 Good afternoon. My name is Steve Morderboy. I'm the Sales and Service Delivery Manager for SEMPA plugins with the developers of all-in-one SEO pack, and today I'm going to talk about SEO for business owners, specifically 2018, what's changed. So the first thing, let's understand how search is performed in 2018. We know that most people these days are using mobile phones across the world, and we can talk to Google through our phone. Hey Google, do dogs dream? We've seen the commercial that was on the TV. So that's conversational search. We ask Google a question and we expect to get meaningful responses back from Google. Google doesn't look at that phrase and say these are a bunch of keywords. It looks at that and it understands the meaning and the intent of the full phrase, the full term. So that changes how we organize our content and structure our content for search. Google also understands semantic search, so certain words can mean different things. So for example, where's the location for WordCamp Atlanta 2018? What's the venue for WordCamp Atlanta 2018? What's the location? Where's the location? What's the venue? Where's the venue? So semantic search. So let's look at how we can be successful in 2018. So first of all, pages. Quality content is still important in terms of ranking. It's more important than anything else you're going to do. First of all, web pages, creating a separate page for each topic, each product, whatever you sell if it's a service or a product, having an individual page for that product or service. This is really important because if you start to try and include multiple products or multiple services on the same page, you're going to confuse Google. So optimise one page, one product. Think about structure of pages. So mywebsite.com slash services slash WordPress SEO services. That's a good example of page structure. You can create that on the pages with parent pages. You've shown Google there that you've got good page structure. And this builds meaningful URLs. So we have a URL that tells Google, this is my domain. This is a services subpage and the subpage is WordPress SEO services. Don't create duplicate content. So if you've got a large site and you've got hundreds of pages, make sure that none of them are duplicating each other. One page, one topic. And specifically no useless pages. So a good example of this is companies that put up a location page for each location they service. So, for example, Brooklyn, Bronx, Staten Island, Manhattan. And they just changed the city name. The content is still the same. We service HVAC engineering in Bronx. We service HVAC engineering in HVAC systems in Brooklyn. Just changing the name, the certain keywords on those pages, it's still duplicate content. So don't do it. It doesn't any value to your visitors. They're not coming to try and find that information. They want to know what locations you service, what locations your business is in. They're going to look at your location page, which is going to have your address, Google map. And you can say on there, we service the following areas. So that's pages. So then we get to posts. So people seem to have forgotten that in the world of business in 2018, we have to market our business. I'm 48 years of age. Back then we used to market our business with mail shots and advertisements in yellow pages. Nowadays we can use the internet. Still means you have to actively have to market your business regularly. If you don't, the phone won't ring. But now we're doing it through our blog. I know business owners hate this word, blog, blog posting. Call it news, call it articles, call it press releases. I took a Microsoft's website 10 years ago and they would put out a press release. That's how they get new information on their website, talking about their products. Whether you call it blog or news or articles, white papers, whatever you want to call it, post regularly. Quality comes first. The same today as it is tomorrow, quality will always come first. Regularity comes second. So post as often as you can without it being to the detriment of the quality. So don't try and force yourself to post every week when you've got nothing to say. But keep that frequency going. You'll be surprised how quickly you can drop off search rankings if you go from posting every other week to suddenly posting every three months. Google sees that and you're not actively marketing your business anymore. Make sure your content is easy to read and with a catch on. We all know click baiting on social media, gets people clicking on the link. It's going to their site. So use catchy titles for your posts, for your news. Make the content easy to read. This is something very simple as making sure you've got clear fonts. No script fonts. Make sure the font is distinct from the background color of the page. If you've got a light source, make sure you've got clear fonts. The background color of the page. If you've got a light gray font on a white background, it's not going to be easy to read. Font size, 16 pixels or more. Small fonts immediately turn us away. We don't want to read long paragraphs with small fonts. Break your content up. Use high quality images that mean something to what you're writing about. These are all important when you're crafting a post. Permalink settings. It used to be that we would recommend category slash post name. Nowadays, if you're going to settings permalink, you want to use the post name setting. If you've got an active site, it's been up a long time. You've got a lot of content. Be very careful about changing your permalink settings. It can really screw with your content. You'll end up with a lot of broken links. So make sure you take a full backup of your site first. And make sure you try it out on a dev copy of your site. And then use categories and tags to organize your posts. Categories across a hierarchical. So we know from going to a good news website if we're looking for blog posts or news articles about the Green Bay Packers. You're not looking under hockey. You're looking under football, NFL, and then you're going to find your posts, your news. So use good category structure. And don't overdo it. We don't want to see a site with 200 categories or 200 tags. There's no way you're using these. So keep it simple in terms of categories and tags. So that's posts. Internal linking. So you're going to grab somebody that's going to come to your site if I have a post because you're writing great quality content that somebody wants to read. But once they get to the post, it shouldn't be a dead end. So build a logical path through your site. Use good internal linking. Make sure that you link to the relevant service or product, the page. And make sure from there that you link somewhere that you can capture that visitor, contact form. So good internal linking. Make sure you've got a good nav menu. Again, nav menus shouldn't be huge. It shouldn't be complex. It shouldn't be too difficult for me to find your content. Shouldn't have a nav menu with 10 top-level items across the screen. 4, 5, perfectly fine. If you're going to use drop-downs, make sure the drop-downs match your page structure. Again, with my example, if we have a top-level page called services and then we have a drop-down and under there we should see those sub-pages under that parent page. That services parent page. So slash, services slash WordPress SEO. Services slash WordPress design. Services slash WordPress development. These are all sub-pages. They should be a drop-down under services. Monitor for problems in Google Search Reconsole. Google Webmaster Tools. This is a free tool. You should all be using this if you own a website. It's going to tell you when you're doing something wrong. Fix it as soon as you find a problem. Google doesn't specify how long you've got to fix the problem, but fix it as soon as you find it. You can check for broken links, broken images, broken videos by using the broken link checker plugin, which is in the wordpress.org repository. External links. These are often referred to as backlinks. Links from external websites, other people's websites to your site. So most importantly, don't pay for a backlinking service. It's not going to provide any value. It's usually going to do more damage than good. You cannot manufacture a good quality backlink. You cannot. The only way you can get somebody to link to you is either through an existing business relationship where they want to link to your business or by writing the best possible quality content about the subject you're talking about. Then somebody reads it and is going to want to link to you. But visitors should be able to share content on your site. So make it easy for them to share, pin, like, tweet, whatever it is, whatever social media channel they want to use. Because this tells Google somebody read your content, liked it enough to share it with their social network, their friends. And you can use an SEO plugin like All-in-One to control how those shares look. So that nice pretty image that you see in Facebook, that title, that description, that when we're scrolling through our Twitter feed or our Facebook, Instagram, we see that nice picture. We see a good quality title and description. We want to click on it. You can monitor for backlinks in Google Search Console and disavow any high number of bad backlinks. So if you've got a lot of bad backlinks, perhaps from some old backlinking service you may have paid for, disavow those. SEO titles and descriptions. So whilst these don't necessarily contribute much to Google ranking, they're an important part of SEO. And Google has strict quality rules about these quality guidelines. So this is an SEO title, an SEO description. First of all, in 2018, the description link has changed from what was around about 160 characters to now up to 220 characters. It's between 230 and 320 characters. It doesn't necessarily mean you're getting that, but you have to do a site search on Google to find out. Google are also experimenting with longer titles. Now, they don't measure by characters for the title, that blue title there you see. They measure by pixel width. So an I is less pixels than an M. But generally between 55 and 60 characters, but if you're getting those longer titles, then you want to look for those on Google. And again, just remember it's an experimental thing right now. They may not necessarily keep them. So create good descriptive titles and descriptions. Every page of content, the category, every tag, every post, every product, every testimonial, everything should have a title and a description, a SEO title and a SEO description. They must all be unique. No duplicates are allowed. Brand your titles. You'll see this in search results. When you search, you'll see maybe a search for cordless drills, and I'll see a pipe or a hyphen, and then I'll see amazon.com or blows.com or homedepot.com or homedepot. That's branding, and it's part of Google's quality requirements for titles. You'll see a link there to Google's article about quality guidelines, and you can monitor for problems and fix them. You can monitor them in HTML improvements in Google's search console. It'll tell you long titles, short titles, same with descriptions, duplicates. I'll show you all that in there. Nondescriptive ones. Calling and indexing. So have an XML sitemap. Every site must have an XML sitemap. It's an essential part of submitting your site to Google. A good SEO plugin will do this for you and will dynamically generate the sitemap for you, which means you don't have to keep generating yourself. Every time you publish, edit and update or delete, the sitemap gets regenerated and sent to Google and Bing. Every time a robot comes and asks for the sitemap, it is dynamically generated at that time. It's never stale. It cannot be deleted. It's not a static file. Submit the sitemap via Google, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console, and check for issues. Robots.txt. WordPress now dynamically generates a standard WordPress... standard robots.txt. It's good for most sites. However, it may not be good for your site. So make sure you test it in Google Search Console. Make sure you're not blocking anything like access to JavaScript, CSS or Ajax that renders your page. If your page cannot be rendered, Google can't consume the content on that page. So also do a fetch and render in Google Search Console and make sure that all your content is correctly rendered and you can do that for both desktop and for mobile. No index. If you have a page that you don't want to show up in Google, set the no index meta tag. Again, a good search engine SEO plug-in will enable you to do this very easily. Thank you pages off of contact forms. Do not need to be in Google. Cart pages for shopping carts. Do not need to be in Google. Your privacy policy page does not need to show up in Google. Your privacy policy policy. Use a mobile-friendly theme. We know how many people are using mobile now, tablets and cell phones, smart phones. So make sure you optimize your site both for the look. Makes it look good, makes it so that people can navigate through your site easily and find your content and contact you via a phone. But also make sure it loads quickly on slow networks. You can check for this under mobile usability in Google Search Console. Yep, I can take some questions. So the last ones are secure site and use caching to get those page speed down. So less than three seconds. And finally, if you've got a good blog, use the Google AMP plug-in, the WordPress AMP plug-in. If Google dings you for not having a unique meta-description or meta-titles, how do you handle a site that has 500 products that are all maybe, or even 100 products that are all maybe kind of related? And you say like the t-shirt and the t-shirt and the t-shirt, like how do you handle that? That's a very good question. I mean, you can, again, it depends on how you're creating your product pages, but it's going to be confusing to visitors if they're coming to their website and they're looking for a specific type of t-shirt and all they see is t-shirt, t-shirt, t-shirt. So good descriptive product titles that then an SEO plug-in will take that title and create the SEO title automatically for you, or you can then do something like tack in the brand of t-shirts. So Los Angeles Apparel, TR01 is the particular brand for this t-shirt. So then if I'm searching for that particular t-shirt, you're going to come up in search results. Someone is going to be able to find that t-shirt in amongst the crowd of other t-shirts you've got.