intro to seo for wordpress

Meetup WordPress Perth - Intro to SEO for WordPress – 6 th April 2014

Intro to SEO for WordPress

http://www.quickflix.com.au/


What is Search Engine Optimisation?

– SEO is the practice of improving and promoting a web site in order to increase the number of visitors the site receives from search engines.

– There are many facets to SEO including page content, links but the main aim is to ensure your website is structured in a way that search engines understand.

– It’s important to note that SEO is also about improving the visitor experience or user experience and we shouldn’t get caught up on only trying to please search engines.

Why you need it?

– Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing drive the most web traffic online.

– They are the primary method of navigation for most internet users.

– You’ll miss out on thousands of potential visitors to your website.

– It helps to increase brand exposure, sales and customer loyalty.

– SEO provides a greater return on investment than any other form of advertising.



What is a Search Engine Algorithm?– Unique to every search engine, and just as important as keywords,

search engine algorithms are the why and the how of search engine rankings. Basically, a search engine algorithm is a set of rules, or a unique formula, that the search engine uses to determine the significance of a web page, and each search engine has its own set of rules

– In a nut shell? – A technical term for what you can think of as a recipe that Google uses to sort through the billions of web pages and other information it has, in order to return what it believes are the best answers.



Meet The Hummingbird• “Conversational search” Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words.

• The recent biggest change is called The Hummingbird its’ paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words. The user intent behind the query!

Here is the a list of most changes “known” to have occurred: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change



The evolution of Search• The evolution of search and Google.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTBShTwCnD4#t=159



Fluctuations in Search– In 2012 alone Google made 665 updates to it’s algorithm.

– This is why SEO is a full time job :)

Source: http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/insidesearch/howsearchworks/algorithms.html



Over 85 Rich SERPs Features

How Google is forever changing the ways it displays data.



What makes your website rank?



The Old SEO – The Don’ts– The SEO tactics used in the past.

– Repeat the keyword/phrase a 1000 times on the page– Hide text and links on the page– Build a million non relevant links, in a short period of time– Add heaps of pages with not a lot of content– Enforce exact match anchor text– Build low quality links– Place links sitewide and in footer – penguin sorted that out.– Build only one type of link – such as directories– And much more…



The New SEO – The Do’s– The SEO tactics you must do.

– Create engaging, good quality and unique content and services that will encourage other websites to naturally link

– Create a wide distribution of links – from social media, blogs, reviews etc.– Don’t enforce anchor text links – natural, even no follow links are good– Aim to gain reputation and authority – do original research – compare Doritos and

Cheetos? Give tutorials, live blog an event etc.– Be social and not just on Facebook e.g. Google Plus, Quora, Youtube etc.– Ensure no duplicate content issues– Ensure your website is mobile friendly– Be found locally – Google Places– Update your website often and with relevant content – can’t say this enough



The WordPress SEO must Do’s– The SEO implementation you must do.

– Choose a good SEO plugin – All in one SEO pack or Yoast– Configure the plugin to suit your needs– Ensure correct structure of page titles and urls – this is vital!– Create an xml sitemap - to index the website– Create a robots txt file – it removes unnecessary pages/content. Add link to sitemap.– If you choose add your webmaster tools urls– For url’s dashes are best, next underscores. It’s bad to not use spaces – search

engines do look at the placement of dashes.– Adjust permalink of url’s – postname– Install Google Analytics– Add image alternative text and title



The SEO Plan of Attack– Before you do anything! You must:

– Keyword research– Review your competitors– Review the online industry and offline– Get to know your customers/followers – what are they interested in, what

are their needs, what are they seeking?– Review what’s currently working – check your stats – most popular content– Who is currently talking about me, how can I engage with them– Review who’s already ranking for the keywords you want to target – what

makes them different?



The Perfectly Optimised Page



Thank YouLauren Benedetti

Digital Marketing Specialist

www.laurenbenedetti.com.au
