We live in a world of information at our fingertips. At the heart of finding, collating and sorting that information are search engines.
93% of online experiences begin with a search engine
Google alone carries out over 3.5 billion searches every single day
Accounting for around 65% of global search traffic, Google are most definitely the big boys in the playground.
A 2011 study by Slingshot SEO revealed that the first result on a Google search received 18.2% of total click through traffic. That share falls below 2% from the fifth result on down. 75% of users admit to not even scrolling past the first page of search results.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process by which we are able to produce and present our online content in a way which best fits this modern search landscape. And make no mistake, SEO is vital to a vibrant, successful online presence.
There are 3.42 billion internet users today, accounting for 46% of the global population. That’s a huge market expecting the best from your online presence, whether you’re a bricks and mortar retailer or a shiny, full-service digital agency.
Search engines run sophisticated computer programmes known as algorithms which utilise ‘search spiders’ to crawl the internet, assessing and ranking websites by an established set of criteria. These algorithms are incredibly complex, and the more data they receive from search results and the engagement of their users, the more complex they become.
Key to understanding how they assess this digital landscape is the art of relevancy and reputation.
At the heart of good SEO. In simple terms this is how well matched the content of your website is to the desires of your audience. Search engines are only helpful for as long as they link up the information people want to find, with the information that websites provide. The way this is done is through relevant, targeted keywords and phrases.
If you don’t mention you’re an awesome cocktail bar in Cambridge on your web page, nobody is going to be able to find you when they search for ‘Cambridge cocktail bars’. Angling your digital presence to answer the most appropriate user queries is how SEO drives good web traffic.
A measure as to how trustworthy your domain and your content may be. Search engines use a range of factors to ascertain this, but in the easiest terms it’s how much of an established and respected authority you appear to be on a given topic.
Relevancy and reputation are simple summaries of the vital guiding principle of good SEO, linking up the most relevant and beneficial content users desire from the queries that they provide. As algorithms that search engines use grow in their understanding of search users, the importance of that natural understanding grows with it.
It’s clear that the art of SEO has become so shrouded in jargon and confusion that picking out the right path can be a challenge. This guide will demystify the mysterious, offering clear, concise advice on how to completely optimise your online presence using SEO best practice.
Where best to begin? In the next section we’ll debunk some of the myths seeking to cloud the issue.
Beginner's Guide to SEO: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
SEO: A Comprehensive Guide For Beginners: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/seo-guide/
The world of SEO is a constantly shifting landscape, algorithms are updated, machine learning grows more powerful and to stay relevant the requirements for good practice must adapt and grow along with them.
In such a dynamic, changing landscape it’s understandable that confusion can occur. Many of the misconceptions surrounding SEO are a direct result of the fast-paced nature of changes.
These misconceptions are sometimes so pervasive that it can be difficult for a newcomer to SEO to understand where the truth might lie. In providing this guide to best practice SEO, we need to first tackle some of those misconceptions head on.
SEO Myths: https://www.optimizesmart.com/12-strong-proofs-debunk-seo-myths-educate-clients-seo/
17 SEO Myths You Should Leave Behind in 2016: http://offers.hubspot.com/seo-myths
A user’s first impression of a website is the site speed. That’s the time it takes a website to load. We don’t live in a world of screechy 56k dial-up anymore. People expect an experience that mirrors this.
Site speed is a factor of page speed, the time it takes a particular page on your domain to load. Site speed is an indication of the speed of the whole domain, using a representative sample of pages.
Site speed isn’t simply a case of user experience (UX), it’s also a confirmed ranking factor for Google. But what metric is actually measured? Research seems to show that time to first byte (TTFB), the time it takes a browser to receive the first byte of response from a web server, may be the deciding factor in this ranking. As with many ranking factors it’s unclear the full impact, but unlike many, at least Google have come out and said it does matter!
It’s clear why. A huge motivator behind Google’s search ranking system is to provide users with the best possible experience. That means not only sourcing and linking the best content for a user query, but offering the solution which can most quickly answer that query. A slow site will significantly detract from meeting that need.
If annoying your customer isn’t bad enough, slow site load times can also add to another negative ranking factor for Google, what’s known as the Return To Search Engine Results Page (RTSERP). That’s how many users visit your site, then immediately abandon it to return to search results without looking past the page they land on. The quicker they do this, i.e the less time they spend on your page, the worse this looks in Google’s analysis of the value added by your website. Slow load speed means people leave out of frustration. This isn’t theoretical: a 2012 consumer study showed that 67% of UK consumers abandon online purchases due to low load speeds.
It’s worth watching this video on the impact of queries, long and short clicks and click through rates on Google rankings to understand the importance of this better.
So intuitively you might think that having a small, sleek, quickly loading site is the answer. To an extent this may be true. However there’s a good chance you’re then making sacrifices on quality and depth of content simply for a single ranking factor.
If time to first byte (TTFB) is indeed the metric measured, as seems to the case, then in pure ranking terms worrying about large sized, high-quality content may not be as significant an issue as the back end infrastructure used to provide your web services.
Your web servers, databases and network infrastructure may be a more significant ranking factor than you think. Delivering that first byte may well be exactly the factor that Google is ranking. Don’t mistake that direct ranking correlation as the only impact on your search rankings however, ultimately your user satisfaction and behaviour can have just as an important organic impact on your optimisation. Fast websites make people happy. Happy people visit more often, and spend more of their time on your website. So what’s next?
Unnecessary fancy flash videos can slow load times.Too many HTTP requests. These are the requests sent to web servers for files on your web page. Assess them, remove those deemed unnecessary.Images not properly optimised will also slow down load times. Make sure images are properly sized for your web page.Bulky code can cause issues. Assess and trim white space or unnecessary spacing and line breaks.Lots of funky embedded external media. Ask yourself do you really need to embed external media to your site? Once you do so, you’re at the mercy of the host’s load speed.
Whether you think you have issues, or you’re just plain diligent and want to check all the same, there are a number of tools you can use to assess your site speed:
Google’s page speed insights tool not only analyses site speed, but offers some basic advice on areas to improve on.
The Firefox add-on Firebug provides a wealth of development tools, a speed analysis tool being one of them.
And webpagetest.org offers an alternative analysis with a simple to use interface breaking down results.
The above tools should offer some helpful insight on where to focus your time. Next up? The importance of mobile.
How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/
10 Ways to Speed Up Your Website –and Improve Conversion by 7%: http://blog.crazyegg.com/2013/12/11/speed-up-your-website
Wondering whether to optimise your website for mobile? It’s not even a serious question anymore. If you want to remain relevant, you need to think mobile.
According to the We Are Social’s 2016 report, laptops and desktops accounted for 56% ofweb traffic in 2015, down 9% year on year. This is still the largest market share, but it’s what happened to mobile that should get your pulse racing. Mobile phones accounted for 39% of web page views globally in 2015. That’s a huge 21% increase year on year.
One of the most significant limits to mobile web browsing used to be the problem of data connectivity. That’s no longer such a challenge. The average global mobile data speed today is roughly 2 MB a second. Erickson reported the average monthly data traffic per smartphone was over 1 gigabyte in 2014, and predict that to increase five-fold by 2020. You don’t need to be scared of a mobile site that looks good anymore.
That doesn’t mean you should discount loading speeds. Page speed is still a ranking factor, and although mobile data speeds have come on leaps and bounds in recent years, it’s still slower than your average broadband.
Want to speed up your mobile page? Optimise your images, minimise your code where possible and try to remove as many redirects as you can. Oh and don’t use flash. Many mobiles don’t support it, so it’s often a waste of resources.
If we’re talking mobile speed, we need to talk Accelerated Mobile Page, or AMP. This open source initiative, spearheaded by Google, Twitter and various other exciting tech giants, aims to dramatically improve page speed for mobile users.
This is seen as particularly important in international markets like Indonesia, where mobiles accounted for a whopping 70% of web traffic in 2015. In a country with 326 million mobile phone connections, that’s a big market to tap.
Given Google’s own involvement in the project, and their continuing drive for faster web pages and better user experience, it’s postulated that AMP may go on to be considered a ranking factors for mobile SERPs, in the same way ‘mobile friendly’ is now. Even aside from the possibility of AMP conferring a positive ranking benefit in itself, the functionality of it as a platform which delivers faster load speeds most certainly does.
AMP HTML is essentially a custom version of HTML. A basic understand of the language means AMP should be an easy step forward. Luckily there’s a robust AMP tutorial ready to lead you along the way.
Mobile screens are smaller than laptops. It’s such an obvious statement, but it’s one with significant consequences for SEO. Those consequences are made clear in a recent eye-tracking study undertaken by Mediative. Some key takeaways to consider:
It takes 87% longer for the first organic result to be seen on mobile.
Just 7.4% of total clicks were below the 4th result.
Only 62.9% of tasks resulted in a user scrolling down.
11% more clicks went to Google’s knowledge graph on mobile compared to desktop.
The top sponsored ad was viewed by 91% of searchers
If you’re the kind of business that gets a significant portion of your traffic from mobile, or work heavily in markets like Indonesia where mobile far surpasses desktop access, then these results can have serious consequences.
The key takeaway is that mobile square ‘inchage’ is extremely valuable, and the limited screen size makes that competition all the more fierce. It also means ranking in the top 4 organic results is even more important than it is on desktop.
Google made it clear in discussing a recent update. If your site is not optimised for mobile, it will do poorly in mobile search results. This is something they’re very keen to push, with an update in May 2016 looking to amplify ‘mobile friendliness’ as a ranking factor for mobile results. Thankfully they also made it easy for you to see through their eyes, by providing a handy tool to check your site. Just input your website, and let Google provide its own assessment. Simple.
If you want to make things better? Some quick tips.
Mobile may offer unique challenges, but if there’s one thing it shares with its dated desktop cousin, it’s the benefits of good keywords. That’s where we go next.
Make site mobile friendly: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/115764-make-your-website-mobile-friendly-now-3-ways
App Store Optimization – A Crucial Piece of the Mobile App Marketing Puzzle:
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/app-store-optimization/
17 Testing Tools for Mobile UX:
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/testing-tools-for-mobile-ux/
Keywords. The clue is in the name. They’re vital to effective SEO and at the heart of the idea of relevancy. Get them right and our online presence will benefit greatly. Fail to give them the attention they deserve and you may forever languish in the lower pages of search engine results. Here we take a look first at keywords and the theory of targeting, before moving on to some useful resources for your keyword planning.
The traditional marketing funnel is a useful tool in understanding the path of good keyword conversion. Grow awareness. Cultivate interest. Provide consideration. Deliver conversion.
As a shoe retailer it might be tempting to go all out targeting the keyword ‘shoe’. It’s what you’ve got. It’s what you want to sell. ‘Shoe’ is an incredibly popular search term, so surely targeting the top will get you the search ranking you dream of? Well no. That’s vanity talking.
First of all there’s a huge amount of competition for the term ‘shoe’. Unless you’re far and away the largest shoe retailer out there, you’re going to find it tough to rank. That’s problem number one. That’s applying the sanity part.
Problem number two goes back to relevancy. How many people actually searching for the term ‘shoe’ are really looking to buy the type of shoes you sell? Maybe they’re just looking up shoe sizes because they’re curious. Maybe they want to know what shoes their favourite celebrity was wearing at the Oscars. This would be an example of a keyword right at the top of the marketing funnel. The term ‘shoe’ may at best raise awareness. Use of content with a more defined key phrase, perhaps answering questions such as ‘what shoes are best for running?’ would move us further down the funnel, providing interest, maybe even consideration. But if you want to convert, you need to look to the long tail.
High-frequency search terms like ‘shoe’, terms which garner hundreds or thousands of daily searches, make up only about 30% of all internet searches. 70% of searches actually lie in what is known as the ‘long tail’. These tend to be more detailed, specific searches which produce far more targeted results.
The benefit of the long tail is that these searches are made further down the conversion journey. A user searching for ‘Size 10 men’s training shoes in white’ is far more likely to convert to purchasing those shoes than the higher frequency but broader term of ‘shoe’. Ranking well for long tail searches provides relevant traffic which can deliver real conversion.
Of course not everyone is looking to buy shoes. That’s just an example of one type of search. There are three broad types of search to be aware of. Ultimately they’re defined by searcher intent.
This is the act of inputting a specific search term with the intent of finding a particular website. It’s nearly pointless trying to target this type of search. Somebody Googling ‘Facebook’ is unlikely to want to visit Amazon.
These are searches covering a broad topic, for example searching for ‘world’s biggest cities’. The searcher is looking for information on a given topic. Generally these are queries without any financial value. It’s for this reason that Google has been pushing its own knowledge graph, the informative results to queries that are becoming amore common response to informational searches. That’s not to say you can’t derive a benefit from targeting these queries. The kind of keywords which could work would provide answers, value adding blogs, how-to videos explaining a topic. These can help deliver authority on given topics which may well result in later benefits for your business.
This is where the real benefit in keywords often lies. These are the searches which indicate intent to complete a transaction. They can be broad queries like ‘buy trainers’ or more targeted such as ‘Size 10 men’s trainers in white’. These searches live in the sweet spot of the marketing funnel, the ever-present chase for conversion. It’s here that long tail keywords can really deliver value.
We’ve defined where keywords can deliver the most value, but how do you decide upon the keywords to use? Here are some great places to look.
So often overlooked in technical SEO recommendations, but your hard-won business knowledge should be a vital first step in your keyword research. Who is your customer? What are their favourite brands or topics? What’s your experience of the target segment and the types of things they’re looking for? This traditional style of persona creation should give you a good foundation for the keywords and terms which you should explore.
This is often the first point of call for an exploration of keywords. Google’s rather helpful tool not only provides estimated search volume of given keywords, it also has the option to search for similar terms, given you an indication of other words or phrases which could drive traffic. If that’s not enough, it also provides an estimated cost of running paid campaigns.Search for your chosen keyword, then assess the search volume under Local Monthly Searches. Be aware however, this figure represents the total searches for the given term, not the numbers you will directly achieve.
Such a simple tool for keyword research but often overlooked. Google’s autocomplete function is actually a very powerful resource. When we type in words to Google, the complex Google algorithms try to help us out by predicting what might come next. That prediction is a good indication of the types of terms people are searching for. This can give you a great insight into keywords phrases. It may also lead to you wondering what Shoes of Prey are.
An alternative and easy to use keyword planner. Keywordtool.io offers a simple, free search function that will take your suggested keyword and provide up to 750+ alternative long tail keywords. It actually works by using data from Google’s own autocomplete function.You can search in 192 Google domains, in 83 Google language interfaces. The free version simply offers you the alternative keywords without any metrics. Keyword Tool Pro offers search volume, cost-per-click for campaigns and indication of AdWords competition.
This is the reverse engineering side of keyword planning, using competitor research. Screaming Frog is an extremely easy to use piece of software which crawls a given website domain, hunting down various useful snippets of information for SEO. On top of a lot of very useful technical data, it also picks out keywords in use on a particular website. Using Screaming Frog can give you a helpful insight into what keywords the competition is using. If you’re feeling competitive you can try and rank for the same words, stealing your competitor’s traffic. Alternatively you can use this to inform your own choices so as not to overlap with a competing term.
Another superb resource, and one that’s perhaps less well known. SEMRush aims to make it easier to assess market opportunities by collating and presenting a wealth of search data such as competitor’s organic and paid search results, link building and advertising. For keyword research purposes it also displays some valuable data on words and phrases that can help identify terms to target on your own website. There’s a limit to both the depth of results and the number of daily searches for the free version, with various packages for paid content.
So now you’ve identified your keywords, where do they go? Here’s a brief list, and an image to explain.
• Page title – Keywords near the beginning. Make each title unique
• URL – Sensibly structured and easy to read
• Page headings and H1-H2 – Tags inserted in body of copy
• Body of the text – Nearer the top of copy is generally better. And make it read naturally!
• Image alt attributes – Ensure it relates to the image
• Image name – Ensure it relates to the image
This is a best practice guide on where to put your keywords. But always remember, do not cram them in! That goes for page attributes like above as well as the body of the content.
Keyword Research: The Definitive Guide: http://backlinko.com/keyword-research
Keyword Research: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-do-keyword-research-ht#sm.00000mkgu8174ie3av90w84ie86ok
Your site layout not only determines the ever important usability, and how easy users find it to navigate, but also plays an important part in the technical side of search ranking.
How easy a site is to navigate translates into how easy it is for a web crawler, the tools by which search engine algorithms search and assess websites, can navigate and index your website. If the web crawler can’t do this easily, your search rankings will not be favourable.
You should be aware that crawlers have a ‘crawl budget’, dictating how long they will spend crawling a given site at a given time. The less authority a site has, the lower the budget. That means you’ve got a limited amount of time to impress.
Imagine yourself as a bricks and mortar retailer. You want to arrange your stock in a way that makes it as easy as possible for your customer to find what they want. Now think of these web crawlers as a mystery shopper, assessing the way your store is set out and using those results to recommend (or not) your business to others.
The site structure is the framework of your entire digital presence. Optimising it provides a smoother, more enjoyable user experience, but also delivers tangible benefits to search rankings.
Your site layout not only determines the ever important usability, and how easy users find it to navigate, but also plays an important part in the technical side of search ranking.
Sites should be structured with the homepage at the head of the tree, with roots of category, subcategory, and further pages such as product pages logically linked, using an easy to follow process.
Be sure to name each section in a logical way that mirrors the terms that users will be searching for.
Aside from a crawl budget, web crawlers like Googlebot also dislike too great a ‘crawl depth’. That’s a reference to how far down a chain of links a web page is hidden. Keep things simple, categorised, and don’t send crawlers down a dark and winding digital alley.
You’ve gone to the effort of planning and implementing a well laid out domain. Make sure and create an XML sitemap to derive the full value from having done so.
These are a quick, easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about the layout of their pages and how best to crawl them. The crawlers will find their way across your website anyway, but think of this like giving them a roadmap to make the process that bit easier.
These are the signposts for your users. A good URL can make a huge difference in user experience and the resultant web traffic that you receive.
Internal links point to another page on the same website, and how these are implemented can directly impact your SEO. Ensure the anchor text used as the basis for the link uses a relevant keyword. Use of the word ‘here’ to indicate a link is dated and terrible for SEO. Internal linking provides further data for crawlers on relevancy and detail of your site layout. They allow users to navigate through your website, help establish information hierarchy and help spread what’s known as authority’, or the metrics of ranking, throughout your site. Again this is a logical process. Ensure each of your web pages has a link from another page on your site, and to another page on your site. Follow the established hierarchy of your web structure. And don’t just throw links in all over the place.
Sometimes your website will quite naturally end up with several different versions of a piece of content in multiple locations. There are a number of valid reasons this can happen, say the change of name of a product requiring a new URL. Well discuss the idea of duplicate content itself in more detail, but in architecture terms 301 can be a great help.
With all these pages of similar information, which should crawlers crawl? Use a 301 HTTP redirect to direct crawlers to the relevant content. It’s important you use 301 and not 302, as 301 actually distributes ‘link juice’. How much juice? Open for debate, but a recent 301 redirect study suggests as much as 15% could be lost.
Canonicalization is the process whereby you direct search engines towards the original version of content.
Do this by adding the tag rel=canonical as part of the HTML head of a web page. As below:
This method passes around 90% of the ‘link juice’ to the original content and is quick and easy to implement.
HTML is the original building block for the World Wide Web, but it’s come a long way since. HTML and CSS should still be the fundamental tools for good site building. Fancy coding with JavaScript, Flash and others can reduce a crawler’s ability to fully index your site.
Google wants to see websites running on secure HTTPS servers. That’s important enough in itself, and provides a small ranking boost. On top of this more and more browsers, and indeed users, are savvy to the possible security problems of alternative servers. Hosting on secure HTTPS can be a real benefit for your traffic and ultimately your search rankings. This video offers a look at the technical sides of these challenges for you.
In Summary, there are 3 main benefits to proper site structure:
The structure is in place, it’s time to optimise your pages.
How to Create a Site Structure That Will Enhance SEO:
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/site-structure-enhance-seo/
Chapter 3: Site Architecture & Search Engine Success Factors:
http://searchengineland.com/guide/seo/site-architecture-search-engine-ranking
No longer than 55 characters. Check title length if unsure. Use keywords in titles. Best practice is to include two keywords if possible, and ensure the title reads naturally. If your brand has name recognition that can drive traffic, be sure and use it.
Make URL’s easy to read and logical. Include keywords. Follow site hierarchy. Separate words with hyphens if required. Shorter is always better.
Ensure every single page is linked from another page, and to another page on your website. Add these links naturally. Use descriptive anchor text as the basis for internal links.
Use descriptive anchor text. Link outbound to pages relevant to the content of your own page in order to help crawlers identify the topic. Links to high authority sites in particular can help build trust and establish authority in a topic area.
Provide unique content about the subject relevant to the page. Use keywords at the start of copy where possible. Break down into easy to read sections with headers and sub-headers. Include keywords in headers/sub-headers where possible. Aim for 500+ words, depending on and assuming it’s relevant to the topic.
Should include keywords relevant to the content of the page. Do not repeat keywords.
Provide easy to use social sharing buttons. The easier your website is to share the more likely you are to generate traffic from these sources.
Ensure all images have alt image attributes. Use relevant keywords that relate to the image.
Make sure your page loads quickly. See our section on page speed for tips.
Images can account for a large amount of the bytes on your website. Optimise them to ensure they only take up as much space as they need.
Don’t hide keywords in images or flash videos. Crawlers can’t ‘read’ this text, so the benefits linking searcher intent to that keyword will be absent.
Ensure your page links back up the chain of architecture.
Ensure your page links down the chain if applicable.
Standard practice is a logo in the top left linking back. Ensure every page has these ‘breadcrumbs’, so that users know where they are in your site, and how to get back.
Duplicate content is content that appears on the World Wide Web in more than one location, or URL. That could be multiple locations on one site or on several separate domains. There are four main reasons that this can be a problem.
Canonicalization is the process whereby you direct search engines towards the original version of content. It’s pointing a digital finger at the official version.
Do this by adding the tag rel=canonical as part of the HTML head of a web page. As below:
This method passes around 90% of the ‘link juice’ to the original content and is quick and easy to implement.
Another alternative to work around duplicate content is the 301 permanent redirect. Add these 301 redirects in your .htaccess file to redirect your users, Googlebot, and other spiders to the appropriate version of your content.
A useful alternative if you’re worried about large amounts of duplicate content is use of the meta tag ‘noindex, follow’. This note essentially asks crawlers not to index a particular page, but directing them to continue to follow links within the page. It should be added into your meta-tag at the header of the page.
This can be particularly useful in issues of pagination, that is the practice of breaking up content over multiple pages or URLs, such as an article over several pages or multiple images in a gallery. Rel=next and rel=prev is recommended for dealing withpagination.
Like much of SEO best practice, dealing with duplicate content involves a whole lot of logic and common sense with a small slice of technical knowhow. What’s important is that you don’t quake in fear at the idea of any and all duplicate content, and maintain a consistent approach to any content you deem requiring one of the solutions discussed above.
Where next? We’ve had a look at the technical side of SEO. Now let’s take a look at the users.
Duplicate Content SEO Advice From Google: http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/duplicate-content-problems/
What is Duplicate Content?: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2049078/duplicate-content-101
The ultimate goal of a search engine is to match user intent with the appropriate web page. Yet the actual impact of user engagement can be a murky old world. User-based metrics, and their impact on ranking factors, are notoriously difficult to pin down. So what are they? And which might be ranking factors?
Let’s start with this great correlation study from Moz and SimilarWeb. The numbers shown are mean Spearman’s correlation. This study perhaps doesn’t cover all the factors, and we should always be careful of the peril of correlation vs. causation, but it does give us a good basis to explore the ranking potential of user engagement.
Thisfactor relates heavily to the idea of name recognition. The more visits you getto a site, the higher you tend to rank. It seems pretty simple.
Howeverthis is likely to be correlation rather than causation – bigger brands tend tohave more links, authority and online presence than smaller brands. It’s fairlyobvious from what we know of SEO that the more you improve your visibility,trust and name recognition, the higher you will rank.
We can gather the three above under the heading of engagement. Time on site does indeed seem to indicate a slight positive ranking benefit. The longer someone spends on your site, the better. Likewise a greater number of page views also seemed to correlate with higher rankings.
RTSERP, defined in this study as ‘bounce rate’, shows a negative correlation, which is what we would expect. The higher the bounce rate from your site, the worse your site will rank. This makes a lot of sense when looking at user engagement as a whole. If a user immediately clicks back from the first page on your site they visit, they’re then unable to engage in any of the other activities on your website that may add further user engagement benefits to your search ranking.
This is a SimilarWeb metric that correlates website traffic and user engagement to assess the idea of authority. A lower ranking, i.e being in the number one spot, does seem to correlate with higher search ranking. Although this is more an endorsement of their assessment than a metric to aspire to.
In its simplest form this is the number of people who click on a link against the number of people who have the opportunity to do so. There’s been a lot of talk about this metric over the years. A recent study seems to indicate that this is not a ranking factor, but others argue to the contrary. If you want to dive into the argument then this is a great summary of click through rate studies. The most convincing argument is perhaps the simplest, why would Google overlook a ranking factor which delivers a direct assessment of their own ability to match searcher intent?
Meta-descriptions are the short bodies of text which describe an individual web page in search results. In many ways they are the very first impression your user will receive of your website. It’s important that first impression is a good one. Ensure it’s less than 155 characters long, so it’s not cut off in search results
Write a meta-description that educates your user as to what your page is for, entertains or excites them to want to visit it, and offers a relevant sample of what they can expect on your page. The actual text in a meta-description doesn’t directly rank in SEO, so there’s no point throwing in keywords you don’t need to. Instead think of this as your first chance to impress your user, and let your brand, your organisation or your offer shine. The more engaging your meta-description is the higher the click through rate you’re likely to receive.
We’ll go into linking in more detail to come, but Google has long looked at linking as a tacit peer endorsement. The better quality a site is, the more likely it is to be linked to. The more high-quality links in, the more users are endorsing a particular site.
We know Google and other search engines are built on matching searcher intent. It’s hard to see how user engagement wouldn’t be a part of that. Unfortunately it’s also hard to see just where that interaction might lie in influencing the ultimate search rankings.
There’s a lot of excitement over Google filing patents in regards to algorithm updates and possible technical answers to some of the challenges around tracking user engagement, but Google aren’t so keen on everyone getting excited by patents.
Whether or not user engagement directly impacts search ranking factors, and understanding how to measure that, may ultimately be superfluous to the argument. Having a beneficial web presence is all about user engagement. You want to deliver what your user wants, in the easiest form for them to interact with, and in a way that encourages them to do so as much as they possibly can. That’s just smart business.
Build your website to cater for your user. Curate your online presence so you can deliver what they want. Once you’ve done that, you’ve already won half of the SEO argument, even if you can’t measure exactly how you’ve done it.
User Engagement: http://www.thesempost.com/user-engagement-as-a-google-ranking-factor/
User Engagement Metrics Aren’t a Ranking Signal, But You Should Treat Them Like One: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/opinion/2422545/user-engagement-metrics-aren-t-a-ranking-signal-but-you-should-treat-them-like-one
Search Engine Ranking Factors 2015: https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/correlations
The world’s a big place. But the World Wide Web opens it up more than ever. Can any market ever truly be just domestic anymore? So in this international world, how is our digital presence impacted, and what does that mean for SEO?
Knowing your market is key to any good business. Understanding that market is even more important when it comes to internalisation.
So you want to a web presence in Indonesia? That’s 250 million customers just waiting for you. So you need to set up your website in Bahasa Indonesian? Except 70% of web traffic in Indonesia is from mobile, so you need to focus not just on the language, but on the optimisation for their preferred method of consumption.
Wait a minute though, maybe you can add in the 30 million people in Malaysia, really open up that regional market? Except in Malaysia the common business language is English, and there’s a roughly equal split between laptop and mobile web consumption. How do you balance an optimised digital presence in the region? Welcome to the problem of internationalisation.
Your first question should be, is there enough interest for you to internationalise your web presence? Use Google Analytics to check your volume and trend of traffic by location and language.
What are the identifiable keywords, phrases, pages, topics or referrers driving your traffic from a given location? Does that translate into a tangible business benefit that will reward internationalisation?
It may be a complex cost-benefit analysis, but it’s better than a shot in the dark. What’s your current conversion rate from domestic traffic? How might that translate with the traffic you estimate you’ll receive internationally? What’s the competition locally? What’s the cost of setting up an international web presence?
Assuming the business case for internationalisation is a convincing one, you need to look at the options for how to move forward. Is it best to target by country, or by language? That is something you need to seriously consider. We can’t tell you the answer. It will depend on your business goals and the traffic you’re targeting. Here’s a handy decision tree from International SEO Consultant Aleyda Solis, hosted on Moz.
There are a confusing array of options on how to set up your international web presence, and depending on whether you decided on a country targeting or language targeting approach that can change.
Internationalisation:
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-international-seo-faqs-15786.html
The Ultimate Guide to Multilingual and Multiregional SEOs:
http://searchengineland.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-multilingual-and-multiregional-seo-157838
FAQ: Internationalisation:
https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-internationalisation#q1
Schema markup is a vocabulary or code which you can add to your website HTML to improve the information your website provides to search engines, and thus the information search engines provide to users.
Schema doesn’t just tell search engines what your data is, it tells them what it means.
Utilising schema will allow you to more effectively manage the information displayed by search engines in SERPs, presenting ‘rich snippets’ of information.
It also helps to inform Google what to display in knowledge panels. This can be particularly important in engaging mobile users.
No new skills needed. Scheme simply requires you to add unique schema vocabulary to HTML microdata.
You, and your user. Allowing you to more accurately represent the relevant information in your SERP means better user experience and better engagement.
It can show an awful lot. Most often:
A Searchmetrics study found domains with schema integrations rank four places higher on average than those that do not. As with all such studies it’s hard to isolate this single factor, but the correlation is strong.
Only 0.3% of domains were using schema as of Searchmetrics 2014 study, yet 37% of Google results were displaying rich snippets. That’s competitive advantage waiting to be delivered.
Some organisations have reported as much as a 28% increase in click-through-rates from implementing schema.
It starts with Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper.
– Select the type of data you want to markup.
– Add the URL you wish to markup.
– The markup tool will load the trial page.
– Highlight and mark those aspects you wish to markup. Do this until complete.
– Add the HTML.
– Then add Schema markup to your page.
Check the Structured Data Testing Tool to see how it will look on your page.
Rich Snippets: All You Need to Know:
https://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-generating-rich-snippets/
How to Boost Your SEO by Using Schema Markup:
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/get-started-using-schema/
Schema.org Structured Data: https://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data
Links are the roadmaps of the internet. They not only direct our users, but they provide the avenues down which search engines crawl. Getting your links wrong can deliver digital gridlock. Getting your links right can not only deliver a far superior user experience, but provide significant benefits to SEO.
Many experts consider good links to be amongst the single most important factors of best practice SEO in determining search engine rankings.
Search engines consider links to be a vote of popularity. They’re a huge indicator of that all-important reputation and authority. The more links driving traffic to your site, the better that looks to search engines. The better things look to search engines, the higher you rank. But not all links are created equal.
There was a day in the dark days of what is known as ‘black hat SEO’ that people would attempt to build any link they could. They would create ‘link farms’, a spammy web page with hundreds and hundreds of links in order to fool search engines into believing a website was worthy of higher search rankings.
Search engines got smart. Nowadays the algorithms are much more sophisticated in how they evaluate a link, and they actively punish a site for excessively spammy inbound links. Search engines don’t simply want quantity, they want quality. Now they’re looking for authority.
Authority is simply a way of explaining the value that search engines ascribe to a particular domain, and thus the benefit of a link from that domain. If your website has an inbound link from The Financial Times, that will rate far more highly than a link from Bob’s Wonder Emporium of Financial News. So what factors into a link’s authority?
Here are some of the most important.
The more popular a site is, the more value it has. A site which itself has thousands of links pointing to it such as The Wall Street Journal, in an established chain of authoritative links, is far more likely to be important.
So The Wall Street Journal might be an important newspaper, but if you’re looking for content on cheese, links from authoritative cheese websites all pointing to the Global Cheese Foundation are far more likely to add value to that topic.
Back to the importance of good anchor text. A link to my website from the anchor text here, misses out on potential value. It does not link a keyword with the relevance of the link. Thousands of links pointing to my popular digital agency anchored with the word digital marketing drive meaningful traffic that search engines can understand. Be careful with this however, over-optimisation of anchor text can itself result in a penalty. Variation is key.
Call it a map, a neighbourhood, a chain, whatever you call it, the links that go to sites that link to you all add (or detract) link value. High-quality links linking to a high-quality link that link to your site pass on a sort of conferred benefit. Think of it like being judged because of who your friends hang out with.
How fresh the content or link that links to your own page is can impact its benefit. The value ascribed to a link tends to decrease over time.
Links from a diverse range of sources will add more value than repeatedly being linked from one particular source.
You might think with all the benefits of links that a hearty social media presence is all you need! You’d be wrong sadly. Social links don’t act in the same way as web links. Social links are normally flagged 'nofollow', which tells search crawlers not to pass on any authority. The links are still followed as normal, but the target site won't benefit from that link in terms of gaining more authority. So that means 50,000 people sharing a link to your awesome new website on Facebook wouldn’t work in the same way as 50,000 inbound links from a variety of web pages.
That’s not to discount social as some dead link-building tool. Driving social engagement increases awareness of your brand, and builds up the wider knowledge of your organisation as a resource. That increases the chance of building up links with people blogging about you, mentioning you on forums or a variety of other methods. It’s just rather hard to measure.
External links are worth far more value than internal links. Think of internal links like the self-promotion of the link-building world. It shows you’ve got something to be proud of, but lacks the endorsement of others. It’s that peer endorsement that means external links to your site add more value.
If you’re worried about the link distribution you already have, there are some useful tools to look into this.
Building links is just like building any other business relationship these days, you work hard, meet new people and try to add value to their own area of interest while hoping they can add a mutual benefit to yours.
Pretty simple this one. If you host great content, a video that’s exciting and informative, an article that educates and entertains, a fantastic guide on SEO for digital marketers…. then people will link to that content.
You don’t even have to do it in person. Reach out to sites or bloggers in the community you serve, show them how you can add value to their own users. Develop relationships and those relationships will link back to your website.
Having your own blog is a great way of building links. It’s a natural way of producing fresh content, and one that can engage users. It’s part hosting great content, part speaking to people. If you’re hosting on your own domain obviously those internal links you create won’t carry as much authority, but you’ll still be generating a benefit.
Devise methods of having your customers link back to you, be that customer reviews, sponsorships or competitions.
Good press can drive some great traffic. Shout about what you’re doing well, and make sure links back to your web page are part of that.
Where next? With all this SEO learning so far, it’s time to think about how you’re going to track the results.
The Advanced Guide to Link Building: https://www.quicksprout.com/the-advanced-guide-to-link-building/
Link building: https://www.wordstream.com/link-building-strategy
You’ve read the guide, you’re ready to go. Let’s summarise the most important best practice recommendations, and run you through your prelaunch checklist.
Great SEO can deliver significant benefits to your business. But how do you track that? Measuring ROI is a hugely important aspect of any business area, and the digital space is no different.
Here we look at the best metrics to track, what they can show us, and equally importantly, just how you go about tracking them anyway.
There are three main ways visitors will arrive at your site, direct, referral or search.
All three of these metrics provide valuable insight, but in terms of measuring the impact of SEO, it’s search traffic that we’re most interested in. Keep a track of the monthly volume of traffic, and its percentage share of overall traffic to your site. This way you can evaluate through fluctuation in traffic if specific efforts made recently have paid off, or conversely if some new changes to search rankings have somehow seen your website lose traffic.
As important as measuring the share of traffic received from search engines can be, measuring how that share is proportioned can also deliver some great insights. Google, Bing and Yahoo dominate search traffic globally, with the odd exception.
Understanding and measuring the share you receive from individual search engines allows you to assess the impact of changes you yourself make, but also that search engines make to how they rank websites.
If you find your search traffic with Bing and Yahoo has remained steady, but your Google traffic has dropped significantly, chances are there’s been an algorithm change at Google that’s impacting your search rankings, and it’s time to investigate. If you find all three of the search engines are throwing you less traffic it may well be an issue of accessibility or a technical change on your website.
Tracking keyword rankings is one ofthe more clear-cut metrics in SEO. By understanding the entry/landing pages forusers arriving on your site, you can make a good estimate about the kinds ofthings they’re searching. (This is particularly important since Google nowwithholds keyword data). This insight helps you to appreciate the benefits ofusing particular phrases, so you can further develop and identify key termswhich could generate more traffic.
Understanding the total number of pages on your site receiving referrals from search engines can help you understand how your wider site and its underlying architecture is performing.
By tracking this number we can see how efforts such as site architecture improvements, link acquisition and other structure changes improve how your website is crawled by search engines, and how much of it is ultimately indexed.
As a vital part of SEO understanding the volume and origin of backlinks to your site can help develop a wider SEO strategy. This links back to assessing the source of your visitors, but the navigational side.
Understanding where backlinks are originating from, what content they point to and who the influencers are that are leading that traffic can help develop future SEO strategies around content.
These are the metrics you need to measure, but what’s the best way to go about it? Let’s look at some of the best tools for the job.
A fantastic free tool which can offer a wealth of information about your website and the traffic it receives. It provides data on user engagement such as time of visit and bounce rate as well as letting you track things like downloads of a particular resource from your site.
Analytics also gives you some fantastic demographic information on your users, providing details of their location as well as aggregating data. Since it’s Google software, it’s also able to integrate with the likes of Google AdWords, Search Console and AdSense. It’s well established, and there are some great Google Analytics tutorials to get you started.
Once setup this tool will provide data on the top search queries driving traffic to your website, along with the pages on your websites receiving the most visitors. The search queries option will show the top search queries driving your traffic, as well as the pages it is being driven to. Since you can integrate it with Google Analytics it streamlines two useful resources rather handily. Rankings are only held for 90 days, so you’ll need to audit regularly to track over time.
This software can be a handy tool for analysing the benefit of links to your site. It provides details of backlinks and the anchor text which is driving traffic to you, along with content auditing and a rank tracking. This can help you understand what kind of content you have that is creating links, and what the keywords in anchor text that deliver it are.
Another great tool for looking into keyword rankings and organic traffic. The free version reveals the top 10 organic results, but has a limited amount of searches per day. The pro version allows 3,000 reports today and reveals 10,000 results per report. This is a great review of SEMrush functionality and some of the other data points it will help analyse.
Moz Pro leverages the knowledge of some great SEO expertise to provide easy to digest data on everything from keywords to propriety metrics on authority and site rankings. On top of keyword insights it offers up some useful looks at metrics around both external and internal links.
SEO PowerSuite is another option that covers much of the benefits of Moz Pro and SEMRush. The free version allows you to carry out keyword research, but that’s about it. If you want to pay for extra features it has the benefit of being a one off payment. SEO PowerSuite offers keyword research, ranking data, link auditing and site auditing.
Hopefully now you’ve got a good idea what to measure and how to do it. Do it often, and do it right. Only by tracking over time will you gain a true understanding of the impact of your SEO efforts.
With a solid grasp of SEO and an understanding of what needs to be done, let’s finish up on some tools which can help you along the way.
Measuring And Tracking Success:
https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/measuring-and-tracking-success
5 Must-Know Google Analytics Strategies To Measure SEO Success:
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/google-analytics-strategies-to-measure-seo/Schema.org
How to Measure SEO Success:
https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2285550/how-to-measure-seo-success
Welcome to the digital tool shed! By now you should have a solid grasp of SEO, the benefits it can bring, and the best practice guidance on how to deliver those benefits.
Now sit back, grab a cuppa, and browse a list of useful tools that can help you along the way.
A great analysis tool and all round excellent resource. Will help you build an XML sitemap, check for broken links, assess your site structure, check meta-tags and attributes, research competitor sites for keywords and generally generate some very useful data.
A great all round tool both for keyword research and measuring metrics to analyse the impact of SEO efforts. Delivers robust data on traffic, links, keywords as well as delivering some great possibilities in competitor research.
A fantastic free tool which can offer a wealth of information about your website and the traffic it receives. It provides data on user engagement such as time of visit and bounce rate as well as letting you track things like downloads of a particular resource from your site.
Once set up this tool will provide data on the top search queries driving traffic to your website, along with the top pages on your website for traffic.
Free version allows you to carry out keyword research. Paid version offers keyword research, ranking data, link auditing and site auditing.
Provides easy to digest data on everything from keywords to propriety metrics on authority and site rankings. On top of keyword insights it offers useful metrics around both external and internal links.
Will provide insights into page speed and suggest changes to improve it.
An add-on for Firefox which allows you to edit, debug and monitor CSS and HTML as well as providing a speed analysis tool.
Simple, easy to follow tutorials on how to build your site with the Accelerated Mobile Project.
Step by step help on building schema markup data to improve SERP listings.
Provides valuable insight into backlinks and domain authority.
Detailed, in-depth look at backlinks, with a lot of historical data.
A handy tool for analysing the benefit of links to your site. It provides details of backlinks and the anchor text which is driving traffic to you, along with content auditing and a rank tracking.
One of the best ways to assess and analyse keywords and the benefit from targeting them. Build targeted campaigns based on the popularity of words and cost analysis.
A supremely easy to use keyword research tool that generates a wealth of suggested terms to help target your content.
Simple, easy to use method of checking your title tag length.
Simple, easy to use method of checking how meta-descriptions will display in SERPs.
