A Practical Introduction to SEO John Doherty Lead/SEO Consultant, Distilled NYC GENERAL ASSEMBLY I A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEO
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A Practical Introduction to SEO John Doherty
Lead/SEO Consultant, Distilled NYC
GENERAL ASSEMBLY I A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEO
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What is SEO? Definition
GENERAL ASSEMBLY I A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEO
SEO is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” listings on search engines. All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have such results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Payment isn’t involved, as it is with paid search ads. source
We’re optimizing the organic listings,
not the paid listings.
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That’s great, but tell me how do it.
GENERAL ASSEMBLY I SEO 101 BY DISTILLED
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SEO has 3 main tenets
• Content
• Accessibility
• Outreach
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1) Content
Everything in SEO, and broader online marketing, starts with content.
GENERAL ASSEMBLY I A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEO
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Content should be aimed at user needs, with
search engines taken into account.
If you want to rank, put the words on the page.
Keyword Rich Content
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These are the strongest on-page indicators to
the crawlers what your content is about.
Optimized Titles and Headings
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To get traffic from the search engines, you
need to create content around the keywords
you want to rank for.
http://www.johnfdoherty.com/minimum-
viable-keyword-research/
Keyword Research
http://bit.ly/QU6dtu
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These are the pages that meet your target
audience’s needs. They will usually be your
most linked-to pages.
User Targeted Content
http://bit.ly/nODcB5
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Depending your niche and site goals, allowing
users to create content on your site, with
editorial control, is a great way to get content
scaleably
User GeneratedContent
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Depending your niche and site goals, allowing
users to create content on your site, with
editorial control, is a great way to get content
scaleably
ONE WORD OF
CAUTION WITH
UGC
Provide some education to your users, or require them to adhere to certain length and
quality requirements. Build SEO best practices into your system
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Depending your niche and site goals, allowing
users to create content on your site, with
editorial control, is a great way to get content
scaleably
CONTENT
STRATEGY, not
SEO CONTENT
A blog is not a content strategy. And we’re past the days of “unique content for SEO”. You need unique content on your site, but it needs to be content that is not only unique
but also useful for users.
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Depending your niche and site goals, allowing
users to create content on your site, with
editorial control, is a great way to get content
scaleably
On-Site
Content
Strategy is
ongoing and
integrated
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Depending your niche and site goals, allowing
users to create content on your site, with
editorial control, is a great way to get content
scaleably
To get users
from organic,
you need to
give them
content
The Dropbox method
is very specific and
hard to replicate.
From an organic
perspective, it’s not
good practice.
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Depending your niche and site goals, allowing
users to create content on your site, with
editorial control, is a great way to get content
scaleably
Build pages friendly to
rankings AND conversions
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Depending your niche and site goals, allowing
users to create content on your site, with
editorial control, is a great way to get content
scaleably
Don’t forget about the
other verticals of search
too.
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Don’t Forget “Why” Especially as a startup, you’re unknown. You need people to connect
with your brand, so tell them “why” they should care. Who works there?
What are you trying to do? Why?
GENERAL ASSEMBLY I A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEO
“Sell benefits, not features”
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Depending your niche and site goals, allowing
users to create content on your site, with
editorial control, is a great way to get content
scaleably Show Your
Personality People want to connect with your story and be part of something bigger. Show who you
are and why what you are doing it cool. Tell a story.
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2) Accessibility
Without a clear site structure, search crawlers cannot access and
therefore cannot rank your site and content.
GENERAL ASSEMBLY I A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEO
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The search engine crawlers are your fifth user.
Not only do you need to think about how
human users use your site, you also need to
think how search crawlers access it.
If they can’t crawl it, users won’t come.
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Google can’t crawl content that you need to log in to see.
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Links drive SEO and the Internet. This is
mostly how Google discovers new content
(though social has a role in that now). If you
want your content to be discovered and
ranked, put your most important content as
high in your site structure as possible.
Google crawls links.
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Most important pages go near the top of your site’s hierarchy. These are passed the most
internal link equity from the most well-linked-to pages. Think about categories and site
taxonomy when it comes to linking.
Site Structure
Image Credit:
https://seogadget.co.uk/
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Always think about ways to link to the other pages on your site. Top navigations make the
most sense, as well as linking to parallel pages in categories. Link with targeted anchor text,
but make it natural for users. Think “Hotels in Paris” not “Paris Hotels Best”.
Internal Linking
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Google has gotten better about crawling Javascript and AJAX onsite, but best practices still
dictate that if you want the content indexed, you need to display it with HTML and CSS.
HTML5 is fine as well. Otherwise, you risk not getting credit with the search engines.
No fancy JavaScript
or AJAX
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Or otherwise this might happen. And you do
not want this to happen.
No fancy JavaScript
or AJAX
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Category pages have a better chance of ranking for competitive terms than individual product
or article pages. Link back to these from articles, link to them from the homepage and other
categories. Good post - http://kaiserthesage.com/large-scale-link-building/
Categories Categories Categories
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This page can rank for “women’s shoes”
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This won’t. Ever.
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A Few Technical Best Practices
36 GENERAL ASSEMBLY I A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEO
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Shorter URLs have been shown to correlate better to rankings than long URLs.
Google/search engines stop crawling at a certain point to save on computing costs.
Therefore, try to keep URLs under 80 characters.
Post - http://www.johnfdoherty.com/lessons-from-google-about-url-lengths/
Short URLs are better for rankings
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I tend to favor branding over domains with keywords in them, especially domains with
hyphens and keywords. If you build a brand, you’re more likely to win online because of
brand loyalty.
A good post by Rand Fishkin - http://moz.com/rand/domain-bias-why-branding-search-
marketing-cannot-be-separated/
Short, easy to remember domain
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Title tags are still the #1 correlated onpage metric to search rankings. If you want to rank
for a term, you need to have it in your title tag. Stuffing keywords into title tags no longer
helps though. Titles must be relevant to the user otherwise Google will change them in the
search results to return a better result to users.
Optimized Title Tags
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To truly be able to optimize your site well, you need to track where users are coming from
and through which keywords. Therefore, at least have Google Analytics and Google
Webmaster Tools set up.
Intro: http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/index.html
Analytics
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If and when you rearrange your site, use proper 301 (permanent), not 302 (temporary)
redirects. 302 redirects do not pass link equity, whereas 301s will preserve up to 90% of
your link equity and help you preserve your rankings.
Redirects
This guy again
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3) Outreach
Without outreach for press and links, your site will not rank. Links drive
the ranking algorithm.
GENERAL ASSEMBLY I A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEO
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Links still rule the SEO world. SEOmoz Ranking Factors
40 Recent algo changes have changed linkbuilding
A real example (WPMU) from @rosshudgens
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update
41 So we must be careful about what links we get.
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Let’s do it right.
GENERAL ASSEMBLY I A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEO
Do PR (and cool stuff)
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• Ask friends if you can write
on their site
• Engage online
Guest Content
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Here’s an Analytics Custom Report for you
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=OClPZwEVQ-
aOBYBhDq21Sw
• Track the following:
• Links
• Referral Traffic
• Conversions
Guest Content
Every niche or vertical has influencers. You should
know who they are, or find them using Topsy or
FollowerWonk. Seek to connect with them (online
and offline).
Find Influencers
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Do stuff worthy of their attention
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Winning Combination
GENERAL ASSEMBLY I A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEO
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Great content on a crawlable site that converts.
GENERAL ASSEMBLY I A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEO
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Tools To Know
GENERAL ASSEMBLY I A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEO
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THANK YOU John Doherty
@dohertyjf
Questions?
GENERAL ASSEMBLY I A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEO
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