Jennifer D Begg’s slides for The Guardian Media Academy and Guardian Seminars, SEO: Ensuring your web presence is a success

1. SEO
Optimising your web
presence

2. What is SEO?
Search engine optimisation is the
process of improving the visibility
of a website or specific web
page to a search engine. This is
done by observing the rules used
by search engines to rank
content, and maximising a
page’s potential visibility.

3. ACROSS THE WEB
ON THE PAGE

4. Things we will avoid
• SEO Spam: Hidden text & links,
keyword repetition etc
• Duplicate title tags
• Pages with multiple URLs
• Non optimised image & video
content

5. We will put maximum effort into:
• Planning with specific goals in mind
• Checking & improving content, user
journeys & appropriate tagging
• Perfecting on page optimisation
• Using analytics to perfect goal
attainment
• Tracking & improving referral
performance
• Courting & creating quality back links

6. Your personal SEO Plan
Learning & Planning

7. 1. Organisational Goals
Primary Business Goal eg. eCommerce Transaction
Additional Goal eg. Email sign up
Additional Goal eg.ePetition
Additional Goal eg. Awareness raising, content
sharing

8. Bringing traffic to your site
isn’t the same as
achieving company
goals

9. Is your business ready for traffic?
Running a very successful SEO campaign
can be brilliant for your bottom line if your
organisation’s products and services are
scalable.
If you run a small start up, ensure that you
have contingencies in place for a
successful campaign.

10. 2. Website readiness
• Does your site facilitate reaching
organisational goals?
• Are there specific paths that
users can take which lead to
conversion?
• What does conversion look like?
• Where do visitors land?

11. The good news?
Good SEO practice is strongly
aligned with good accessibility
and content practice. In
general, actions that assist SEO
will also help improve your site’s
usability and relevance.

12. How?
• Using text and detailed descriptions
makes your site more visible to search
engines
• Carefully placed, appropriate keywords
help guide visitors to the most relevant
content
• HTML descriptions of flash files and .gif
images assist screen readers and search
engines
• More regularly updated content is good
for visitors and SEO
• Engines love strong site navigation

13. 2. Website Readiness
Feature Exists Planned Rating
About Page / Org history
Product / Service Info
Purchasing / Donation
Customer Support
News pages / Blog
Contact / Lead form
Offline Contact details
Bricks & Mortar Business info
Links to other resources
Educational Materials

14. Who makes these changes?
• Editing HTML on all site pages
• Creating Robots.txt files
• XML site map
• Customer facing site map
• Converting graphics to optimised text
• Rewriting page text for optimisation
• Ensuring Flash files have alternative
HTML text

15. 3. Conversion Goals
Goal Target Conversion Potential
Conversion Audience Page Landing Page
Newsletter sign up Alumni Thank you page Latest news

16. Tracking & Improving
Goals & Conversions

19. Conversions as Goals

20. Collecting Keywords
• Put yourself in the mind of your target
audience – what search terms will they
use?
• Prevalent words on your site
• Your website statistics
• Industry media
• Internal searches
• Competitor’s website
• Related search results

21. wordle.net

23. What does it mean?
• Which keywords are creating the most
visits?
• Are they also the words with the most Pages
/ Visit? Average time on site?
• Which words have the highest bounce
rate?
• Which landing pages are these words
leading to?
• How do these relate back to your
conversion goals?

24. Data collection time!

25. Relevance, Popularity &
Competition
Keyword (s) Relevance Popularity Competition
Digital High 74,000 Low
Switchover
Legal Support High 60,500 Medium
Strategic High 480 Medium
Business
Consultancy

27. Compiling your shortlist
• Combine to create long tail search terms
• Choose appropriate landing pages
• Value of keyword conversions
• Beware of single word groups
• Be discerning when deciding relevance
• How many sponsored listings are there for
a given term?
• Google allintitle:“keyword”

28. Ranking your shortlisted Keywords
• Search your keywords on
google/yahoo/msn
• Does your site appear within the top 30?
Take a note of the number
• Is the result Web / Image / Video /
Directory?
• Look at organic searches only
This is a good time to note where
competitors rank for your chosen terms, as
well as any potential broken links to your
site

29. Don’t forget Queries

30. Small note on Paid Promotion
• Use Google Analytics to tag URLs for
banner campaigns so that source
data can be tracked in your reports
• Use auto tagging for AdWords
campaigns
• Link paid search through to named
conversions on Google Analytics to
ensure reliable tracking

32. Is your site indexed?
• Google / MSN site:yourdomain.com
• Take a note of how many links are
listed
• Check to make sure there are no old
pages or pages you want to keep
unlisted
• Search for URLs with “” to double
check each page has been listed

35. Keeping Search bots off your
site
• Robots.txt (see robottxt.org for more
info)
• URL removal tool (Google Webmaster)
Not linking to a page will not ensure that
it can’t be found. For example if that
page became a referral page for
another site, they may list it at some
point.

37. Set a baseline

39. Choose your metrics carefully
• Unique visitors / visits
• Page views
• Pages / visit
• Average time on site
• Bounce rate
• Referral URLs
• Traffic from search engines
• Geotargeting (webmaster tools)

40. B2B vs B2C
Advantages & Challenges

41. Business to Business
• Your target audience is much more
well defined and therefore more easily
found and targeted
• High %age of conversions which are
usually of higher value
• Large amounts of text on your website
which can be more easily optimised

42. Challenges
• High quality links can be harder to
come by due to the smaller audiences
involved
• Campaigns can be harder to judge
due to the longer conversion cycle
• Dynamic, rich media content is not so
prevalent on B2B websites & therefore
less potential for sharing

43. Business to Consumer
• Access to wide and varied content
raising potential for sharing
• Potential for user generated content
like reviews
• Much more defined relationship
between sale value and SEO value
• Higher potential for quality back links
from large news websites

44. Challenges
• Varied audience with a range of
online skills (unpredictable)
• Who are your competition? Online is a
completely different landscape
• Less well defined sales process which
usually includes branding as one of the
goals

45. Organisation size
Being a large organisation can be great
for newsworthiness but detrimental when
it comes to the following:
• Large pay per click campaigns can be
unwieldy
• Brand continuity across departments
• Clarity of campaign message
• Old links and out of date content

46. Organisation size
Being a small organisation means you can
be more agile when it comes to web
updates and campaign tailoring.
Challenges come in the form of :
• Size
• Budget
• Resources

47. 4. Action your findings
Does this page have… Y/N
A unique HTML Page title?
Target keywords in the title?
At least 400 words HTML text?
Exact keyword phrases within the body text?
HTML text links from the homepage?
HTML text links from other site pages?
Images / Video with ALT tags and title descriptions?

48. Right click on any
page and click
“view source”

49. Meta descriptions
can be used by
search engines to
describe links

50. Writing content for SEO
On & off your own site pages

51. On Page
• Optimised content is a means to an end
– it has to appeal to your audience!
• Less is definitely more when it comes to
scattering keywords throughout your text
• Vary the versions of a keyword group, do
not replace every generic term to the
detriment of readability
• Split long tail terms with punctuation and
line breaks

52. Where should you include
keywords?
• Headlines
• Sub Headlines
• Image Descriptions and Alt tags
• Main article copy (conservatively)
• Link text
• Navigation links
• Calls to action

53. However, don’t get hung up on:
• Keyword density
• Keyword prominence
• Subparts / Stems (read, reads etc)
• Related terms
• Synonyms
• Modifiers (science fiction, supernatural
fiction)

54. These things are important but should be
used as part of your natural writing style.
Again, copy that is designed to appeal
to your users naturally lends itself to
including your keywords within the
elements of a page.
Google uses a multitude of metrics to
determine your page relevance and
rank. You will never truly know exactly
how their algorithm works!

55. Integrated Blog
• Is your CMS system SEO friendly?
• Plan & schedule updates from a range of
contributors including clients
• Don’t get hung up on your keywords
when it comes to blogging
• Make the content easy to share &
available in different formats (like video /
text / PDF)
• Spend time on community engagement
• Remember links (especially internal)

56. 5. Quality link planning
• Rediscover content you already have –
can it be syndicated?
• Make a list of potential blogs to connect
with
• Do you comment on other blogs?
• Who do you send your press releases to?
• Offer to be a guest blogger / writer
• Spend time and resources creating
content to place on reputable sites with
strong page rank

57. Requesting a link
• Who is linking to your top 3 competitors –
can you get in on the action?
• Do any of your top clients have websites?
• Which sites come up top in your keyword
searches – do they take submissions?
• Do any sites mention your company but do
not link to your pages?
• Are you a member of any business
associations?
• Sympathetic campaigning sites for charities

58. Approaching bloggers
• Be familiar with their content, spend time
interacting on the site
• It’s about content that’s right for their
audience, not selling your website to the
blog owner
• Do your research and mention past posts
• Be polite – your letter could easily be
published
• If you would like a review, send a free
sample but accept that you have no
control over their opinions

59. Assess if a link is worthwhile
• Are your keywords within the article on
the site or - even better - do they perform
the function of the link?
• Are both sites aimed at the same
audience?
• Is the link coming from a flattering
article?
• Is it linking to the most appropriate page?
These are things that search engines are
looking for too, and it helps them assess
both the link and your site.

60. STOP! Don’t forget internal links
Every opportunity to link to content
within your site is another pathway for
search engines to find your content.
Avoid “click here” and use keyword rich
text for maximum results.

61. Directories
Generic:
• Dmoz.org (The Open Directory)
• Dir.Yahoo.com (Yahoo Open Directory)
• Google.com/Places (Bricks & Mortar
Business)
Sector specific
• Be wary of directories that charge
• Are your competitors there?
• Check the site back links & indexed
pages

62. Social Search
Where does social networking
fit in?

63. Social networking
• The more your content is shared the
better it is for your SEO
• Make sharing easy by embedding
share options on your pages
• Encourage employees to get involved
in the sharing love
• Don’t forget social bookmarking!

65. EU Cookie Law
Help!

68. Early days
• Too early for any statistically relevant
data on how many users will “opt out”
• More important than ever to make
sure you use specific, traceable links in
advertising, link building and social
media (UTM)
• Use Cookiepedia.co.uk to help you
put together your own opt in options
• Show willing. Don’t panic.

69. Finally
take a bow

70. Things to remember
• Have holistic SEO practices to ensure
you’re not caught out by changes in
algorithms and trends
• Don’t stop when you get to the top –
expand!
• Always take quality over quantity
whether it’s links, leads or keywords
• Promote your whole site, not just the
homepage