
| | 02:20 |
Think about that compared to a link
that uses anchor text like "link" or "click
| | 02:24 |
here." Unless that page is really about
links or clicking here, it's not going to
| | 02:29 |
tell a search engine much
about what's on that page.
| | 02:33 |
Another indicator of quality is
freshness and trends. Search engines expect you
| | 02:38 |
to naturally gain a steady amount of
links over time, and if you don't, it might
| | 02:43 |
be interpreted as a bad thing.
| | 02:44 |
For example, if a bunch of links to
your site showed up on the Internet five
| | 02:49 |
years ago and you've had nothing
since then, your content may be considered
| | 02:53 |
stale, and your site would be less
authoritative and less trustworthy.
| | 02:57 |
On the other hand, if you've never had
anyone linked to you in your life, and
| | 03:01 |
then on one certain date there was a
pattern of a hundred new links showing up
| | 03:05 |
on random blogs on the same day every
single month, the search engines are going
| | 03:10 |
to investigate a little deeper, and they
might find out that you've hired someone
| | 03:13 |
to buy you a bunch of links every month.
| | 03:16 |
And while we're talking about spam,
this is probably a good time to say that it
| | 03:20 |
is highly recommended that
you not try to trick the system.
| | 03:24 |
Search engines are very aware of just
about every technique out there, and there
| | 03:28 |
are some very real penalties for getting
caught trying to manipulate the system.
| | 03:32 |
If a search engine finds an extremely
large amount of similar links with the
| | 03:36 |
same anchor text popping up all over the
place, or links that appear to have been
| | 03:40 |
paid for, or suspicious groups of
websites known to practice spamming techniques,
| | 03:45 |
or any number of other factors, it's
very easy for them to figure out exactly
| | 03:50 |
what you've been doing and
then penalize you for it.
| | 03:53 |
Penalties can be anything from dropping
your rankings for minor infractions, to
| | 03:57 |
dropping you from the entire index
if you're doing really overt things.
| | 04:01 |
Remember, search engine optimization
is not something you do for short-term
| | 04:05 |
gains. It's something you build upon
day after day, to build long-term value.
| | 04:10 |
Finally we've entered into an era where
social media is now a part of our online lives.
| | 04:15 |
When people post and share links to
our content, or indicate its quality by
| | 04:19 |
clicking a button, search engines are
taking note. If you think about it, where
| | 04:24 |
they used to have to rely on other
websites in the weighted democracy, social
| | 04:28 |
media allows them a signal that
actually tells them what people like.
| | 04:32 |
Understanding your audience, and the
keywords they are typing into search
| | 04:36 |
engines, and creating great content
around it is the first step to SEO. But
| | 04:41 |
earning the links back to your
website around the Web is what really shows
| | 04:45 |
search engines just how
trustworthy and authoritative you really are.
| | 04:49 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Building internal links| 00:00 |
Earning links back to you from
people and websites you don't control is a
| | 00:04 |
necessary but challenging thing to do,
but don't forget about the links you do
| | 00:08 |
have complete control over.
| | 00:10 |
Determining how you link to pages
on your own site is important for
| | 00:14 |
search engines as well.
| | 00:16 |
Internal linking helps search engines
understand the structure of your website,
| | 00:20 |
the topics and themes of your content,
and even the relative importance each
| | 00:24 |
page has on your site.
| | 00:26 |
We can break down internal
linking into two different types:
| | 00:30 |
Navigation links and Contextual links.
| | 00:33 |
Navigation links are typically links found
on the top, side, or bottom of your web pages.
| | 00:38 |
You can think of them as part
of the framework of your site.
| | 00:41 |
Navigation links are present on every
page of the site, and they're used to help
| | 00:46 |
guide users as they click around your
site and find what they're looking for.
| | 00:50 |
Search engines will analyze your
navigation links to determine a hierarchy of
| | 00:54 |
pages that drill down from your
homepage, and they will be able to see how your
| | 00:59 |
content is organized, and how
flat or deep your site's structure is.
| | 01:03 |
Outside the navigational framework of
your website, you'll have contextual links.
| | 01:08 |
These are links within the content of a
specific page that point to another page on your site.
| | 01:13 |
And just like external links, these can
be very helpful when the content of one
| | 01:18 |
page makes reference to
the content of another page.
| | 01:21 |
Contextual links help users by cross-
referencing other relevant information, but
| | 01:26 |
they help search engines too.
| | 01:28 |
Search engines can look at the
anchor text of an internal link to help it
| | 01:32 |
understand the content of the page the
link points to, and internal links help
| | 01:36 |
the search engines determine topical
relevancy between pages, and the importance
| | 01:41 |
of a page, by the quantity of
internal links pointing to it.
| | 01:45 |
When you're building your website, make
sure to give some thought and planning
| | 01:49 |
to the navigational elements you
plan to use across all of your pages.
| | 01:52 |
And when you're writing content, make
sure you're taking advantage of linking to
| | 01:56 |
other pages on your site with contextual
links that use appropriate anchor text.
| | 02:01 |
Both your users and the
search engines will appreciate it.
| | 02:05 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Building external links| 00:00 |
Building quality links to your website
will improve its overall popularity in
| | 00:04 |
the eyes of the search engines and
improve your search engine visibility.
| | 00:08 |
But you're probably thinking what
most people are thinking at this point.
| | 00:12 |
How do I get links pointing back to
my site when I don't have control over
| | 00:15 |
other websites out there?
| | 00:17 |
The good news is that links come in
different forms and can be generated
| | 00:20 |
from different tactics.
| | 00:22 |
First, there are some easy ones.
| | 00:24 |
A very common way of generating links
is to submit your website or business to
| | 00:29 |
different web directories.
| | 00:30 |
But keep in mind that you are going to
want to be extremely selective about the
| | 00:34 |
directories you submit to.
| | 00:35 |
What you don't want to do is click on
one of those ads that says they'll submit
| | 00:40 |
your website to 4 billion search
engines and directories for $1.99.
| | 00:44 |
There are lots of spamming directories
out there, and there are very few that
| | 00:48 |
are actually trustworthy.
| | 00:49 |
A good guideline to follow is whether or
not the directory conducts some form of
| | 00:54 |
editorial process that reviews each
link, and only accepts relevant and trusted
| | 00:59 |
websites themselves.
| | 01:01 |
If a directory is willing to publish
any link without any review, it's probably
| | 01:05 |
not a reliable directory. The Yahoo!
| | 01:08 |
Directory is a good place to start,
and if you run a local business, you can
| | 01:12 |
submit your information to the
different search engines' respective local
| | 01:15 |
business directories.
| | 01:17 |
If you have industry-specific
directories and listing services that are trusted
| | 01:21 |
and unique to your market,
those are good places to go next.
| | 01:25 |
Another way of building links is to
entice other websites to link to your content.
| | 01:30 |
And the key factor here is that you
need to have quality content that people
| | 01:34 |
are willing to link to.
| | 01:36 |
In a search engine's perfect world,
someone reads a piece of content and says,
| | 01:41 |
vow, that is so fantastic
that I have to link to it.
| | 01:44 |
And sometimes great content attracts
links naturally as a result of people
| | 01:48 |
discovering it and sharing it around.
| | 01:51 |
But there are other times when you
may have to do a little outreach to get
| | 01:54 |
people to discover your
content in the first place.
| | 01:57 |
Leveraging your social connections to
share the fact that you've posted new
| | 02:01 |
content can get the word out.
| | 02:03 |
And don't stop there, try to find other
websites that you feel have the same audience.
| | 02:08 |
For example, there may be a professor
at a university that's doing research
| | 02:12 |
in your field, and publishes their own blog
about topics that are very relevant to yours.
| | 02:17 |
Reaching out to that professor and
letting them know that you have content that
| | 02:20 |
their own readers would find
interesting and useful might just earn you a very
| | 02:25 |
relevant and very trustworthy link.
| | 02:28 |
And beyond generating links from other
websites, these days it's crucial to gain
| | 02:32 |
links from social media sharing.
| | 02:34 |
People are social beings, and we're
very eager to share content we find
| | 02:38 |
interesting with our friends,
our families, and our colleagues.
| | 02:41 |
To search engines, this is a fantastic
signal that tells them what content people
| | 02:46 |
actually like, and what real
people are actually interested in.
| | 02:51 |
So use those sharing buttons on your
content pages, and use your own social
| | 02:55 |
influence on the networks you
participate in to get links to your content out
| | 02:59 |
there and passed around.
| | 03:01 |
Keep in mind, there are some very bad
ways to build links too, and you can be
| | 03:05 |
penalized for doing this
the wrong way, so be careful.
| | 03:08 |
As a general rule, if it feels like you're
trying to cheat the system, don't do it.
| | 03:13 |
Getting caught is something that will
inevitably happen, and when it does, there
| | 03:17 |
are some very real
consequences that are not easy to undo.
| | 03:20 |
Imagine trying to run your business without
anyone ever finding you on a search engine.
| | 03:25 |
Another rule of thumb is that if it's too
easy it's probably going to get you in trouble.
| | 03:30 |
Don't fall prey to the companies out
there offering to sell you 1000 text links
| | 03:35 |
every single month, or post whatever
you want them to on their blog for $20.
| | 03:39 |
Don't trade links with perfect
strangers that have absolutely no relevance to
| | 03:43 |
your business or your content, and don't
put yourself on listings or directories
| | 03:48 |
that exist solely to get you more links.
| | 03:50 |
As with most things, common
sense will keep you out of trouble.
| | 03:55 |
The web is constantly changing and
evolving, and the search engines are too.
| | 03:59 |
While a lot has changed with the
search engines over the years,
| | 04:02 |
the importance of links has remained
intact, and that's because quality and
| | 04:06 |
insightful content will always attract
readers willing to share your content.
| | 04:11 |
As long as your link building tactics
keep those key elements in mind, you'll
| | 04:15 |
always have an opportunity
to build new, quality links.
| | 04:19 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Finding link-building opportunities| 00:00 |
Search engines rely on links to
determine whether your web pages are
| | 00:03 |
trustworthy and authoritative.
| | 00:05 |
And to earn and uphold that status,
it's important to always be on the lookout
| | 00:09 |
for new link building
opportunities that you can take advantage of.
| | 00:13 |
One simple way to find new
opportunities is to analyze the backlinks of other
| | 00:17 |
websites' ranking for a target keyword phrase.
| | 00:20 |
The logic here is pretty straightforward.
| | 00:22 |
If a web page is ranking well for the
keywords you're targeting, then they must
| | 00:26 |
have some good backlinks.
| | 00:28 |
By examining their links, we might find
some that we'd like to go after as well
| | 00:32 |
to help out our own rankings.
| | 00:34 |
Let's take an example, and say we want
to find new link building opportunities
| | 00:38 |
for the phrase "backpacking tours."
| | 00:40 |
The first thing to do is head over to
Google, and do a search for that term.
| | 00:44 |
The top results here are ranking
high in part because of their on-page
| | 00:48 |
optimization, but another strong reason
they rank so well is because they have a
| | 00:53 |
lot of good links pointing to those pages.
| | 00:55 |
What we want to do is analyze who is
linking to those pages, determine how they
| | 01:00 |
got those links, and create a link
outreach strategy to emulate those efforts.
| | 01:05 |
One tool we can use for backlink
research is Open Site Explorer, another tool
| | 01:10 |
that's part of the SEOmoz tool suite.
| | 01:12 |
Let's pick one of those top ranking URLs
from the previous search and enter it in.
| | 01:17 |
You will see lots of tabs of
information about this page, but the first
| | 01:22 |
tab, labeled Inbound Links, lists out all the
pages linking to the one we're examining.
| | 01:28 |
You can play with all the various
filters to narrow down this list according
| | 01:31 |
to different criteria, but for now we're
going to show links from only external sources.
| | 01:38 |
This means we're not going to list links
coming from somewhere else on the same site.
| | 01:43 |
You can examine each of these
links, and your goal here is to gain an
| | 01:47 |
understanding of whether or not the link
would be a good fit for you, and if so,
| | 01:51 |
what will be your link outreach strategy.
| | 01:54 |
One thing to remember is that you want to
build strong, quality links to your own site.
| | 01:59 |
So try to focus on backlinks with a
high page authority or a domain authority.
| | 02:04 |
You will want to be on the lookout for a
few different kinds of opportunities as
| | 02:08 |
you go through these lists, and one
thing you may discover are additional
| | 02:12 |
directories that you can submit your site to.
| | 02:14 |
You should have already submitted your
site to many high quality directories,
| | 02:18 |
but there is a good chance that you've
missed some, and this type of analysis
| | 02:21 |
will let you see what other
directories your competitors have discovered that
| | 02:25 |
may be able to help you as well.
| | 02:27 |
Another common strategy that may
uncover opportunities you can take advantage
| | 02:31 |
of is guest blogging.
| | 02:33 |
This is when you reach out to
another website and offer it to produce
| | 02:36 |
content for their blog.
| | 02:38 |
This can be a win-win arrangement where
the blog gets content that helps their
| | 02:42 |
site and their users, and in return you
include back links to your site within
| | 02:46 |
the content that you've produced.
| | 02:49 |
Not only does this help with backlink
development, but it can also strengthen
| | 02:53 |
your industry relationships, provide
an outlet for thought leadership, and
| | 02:56 |
improve your status in your industry.
| | 02:59 |
You'll also want to be on the
lookout for links from nonprofit sites.
| | 03:03 |
Many companies will support nonprofit
organizations through donations, expertise,
| | 03:07 |
or in-kind work, and many times these
organizations will link back to your site
| | 03:12 |
wherever they may highlight their
sponsors and organizations they work with.
| | 03:16 |
Links from these domains are generally
considered very trustworthy by the search engines.
| | 03:21 |
So you might want to think about what
causes are important to your organization
| | 03:25 |
and consider supporting them.
| | 03:27 |
Or reach out to the nonprofits you're
already working with and see if there is
| | 03:31 |
an opportunity for a link or a story
that can be published on their site.
| | 03:35 |
Another great method is to produce high
quality educational content to post on
| | 03:39 |
your website for the specific
purpose of garnering a link back to it.
| | 03:43 |
There are many sites in just about
every industry vertical whose primary
| | 03:47 |
purpose is to promote industry-
specific education and guide their users to
| | 03:52 |
informative content.
| | 03:54 |
By creating high-quality, informative
content that fills gaps, or by creating
| | 03:58 |
relationships with these sites to
understand what content they're in need of,
| | 04:02 |
you'll gain a network of people and
pages that are happy to link to you.
| | 04:07 |
Once again, this is a win-win
situation, where the third-party site gets the
| | 04:11 |
benefit of directing their readers
to trustworthy content, and you get the
| | 04:14 |
benefit of gaining links from
trustworthy and relevant sites.
| | 04:18 |
There are many more strategies that
can be uncovered from competitor backlink
| | 04:22 |
analysis, and the key is to spend the
time analyzing what opportunities are out
| | 04:26 |
there, and how you can take advantage of them.
| | 04:29 |
And remember to repeat this process with
a handful of top ranking pages for each
| | 04:34 |
of the keywords that you want to rank for.
| | 04:36 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Executing a link-building strategy| 00:00 |
Executing a link building plan
requires organization during your outreach
| | 00:04 |
efforts, as well as a way to monitor the
progress of building new links over time.
| | 00:09 |
One tool that can be really helpful in
managing your link building prospects is Raven Tools.
| | 00:14 |
Raven Tools has a lot of features
to help you with the overall Internet
| | 00:18 |
marketing efforts, but one that's
particularly useful is the Link Manager.
| | 00:23 |
The Link Manager Tool helps you manage
your outreach efforts, allowing you to
| | 00:27 |
track your progress from the moment
you decide you want to try to get a
| | 00:30 |
particular link, until well after it's
been up and found by the search engines.
| | 00:35 |
You can assign the status of the
outreach, what kind of link it is, and who in
| | 00:39 |
your organization has the
responsibility for this link.
| | 00:42 |
You can enter the website you're
reaching out to, and you can also add the URL
| | 00:46 |
and anchor text of any links you
generate, which the tool will monitor over time,
| | 00:51 |
providing uptime status
and link value reporting.
| | 00:54 |
You can also enter the contact
information of the person you're working with
| | 00:58 |
to gain this particular link, and you
can add any additional details around the
| | 01:02 |
process, conversations you've had, and an
overall progress report in the Description tab.
| | 01:08 |
As you start identifying link
opportunities and building relationships with the
| | 01:12 |
different people out there that can help
you turn them into realities, you might
| | 01:15 |
find that you're juggling
a lot at any given time.
| | 01:18 |
Using a tool like Raven to keep track
of everything with tidy, sortable, and
| | 01:23 |
filterable lists can really help keep
this process organized and on track.
| | 01:28 |
As you gain links over time, the other
thing you'll want to determine is whether
| | 01:32 |
or not these links are increasing
the overall authority of your site.
| | 01:36 |
One tool you can use to get a current
snapshot of the value of your current
| | 01:40 |
links is the Open Site
Explorer tool from SEOmoz.
| | 01:45 |
Just enter any one of your URLs,
and you'll be able to see a numeric
| | 01:49 |
representation of both the
domain's authority, as well as the specific
| | 01:52 |
page you've typed in.
| | 01:55 |
To get some rich historical backlink
data, you can use the Backlink History
| | 01:59 |
feature from yet another
tool called Majestic SEO.
| | 02:03 |
This will give you some insightful
trend graphs to let you know how strong your
| | 02:07 |
link outreach is performing over
periods of time, and looking at the Cumulative
| | 02:11 |
View can help you see how you're progressing.
| | 02:14 |
You can even compare yourself to up
to four of your competitors to see what
| | 02:18 |
they're up to, and how you stack up.
| | 02:21 |
Being organized in your outreach
efforts and having access to link performance
| | 02:25 |
information will give you control
over your efforts and data to measure how
| | 02:28 |
you're doing over time.
| | 02:30 |
Having these tools and processes in
place is a key part of maintaining the
| | 02:34 |
ongoing forward momentum that you
need to keep building high-quality links.
| | 02:39 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
7. Measuring SEO EffectivenessMeasuring SEO performance| 00:00 |
One of the biggest challenges you might
find is in figuring out whether your SEO
| | 00:04 |
campaigns are succeeding or failing.
| | 00:07 |
SEO measurement not only involves the
analysis of basic metrics like traffic
| | 00:11 |
resulting from organic search
engines and specific keywords, but it also
| | 00:15 |
requires a holistic approach to
measuring business outcomes and making
| | 00:19 |
adjustments based on data.
| | 00:21 |
If you've never paid attention to SEO
before, there are some basic things you'll
| | 00:25 |
need to have checked off your list.
| | 00:26 |
Before you can do anything, you
need to make sure that you have an
| | 00:29 |
analytic solution installed.
| | 00:31 |
Something like Google Analytics,
Adobe Omniture SiteCatalyst, WebTrends or
| | 00:35 |
Coremetrics will do the job.
| | 00:37 |
You'll want to invest some time and
resources into making sure that your web
| | 00:40 |
analytics tracking is implemented and
configured properly and recording data accurately.
| | 00:46 |
This means that you'll probably need
to go beyond slapping some JavaScript on
| | 00:50 |
your pages, and at a minimum, you
will need to configure your analytic
| | 00:53 |
solution to track goals and business
outcomes, but the sky is the limit on
| | 00:58 |
what you can track these days.
| | 01:00 |
Ensuring a robust and complete
implementation will make your data trustworthy
| | 01:04 |
enough that you can use it to make
confident, evidence-based decisions.
| | 01:09 |
Once you're collecting the data,
you will need to define your business
| | 01:12 |
objectives and the key performance
indicators, or KPIs, you'll use to measure them.
| | 01:17 |
For example, you might want people to
submit a contact form on your website. In
| | 01:21 |
that case, you can configure your
analytic solution to track that as a conversion
| | 01:25 |
action, and you might look at KPIs like
the number of conversions that occur and
| | 01:29 |
the conversion rate.
| | 01:31 |
This is just one example.
| | 01:32 |
But remember, you'll have lots of goals
for your website, and that means you'll
| | 01:36 |
have lots of KPIs to
continually monitor and improve upon.
| | 01:39 |
You'll also want to establish some
SEO-specific KPIs that can help you
| | 01:44 |
understand how your SEO efforts are
paying off. Things like organic search
| | 01:48 |
traffic, or visits to your website from
search engines that are not generated by
| | 01:52 |
paid search, but organic listings; your
total organic search traffic compared to
| | 01:57 |
a previous timeframe, like month-over-month
or year-over-year; non-branded
| | 02:02 |
keyword searches, or searches where your
brand or your business name was not part
| | 02:07 |
of the search term; and target keyword
rankings, or how well you rank for each of
| | 02:11 |
your target keywords.
| | 02:12 |
While this last one might not be
available in your standard analytics reports,
| | 02:16 |
there are plenty of tools out there
that can automate the monitoring of
| | 02:20 |
keyword rankings over time.
| | 02:22 |
Anyone working in SEO that's worth
their paycheck should be keeping an eye on
| | 02:25 |
these metrics at a minimum, but this
is really just scratching the surface.
| | 02:29 |
While attracting traffic to your
website through your SEO program is certainly
| | 02:33 |
important, you also need to see what the
traffic is actually doing once they get to your site.
| | 02:38 |
When you analyze traffic that comes
from a certain search engine as a result of
| | 02:42 |
a certain keyword search, and lands on
a certain landing page, you should also
| | 02:46 |
start to look at how that traffic
converts on your business goals.
| | 02:50 |
If you're in an ecommerce situation,
then you should obviously be looking at
| | 02:53 |
things like revenue, average order
values, and other transactional data.
| | 02:57 |
But even if you don't sell your products
online, you've still got lots of things to track.
| | 03:02 |
You can look at leads that come in the
form of newsletter subscribers, social
| | 03:05 |
followers, event or demonstration
sign ups, driving directions to your
| | 03:09 |
brick-and-mortar store, contact
forms, or anything else you can dream up.
| | 03:13 |
And these days there are lots of
analytic solutions that allow you to track
| | 03:17 |
phone calls back to the
source of traffic as well.
| | 03:20 |
Make sure that you're measuring all of
these important business goals so that
| | 03:23 |
you can look at the conversions and conversion
rates from the traffic your SEO is generating.
| | 03:29 |
Ensuring that you're collecting the
right data, reporting on your KPIs in a
| | 03:32 |
meaningful way, and analyzing the data
to really understand what's happening
| | 03:36 |
with your SEO strategy, is a foundation, but
just looking at the data doesn't change anything.
| | 03:41 |
Measuring and improving your SEO over
time is a continuous cycle of measurement,
| | 03:46 |
learning, and taking action.
| | 03:49 |
You have to use the data to learn what
changes you can make to your strategy,
| | 03:53 |
and once you've made those changes,
you'll start the cycle over again by
| | 03:56 |
measuring whether or not those
changes produced an improvement.
| | 04:00 |
Until you reach perfection, there's
always something you can be doing better.
| | 04:04 |
And a data-driven measurement plan for
your SEO will have you on the path to
| | 04:08 |
continuous improvement.
| | 04:10 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Analyzing keywords| 00:00 |
Keywords are the backbone of search
engine optimization, and when we're
| | 00:03 |
measuring our SEO efforts, analyzing
the different keywords that are bringing
| | 00:07 |
people to our websites is
an excellent place to start.
| | 00:11 |
Inside Google Analytics, we can navigate
to the Organic Search Traffic report by
| | 00:16 |
drilling down through Traffic
Sources > Sources > Search > Organic.
| | 00:21 |
This report will show us all the
keywords that have driven traffic to our pages
| | 00:25 |
from organic search engines, and
although we are only looking at 10 by default,
| | 00:30 |
you can change this to
show up to 500 rows at a time.
| | 00:34 |
Another quick tip is to use the
Secondary dimension dropdown so that we can see
| | 00:39 |
which search engine sent us the traffic.
| | 00:42 |
Just select Source from the dropdown
and you'll see another column of data show
| | 00:46 |
up with this information.
| | 00:48 |
By default, we'll be looking at general
site usage metrics, and here we'll be
| | 00:52 |
able to get some insights around just
how engaged visitors are that find our site
| | 00:56 |
through certain keywords.
| | 00:58 |
Take a look at the second and third rows.
| | 01:01 |
We can see that the keyword "explore
california" keeps people on the site six
| | 01:05 |
times longer than "california events,"
and people view three times more pages.
| | 01:11 |
Not only that, but we're getting a lot
more visits from this particular keyword.
| | 01:15 |
Looking at the Bounce Rate, we can see
that people are much more likely to dive
| | 01:19 |
deeper into our site if they found
us from a Google search on the "explore
| | 01:23 |
california" keyword as well.
| | 01:26 |
If you haven't yet configured goals
in your Google Analytics account to
| | 01:29 |
track business outcomes, you'll
probably want to stop this video and make
| | 01:33 |
that your top priority.
| | 01:35 |
You can't manage what you can't
measure, and that goes for all of your online
| | 01:38 |
marketing efforts, not just SEO.
| | 01:41 |
Once you've got your goals set up, you
can click on a goal set to see how your
| | 01:45 |
keywords are performing with
respect to your business objectives.
| | 01:48 |
Here we've got even more data that
tells us california events isn't necessarily
| | 01:53 |
a good keyword for us.
| | 01:55 |
The explore california keyword is
driving more contact form submissions,
| | 02:00 |
newsletter signups, video
views, and PDF downloads by far.
| | 02:03 |
Of course, if you have configured
ecommerce in Google Analytics, you can also
| | 02:08 |
look at not just goal data, but transactional
data for each of the keywords you are analyzing.
| | 02:14 |
One thing we need to mention is that in
late 2011, Google made a change to how
| | 02:19 |
it allows Web Analytics Tools to
capture keyword data from organic searches.
| | 02:24 |
If a user does a search while logged
into their Google account, Google now
| | 02:28 |
encrypts the keyword data so that
it cannot be read by Analytics Tools.
| | 02:32 |
And unfortunately, this means that
all of those keywords are dumped into a
| | 02:36 |
generic row of data called not provided.
| | 02:39 |
Here we can see that over half of the
organic traffic to this website came from
| | 02:44 |
users that were logged into Google,
and unfortunately, that means that the
| | 02:47 |
keywords that they used are unavailable
to us in Google Analytics or any other
| | 02:52 |
web analytics software.
| | 02:54 |
One thing that we can do is drill down
on that not provided link and change your
| | 02:58 |
primary dimension to Landing Page.
| | 03:02 |
This will at the very least allow
us some insights into how the ranking
| | 03:05 |
pages are performing, and if we
combine this with data around which of our
| | 03:10 |
pages are ranking for which terms, we can
often infer the keywords that led to these visits.
| | 03:16 |
Remember that when you're looking at
keyword reports, you're only seeing data
| | 03:19 |
for people who found your website
through a search that you ranked for, and they
| | 03:23 |
clicked on you in the search results.
| | 03:26 |
What that means is that Web Analytics
is not a very good indicator of what
| | 03:30 |
opportunities you are missing.
| | 03:32 |
If you don't rank for a keyword,
no one is going to be clicking on a
| | 03:36 |
search result for you, and no data for those
missed opportunities will ever show up here.
| | 03:41 |
Make sure to continually look at data
from your keyword research tools as well,
| | 03:45 |
to identify keyword opportunities, and
once you do start getting traffic from
| | 03:49 |
them, you'll be able to analyze how
they perform in your Web Analytics tools.
| | 03:54 |
Earlier in this course, we looked at
Google Webmaster Tools, and one thing
| | 03:59 |
you can do is link your Google Webmaster
Tools account to your Google Analytics account.
| | 04:04 |
Once you've done this, you can view
all of this data under Traffic Sources >
| | 04:08 |
Search Engine Optimization.
| | 04:11 |
In the Google Webmaster Tools' Queries
report, you can find data on impressions
| | 04:15 |
in search engine results, your
average rank positions, and clicks and
| | 04:19 |
click-through rates.
| | 04:20 |
Note that these numbers aren't perfect.
| | 04:22 |
So feel free to take the data in Google
Webmaster Tools reports with a grain of salt.
| | 04:27 |
That said, it's still accurate enough to
get some valuable insights based on the
| | 04:32 |
trends rather than the raw numbers.
| | 04:35 |
One thing to look for are keywords
that have high impressions, but low
| | 04:39 |
click-through rates. This means that
you might be showing up in the search
| | 04:42 |
results, but no one's clicking on your listing.
| | 04:45 |
This could mean that you've got
problems with your title, or maybe your
| | 04:48 |
description, and it's
worthwhile to take a closer look.
| | 04:52 |
With all of the data available,
analyzing keywords can be an intimidating task,
| | 04:57 |
but it's an extremely
important one for anyone doing SEO.
| | 05:01 |
Because everything begins with a
search, understanding what happens after
| | 05:05 |
searchers click on those pages that we've
worked so hard to rank for is the key to
| | 05:10 |
putting a value on all of our efforts.
| | 05:13 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Analyzing links| 00:00 |
Over time, if you're consistently
putting out good, quality content, promoting
| | 00:04 |
it, and working through link outreach
opportunities, other websites will start linking to you.
| | 00:10 |
Being able to clearly see what's
happening to your link portfolio can tell you
| | 00:14 |
how you're doing in your quest to show
the search engines just how trustworthy
| | 00:17 |
and authoritative your website is.
| | 00:19 |
There are two exceptional tools for
analyzing backlink metrics, Open Site
| | 00:24 |
Explorer by SEOmoz, and Majestic SEO.
| | 00:28 |
You can use these tools to analyze links
for any website, not just your own, and
| | 00:32 |
as we saw earlier in this course,
looking at your competitors' backlinks can be
| | 00:36 |
a great way to discover new link opportunities.
| | 00:40 |
When you're analyzing your own
backlinks however, we'll want to take a look at
| | 00:44 |
some metrics that can tell you how
your link building efforts are going.
| | 00:48 |
Using Open Site Explorer, you can
produce a report on domain and page
| | 00:52 |
metrics for any URL, and you'll also see a
list of the pages that link back to that website.
| | 00:58 |
Let's take a look at lynda.com by
typing in the URL and clicking Search.
| | 01:03 |
Along the top, we have different metrics
that tell as various things about the website.
| | 01:08 |
The Domain and Page Metrics give you
an idea of just how authoritative your
| | 01:12 |
domain, and the specific
page you are looking at, are.
| | 01:16 |
In this case, we've typed in just
the domain, which means the page we're
| | 01:19 |
analyzing is actually the homepage.
| | 01:22 |
We can also see the total number of
links coming into this page, as well as the
| | 01:26 |
unique number of domains that
these links are coming from.
| | 01:30 |
You can see some public social
metrics as well, though they do have some
| | 01:34 |
limitations based on how this data is collected.
| | 01:36 |
What we're really looking to do here
is make a habit of checking in on these
| | 01:40 |
numbers over time, and our goal
here is continual improvement.
| | 01:45 |
The higher your site's domain authority,
the stronger and more able your domain
| | 01:49 |
is to influence rankings, and as your
link portfolio grows, you should expect to
| | 01:53 |
see your authority scores rising as well.
| | 01:56 |
By filtering down to just the backlinks
coming from external pages, you can look
| | 02:01 |
through each of the links that you
have coming back to your site and identify
| | 02:05 |
any areas for action.
| | 02:06 |
For example, you might find that a
blogger that you have a relationship with has
| | 02:11 |
linked to you, but you'd like them to use
different anchor text in that link that
| | 02:15 |
reflects a keyword that you need some help with.
| | 02:18 |
You might also find opportunities for
guest authorship, or you may find links
| | 02:22 |
that you don't want to be a part of.
| | 02:24 |
In any of these situations, knowing
who's linking to you and how, can help you
| | 02:29 |
manage and expand your link building efforts.
| | 02:32 |
If you want to automate the process of
monitoring Domain, Page, and Link Metrics,
| | 02:36 |
you can do this using
SEOmoz's Campaign tracking feature.
| | 02:41 |
Once you've created a Campaign within
the tool, you can navigate to the History
| | 02:45 |
report in the Link Analysis section.
| | 02:48 |
And you'll be able to see how your site
compares with the websites you've added
| | 02:51 |
as competitors over a period of time.
| | 02:54 |
You'll see graphs for things like
Domain Authority, total number of links, and
| | 02:58 |
specific types of links that can help you
gauge how your link building efforts are going.
| | 03:02 |
There's lots more data and reports
you can explore within the tools of
| | 03:06 |
SEOmoz, but let's switch over to Majestic SEO
now and look at the Backlink History reports.
| | 03:13 |
The Backlink History shows you the
number of links you've acquired on either a
| | 03:17 |
monthly, cumulative, or normalized basis,
and you can use it to get a sense of how
| | 03:21 |
your link portfolio has grown
since your website launched.
| | 03:25 |
You can also define up to four other
competitors to compare yourself against, and
| | 03:29 |
this can help you see how you're
stacking up to the sites that you're trying to
| | 03:33 |
beat out in the search results.
| | 03:35 |
The two sections you'll see are the
Backlinks discovery Graph, which provides the
| | 03:39 |
total number of links out there
pointing to your website, and the Referring
| | 03:43 |
domains discovery graph, which lets
you know how many different domains have
| | 03:47 |
links pointing to your site.
| | 03:49 |
By consistently growing your link
portfolio, you're building a strong trust with
| | 03:53 |
search engines, and as a result, your
pages will be better positioned to rank
| | 03:57 |
higher in the search results.
| | 03:59 |
Using tools like these to help manage
this process can provide feedback as to
| | 04:04 |
how your efforts are working, and keep
you on the right track as you continue
| | 04:08 |
to move forward.
| | 04:09 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Analyzing the impact of social media| 00:00 |
SEO experts in the industry have been
testing social shares and how search
| | 00:04 |
engines may be handling these
signals in their algorithms to rank pages
| | 00:07 |
for quite a while now.
| | 00:09 |
And Google has stated
what most SEOs now believe.
| | 00:12 |
They do use social
signals to determine rankings.
| | 00:16 |
Let's take a look at a few ways to
measure how your content is being shared and
| | 00:20 |
identify the most
shareable content on your website.
| | 00:23 |
Because social sharing has an impact on
your rankings, it's important to look at
| | 00:27 |
what's worked in the past, so that we
can make improvements in the future.
| | 00:31 |
There are lots of tools out there to
measure and manage social media these days,
| | 00:35 |
but one you should take a look
at is called Social Crawlytics.
| | 00:39 |
You can use this tool to audit your
pages and see how many shares from a variety
| | 00:43 |
of social channels are pointing to your site.
| | 00:46 |
Social Crawlytics covers eight
social media channels: Facebook, Twitter,
| | 00:50 |
Delicious, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon,
Digg, Google+, and Pinterest.
| | 00:56 |
To start, you can log in with your
Twitter account, and you'll just need to enter
| | 01:00 |
a website address in the dashboard
screen to initiate the crawling process.
| | 01:04 |
We'll use my own company's website,
www.cardinalpath.com, as our example.
| | 01:11 |
Depending on how deep your site
structure goes, you may need to adjust the Crawl
| | 01:15 |
depth from two to three or four.
| | 01:18 |
This tool will only crawl HTML content
pages, so keep in mind that if you have
| | 01:23 |
other types of files on your site,
they will be discarded from the report.
| | 01:27 |
When you're ready, click Submit and the
tool will start crawling and processing
| | 01:31 |
the results for your domain.
| | 01:33 |
It may take up to 10
minutes for your report to finish.
| | 01:37 |
The completed report will appear in
the Reports tab, and you'll find a page
| | 01:41 |
filled with figures and charts.
| | 01:43 |
The Summary tells us how many times
your website's pages were shared, up to the
| | 01:47 |
depth you specified for the crawl.
| | 01:50 |
Here, we can see around 1100
shares of the 148 pages of our website's
| | 01:54 |
content that was scanned.
| | 01:57 |
The Page shares per network bar chart
breaks down all of the pages crawled,
| | 02:01 |
and shows you which channels were most active.
| | 02:04 |
In this case, we can see that Twitter
and LinkedIn are very active channels
| | 02:08 |
for us, and this kind of information
helps us understand where we have a strong
| | 02:12 |
presence we can take advantage of, as well
as which networks we might want to work on.
| | 02:17 |
Hovering over any of the slices of data
will show us the actual content that was
| | 02:21 |
shared on that channel.
| | 02:23 |
Further down the page, you'll find a
table with the results listed by page URL.
| | 02:28 |
Here is where you can see the raw
number of shares from each channel, along with
| | 02:32 |
a count of all shares added
up under the Total column.
| | 02:35 |
Having this data to look at, as you
continue to create and promote content on
| | 02:39 |
your pages, can help you determine how
useful and shareable your content is.
| | 02:44 |
By analyzing what kinds of pages tend
to get shared and how effective your
| | 02:48 |
promotion strategies are, you'll be
able to ensure that you're authoring the
| | 02:52 |
right kind of content, and promoting it
in a way that will get it out there in
| | 02:56 |
the social networks, for both
people and search engines to find.
| | 03:00 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
8. SEO for EcommerceUnderstanding SEO and ecommerce| 00:01 |
These days, lots of people use search
engines for shopping, whether they're in
| | 00:05 |
the early stages of research, or they're
ready to buy something right now.
| | 00:08 |
Whatever stage of the buying process
they're in, if you sell the products they're
| | 00:12 |
searching for, you're going to
want to be found, and there are a few
| | 00:15 |
different things to consider that are
specific to ecommerce websites that can
| | 00:19 |
help search engines match your pages
to the intents of people's search queries.
| | 00:24 |
First and foremost, remember that
everything that applies to normal content also
| | 00:28 |
applies to ecommerce pages.
| | 00:30 |
The common best practices around
website linking structures, external links, and
| | 00:34 |
onpage optimization are all very important.
| | 00:37 |
But in an era where search engines
want to explicitly identify content at the
| | 00:41 |
most granular level of detail that
they can, we want to make sure that search
| | 00:45 |
engines are very clear that your
ecommerce content is exactly that.
| | 00:50 |
Beyond the typical HTML code that is
found on web pages, you can use very
| | 00:54 |
specific metadata to help identify
your content as ecommerce content and
| | 00:58 |
describe the products that you are offering.
| | 01:01 |
But even before you put in place
those technical components, it's still as
| | 01:05 |
important as ever to know what
keywords your potential customers are typing
| | 01:08 |
in to search engines.
| | 01:10 |
Make sure to analyze your keyword
research to determine what intent people have
| | 01:14 |
when using certain keywords, and
what content they're looking for.
| | 01:18 |
If you find that people are searching
for comparisons between you and your
| | 01:21 |
competitors, then you might consider
building content specific to that need.
| | 01:26 |
For those typing in keywords that
indicate that they are further down the
| | 01:29 |
purchasing process, like "buy product X"
or "product Y coupon," you'll want to
| | 01:34 |
ensure that the content you're creating
contains an easy path to the shopping cart.
| | 01:39 |
One more thing that's unique to
ecommerce is that the products that you sell are
| | 01:43 |
often being discussed outside
the bounds of your own website.
| | 01:47 |
You can find discussions on forums,
social media, or other websites about the
| | 01:51 |
products that you sell, and these
can be opportunities to jump into the
| | 01:55 |
conversation as a knowledgeable product expert.
| | 01:58 |
If someone is posting a review of their
experience with you, you can use things
| | 02:02 |
like Google Alerts or Social Media
Monitoring Tools to make sure you're aware
| | 02:06 |
of it, and good or bad, it's an opportunity
for you to listen and join the conversation.
| | 02:11 |
If people are expressing negative
feelings about you or your product, you can
| | 02:15 |
reach out to them and resolve
the situation in the public eye.
| | 02:18 |
If people are saying good things about
your products, reach out and say thank you.
| | 02:22 |
It might even lead to social media
activity that ends up building links or user
| | 02:27 |
generated content for you.
| | 02:29 |
All of these public mediums are seen by
search engines, as well as people, and
| | 02:33 |
you can gain some very
tangible benefits from both.
| | 02:36 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with semantic HTML| 00:00 |
Ecommerce sites are different from most
normal websites, because they have very
| | 00:04 |
specific content about very specific products.
| | 00:07 |
To help search engines identify these
specific bits of content, we are going to
| | 00:12 |
take advantage of
microformatting from schema.org.
| | 00:15 |
Schema.org contains many schemas that
can help identify different kinds of
| | 00:19 |
content, and that includes ecommerce content.
| | 00:23 |
Your ecommerce site will have product
pages, and these pages should be using the
| | 00:27 |
schema for products that's
found at schema.org/product.
| | 00:32 |
In your code, you can specify a
product name, description, product image, and
| | 00:36 |
even brand, manufacturer, and model information.
| | 00:40 |
Another element you can
associate with your products are Offers.
| | 00:44 |
Offers have a whole list of
Properties that you can populate.
| | 00:47 |
Things like, how much you are selling
the product for, the availability of that
| | 00:51 |
product, what the condition of that product
is, or what date that price is valid until?
| | 00:56 |
You can also mark up any Rating
information that you have for a product by
| | 01:00 |
using the Rating schema.
| | 01:02 |
This can be found at schema.org/AggregateRating,
and to take further advantage of
| | 01:08 |
user-generated content, you can apply
microformatting to the reviews you're
| | 01:12 |
collecting on your products.
| | 01:14 |
Schema.org/review provides the
syntax around properties like the title of
| | 01:19 |
the review, who wrote it, when it was published,
and of course the content of the review itself.
| | 01:25 |
If you operate a local business, as
well as an ecommerce storefront, you can
| | 01:29 |
also provide detailed
information about your business locations.
| | 01:33 |
You can use microformats to specify
your business address, along with a link to
| | 01:37 |
a map, the contact information for that
location, and a description of your business.
| | 01:42 |
If you have more than one location,
make sure you're doing this for each one
| | 01:46 |
individually, and you can even associate
reviews, photos, and events with each of
| | 01:51 |
your listings. And make sure to take
a look at the schemas that exist for
| | 01:55 |
specific types of businesses, like
restaurants and professional services, to see
| | 02:00 |
if there's elements or
properties that make sense for you.
| | 02:03 |
Taking full advantage of the schema.org
microformats for your ecommerce
| | 02:07 |
specific data is a great way to make
sure that search engines know exactly how
| | 02:12 |
to interpret your content. And investigating
the various microformats that are
| | 02:16 |
out there, might help you add more
relevant content that you wouldn't have
| | 02:20 |
otherwise thought of.
| | 02:22 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| The technical components of ecommerce| 00:00 |
Ecommerce websites are unique in that
they're constantly evolving, because of
| | 00:04 |
product inventory that's coming and going.
| | 00:07 |
These websites tend to be very large as
well, which can increase the chances of
| | 00:11 |
technical issues being introduced.
| | 00:13 |
If you're running an ecommerce site,
there are some specific things to watch out
| | 00:17 |
for, and some things to put on your to-do list.
| | 00:20 |
First, if you're out of stock of a
product, the product changes slightly, or
| | 00:24 |
you're not selling it at the moment,
but you expect to at some point in the
| | 00:27 |
future, make sure to leave the page
intact, but of course update the page with
| | 00:32 |
the appropriate messaging.
| | 00:34 |
You don't want to have to start from
scratch, especially if you're already
| | 00:37 |
getting good traction with the search engines.
| | 00:40 |
But if a product no longer exists in
any form, make sure that that product URL
| | 00:45 |
returns a page "not found"
with a status code of 404.
| | 00:49 |
You should make sure that your 404
page has been customized to provide an
| | 00:53 |
appropriate message letting users know
that you're sorry that they didn't find
| | 00:56 |
what they're looking for.
| | 00:58 |
You'll also want to include
navigation, a search bar, or perhaps even some
| | 01:02 |
suggested pages so that anyone that lands here
has a way to continue shopping on your website.
| | 01:08 |
If the product page location has
just moved, like if it was assigned to a
| | 01:12 |
different category, you'll want to
make sure to implement a 301 permanent
| | 01:16 |
redirect to take users to the right
place, and to let search engines know that
| | 01:21 |
this is the new home for
this particular product.
| | 01:25 |
With content that's always changing, we
also want to make sure that the search
| | 01:28 |
engines have a way to
discover your new content right away.
| | 01:32 |
Make sure your ecommerce platform
generates an XML sitemap of all your website URLs.
| | 01:38 |
Most ecommerce platforms can dynamically
create these XML sitemaps, as your site
| | 01:43 |
changes from the same database that
drives the website itself, and many of them
| | 01:48 |
can submit the sitemap URLs to the
Search Engine Webmaster Tools as well.
| | 01:53 |
Making sure this process is in place,
ensures that search engines will always
| | 01:57 |
discover your new content right away.
And don't forget to place the
| | 02:01 |
rel="canonical" tag on each of your pages.
| | 02:04 |
This will make sure that search engines
are indexing only unique URLs for each
| | 02:08 |
of your category, subcategory, and
product pages, and it will ensure that you
| | 02:13 |
don't run into any duplicate content issues.
| | 02:16 |
Again, many ecommerce platforms will
do this for you or offer it as a feature
| | 02:20 |
that you can enable and configure.
| | 02:23 |
Last, a common presentation style on
ecommerce sites includes paginated content.
| | 02:28 |
For example, you might have 30
products in a particular category, but they're
| | 02:33 |
displayed 10 per page.
| | 02:35 |
To a search engine, this might look
like three different pages, and it can be
| | 02:38 |
confusing to search engine
crawlers as they traverse your website.
| | 02:42 |
Fortunately, you can use the rel="next"
or rel="prev" attributes on
| | 02:46 |
your pagination links, to tell search
engines not to treat the linked page as a
| | 02:51 |
unique page, but instead, as just
an extension of the current page.
| | 02:55 |
Keeping in mind the extra technical
components of an ecommerce website will
| | 02:59 |
help search engines to clearly index
your content and understand the products
| | 03:03 |
you offer, setting you up for a better
chance of being returned when users come
| | 03:08 |
searching.
| | 03:09 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exploring ecommerce information architecture| 00:00 |
Just like any other kind of website,
search engines need to understand how your
| | 00:04 |
ecommerce content is organized.
| | 00:06 |
With a well-organized structure, your
content pages, ecommerce specific pages,
| | 00:11 |
and even the products themselves, will
be clearly recognizable and identifiable
| | 00:15 |
to search engines as they
crawl the pages of your site.
| | 00:18 |
Remember that internal linking is
crucial for helping search engines understand
| | 00:22 |
the structure of your website.
| | 00:24 |
When you walk into a store in the
offline world, it's organized into different
| | 00:27 |
sections to help visitors head in the
right direction before they actually start
| | 00:31 |
looking for specific products on the shelves.
| | 00:34 |
Websites should be built with the same
concept in mind, using your linking to
| | 00:38 |
set up that structure.
| | 00:39 |
At the highest level of your
hierarchy, you can identify the different
| | 00:42 |
categories of products that you sell,
and within those category pages, you can
| | 00:47 |
link to the next level of
subcategories or products.
| | 00:50 |
By doing this, search engines will be
able to understand what it is you sell and
| | 00:54 |
what categories your products fall under.
| | 00:57 |
This allows them to return the best, most
relevant pages of your site to searchers.
| | 01:02 |
If someone was searching for shoes, for
example, a search engine can return your
| | 01:06 |
general shoes category page.
| | 01:08 |
When they start searching for a certain
type of shoes, then you want them to end
| | 01:12 |
up on your subcategory page
for that particular type of shoe.
| | 01:16 |
And if they're typing in model
numbers and specific products, you want the
| | 01:19 |
appropriate product pages being returned.
| | 01:21 |
When we get to the actual product pages
themselves, there are a few things to remember.
| | 01:27 |
First, each and every product should
have its own unique page, and on each of
| | 01:31 |
those pages you'll need to
include content around the product.
| | 01:35 |
That means including things like the
product name, properly tagged images,
| | 01:39 |
robust and unique product
descriptions, product colors, sizes and other
| | 01:43 |
options, prices, whether or not it's
in stock, and a host of other attributes
| | 01:48 |
that we typically
associate with ecommerce products.
| | 01:51 |
Over and above the page content, we
even have the ability to identify those
| | 01:55 |
attributes even more clearly to the search
engines by adding special metadata to your code.
| | 02:01 |
And of course, don't forget to make
sure that you're including your category,
| | 02:04 |
subcategory, and product
pages in your XML site maps.
| | 02:08 |
You can even weight the relative
importance of each tier of pages, or specific
| | 02:12 |
pages themselves, to give the search
engines an idea of which pages you feel are
| | 02:17 |
the most important on your site.
| | 02:19 |
The more you can help search engines
with identifying the details of your
| | 02:22 |
ecommerce product information through
your site structure, internal links, and
| | 02:26 |
metadata, the more they will trust your
site with providing a quality shopping
| | 02:30 |
experience for users, and all other
things equal, the more likely they are to
| | 02:34 |
return your pages over the competition.
| | 02:38 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Producing ecommerce content| 00:00 |
Creating content for ecommerce sites
serves a number of different purposes.
| | 00:04 |
First, it needs to be attractive to the search
engines, so that people will find your pages.
| | 00:09 |
But once you've got people on your pages,
the content needs to be effective, not
| | 00:13 |
only in encouraging people to buy your
products, but also in getting them so
| | 00:17 |
excited that they want to share your
content with other people through links and
| | 00:20 |
social media, which helps your overall SEO.
| | 00:22 |
It's one thing to simply describe
a product, but people are a little
| | 00:27 |
more complex than that.
| | 00:29 |
Going back to Marketing 101, we
don't sell products and services,
| | 00:33 |
we sell solutions to people's problems.
| | 00:35 |
So make sure to describe
more than just the product.
| | 00:38 |
Describe how the product is actually
used, and take opportunities through photos,
| | 00:43 |
videos, animations, or even step-by-step
diagrams, to really show your customers
| | 00:48 |
how this thing works, and how it will
solve the problem that they are having.
| | 00:52 |
This is something your competition is
probably not doing a great job of, and it
| | 00:56 |
will give you an angle on some very
unique content that will stand out to both
| | 00:59 |
search engines and website visitors alike.
| | 01:02 |
You also need to remember that your
visitors are aware that if they buy
| | 01:06 |
something from you, you stand to benefit.
| | 01:08 |
It's like when you go into the
electronics store and the salesperson who is on
| | 01:12 |
commission recommends the most expensive camera.
| | 01:14 |
You know that it's because they'll
make the most money if you buy that one.
| | 01:18 |
But on the web, we have the option of
reading through reviews from people just
| | 01:21 |
like us who are at that same
crossroads, and ended up making the decision to
| | 01:25 |
purchase this product.
| | 01:27 |
Now, they're going to tell us what
they think about that decision, and they're
| | 01:31 |
not getting any commission.
| | 01:33 |
As consumers, we tend to trust these
reviews, and displaying product reviews or
| | 01:37 |
service testimonials is a great way to
help people understand the value of your
| | 01:41 |
products through other people's experiences.
| | 01:44 |
And last, don't forget to include
additional product recommendations.
| | 01:49 |
If your ecommerce software has this
built in, make sure you're leveraging it.
| | 01:53 |
And if not, take a look at the many product
recommendation engines out there on the market.
| | 01:58 |
As people browse certain products, you
can recommend other similar products that
| | 02:02 |
people tend to buy, that have great
reviews or that match other criteria, and
| | 02:06 |
this can be a great
option for cross-sells as well.
| | 02:10 |
If someone puts that camera in their
shopping cart, you can suggest that they
| | 02:13 |
get some lenses, a carrying case,
and an extra battery as well.
| | 02:17 |
Taking the time to create comprehensive
and unique product pages that help users
| | 02:21 |
solve their problems, reassure them
through other people's experiences, and help
| | 02:26 |
them through the conversion funnel, will
benefit you not only in your sales, but
| | 02:30 |
also in the search engine
visibility that you will gain.
| | 02:33 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Leveraging link building and social media for ecommerce| 00:01 |
Building links and getting people to
your ecommerce content can be challenging,
| | 00:05 |
but with a little creativity, you can
find some very valuable opportunities that
| | 00:09 |
will help out the search
engines, as well as your visitors.
| | 00:12 |
First and foremost, make sure that you are
taking the time to create really good content.
| | 00:17 |
Anything you can do to help show how
a product will solve the problems of a
| | 00:21 |
consumer is going to be a good thing,
and it becomes a lot more shareable than
| | 00:25 |
just another product name and description page.
| | 00:28 |
Over and above videos and diagrams and
things like that, there are a few ways to
| | 00:33 |
spruce up your product pages even more.
| | 00:35 |
With a little work, some out-of-the-box
thinking, and a good programmer, you
| | 00:39 |
can come up with interactive
features that can help the customer really
| | 00:42 |
understand your product.
| | 00:44 |
Think of those clothing websites
that allow you to put together an entire
| | 00:47 |
wardrobe through a drag-and-drop
interface, or home decor stores that allow you
| | 00:52 |
to lay out and generate your
dream kitchen or living room.
| | 00:55 |
Whatever you're selling, these kinds of
useful features are the kinds of things
| | 00:59 |
that people blog about, link to,
and share with their social networks.
| | 01:03 |
Another thing to remember is that
investing in high quality images of the
| | 01:07 |
products you're selling is
something that will pay off in the long run.
| | 01:11 |
Blogs and image-based social networks
are filled with users willing to share
| | 01:15 |
quality, beautiful, and interesting
images associated with your products.
| | 01:20 |
Take time to produce and promote
professional, high quality, unique images, and
| | 01:25 |
you'll be in a good position to garner
even more links back to your content.
| | 01:29 |
And at the end of the day, don't forget
about your customers, and remember that
| | 01:32 |
they love a good deal.
| | 01:34 |
Free stuff, giveaways, discounts, and
special offers are the kinds of things
| | 01:38 |
that get shared around the
Internet and can spread like wildfire.
| | 01:42 |
You might feature a section on your
site that shows your current deals and
| | 01:45 |
coupons, or you might run a contest or
a sweepstakes, or even have a crazy deal
| | 01:50 |
of the day page that offers up a loss
leader, but gets people talking about you.
| | 01:55 |
You might break even, or even lose a
bit on your promotion, but think of it as
| | 01:59 |
investing in all of the links, the
blogger attention, and the social media buzz
| | 02:03 |
that will find you new
customers, and that search engines love.
| | 02:07 |
And last, don't forget to let your
users generate some content for you.
| | 02:11 |
Whether it's product reviews that you
ask for in follow-up emails after a
| | 02:15 |
purchase, testimonials, or social
media integrations, making it easy for your
| | 02:20 |
users to share their experiences leads
to lots of potential links, sharing, and
| | 02:25 |
user-generated content that can help
future customers make the decision to buy
| | 02:29 |
from you instead of your competition.
| | 02:31 |
While adding the standard social
media sharing and liking buttons to your
| | 02:35 |
product pages is a must, you might
also think about providing "save to my wish list"
| | 02:39 |
or "share with a friend"
functionality that can spread the word and keep
| | 02:43 |
people coming back.
| | 02:45 |
In short, don't be another boring
ecommerce site, with boring product pages.
| | 02:50 |
There are plenty of those out there already.
| | 02:52 |
Instead, go that extra mile to produce
truly useful and engaging content that
| | 02:57 |
excites your users and has the
potential to gain links and social media shares.
| | 03:02 |
Get creative, take time to think
about your audience and what can be really
| | 03:05 |
useful to them, and then take the time
to create the right, effective content
| | 03:10 |
that meets those needs.
| | 03:12 |
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| Adapting ecommerce websites for international audiences| 00:00 |
If your target audience crosses
countries and languages, there are a few things
| | 00:04 |
you want to do to help position
yourself well for the search engines.
| | 00:07 |
First, and maybe the most obvious,
you'll want to consider having your content
| | 00:11 |
translated and regionalized for
the markets that you're targeting.
| | 00:15 |
This can be a big investment, and
you'll need to do this right, which means
| | 00:19 |
you're not going to get away with
dumping your site into Google Translate and
| | 00:22 |
copying and pasting back
into your ecommerce platform.
| | 00:25 |
But the investment is going to pay off
for you, because people from different
| | 00:29 |
countries that speak different
languages are going to be typing in different
| | 00:32 |
keywords, and the search engines are
much more likely to return relevant and
| | 00:36 |
quality content that matches a user's language.
| | 00:40 |
The next thing to do is to have a
unique URL for each of the translated
| | 00:44 |
versions of your pages.
| | 00:46 |
Many ecommerce solutions don't do this,
so you'll want to check and make sure
| | 00:50 |
that as you switch between languages, the
full URL in the address bar is unique for each.
| | 00:56 |
This allows search engines to separate
one page from another when determining
| | 01:00 |
relevancy for search queries and
visitors using different languages.
| | 01:04 |
And don't worry about translated pages being
considered duplicate content by search engines.
| | 01:09 |
Although these pages may be talking
about the exact same things, search engines
| | 01:13 |
are very good at distinguishing
languages, and treat different translations on
| | 01:17 |
separate pages as different pieces of content.
| | 01:20 |
From a technical standpoint, we can
help search engines identify what
| | 01:24 |
language and country the content
is targeted to by providing specific
| | 01:28 |
metadata on our pages.
| | 01:30 |
We do this with what's
called the hreflang link element.
| | 01:33 |
Say we have one version of a page in
English and one version of the page in Spanish.
| | 01:38 |
We can use these two link tags on both
pages to let the search engines know that
| | 01:42 |
these are translations of the
same page in specific languages.
| | 01:46 |
And we can get even more specific.
| | 01:48 |
For example, if we had a special
version of the page that was translated into
| | 01:52 |
Spanish and regionalized to Mexico, we
could instead use a link tag that specifies
| | 01:58 |
both the language of
Spanish and the country of Mexico.
| | 02:02 |
Crossing borders and languages can be
a challenging and rewarding experience,
| | 02:06 |
and making sure that your pages are
optimized for the regions and languages you're
| | 02:10 |
targeting, will help you
attract and convert the right audiences.
| | 02:15 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
9. Local SearchUnderstanding local search| 00:00 |
If you're a brick-and-mortar business, or
if you have a local presence, then it's
| | 00:04 |
important that you know that it's a
fact, your potential customers are using
| | 00:07 |
search engines to look for
local products and services.
| | 00:11 |
And search engines are getting pretty
good at giving users exactly what they
| | 00:14 |
want, with some very specific
local types of search results.
| | 00:18 |
Let's say you're in Boston
with a toothache that needs some
| | 00:21 |
immediate attention.
| | 00:22 |
These days, the first thing you're
likely to do is head do a search engine and
| | 00:26 |
start typing "dentist boston" and looking
at the current market share data, you're
| | 00:30 |
more likely to do it on
Google, than anywhere else.
| | 00:34 |
In the search results you'll see a
list of businesses in the Boston area
| | 00:37 |
matching your search.
| | 00:39 |
You'll see some special listings with
location markers and a map that shows you
| | 00:43 |
where all those businesses are located.
| | 00:45 |
When you click on that marker, you end
up in a Google Maps interface, showing
| | 00:50 |
a map of the area surrounding the
business, and plenty of information and
| | 00:53 |
reviews on the left.
| | 00:55 |
For each business listing that you see,
you can either click the link to the
| | 00:59 |
website, or head over to that particular
business' Google+ Local page, where you
| | 01:04 |
can find reviews, photos, and even
see who in your social circles has had
| | 01:08 |
anything to say about that business.
| | 01:11 |
The bottom line is that if you're a
dentist in Boston and you don't have this
| | 01:15 |
kind of local listing on the search engines,
your phone isn't very likely to be ringing.
| | 01:20 |
So how do you position yourself to have
your business featured in these special
| | 01:24 |
local search results when people type
in search queries with a local intent?
| | 01:29 |
Well, there are a few things that you can do.
| | 01:31 |
First off, you're going to need to have
a Google+ Local page. If you're not on
| | 01:37 |
Google+ yet, now is a good time to start,
and you can walk through the process of
| | 01:41 |
setting up a Google+ account and a
Google+ Local page for your business.
| | 01:46 |
If you had a Google Places account,
it's already been migrated to Google+
| | 01:50 |
Local for you, and you can simply log
in and make any updates or changes to
| | 01:55 |
leverage the new format.
| | 01:57 |
And don't forget to ask your happy
customers for reviews on your Google+ page.
| | 02:01 |
The more reviews and the more positive
they are, the more likely Google is to
| | 02:06 |
return your pages above the competition.
| | 02:09 |
Next, we'll need to
understand the concept of citations.
| | 02:13 |
Each and every mention that search
engines find around the web of the name,
| | 02:17 |
address, or phone number of your
business is considered a citation, and the more
| | 02:22 |
citations a business gets from
quality sources, the more the search engines
| | 02:26 |
trust that this is a business
searchers are looking for and the higher it can
| | 02:30 |
rank in local search results.
| | 02:33 |
Next, your website is a critical
piece of your local marketing strategy.
| | 02:37 |
You'll want to make sure that you
have separate pages on your website for
| | 02:41 |
each service or category of products
that you offer, and you'll want to make
| | 02:44 |
sure that your business' name,
address, and phone number, are clearly
| | 02:48 |
identified on your website.
| | 02:49 |
Of course, remember your content
strategy, and make sure that you have relevant
| | 02:54 |
keywords in your copy to
ensure optimal search performance.
| | 02:58 |
Focusing on creating, maintaining, and
growing your Google+ Local page, building
| | 03:03 |
consistent and quality citations of
your name, address, and phone number around
| | 03:07 |
the web, and focusing on the content of
your website, are the key ingredients that
| | 03:11 |
you'll need for local search success.
| | 03:14 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding Google+ Local| 00:00 |
Google+ Local, which used to be Google
Places, is a place where businesses can
| | 00:05 |
get themselves a robust and
feature-rich online listing for free.
| | 00:09 |
When you create a business listing on
Google+ Local, you'll have the opportunity
| | 00:13 |
to provide basic information
about your business, photos, and more.
| | 00:17 |
Users will be able to leave
reviews for you, and as an administrator,
| | 00:21 |
you'll also get to see statistics
about your visitors and the searches that
| | 00:25 |
they've done to bring them to your page.
| | 00:27 |
But all of this is only going to be seen
if your visitors can find the page, and
| | 00:32 |
there are essentially three factors
that influence rankings on Google+ Local:
| | 00:36 |
relevance, distance, and prominence.
| | 00:40 |
Relevance is all about how well your
business listing matches a user's search term.
| | 00:45 |
In most cases, the more complete and
accurate a business listing is, the
| | 00:49 |
easier it is for Google to properly
understand your business and return its
| | 00:53 |
listing in the search results.
| | 00:55 |
Also, the more relevant your business
is to the search term, the more relevant
| | 00:58 |
it is to the searcher, which is more
likely to provide a quality experience that
| | 01:02 |
the search engines want, and get you the click.
| | 01:05 |
The second factor is distance.
| | 01:08 |
Local searches are by definition bound
to a geographic location, and Google uses
| | 01:13 |
what it knows about where a searcher is
physically located, including location
| | 01:17 |
terms in the search query.
| | 01:19 |
It then attempts to return the most
relevant result based on listings in
| | 01:23 |
that specific area.
| | 01:25 |
In many cases larger metropolitan
areas are divided into smaller parts, so
| | 01:30 |
you'll need to consider how you choose
to list your business in Google+ Local.
| | 01:34 |
For example, cities like Newark,
Jersey City, and Elizabeth are all considered
| | 01:39 |
part of a broader New York metro area,
but if you lived in any of those places
| | 01:44 |
you wouldn't be searching for a
business using New York in your search query.
| | 01:48 |
As a business owner, you want to think
about how locals will be typing in their
| | 01:52 |
queries, and mimic that as best you can.
| | 01:55 |
If you have multiple locations, you
should create separate listings for each, to
| | 01:59 |
maximize your exposure on the search
results, and make sure that your closest
| | 02:03 |
location is the one that the user sees.
| | 02:06 |
Finally, the prominence of the listing
has an effect on how well it will rank.
| | 02:11 |
Prominence is a measure of how well-known
your business is across the web, and
| | 02:15 |
much like regular content pages, it
looks for evidence around the web that
| | 02:19 |
others are talking about you.
| | 02:21 |
Things like links, reviews, articles,
blogs, directory listings, and any other
| | 02:25 |
mentions about your business are all
considered, and generally, the more positive
| | 02:30 |
these mentions of your business are, the better.
| | 02:33 |
To maximize your chances of ranking
well in local search results, just
| | 02:37 |
remember these three things:
| | 02:38 |
make sure that your listing is as
complete, accurate and relevant to your local
| | 02:42 |
searches as possible.
| | 02:44 |
Make sure that you define your
distance from searchers by defining the exact
| | 02:48 |
area or areas that your business serves.
And just like you do with your general
| | 02:52 |
SEO strategy, work on building your brand,
customer relationships, and loyalty to
| | 02:58 |
earn prominence around the web.
| | 03:00 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting up and optimizing Google+ Local| 00:01 |
You'll need to list your business on
Google+ Local so it can appear in the Google
| | 00:04 |
Local search results, and
the first step is to visit
| | 00:06 |
www.google.com/placesforbusiness.
| | 00:11 |
Before you log in, here's a tip.
| | 00:13 |
When signing up for Google+ Local,
it's a good idea to create separate Google
| | 00:17 |
accounts to manage your listings. And
this account should really be tied to your
| | 00:21 |
corporate domain, something like
local@yourdomain.com will keep your business
| | 00:26 |
account tied to the business and
separate from your personal account.
| | 00:30 |
If you and the organization you're
working for ever decide to part ways, this
| | 00:34 |
separation can save you a
lot of headaches later on.
| | 00:36 |
Once you've logged in for the first
time, you'll be prompted to enter your Phone
| | 00:40 |
Number, and Google will tell you if
it already knows about your business.
| | 00:44 |
If it does, it will pre-fill
whatever information it's found on the form
| | 00:48 |
we'll need to fill out.
| | 00:49 |
This is your chance to provide as much
information as you possibly can to Google
| | 00:53 |
about your business, so you'll want to
fill out all the required fields and as
| | 00:57 |
many optional ones as you possibly can.
| | 01:01 |
You'll start out by
entering your company name in the
| | 01:03 |
Company/Organization field.
| | 01:05 |
It's important that you don't try to add
keywords to your company name to get a higher rank.
| | 01:10 |
Remember that consistency across
your citations is extremely important to
| | 01:14 |
local search rankings, so this can actually
hurt you, and it's against the terms of service.
| | 01:19 |
Since consistency in your name,
address, and phone number is so critical,
| | 01:24 |
sometimes it can be helpful to
ensure that there's a default that you're
| | 01:27 |
using everywhere you can.
| | 01:29 |
One trick is to write out the business
name, address, and phone number just once
| | 01:33 |
in a text file, and then store that
text file somewhere that anyone doing this
| | 01:37 |
kind of work can access, and when
you're updating citations, you can just copy
| | 01:41 |
and paste the information from that document.
| | 01:44 |
This will minimize the chances of the
information being inconsistent or incorrect.
| | 01:49 |
Next, fill in the email address that you want
associated with your business and your website.
| | 01:54 |
Although these are optional, it's a
good idea to use them, and you can take
| | 01:58 |
advantage of the 200 character
description of your business.
| | 02:01 |
You'll want to think about your target
keywords, but ultimately, this should be
| | 02:06 |
enticing marketing copy that
describes what your business does, and why a
| | 02:10 |
consumer should choose you over the competition.
| | 02:15 |
The next step is choosing the categories
under which you're going to list your business.
| | 02:19 |
Category suggestions will appear as you
begin typing, and you'll want to choose
| | 02:24 |
one of the suggested categories if you can.
| | 02:26 |
You can also use the Add another
category link to select up to five categories.
| | 02:32 |
The Service Areas and Location Settings
section asks whether your customers come
| | 02:36 |
to you, or you go to your customers.
| | 02:38 |
For example, if you're running a coffee shop,
chances are your customers are coming to you.
| | 02:43 |
Wedding photographers, on the other
hand, usually travel out to their clients.
| | 02:48 |
You can also enter your operating Hours
and the Payment options that you accept.
| | 02:52 |
Generally, you'll want to provide as much
information as you can throughout your listing.
| | 02:57 |
Remember, potential customers are
searching on the go, and if they know for a
| | 03:01 |
fact that you're open at a particular
time or accept the credit card that they
| | 03:05 |
have in their wallet, that might be
enough to bring them into your door, instead
| | 03:09 |
of your competitors'.
| | 03:11 |
Photos and videos are a great way for
you to showcase your business to potential
| | 03:15 |
customers, and really show them exactly
what they'll be getting if they choose
| | 03:19 |
to do business with you.
| | 03:21 |
If you're a restaurant, pictures of
tempting plates of food, friendly service,
| | 03:25 |
and a great atmosphere
might win you a new customer.
| | 03:28 |
You might even put up a video of your
salad bar or a walk around the dining room.
| | 03:32 |
Whatever your business, an additional
10 images or 5 videos to your profile can
| | 03:37 |
help someone decide
whether to come in or stay away.
| | 03:41 |
The last piece of the puzzle is the
Additional Details field, and this is where
| | 03:45 |
you can get creative.
| | 03:47 |
If you have anything else to say about
your business, this is where you'll put it.
| | 03:50 |
And while Google+ Local won't display
this section in your listing, it's still
| | 03:55 |
worth your while to add as many details
about what makes your business unique as you can.
| | 04:00 |
After you've filled out the form,
you'll need to verify your business listing
| | 04:04 |
before it will go live.
| | 04:06 |
Google+ Local will send you a pin
verification code, either by mail at your
| | 04:11 |
business address, or by a phone,
and once you receive your pin,
| | 04:14 |
you'll need to enter it into your
Google+ Local account to verify that you
| | 04:18 |
actually do own the business you've claimed.
| | 04:21 |
Once your listing is online, you can
always come back to edit it or add photos,
| | 04:26 |
videos, or anything else that hasn't
already been added to the listing.
| | 04:30 |
The more you tell Google about your
business, the easier it will be for the
| | 04:33 |
search engine to understand what
your business is about, and place you
| | 04:37 |
appropriately in the search results.
| | 04:38 |
And the more detail you provide in your
listing, the better chance you'll have
| | 04:42 |
of convincing customers
to walk through your doors.
| | 04:46 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Getting more citations| 00:00 |
Having accurate information on
the web is extremely important.
| | 00:04 |
If your information is incorrect, it can
hurt the chances that people will find
| | 00:08 |
you, and that's not good for you or
the customer that you could have served.
| | 00:13 |
The more a search engine can trust your
location information, the more confident
| | 00:17 |
it can be in returning your pages to
the local searcher, and for this reason,
| | 00:21 |
citations are extremely important.
| | 00:24 |
A citation is any mention of your
business name, address, and phone number
| | 00:28 |
on the web, and this combination of
information is often referred to as NAP for short.
| | 00:34 |
Aside from having as many as possible
on quality sites, citations should also be
| | 00:39 |
exactly the same wherever they appear.
| | 00:43 |
You can check how your business
looks on lots of directory websites by
| | 00:46 |
visiting getlisted.org.
| | 00:49 |
GetListed is a site that provides
information on local search, and you can use
| | 00:53 |
the tool to find out how well your
business is listed online by entering your
| | 00:57 |
businesses' name and ZIP code.
| | 01:00 |
GetListed will then look up the
listing across a host of different popular
| | 01:04 |
directories, and give you a listing score
that tells you how well you've used the
| | 01:08 |
free listings search engines
used to collect local search data.
| | 01:12 |
Clicking on each of the tabs to the
left will provide even more information on
| | 01:16 |
the accuracy of your business
information, reviews, and other things you can do
| | 01:20 |
to improve your listings online.
| | 01:22 |
For example, in the Accuracy tab, you'll
see your business information listed on
| | 01:27 |
a number of local directory websites.
| | 01:30 |
Here, we can see that the Google
listing still needs to be claimed, and the
| | 01:33 |
Bing listing doesn't even exist. And
we can also see that there are some
| | 01:37 |
subtle differences between the name,
address, and phone number among some of
| | 01:41 |
this listing sites.
| | 01:43 |
For example, Yelp has the business
listed as White House Press Room, while
| | 01:47 |
Foursquare has it listed
as White House South Lawn.
| | 01:51 |
You can also see that there are slightly
different phone numbers that are shown
| | 01:54 |
across different directories.
| | 01:56 |
Having this information is crucial, and
by claiming each of these listings, you
| | 02:00 |
can make the changes to the
information to ensure that the name, address, and
| | 02:04 |
phone number is consistent across them all.
| | 02:08 |
Another great part of GetListed are
their studies on local citation sources
| | 02:12 |
for each city and category,
found in the Learning Center area.
| | 02:16 |
These will tell you which local
citation sources are the most popular in each
| | 02:20 |
city and for each business category,
and they can be very helpful in finding
| | 02:24 |
specific listing sites that
you'll want a citation from.
| | 02:28 |
When you run out of things to
discover on GetListed, there are still lots of
| | 02:32 |
places that you can list your business,
and it's just a matter of digging a bit
| | 02:36 |
deeper to uncover them.
| | 02:37 |
A great tool for this is the
Whitespark Location Citation Finder tool.
| | 02:42 |
Here, you can research and manage all
of your local citations in one place.
| | 02:47 |
You can search by either Keyphrase
or a Phone Number, and for this example,
| | 02:51 |
let's say we're looking for
citation sources for an auto repair shop in
| | 02:55 |
Allston, Massachusetts.
| | 02:57 |
We fill in the fields, click Search, and
wait for the tool to generate a list of
| | 03:01 |
suggestions on which local
directories we could use for this business.
| | 03:06 |
In the search results, you can scroll
down and get a list of lots of potential
| | 03:10 |
citation sources you may want ago after.
| | 03:13 |
If you find citations that you
already own, you can mark them as Got It.
| | 03:17 |
You can also mark citations which don't
make sense for your business as Useless.
| | 03:21 |
These options can help you organize
your citations in a meaningful way, and help
| | 03:26 |
you keep track of which ones you're
getting over time without wasting hours
| | 03:30 |
looking at the same websites over and over.
| | 03:33 |
The quantity, quality, and consistency
of the citations that search engines find
| | 03:37 |
around the web for your business are an
important factor in how well you rank in
| | 03:41 |
local search, and having tools like
these to manage your existing citations and
| | 03:46 |
help you find opportunities for new
ones can make a big difference in your
| | 03:49 |
overall local search strategy.
| | 03:52 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Getting more reviews for your business| 00:01 |
Online reviews can be a major asset
for businesses, and this is especially
| | 00:05 |
true for local search.
| | 00:07 |
Recent studies have shown that for a
majority of consumers, positive consumer
| | 00:11 |
reviews make them more likely to use a
local business, and that they trust these
| | 00:15 |
reviews as much as personal recommendations.
| | 00:18 |
If you're not getting reviews online
you're missing out on a huge opportunity.
| | 00:23 |
Reviews not only help you build an
online reputation, they can also bring more
| | 00:27 |
customers to your front door.
| | 00:29 |
A review is a short write-up or a
rating provided by a customer based on their
| | 00:34 |
experience with a particular business.
| | 00:36 |
Reviews can be found on search engines, local
review websites and services, or even blogs.
| | 00:42 |
There are basically three ways a user
can provide a review of your business:
| | 00:46 |
offline, email, or website.
| | 00:49 |
Many businesses communicate with their
customers everyday through phone calls,
| | 00:53 |
physical mail, or in-store interactions.
| | 00:55 |
Every one of these offline touch points
is an opportunity to ask customers what
| | 01:00 |
they thought of their experience.
| | 01:01 |
And you can use negative feedback to
help you improve your business, and turn the
| | 01:06 |
positive feedback into testimonials
that can be used on your website or in
| | 01:10 |
promotional materials.
| | 01:12 |
If you're still not collecting email
addresses on your website for visitors that
| | 01:16 |
want to subscribe to your newsletter or
find out more about you, you're missing
| | 01:20 |
out on a huge marketing opportunity.
| | 01:22 |
Creating, maintaining, and growing a
list of your customers, and those who are
| | 01:27 |
actively interested in becoming your
customers, gives you an extremely useful
| | 01:31 |
and valuable asset.
| | 01:33 |
You can use this list not only to
inform and market to a very qualified
| | 01:37 |
audience, you can also send out
invitations to customer satisfaction surveys, or
| | 01:42 |
automate a post-purchase email that
asks for, or even provides an incentive to,
| | 01:47 |
leave a review for the product or
service that the customer has just purchased.
| | 01:52 |
The third way you can get reviews is on
websites. And while that might be your own,
| | 01:56 |
it's more and more likely everyday
that users are going to be using other
| | 01:59 |
websites to review you, your
products, and your services.
| | 02:03 |
Your own website is of course where you
have the most control over your content,
| | 02:07 |
and you should consider creating a
section dedicated to testimonials and sharing
| | 02:11 |
the experiences of past customers.
| | 02:14 |
This is an opportunity to host user-generated
content on your sites that search
| | 02:18 |
engines will love. And for your users,
reading about the real-life experiences of
| | 02:23 |
past customers can be a powerful
influence to the purchasing decision that a
| | 02:27 |
prospective customer is thinking about.
| | 02:30 |
And don't forget to provide an area where
users can submit reviews directly on your pages.
| | 02:35 |
Whether you build this into your site
directly, or you embed one of the many
| | 02:39 |
third-party review solutions, you'll
never get any reviews if you don't ask.
| | 02:43 |
Aside from your own pages, there's an
ever-growing list of sites out there
| | 02:48 |
that cater to collecting user reviews for all
kinds of products, services, and businesses.
| | 02:53 |
Entice your happy customers to write
reviews on major business listing websites
| | 02:58 |
like Google+ Local, Yahoo Local,
Yelp, Citysearch, and more.
| | 03:02 |
And remember that there are a host of
industry-specific review sites, like
| | 03:06 |
TripAdvisor for the travel sector,
that you'll want to focus on as well.
| | 03:10 |
You'll also want to note that different
review sites offer different frameworks.
| | 03:14 |
While many use the familiar five-star
format, others will break up ratings into
| | 03:19 |
different categories.
| | 03:20 |
Google+ Local, for example, uses the
Zagat system that differentiates restaurant
| | 03:25 |
ratings by food, decor, and
service on a 30-point scale.
| | 03:30 |
Regardless of how you get them and
share them around the web, reviews are great
| | 03:34 |
opportunities to build content and
references to your pages that will help
| | 03:38 |
people find you with the search
engines, and then help them along the path to
| | 03:42 |
conversion when they get there.
| | 03:43 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Optimizing your website for local search| 00:00 |
In order to get the best possible
rankings in the search engines, by now you know
| | 00:04 |
that you have to constantly create
good, relevant content, and then promote and
| | 00:08 |
market it around the web.
| | 00:10 |
When analyzing the pages of your site,
Google and other search engines use a
| | 00:14 |
number of different signals to decide
which pages show, and in what order, when a
| | 00:18 |
user types in a search query. And when
we're optimizing for local search, there
| | 00:23 |
are some specific items
that you want to focus on.
| | 00:26 |
The first is on-page optimization and content.
| | 00:30 |
Every page of your website should be
optimized for a specific, well-researched
| | 00:34 |
keyword, and you'll need to make sure
that you're leveraging the important
| | 00:37 |
elements from a technical standpoint.
| | 00:40 |
You can have a look at previous videos
for more details on technical SEO, but at
| | 00:44 |
a bare minimum, make sure you spend
time optimizing your page title, your meta
| | 00:48 |
description, your heading tags, body
text, and ALT text on each of your images.
| | 00:54 |
So far, this should be nothing new, but
now let's talk about some things specific
| | 00:58 |
to local search that can help you out.
| | 01:00 |
First, your contact information is
going to be especially important, and there
| | 01:05 |
are some specific things you need to put on
your Contact Us page, in some specific ways.
| | 01:10 |
You can head over to schema.org/LocalBusiness
and browse around to find specific
| | 01:16 |
schema elements that make sense for
your type of business, but let's take a
| | 01:19 |
basic example to show how microdata works.
| | 01:23 |
Let's say you've got a contact page
that shows your name, a description of your
| | 01:26 |
business, your address, and your phone number.
| | 01:29 |
You'll probably have some code
that looks something like this.
| | 01:33 |
By adding some tags and explicitly
defining these items through the markup
| | 01:36 |
defined at schema.org, you'll be
telling search engines exactly what type of
| | 01:41 |
information each piece of text
represents. And remember, this is just the basics.
| | 01:47 |
There are microformats for everything,
from your hours of operation, to the
| | 01:50 |
payment types you accept, to industry-
specific items like menus for restaurants.
| | 01:55 |
At a minimum, you'll want to make
sure to include your business name,
| | 01:59 |
address, and phone number, and you
should also include things like your
| | 02:02 |
business email address, driving
directions or a map, and a photo or two with
| | 02:07 |
appropriate ALT text.
| | 02:09 |
And don't forget the human visitors.
You'll want to make it easy for them to
| | 02:12 |
contact and connect with you through forums
and social media functionality. One more tip.
| | 02:18 |
Your business information should
always be in the bottom right-hand corner of
| | 02:22 |
your footer on every page.
| | 02:24 |
This is a very common place that
users are conditioned to look for contact
| | 02:27 |
information, and it will ensure that
they can find your information quickly from
| | 02:31 |
any page of your site if
they want to contact you.
| | 02:35 |
These days, you also have to consider
that people aren't just searching for
| | 02:38 |
you on their desktop PCs anymore,
they're also searching with mobile devices
| | 02:42 |
when they're not at home or in the
office. And much of this on-the-go
| | 02:45 |
searching is with local intent.
| | 02:48 |
Having a site that looks good and
functions on mobile devices is something that
| | 02:52 |
will not only serve you well with
the search engines responding to search
| | 02:55 |
queries on mobile devices, but will
also ensure that your users have a positive
| | 02:59 |
experience with you and your site,
regardless what device they're using.
| | 03:03 |
Google's GoMo program allows you to
get a look at how your website looks on a
| | 03:07 |
mobile device, and it can scan your site
and make recommendations on how you can
| | 03:12 |
improve your page's mobile performance.
| | 03:14 |
If you have resources or programming
expertise, you might choose to address some
| | 03:18 |
of these issues by creating a separate
site exclusively for your mobile users on
| | 03:23 |
a separate domain or sub-domain. Or
better yet, you might choose to use a
| | 03:28 |
responsive design that adapts to
whatever size of screen your website is being
| | 03:31 |
rendered on from a single code base.
| | 03:34 |
If you're looking for a quick solution
and you have a static website, you can
| | 03:38 |
take advantage of a partnership that
Google has with Duda Mobile to create a
| | 03:42 |
quick and dirty mobile version of
your pages right from the GoMo site.
| | 03:46 |
The bottom line is that many of your
local customers are using mobile devices,
| | 03:50 |
and if your site doesn't provide the
information your mobile visitor needs, or if
| | 03:54 |
it crashes their browser, you've
probably lost a potential customer.
| | 03:59 |
Focusing on you're on page-
optimization, your contact page, proper schema
| | 04:03 |
markup, and mobile performance will
ensure that you're taking the right
| | 04:07 |
steps towards local search visibility
with the things that you can control
| | 04:10 |
on the pages of your site.
| | 04:13 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| The future of local search| 00:01 |
How people use search engines to find
places, things, and businesses is in a
| | 00:05 |
constant state of change.
| | 00:07 |
As technology has improved, local
businesses have gained more and more ways
| | 00:11 |
to reach their customers, and the pace of
change is only going to speed up in the future.
| | 00:16 |
Perhaps the most explosive trends these
days are social media and mobile device usage.
| | 00:22 |
Social media is something that's
happening on the go more than ever before, and a
| | 00:26 |
great example of social media working
with mobile devices to deliver local
| | 00:30 |
content is Google+ Local.
| | 00:32 |
From a mobile device that's using GPS or
cell tower signals to become location aware,
| | 00:37 |
A whole new set of local
functionality is unlocked.
| | 00:41 |
Users can use their mobile browsers or
download iPhone or Android apps that keep
| | 00:46 |
them connected to their Google+
account, and right from the app they can find
| | 00:50 |
local businesses based on their
current location, and read reviews from other
| | 00:54 |
Google+ users or people in their networks.
| | 00:57 |
You can also write reviews on the go,
share information with your social
| | 01:01 |
networks, and even get directions to a
local business from wherever you happen
| | 01:05 |
to be, by car, by foot, or
even by public transportation.
| | 01:09 |
From the browser view, or back home
on your laptop, Local is now integrated
| | 01:14 |
right into Google+.
| | 01:16 |
The important part is that this isn't
something that's coming in the future.
| | 01:19 |
All of these features that we've
just talked about are already here.
| | 01:23 |
This is where things are going.
| | 01:25 |
Your online experience is becoming
more and more tailored to where you
| | 01:28 |
physically are, and the lines between local
search, social media, and the kinds of
| | 01:33 |
devices you're using are beginning to disappear.
| | 01:37 |
Over and above Google+, people are using
micro-blogging services like Twitter on
| | 01:41 |
the go and in a variety of devices
from a variety of different apps.
| | 01:45 |
People are checking into physical
locations on networks like Foursquare,
| | 01:49 |
scanning QR codes to redeem coupons
or get more information about something
| | 01:53 |
out there in the world, and they're
maintaining their relationships through
| | 01:57 |
networks like Facebook.
| | 01:59 |
This nearly-endless stream of content
can be overwhelming, and new apps and new
| | 02:03 |
technologies are popping up every single day.
| | 02:06 |
Each and every one of these presents an
opportunity, but the key is that you'll
| | 02:11 |
need to figure out which ones are
applicable to your business, and which ones are
| | 02:15 |
useful for your customers.
| | 02:16 |
The future of local search
is looking brighter than ever.
| | 02:20 |
Smartphones and social media are helping
people discover businesses in their own
| | 02:24 |
town that they might have otherwise
overlooked, and the rapid pace at which ideas
| | 02:28 |
become reality promises new and
innovative things in the future that you'll
| | 02:33 |
need to be paying attention to.
| | 02:34 |
To further develop your local skills,
and to stay up-to-date on the things that
| | 02:38 |
are happening in local search, make sure
to keep an eye on resources like these,
| | 02:42 |
and stay connected to your consumer base.
| | 02:45 |
Ultimately, they're the ones that
will show you whether you're succeeding
| | 02:48 |
in local or not.
| | 02:50 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
10. International SEOUnderstanding cultural aspects of international SEO| 00:01 |
The Internet allows us to find and
interact with a global audience that we
| | 00:04 |
wouldn't have dreamed of reaching in the past.
| | 00:07 |
But bringing your website to
people across the world presents some
| | 00:10 |
challenges that must be considered
with respect to search engines and how
| | 00:13 |
they view the pages of your site.
| | 00:14 |
A fundamental thing to remember for
international SEO is that the different
| | 00:20 |
search engines people use in
different countries can vary quite a bit.
| | 00:23 |
While Google and Bing might cover the
majority of US-based searchers, other
| | 00:28 |
countries will have
different search engines altogether.
| | 00:30 |
Think of Baidu in China, and Yandex in
Russia, both of which have an overwhelming
| | 00:36 |
majority of the search market
in those respective countries.
| | 00:39 |
Remember that search engines usually
have geography-specific versions of their
| | 00:43 |
engines designed for the
different regions of the world.
| | 00:47 |
Everything from the layout of the
search results page to the language and types
| | 00:51 |
of content they think is relevant for a
user in a specific country can be very
| | 00:55 |
different across these geo
-targeted search engines.
| | 00:58 |
The first step to getting serious about
international SEO is to have your site's
| | 01:02 |
content translated and regionalized
to the appropriate language and country
| | 01:06 |
combinations you are targeting.
| | 01:08 |
This is going to take some time and
resources and it's not a place to cut corners.
| | 01:13 |
If you don't have the proper
resources in-house, there are some very good
| | 01:17 |
translation and interpretation
services out there that will ensure that the
| | 01:20 |
quality of your page translations in
other languages is just as high as the
| | 01:25 |
content written in your original language.
| | 01:27 |
Once you have the content translated,
it's also going to be important that you
| | 01:31 |
create new pages on new URLs for your
different language content, and that you
| | 01:36 |
provide an easy way for users to
switch languages on any page of your site.
| | 01:41 |
It's also important to consider that
although the same language can be used in
| | 01:45 |
different countries, there are lots of
different flavors, dialects, and cultural
| | 01:49 |
differences from country to country.
| | 01:52 |
If you operate in Mexico, Argentina,
and Costa Rica, you might consider having
| | 01:56 |
not just one translation for the
Spanish language, but three for the
| | 02:00 |
regionalized versions of each of your pages.
| | 02:03 |
As you put your translations and
regionalized pages up, make sure to take a look
| | 02:07 |
at the data you'll be gathering
in your web analytics solution.
| | 02:10 |
This is where you'll be able to see
which search engines are driving what kind
| | 02:14 |
of traffic to which regionalized
sections of your website, and you can use the
| | 02:18 |
same fundamental measurement and
optimization concepts to ensure that you're
| | 02:22 |
finding and leveraging opportunities, as
well as creating and promoting content
| | 02:27 |
that speaks to users in their own languages.
| | 02:30 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Optimizing technical content for international audiences| 00:00 |
Structuring your website is very
important for international SEO when you have
| | 00:04 |
different languages and
localizations of your content, and there are some
| | 00:09 |
technical things you can do to your
pages to help search engines find and
| | 00:12 |
understand the different
internationalized sections of your website.
| | 00:17 |
First, determining where to place your
translated content is an important step.
| | 00:21 |
Some organizations structure their
multilingual websites by placing different
| | 00:25 |
translations in different subdomains.
| | 00:27 |
For example, you might place
your Spanish version of the site
| | 00:31 |
on es.yourdomain.com.
| | 00:34 |
Other websites will place the
content in different subfolders
| | 00:37 |
like yourdomain.com/es.
| | 00:41 |
Both methods are effective in
establishing a different silo of content dedicated
| | 00:45 |
to a certain language, and they
both have risks and advantages.
| | 00:49 |
While using different subdomains allows
you freedom in implementation, since it
| | 00:54 |
can be considered a completely different
website, it also brings the risk of not
| | 00:58 |
taking advantage of the overall
link value of your main domain.
| | 01:02 |
Using subfolders to house your
multilingual content eliminates this risk, and
| | 01:07 |
it brings the full strength of your
domain to bear, but it maybe challenging to
| | 01:11 |
implement different site frameworks
this way, depending upon how your ecommerce
| | 01:15 |
platform is set up.
| | 01:17 |
Next, make sure to explicitly tell
search engines what language and region the
| | 01:22 |
content is targeted to using a
hreflang link tags on your pages.
| | 01:27 |
These tags will tell a search engine
where each internationalized version of
| | 01:31 |
the page lives by specifying each of the URLs,
along with the language and country targets.
| | 01:38 |
So if you have one version of your
page in English and another in French, you
| | 01:42 |
can put these two tags on both pages,
specifying which URLs house each piece of
| | 01:47 |
content. And you can be more
specific by adding country targets as well.
| | 01:52 |
If you had one version of the page
targeted to French-speaking Canadians for
| | 01:56 |
example, you could modify this tag to
include both the language and the country code.
| | 02:02 |
When it's all said and done, search
engines will be able to properly identify
| | 02:06 |
what audience each page is targeted to
and display the most relevant result in
| | 02:10 |
the different geo-targeted search engines.
| | 02:13 |
Also be sure to use rel="canonical"
tags on each language-specific version
| | 02:17 |
of your content pages.
| | 02:19 |
This can be especially important when
you have similar content targeted to
| | 02:23 |
different countries within the same languages.
| | 02:26 |
You can avoid duplication problems by
explicitly calling out the unique URLs of
| | 02:31 |
each piece of content in each language.
| | 02:34 |
As long as you determine a
scalable structure to house your different
| | 02:37 |
international content, and you apply
the appropriate location, language, and
| | 02:42 |
canonical tags, search engines will
have an easy way to determine which
| | 02:45 |
languages and countries each of your
content pages are intended to serve. And
| | 02:50 |
this will help get the most relevant
and appropriate pages of your site in each
| | 02:55 |
of the language specific search results.
| | 02:57 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Optimizing translated and localized content| 00:00 |
When we translate and localize a
website's content for different countries and
| | 00:04 |
languages, we're essentially creating
another website. And that means that while
| | 00:08 |
we can certainly leverage a lot of the
work we've done for our primary language,
| | 00:12 |
we'll need to go through an entire
keyword and content strategy for each of the
| | 00:16 |
different languages we're targeting.
| | 00:18 |
Starting with the foundation of keyword
research, you'll want to go through this
| | 00:22 |
process in the language you're
optimizing for, and come up with language-specific
| | 00:26 |
lists of keywords that you can map
to the content you're translating.
| | 00:30 |
You can start out with translations
of some of your top primary language
| | 00:34 |
keywords, but remember that many
words and phrases don't translate
| | 00:37 |
directly between languages.
| | 00:39 |
You should expect that you'll find
some interesting surprises and insights.
| | 00:43 |
Of course, you'll need to make sure
that you have a native speaker of the
| | 00:46 |
language you're working with that also
understands the cultural aspects of the
| | 00:50 |
country or countries that you're targeting.
| | 00:53 |
Once you've done the research and have
a solid understanding of your translated
| | 00:57 |
keywords, you'll be ready to
start the translation process.
| | 01:01 |
The first step is mapping the pages of
your site that you will be translating to
| | 01:05 |
the appropriate keywords you'll be
targeting from your localized research.
| | 01:09 |
Once you know what keyword each of your
pages will be optimized for, you'll need
| | 01:13 |
to ensure that whoever is doing the
actual translating understands the basic
| | 01:17 |
principles of technical, on-page SEO.
| | 01:20 |
Titles, headings, and the body copy
are extremely important, and knowing
| | 01:25 |
what keywords you're writing or
translating for up front will ensure that
| | 01:29 |
you're creating content that's
optimized for the right target terms, right
| | 01:32 |
from the beginning.
| | 01:34 |
Lastly, you'll want to evaluate whether
or not you need regionalized content
| | 01:38 |
within a certain language.
| | 01:40 |
If you're doing business in the US,
Canada, the UK, and Australia, you might be
| | 01:45 |
able to get away with a single English
version of your sight, but you might not.
| | 01:50 |
Knowing your customers and your
business, along with looking at your website
| | 01:54 |
analytics data, and consulting people who
understand the cultural nuances of each
| | 01:58 |
region will help you determine how to
write your translated content for target
| | 02:02 |
keywords across the different
languages, and whether or not to invest in
| | 02:06 |
additional country and language combinations.
| | 02:09 |
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| Building links for an international audience| 00:00 |
Once you have your translated and
regionalized pages up and live on your site,
| | 00:04 |
along with a solid content strategy,
you're ready to build links back to those
| | 00:08 |
pages and encourage social
interactions and sharing.
| | 00:12 |
Link building for multilingual
content follows the same rules as any other
| | 00:16 |
content, but there are a few things to
consider, as it may have some affect on
| | 00:20 |
your overall link building strategy.
| | 00:22 |
Search engines try to deliver a search
experience that is relevant to users in
| | 00:27 |
part based on where they are, and
there are certainly parts of the ranking
| | 00:30 |
algorithms that take
regional factors into account.
| | 00:34 |
One way they determine that is by
analyzing the back links, not just for quality
| | 00:38 |
and trustworthiness, but they also
take into consideration what region those
| | 00:42 |
back links are associated with.
| | 00:45 |
In other words, if you're looking to
optimize your French-Canadian pages for
| | 00:48 |
a French-Canadian audience, you'll be
better off generating links from French
| | 00:53 |
websites in Canada.
| | 00:55 |
All other things being equal,
these links would be worth more to your
| | 00:58 |
French-Canadian rankings, than links
to your French-Canadian pages from a Los
| | 01:02 |
Angeles-based English language blog.
| | 01:05 |
When you're seeking out link
opportunities for your internationalized pages,
| | 01:09 |
focus on websites that operate or
conduct business in the country or
| | 01:13 |
countries you're targeting.
| | 01:14 |
You can also take a look at their
back links and make sure that they're
| | 01:18 |
associated with that same region.
| | 01:20 |
One other side effect of search engines
trying to tailor their results to people
| | 01:24 |
in different regions is that the top
10 search results in one country can be
| | 01:29 |
very different than the top
10 results in another country.
| | 01:32 |
When you're doing your competitive
research, or looking for link building
| | 01:35 |
opportunities, you'll want to make sure
that you're using international versions
| | 01:39 |
of the search engines themselves.
| | 01:41 |
For example, if you're looking for
link opportunities for the Costa Rican
| | 01:45 |
Spanish version of your pages, don't go
to google.com, head over to google.co.cr
| | 01:52 |
and start searching using Spanish keywords.
| | 01:55 |
Take a look at who's ranking for
these terms now, and have a look at where
| | 01:58 |
their back links are coming from, to
see if there are any that you want to
| | 02:01 |
pursue based on the same link building
principles you'd use with any other link
| | 02:05 |
building activities.
| | 02:07 |
Last, just as you'll need an expert to
do your translations and regionalization,
| | 02:12 |
in order to do link outreach in a
different country or language, you may find
| | 02:16 |
that you run into some barriers.
| | 02:17 |
If you're not comfortable with
language and cultural norms of those that
| | 02:21 |
you're working with, you might want to
consider finding a resource that is, in
| | 02:25 |
order to maximize the chances of
turning these relationships into valuable and
| | 02:29 |
high quality links.
| | 02:31 |
Link building for international SEO
isn't that different than what you would do
| | 02:34 |
normally, and making sure to include
your translated and regionalized pages in
| | 02:39 |
your overall link building plan, and
keeping a few extra things in mind, will help
| | 02:44 |
you with the search
engines all across the globe.
| | 02:47 |
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| Analyzing and measuring an international SEO campaign| 00:00 |
Measuring your site for International
SEO is similar to what you would do with
| | 00:04 |
any other site, except you have to be
able to segment your sites to view each
| | 00:09 |
language-specific section
of your site individually.
| | 00:12 |
You can measure and analyze the
different international sections with your
| | 00:15 |
web analytics software.
| | 00:17 |
Using Google Analytics, you can filter
your reports or create advanced segments
| | 00:22 |
to match the sub-domain or subfolders
structure that holds your content for
| | 00:26 |
each specific language.
| | 00:28 |
This will allow you to find insights,
such as ecommerce comparisons between your
| | 00:32 |
French and Spanish visitors, or
determine if certain pieces of content are more
| | 00:37 |
or less engaging or likely to drive
conversion in one language versus another.
| | 00:42 |
You can also set up webmaster tools
profiles for each language-specific
| | 00:46 |
sub-domain or subfolder.
| | 00:48 |
This will allow you to really configure
and optimize your international sections
| | 00:52 |
differently from one another.
| | 00:53 |
For example, you might identify crawl
errors that are affecting one part of the
| | 00:58 |
site, but not another. And make sure to
review any HTML suggestions for different
| | 01:03 |
language sections of your site. And you
can manage site maps separately for each
| | 01:07 |
of your international sections as well.
| | 01:09 |
To view ranking data for each of your
international sections, you can use tools
| | 01:14 |
like the SEOmoz Campaigns feature.
| | 01:16 |
This lets you enter a list of keywords
to be tracked on a specific geo-targeted
| | 01:20 |
search engine, and it will show you
how all of your international keywords
| | 01:25 |
perform for search engines across the world.
| | 01:28 |
Here, you can find out what content ranks
well for certain languages, and how each
| | 01:33 |
internationalized section's
visibility improves over time.
| | 01:37 |
Whatever, KPIs you've determined
to measure your SEO performance,
| | 01:40 |
you can look at them in the context
of each regionalized section of your
| | 01:44 |
website, and don't forget to use
the geographic segments that your web
| | 01:47 |
analytics solution supports.
| | 01:50 |
You can explore which regions of the
world are responding to the different
| | 01:53 |
languages you're, supporting and you
can identify opportunities for expanding
| | 01:57 |
into additional languages, or breaking
existing languages into more specifics
| | 02:02 |
regionalized versions of content.
| | 02:04 |
Making sure that your measurement
strategy includes the international sections
| | 02:08 |
of your website will help you to
continue to improve your performance and let
| | 02:13 |
you know how your efforts in other
countries and languages are paying off.
| | 02:17 |
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| Avoiding pitfalls with international SEO| 00:00 |
Although doing International SEO gives
you an opportunity to find new global
| | 00:04 |
markets and engage with people all
across the world, it can be a complicated
| | 00:08 |
process with plenty of
pitfalls that can hurt your progress.
| | 00:12 |
These are some things to watch out for,
and while doing it the right way
| | 00:15 |
might take more time and resources upfront,
it will be worth the effort in the long run.
| | 00:20 |
First, you're going to want to
steer clear of auto translated content.
| | 00:24 |
While auto translation technology has
improved a lot over the years, it's still
| | 00:29 |
not nearly as good as a competent human
translator that can truly interpret and
| | 00:33 |
craft a message that gets the point
across in a way that's appropriate to a
| | 00:37 |
region and a culture.
| | 00:38 |
Auto translated content can come off
as very unnatural and awkward, and while
| | 00:44 |
some may appreciate the effort, many
will view it as a negative, or a clear sign
| | 00:48 |
that you're not serious about serving them.
| | 00:51 |
Another thing to watch out for is how
words and phrases are translated and used
| | 00:55 |
in other countries or languages.
| | 00:57 |
In the US, an English-speaking American
might search the term "car insurance" to
| | 01:01 |
get some car insurance quotes.
| | 01:03 |
If you were to translate this keyword
phrase directly into French, you might end
| | 01:08 |
up with this. And although it's a
valid translation of the phrase.
| | 01:12 |
In French-speaking Canada, people
will be more likely to use this.
| | 01:16 |
And what if you're renting cars?
| | 01:18 |
If the English version of your site
is talking about car rentals, and you
| | 01:22 |
decide to expand to the UK, you better
know that in London you can hire a car
| | 01:27 |
just as easily as rent one.
| | 01:28 |
These are the nuances that you'll start
to find as you do regionalized keyword
| | 01:33 |
research, and having someone that
understands your target region and language
| | 01:37 |
will be invaluable to you as
you go through this process.
| | 01:41 |
Next, don't fall into the trap of just
translating whatever you can, whenever you
| | 01:45 |
have time, and slapping it up on your pages.
| | 01:48 |
While mixing languages on a single page
is really confusing to a search engine,
| | 01:53 |
even separate pages within an unclear
structure can hinder the search engine's
| | 01:57 |
ability to find and understand your content.
| | 02:01 |
Take the time to plan out your
regionalized versions of your website, and develop
| | 02:05 |
clear navigation that will help search
engines correctly group your content by
| | 02:09 |
language and region.
| | 02:11 |
You can further help the search engines
by using metadata to define language and
| | 02:15 |
location targeting, and spending the
time and resources to go through these
| | 02:19 |
steps will ultimately help your
international search engine visibility.
| | 02:24 |
Last, make sure that you really
internationalize your site for the
| | 02:27 |
audience you're targeting.
| | 02:29 |
You may take the time to figure out what
they call car rentals in the UK, but if
| | 02:33 |
it turns out that taxis, trains, and
the tube are the way that your customers
| | 02:37 |
get around in London, you've
really missed your audience.
| | 02:40 |
Just as with any business, make sure
that you've done the market research to
| | 02:44 |
truly understand the international
opportunity, as well as how to speak to
| | 02:47 |
the specific audience around the needs that
your products and services are fulfilling.
| | 02:52 |
Your number one priority is to
provide your users with the best experience
| | 02:56 |
possible, and if you make an effort to
create a quality user experience for your
| | 03:00 |
differentiated, translated, and
regionalized content, it will result in
| | 03:05 |
improvements in your
global search engine visibility.
| | 03:08 |
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|
|
ConclusionDetermining your next steps| 00:00 |
Hopefully by now you're feeling
comfortable with the basics of Search
| | 00:03 |
Engine Optimization.
| | 00:05 |
You've probably also see the
rabbit hole of SEO, and you may have been
| | 00:09 |
left wanting for more.
| | 00:10 |
If that's the case, you can certainly
dive deeper into any of the topics we've
| | 00:14 |
covered, or learn more about topics that
we haven't. Well, there are lots and lots
| | 00:19 |
of online resources out there on SEO
that can help you learn more and keep up
| | 00:23 |
with the latest information.
| | 00:25 |
The blogs and forums at seomoz.org
are a fantastic place to start.
| | 00:30 |
We used some of the SEOmoz tools
throughout this course, and the folks that
| | 00:34 |
curate and contribute to their
content are top-notch and extremely well
| | 00:38 |
regarded across the industry.
| | 00:40 |
On the offline front, there are no
shortage of books on the topic, but one that
| | 00:44 |
stands out is the Art of SEO
Mastering Search Engine Optimization.
| | 00:49 |
Not only can you learn even more from
some tried and true experts, this book
| | 00:53 |
will also serve as an excellent
reference to keep on your shelf.
| | 00:57 |
Wherever you go from here, I hope
you've gained a solid foundational knowledge
| | 01:01 |
of how search engines do what they do.
| | 01:04 |
I hope your path ahead is a little
clearer and I wish you the best of luck with
| | 01:08 |
your search engine strategy.
| | 01:10 |
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