SEO - What matters and What to do about it

360° SEO tactics that

Really Work

Agenda

Is SEO dead?

Keyword research

Website speed

Advanced Link building techniques

Implement Authorship

Utilize schema markup

Avoid duplicate content

Redirection

Actionable landing page optimization

Is SEO dead?● Google frequently updating its search algorithm

Recent updates:Feb 4, 2015

December 22, 2014

December 10, 2014

October 21, 2014

October 17, 2014

September 23, 2014

August 28, 2014

August 6, 2014

● Conventional SEO tactics like backlinks, and meta tags, keyword-stuffed content

are not as significant as they were.

● Google is replacing old SEO tactics with new principals mainly driven by social

media reputation, quality of content, history of authors, search hygiene etc

● Now, ‘Google’ works better. So, it’s difficult to beat it.

Is SEO dead?

● Old SEO principles will be replaced by new principles with

the advancement in internet based platforms (social media,

articles, video content, pictures, behavior) and devices

(mobile devices, apps, maps); so Google will integrate and

put these technologies and diverse sets of data sources to

good use to make their business profitable and index

relevant results keep spammers away.

● SEO can never be your only source of traffic, neither it ever

was. So don’t put all eggs in one basket and diversify your

marketing channels and be adaptive to organic mediums.

Keyword research

- Basic Tools- Google Keyword Planner

- Google Suggest

- Google Trends

- Ubersuggest (http://ubersuggest.org)

- http://keywordtool.io

Keyword strategy

● Drive strategy by user-intent

● better conversion rates, lower bounce rate

● drive users to relevant info

● build relationship with future prospects

Why user-intent?

Keyword research & implementation

● Drive strategy by user-intento Navigational (e.g. web hosting companies, web hosting malaysia)

o Research (e.g. types of web hosting, difference b/w vps and cloud

host)

o Transactional (e.g. buy linux hosting with paypal, 1 usd web hosting)

o Comparison (e.g. shared hosting comparison, ABC vs XYZ, ABC XYZ

comparison)

o Q&A (e.g. Is Linux hosting better than windows hosting?)

o Branded (e.g. ABC services, ABC online store)

Landing page optimization

- Why is it important?

- What can be done?

Why?

● “60% of buying decisions are made before

contacting a sales rep”source: http://www.executiveboard.com/marketing-blog/the-most-important-number-in-b2b-marketing/

● High ROI

● Decrease bounce rate

● Subscription for future conversion

What?

● Landing page CTA: o Try before you buy, moneyback etc

o Online Chat, Request a call-back

o Email Subscription option

o Free demo, free delivery

● Other factors:o Fast page load

o Relevant & quality content that differentiates you

o Less distractions (other irrelevant products, info etc)

Link Acquisition

- Why is it important?

- What am I doing wrong?

- How to improve?

Why is it important?

- Links = Credibility

Most common mistake

- Quality vs Quantity

- Low quality links are like stones attached to

a hot air balloon

- High quality links help your balloon reach the

user

Most common mistake

- Quality vs Quantity

- Slow Beats Fast

- Slow (Quality) Beats Fast (Quantity)

What defines quality links?

- Page/Website Relevance

- Trusted

- Website credibility (receives quality links

internally)

- Lesser outgoing links

- Original content

How to get quality links?

- Analyze your competitors backlinks for

keyword you are optimizing for

- Checkout Pagerank of blog pages that can

get you backlinks. Aim for high PR.

How to get quality links?

- Make sure your links reach the maximum

relevant social media channels (facebook

shares, tweets); social bookmarking (reddit,

stumbleupon etc)

- Find bloggers who blog about content

roundups on others. Get them to cover you

on weekly round, or monthly top 10 etc

Use Google+ Profiles for Authors

- Why implement authorship?

- How it can be done

Why?

● Allows to Associate author's Google+

account to website

● Verified authors rank higher in search results

● Builds trust

● High future value

How?

● Authors must have Google+ account

● Add a link containing rel="author" on every content

page on your blog or website to author's Google+ page

● Add site URL to profile

● If multiple content writer produce for you, you put

separate tag for each author.

● If you write content for other sites, like guest posts; you

can simply add the tag under ‘author bio’.

AuthorRank factors?

Website Speed or Page Speed

- Why is website speed important?

- What is the way to measure speed?

- How speed can be improved?

Why?

- Google’s algorithm loves fast loading pages

- You rank well for your pages

- Your get more conversions because most

people are impatient

- Reduces bounce rate

- People explore more pages

What?

- Use Google page speed service

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespee

d/service

Verify your domain and it’s ready to go

Google PageSpeed service

● Is Free of charge

● Setup requires you to change DNS entry

● Rewrites web pages dynamically with Fast-

performance implementation.

● Serves optimized pages via Google servers

to reduce page load time

What?

Other tools

Google Analytics

Moz Crawl Testhttps://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test

Yslowhttps://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/YSlow/

How?

● Enable compression

● Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML

● Leverage browser caching

● Improve server response time

● Use a content distribution network

● Optimize images

Avoid duplicate content

- What duplicate content needs to be fixed?

- Why avoiding duplicate content is important?

- How to save your self from duplicate content

issues?

What?

● Same content two different pages

● E.g. about, archives, tag-archives, page

snippets, pagination.

Why?

● Google will include all results

● Your rankings suffer

● You lose traffic

● Users less-frequently see relevant results

How?

Add rel=canonical tag.<link href="http://www.example.com/canonical-version-of-page/" rel="canonical" />

The rel=canonical tag passes the same amount of link juice (ranking power) as

a 301 redirect, and often takes up much less development time to implement.

Original page: http://example.com/a/about_me

Duplicate Page 1: http://example.com/a/about_me_1

Duplicate Page 2: http://example.com/a/about_me_2

By implementing the rel="canonical" tool on the 2nd and 3rd instances pointing back to the 1st URL, the search engines

would know to treat all of those pages as if they were URL #1.

How?

Add noindex, follow<head>

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />

</head>

● Add "noindex, follow" on pages that shouldn't be included in a search

engine's index.

● Allows the search engine bots to crawl the links on the specified page, but

keeps them from including them in their index.

● Works well with pagination issues.

Redirection

- What needs to be redirected?

- Why redirection is important?

- How to redirect?

What?

● Removed pages

● Moving website?

● Re-structuring website?

● Fix broken links

Why?

● Because you don’t want to miss potential

customers, readers, revenue

● It tells Google that the page has been

permanently relocated

● Good for future

Webmaster tools

If there are any links pointing to these pages, the

votes are split.

Make sure there’s just one not multiple type of links for the same

page.

Busted Links

Google Webmaster

Make sure there’s just one not multiple type of links for the same

page.

How?

● 301 redirect to new URL where the page is

now located

● You can do it from .htaccess page (free tool:

http://www.htaccesseditor.com/en.shtml#a_r

edirect)

● Plugins available for all popular CMS

(WordPress, Magento, Joomla…)

Using htaccesseditor.com

Utilize Schema Markup

● Why you should be using it?

● What Schema should you be using?

● How to implement?

Why?

● Helps classifying your content e.g. person,

place, review etc

● Helps increasing CTR

● Produces rich results in SERPs

What?

● Schemas supported by Google & Bing○ People: contact information, title/role, email address etc

○ Products: Name, price, image, offer, seller, warranties,

condition, and use

○ Reviews: Item reviews, ratings, name of reviewer

○ Events: Summary, location, start date, end date,

duration, event type, photo, tickets

○ Breadcrumb navigation

○ Restaurants: Branch, menu, business hours, price range

etc

How?

1. http://schema.org

Example

Examples

Search Results Types

Search Results Types

Search Results Types

Search Results Types

Go beyond your

website...

Search Results Types

Search Results Types

Search Results Types

Knowledge-Based Trust

(KBT)

The word first came out in 2012 that Google has been working on

knowledgebase for years.

KBT relies on correctness of factual information provided by the

source

Source with fewer false information considered more trustworthy

Extraction process to compare the facts it finds on web pages to

facts that are stored in a knowledge base (think Knowledge

Graph/Knowledge Vault)

About

- Abdullah Khan

- PPC and SEO specialist

- Clientele: E-commerce, Inquiry driven

websites (booking, quotation etc), SaaS

(software as a business)

- Email: [email protected]