Basic SEO

Basic SEO

github.com/derwiki/presentation-seo

presented by

@derwiki

for AdRoll, March 24, 2015

Ewww, marketing/business words!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• Making sure Google understands your site
• Strategies to find what people are searching for
• Raising your authority with backlinks

If you build it..

• ... they probably won't come
• How will people find your web site/product?
• Hacker News/Reddit/TechCrunch is not a customer acquisition plan
• Search traffic is an easy way to bring relevant traffic to your site

Hands on:Market Samurai

• Nice interface to the Google Keyword Planner
• Example: 'yoga classes'

In your layout

• Title tags
• Should contain your keyword phrases
• Add page specific keyword phrases
• bad: "ApartmentList | Rent apartments across the United States"
• good "56 Top Apartments in San Francisco, CA for Rent ASAP!"
• obviously, s/San Francisco/$CITY/

In your layout

• h1 tags
• Should contain your keyword phrases
• Add page specific keyword phrases
• There should be only one h1 tag/page
• bad: "ApartmentList | Rent apartments across the United States"
• good "Apartments for rent near San Francisco, CA (61 buildings)"
• notice similarities between title and h1?
• when in doubt, set title=h1

In your layout

• meta description
• Don't bother keyword phrase stuffing here
• One goal: get the user to click through
• Destination page should be not be a surprise
• i.e. description shouldn't say "rent condos" and then only try to sell houses

URL Structure

• Like title and h1 tags, URL tokens imply hints about content
• Use semantic naming when possible
• bad: '/gear/15'
• good: '/gear/canon-5d-mark-ii'
• BEST: '/rent/canon-5d-mark-ii/san-francisco/nob-hill'
• The practice of adding "slugs" to URLs is very common
• Additional benefit: obfuscates auto-increment IDs

Long Tail:

Landing pages

• Your home page is only one entry point to your site
• How many variations do people search for? Can you generate them?
• e.g. you list apartments in San Francisco
• People will search for "apartments in san francisco", "rent in pacific heights", "rent 94103", etc
• You have this data, it should be exposed in a way that corresponds to what people are searching for
• Each landing pages may only get 5 hits/day, but if you have thousands that rank, it adds up

Long Tail:

Content Marketing

• Many attainable keyword phrases aren't completely on-topic
• Putting them on main site could be confusing
• Blogs are perfect for these random, high traffic topics
• Make sure to upsell the main site, else it's low-value traffic

Landing Pages and Conversion

• It's more than just the title/h1; landing pages convert better if the content speaks to that market
• e.g. /rent/drones contains information for first time drone flyers
• e.g. /wedding shows wedding photographers the benefits of renting an extra camera
• This strategy is also important for paid advertising / marketing
• i.e. "List your camera and earn money" ads shouldn't point to the homepage, they should point to "/list_your_gear" landing page

Instructing Googlebot

• sitemap.xml (or collection of sitemaps)
• robots.txt for allow/disallow
• Why would you disallow?
• If you have 100,000 pages but only 50 entry points, you want "link juice" concentrated more in the entry points
• nofollow / robots.txt disallow will prevent Google from indexing low-SEO-value pages or pages that you never want GoogleBot to see
• e.g. maybe you don't want to expose all profiles in San Francisco, but rather bring everyone in to an SF landing page with highlighted profiles

Good Web Practices

• SEO has a bad rap
• Really, it's encouraging good and sane web development practices
• Try writing a script that extracts title, h1, and URL for your 50 top-viewed web pages
• Mine was embarassing :)
• Really easy to fix, pays for itself over time in free traffic

Backlinks: why should we trust you?

• Every search engine sucked in the 90s
• Google got it right with PageRank
• The more web sites that link to you, the higher your authority
• If web sites link to you for a specific phrase, i.e. 'camera rental', then you have higher authority for that phrase
• The higher the authority of the domain with the link to you, the more weight it carries
• One "good" backlink (30+ CF) is better than hundreds of low CF scores

Basic SEO

github.com/derwiki/presentation-seo

presented by

@derwiki

for AdRoll, March 24, 2015

My affiliate link: marketsamurai.com/c/derwiki