What you should know about SEO

Transcription

1 What you should know about SEO BJ Cook CEO Digital Adam Lundquist - Director of Digital Marketing, Digital Alyssa Gothelf, Online Marketing Manager, Magento Agenda for Today s Webinar INTRODUCTIONS About Magento and Magento Go About Digital Operative PRESENTATION What is How does Google know about my page? What happens in a search? What are the benefits of SEO SEO ranking factors SEO 101 How do I use Magento to help with my QUESTIONS & ANSWERS Yes, this webinar is being recorded. The recording and the slides will be available online later. 1

2 Introducing Magento Go Launched February 2011 Ready-to-use professionally designed themes CSS-based theming approach Inline and importable translations Drag-and-drop layout editing Out-of-the-box payment gateway integrations Expand your store with Trusted Extensions Professional web design services from partners Introducing Digital Operative Digital Operative empowers passionate brands, agencies and nonprofits with digital customer experiences leveraging social, web, ecommerce and mobile. Digital Strategy & Planning Search (SEO, Paid Search, Link Building) Social Media Database marketing ( ) Guerilla/Viral/Experiential Business Intelligence (Analytics) App Development (Web, mobile, tablet) Design (web, mobile, campaign, UX, IA) Business Development (DO network) Motion Graphics & Copywriting Product Development & Management Products (DoozerCMS, Facebook CMS) 2

3 Presentation SEO Overview - What is - How Search Engines Work? - What Happens in a Search? 3

4 What is SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)? The strategies and tactics used to increase the rank or frequency your page or website appears in the search engine results. How Search Engines Work 4

5 How Do Search Engines Work? Indexing Search bots crawl the web to collect, parse, and store data from websites. This data is stored in an index for fast results. Fact: If your website is not in the index, it will not be found in the results. Tip: Type in cache: to see the cached version. If there is a cached version of your site, then your site has been indexed. How Do Search Engines Work? What happens during indexing Spider crawls websites. Follows, links and records the anchor text Follows links to navigate the web Records the anchor text (the text for a link) Analyzes the HTML code. Can not see: Images Flash files Audio Video 5

6 How Do Search Engines Work? What a Search Engine sees: What Happens In a Search 6

7 What Happens During a Search? #1 Matches the search query Analyze the query Case insensitive Usually doesn't matter if singular or plural Order is important, first word most important Choose Matches #2 Rank the query Will go into this on the next slide #3 Display the result Provide result and snippet - a summary of the page with the result term in it. What Happens During a Search? (Ranking the query) Positive ranking factors On page Keywords Accessibility Off Page Link popularity Number of links Source of links Anchor text Negative ranking factors Duplicate content External links to low quality/spam sites Selling links (link farms) 7

8 What Happens During a Search? Search Engine share (comscore Jan. 2012) Ask - 3% AOL 2% Yahoo 14% Bing 15% Google 66% SEO The Four Steps - How Magento Go Can Help 8

9 SEO 101 A 4 step process for SEO 1. Choose your keywords (Keyword Research) 2. Optimize your content (Onpage Factors) 3. Get indexed (Alert Search Engines) 4. Attract links (Basic Link Building) SEO 101 Ranking factors: (2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors, seomoz) Variety of factors heavily influence SEO 9

10 SEO 101 #1 Choose your keywords a. How do customers describe your product? b. How many people are searching for those keywords? c. How difficult is it to rank for these keywords? d. How qualified are these keywords? Is there previous data to validate your assumptions? e. What keywords is your competition using in their Meta Keywords tag? Tools Google Keyword Tool» SEOmoz» Your own website - SEO 101 #2 Optimize your content 1. On page a. Accessible to search engines I. Robots.txt b. Appropriate keyword usage in document I. Title tags (IMPORTANT!!) II. Keyword Density Number of times keyword appears in your page. Don t keyword stuff or you will be penalized About 3-7% keyword density is good Keyword proximity Better when keywords are closer together, provides a theme 10

11 SEO 101 On page (continued) c. Keyword prominence c. Where on the page the keyword appears is important to search engines d. Put the keywords in prominent positions I. Title Tags I. Do not duplicate title tags II. Headers (H#) III. Closer to the beginning of the text IV. Initial paragraphs of the page V. Alt tags (err on the side of usability) VI. Bold/strong Title tags and meta descriptions: 11

12 SEO 101 On page (continued) d. Anchor text d. Keywords in the link text e. Meta Description I. Not important for ranking algorithm, but is your chance to advertise your product f. URL I. Keyword usage in URL g. Avoid the negatives I. Keyword stuffing II. Err on the side of usability and write page content so real people can read it, not just bots III. Avoid lots of outbound links on pages SEO 101 #3 Get Indexed Magento GO automatically creates a sitemap Create a Google Webmaster account and submit sitemap 12

13 SEO 101 #4 Attract links Quantity All else being equal would rather have more than less links Quality Look for high quality linking opportunities» Google page rank» MozRank» Similar categories Anchor text Tips: - bloggers with your links - Submit to web directories - Guest blogging - Create citation-worthy content (Link Bait) - Write to webmasters 13

14 6 ways Magento Go helps with SEO 1. Easy URL Rewrites 2. Easily Create Meta Tags 3. Easy Redirects 4. Easily generate Google sitemaps for indexing 5. Easily setup robots.txt file 6. Easily setup Google Analytics for tracking #1 Easy URL rewrites URL rewrite changes a dynamic URL to one that is static, readable, and search engine friendly. Helps keep your product and category page URLs readable for visitors and manageable by search engine indexing spiders. Example/» /id/150» funky-green-aviator-hat.html 14

15 How to do a URL rewrite Admin > catalog > manage products. On the manage products page, find the product you would like to modify in the list. Click edit in the right most column of that product. Will be redirected to the product information page within the general tab. Change the name and the URL key. Keep the Create Permanent redirect for old Url checked. Will also prevent Google from thinking that you have duplicate pages. 15

16 #2 Easily Create Meta Tags Where you set the meta description and title tags Can create: Title - Used to give each product a unique title. This title can be seen at the top bar of a web browser. Also used as a title on the search engines results page. Meta Keywords - Words and phrases that are relevant to the product or page. Google officially announced that they do not use meta keywords in the rankings as of Meta description - Meta description is a short description of the page or product. Sometimes used in the little snippet on the SERP. How to create meta tags in Magento Go:» In the admin panel catalog > manage products» Select a product to edit by clicking "Edit" in its respective row» Select Meta Information tab from the left panel to display the window 16

17 #3 Easy redirects How to perform a redirect in Magento Go 1. Navigate to Catalog > Url Rewrite Management 2. Click the Add Url Rewrite button 3. Select Custom from the Create Url Rewrite drop-down menu 4. The Url Rewrite Information form would be completed and look like this ID Path: old-url.html Request Path: old-url.html Target Path: Redirect: Permanent(301) 17

18 #4 Easily generate Google sitemaps for indexing 18

19 Creating a Sitemap in Magento Go From admin panel catalog > Google sitemap From site map management page click add new to create new site map In the filename field select sitemap.xml Click save and generate Submit to Google Webmaster account 19

20 #5 Easily setup robots.txt file Robots.txt is a text file that is checked whenever search engine robots visit your site. Robots.txt is the standard for determining which information on a website gets indexed. When search engines visit your website, the first thing that they look for is the robots.txt file. Bot will found will follow the instructions in the file. Index and follow How to setup robots.txt file in Magento GO Default setting is index and follow which is what you want to get your site in. To change default settings: System > Configuration > Design (on the left side) > Search Engine Robots (in a drop down view) 20

21 #6 Easily setup Google Analytics for tracking Use Google Analytics for tracking the progress of your SEO and marketing efforts. How to setup Google Analytics in Magento Go Create a Google Analytics account Record your UA number Configure your store for Google Analytics From the Admin panel, select System > Configuration. In the Configuration panel on the left, under Sales, select the Google API tab. Click to expand the Google Analytics section. Set Enable to Yes. In the Account Number field, type your Web Property ID. Make sure to include the UA- suffix that precedes the number. The format of the Web Property ID is: UA-########-##. The number can be found on the Google Analytics page for your account, and also in the Google Analytics code for your site. Click the Save Config button to save your changes. 21

22 Questions? (and Answers!) Be sure to visit go.magento.com/support for other tutorials, articles and videos to help you get going with Magento Go! 22