Get More Hits to Your Website

Transcription

1 Get More Hits to Your Website Search Engine Optimization (SEO) With Sarah Johnson

2 What is SEO? The techniques used so that people find your website listing when they search Pay-per-click For example, if you search for cape cod shopping. Natural search listings are the result of SEO techniques Natural Search

3 How do search engines work? Search engines crawl the internet based on select words and index the content based on complex algorithms Search engines read your code, text, image tags, and sitemap file Search engines allow users to look for websites that have select words or phrases found in that index

4 Why is SEO so important? Natural search results pull more traffic More than 80% of users click on the first three search results Natural search results are perceived to be non-biased SEO gives better ROI than any other marketing medium SEO helps create an online brand

5 Your website goals What are the goals of your website? Sell a product, get an online reservation, showcase your art What pages do you want people to go to? What path do you want them to take? Your home page, reservations page, shop online page What do people want, what will they search for that you have to offer?

6 Keyword Research Based on your website goals, develop a list of unique and relevant keyword phrases If you already have a website, run it through the google analytics tool to refine your keyword list Then run your keyword list through the tool to see if you missed any good phrases SEO and keyword research should be taken into consideration at beginning of website design

7 SEO Competitive Analysis Find your competitors How likely are these websites to capture your business? How many sites link to them? Go to link: in your browser How many pages do they have indexed to search for them? Go to Google Webmaster Tools and go to Index Status

8 On Page Optimization Meta keywords and descriptions add little or not value to SEO Meta title one of first attributes search engines see and gets heavy weight in page rank Next attribute search engines look at are header tags; H1 and H2 let search engines know what your content is about Including keyword phrases in your copy is critical, but don't over do it the goal is to provide relevant content that will engage your audience URLs should be short and related to page content Img alt tags important for images to be indexed correctly Link titles need to use keyword phrases XML sitemap important to help search engines spider your site Check for results using Google webmaster tools

9 Content is King Meta keywords and descriptions add little or not value to SEO Meta title one of first attributes search engines see and gets heavy weight in page rank Next attribute search engines look at are header tags; H1 and H2 let search engines know what your content is about Including keywords in your copy is critical, but don't over do it URLs should be short and related to page content Img alt tags important for images to be indexed correctly XML sitemap important to help search engines spider your site Check for results using Google webmaster tools

10 Off Page Optimization Link development get important websites that relate to your website to link back to you Submit to online directories through google, yahoo and local directories such as chamber of commerce listings, Cape Cod resource directories Use social media such as facebook and twitter One way link a website links back to you, more link value Two way link a website links to you and you link back, less link value I link to my site from all sites I develop I link to my site from manta.com, Cape Cod Business Journal, Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce and other regional directories See who links to your site: link:etruro.com

11 SEO & Social Media Blogs help SEO by constantly adding fresh content, which tells search engines to reindex content Use keyword rich social content (blog, video, images, audio) that can be found by search engines Use your keywords in facebook, YouTube, twitter, flickr and other social media to gain search engine visibility YouTube is the second-largest search engine, bigger than Yahoo and Bin. By posting videos and optimizing your posts, you can increase your chances of coming up higher on search pages like Google.

12 Why Search Engines Love Wordpress THE BASICS: Search engines love text because text is easy to read. Search engines love blogs because blogs are text-based and text is easy to read. Also, blogs provide timely, relevant content, and your site is recrawled everytime you post something Search engines love logical architecture and WordPress is designed logically. Search engines love cheap crawling and text is easy therefore cheap to crawl. Search engines love good SEO and WordPress, because of its structure and blog-based design is very SEO-friendly.

13 Why Search Engines Love Wordpress Search engines crawl WordPress sites deeply and more frequently. Just launched websites are usually indexed within a few days, even within a few hours, without have never been submitted to any search engine. Search Engine Friendly URLs: WordPress has the ability of creating pretty URLs for each page on your website. That way instead of having question marks, equal signs and other characters, you will have a readable URL matching the title of the post or page. Internal Linking: The 3 Click Rule - no page on your website should be further than three clicks away for SEO reasons. So if you have the archives widget on your sidebar, any of your posts will be just 2 clicks far away(first click on the month and second click on the post). 3rd Party SEO Plugins - WordPress Developers have created a variety of WordPress plugins which do a number of great things to extend the already great built-in SEO capabilities of wordpress, such as rank target keywords, monitor site traffic and traffic sources, create site maps, and more.

14 SEO Checklist This page has a unique page title The page title contains my target keywords H1, H2, etc. contain target keywords This page has 200 or more words of text that contains my exact target keywords This page can be reached from the home page of the site by following text links Text links from other pages on my site to this page contain my target keywords Use links from pages and posts in my site to other pages and posts in my site