 All right, so one thing, someone has been working in SEO for a number of years, people are asking me about SEO and how to get ranking, how to get visibility, and it's kind of obvious that for a lot of people, organic traffic tends to be, in most cases, one of the top sources of traffic, and which, you know, leads to another question is how can I get more of it, or even at the beginning, how can I start getting that, and people focus a lot on Google, talk about, like, think about Google, what are they doing, what are they doing, algorithm changes, all that kind of stuff, which is fine, but we are kind of missing electric when we just focus on Google alone, so I thought let's just get back to getting the fundamentals done, because we kind of get too far ahead sometimes, but let's get that foundation set and then you build on top of it as well. For the last 10 years or so working in SEO, it can cover a number of things, and there's so many words and areas and jargon and everything involved in SEO that I have to look at, and people can get confused, overwhelmed, and, you know, they need to learn every single thing that you see there, and even for me, I also get, you know, kind of get overwhelmed with that as well, and you can go on forever, but I guess let's not, because it can go on more than that as well, and that's just some of the things I have to cover in SEO, but you don't have to focus on every single little thing. Again, let's get back to the fundamentals, because looking at that, it can make anyone go crazy and just get panicking a little bit as well, so I just thought, right, let's take a breather, stop, let's get back to basics, relax. When I say relax, not like this guy, relax, take a breather, and then think about your website, what is for, and why you're doing it. Yes, you want to focus on Google, but you have to think about the website, it really is for the audience. That is who is for, nobody else. So what I want to do when I talk about SEO, think about how everything you do is for the audience, and also, think about how Google will appreciate that as well, and explain how that can happen as well. Even though it's very kind of PR, when Google say, you know, think of your audience, create content for the audience, all that kind of stuff, it's very PR, but it's also kind of true as well, to an extent. So let's get back to the fundamentals and get started with the kind of the most boring one, first of all, is talking about strategy. It's not that exciting, but it is essential when thought at the beginning. What I mean by that is, first of all, really think about your goals and objectives. You know, what do you want to accomplish? What are your benchmarks? What do you want to establish? What are your performance now? And what do you expect to achieve? Get really specific. Even revenue goals, what are they? You know, you should think about that as well. And then after that, you think about who you are up against. Who are your competitors? What are they doing? How are they competing? What can you do that kind of stand out from the crowd and not exactly copy them? And you have to kind of keep an eye on the market all the time. Important as well is who are your audience, as I said, all about your audience. Get specific. Who are they? The demographic, the location, the age, the gender, what are the pain points, what problems are they having? All these other things are really, really important when you think about whether you're starting a website or you have a website already and you want to build on from there. Very, very important. And I'm going to go through that even why. But one of the things is that I would like to say that if you don't know what you stand for and if you don't know who your audience, then how do you expect Google to know if you don't know? And that's why you have to think back to the fundamental thing about thinking about your audience and not just a machine like Google. So we have to get that basic covered as boring as it sounds. So when we think about your audience, you think about the communication side and you have to speak and think like them. People have asked me what relevance does that have? Why should we worry about the language that we use and all these things? Well, it has a lot of relevance to SEO. Google will know if the way you create your content, if it's too complicated for your audience, the one that you have defined and the one that you know who that you are, if they don't understand it, they arrive on your website and they leave via Google. Google kind of knows that and it could be many other reasons. But if it's a language, then that's something that you need to look at. And it's the basic things like don't use anything fancy, jargon, entity language, and anything complicated. Just kind of be human, all that kind of stuff. It's really, really important. And you might argue as well, okay, my content, my writing is actually very technical or lawyer-speak or it's very science-based, that kind of stuff. So it's technical, it's complicated for a lot of people. But my audience like it. If that suits you, then that's okay because at least you know who your audience are and you know that they understand what you're writing about. So if you have to speak in that language, the average version doesn't understand unless your audience, but that's okay. They're just about thinking about your audience in the beginning and Google will gradually appreciate that. So we'll go back to this section again on what SEO could be about more. And I guess I'll use an example in my own case. And I guess let's talk about this section called schema markup. Something might not, something might not. And I guess okay, let me see if I can explain it in different ways, what it could mean. So one of the definitions could be that it is such a data, you use the microdata at courier and display the snippets, allow such engine to understand the query, the context of it, and determine the relevancy of it. And when I say that to people like my mother or my wife or whatever, you know, they give me that kind of look and you can say what are you talking about? It doesn't make any sense at all. Which I can understand that because, you know, if I'm speaking to the wrong audience with that language, then it doesn't make sense. Let's try it again. Let's try another way. It's a set of codes that allows such engine to understand the content better. The such engine is more relevant display the snippets like the reviews and the dates and just to have your audience further. Okay, it's not bad. Not bad. We're getting there, getting slowly and surely we're getting there. But I just thought, right, let's make it easier again, make it even more understandable. Right, one more time. Set of code you put on your site, so that such engine can understand better. So you can display snippets like the reviews and concert dates and publication dates, so that the audience get the information they want. Happy days. Even better, everyone's celebrating. But here's the thing that we always do sometimes is that you should not make assumptions on your audience knowledge and activities. You need to find out yourself, you need to do your surveys and research, that kind of stuff, to know what do they know, and then you adapt to them, not to Google. So the way of doing that is obviously you Google a lot of such, I guess, we've seen that yesterday, and it's kind of useful. People such like that, that might be relevant to you. Google Trends, very, very useful tool. It's free. Look at the search behavior trends. And keyword research is also important. Find out how your audience are searching for certain things. It's relevant. Market research and surveys, that is actually quite useful, whether you use SurveyMonkey, Google Form, that kind of thing, you understand their level of knowledge and expertise. And do the mom and grand test. When I explain to my mom what I do, first time I explain to her, it doesn't have a clue what I'm talking about. So glad you like to explain that, Google, position, ranking, that kind of stuff. The same thing can apply to your industry. Now, if you explain to someone that is completely out of your industry, then maybe they can understand it better if you just tweak it a little bit. So after the audience, okay, we set the scene on the website. At the end of the day, you can't do that. You can't get your ranking with that website. So there are certain things, obviously, that we need to look at. And certain areas that we need to focus on. And there are some, you know, the fundamentals are, you know, something like your titles, you know, your URLs, put your keyword in there as well. The main body of text, keyword, different type of keyword, make it rich, make it relevant, make it high quality. Your subheadings is also important. H2, H3, when you structure it, not just for SEO, but we've seen yesterday by accessibility, it's also important to make it scannable and have a structure. And also your images as well. That's also important. And, you know, the internal links, the URL structure, the site speed, the site architecture, in terms of how your URL is like, categories and file name, there's so many things that you can do. But these are some of the things that you should look at. And what I mean by optimizing images, there are certain things that you should focus on. And you'll see it in the WordPress dashboard when you upload the images. And the main thing that you think about, first of all, your file name, make it relevant, make it keyword rich, make it readable. If you're using the default one, say DC0516 from the .jpeg, you know, that doesn't make any sense at all to anyone, to Google. So make sure you do that. Separate the word with dash not underscore. That's quite important as well. Also the file size, very important, if it's too heavy, then your site flow, kind of obvious with that. Alt-Tex is, for me, the most important part of image optimization. Now the two things about it, one, again, accessibility is really, really useful. People can, you know, want a screen reader or they have fast internet, they know what is there. So be descriptive in the Alt-Tex. But that is what Google is using to understand what your image is about. At this moment in time, Google can't read your images yet, who knows what's going to happen. But the way I say it, if you want to use the Alt-Tex, how would you describe that image to a person who's hard of sight or blind in approximately 15 words, 15 characters, kind of thing. And just be descriptive. If there's an image of a white dog running on the field chasing the ball, then that's your Alt-Tex. You know, be descriptive like that. Don't just put dog. It doesn't really describe anything at all. So that's really important. And then if you have Yoast, you've got your page title and the description. Very, very important as well. Keyword in the page title, crucial. It has a bit of a ranking factor, actually, on the page title. And the meta description is useful for just encouraging people to clip on your link above everyone else. That's very important when you have a lot of competition on Google. And of course, the thing with Yoast as well is that the whole traffic light system, and you have to cover all these areas just to get optimized. Well, the one thing I should say is that, first of all, there is no such thing as a perfectly optimized page. That doesn't exist. That's impossible. Just do the best that you can. Second of all, if you go all green in Yoast, that doesn't guarantee you anything in terms of ranking. You're not going to get definitely page one, ranking position one, if you go all of that. Thirdly, you don't have to get the green bullet. It's a bit of a myth that you have to get it for every single content. And I've explained about it in another video. It's on a whole other topic as well. But even Yoast admitted that the whole thing about chasing that green dot bullet, whatever you call it, even they admitted that it's indication, it's a suggestion. It's not something that you must do. And I do see that sometimes people think that they have an amazing content, optimized well, keyword as well, but because they haven't got that green bullet, they think that they have to change everything, change their focus keyword, and it kind of makes it low quality. At the end of the day, you guys know more about your audience than Yoast. You know how you should be written, you know how to talk to them, more than a robot technically or a bot. So don't just keep chasing that green bullet. After the whole website scene, you have to talk about your content. The pillar of SEO, there's no doubt, without content you will not rank. You could do some dodgy stuff, but still why would you do that? Because it's for your audience again. Content can mean many things though because people think of content, they think of blog posts. But not necessarily because it can be a text, it can be audio, visual images, videos. Even for me, I've got, you see me walking around with this and I've been recording it all the time. That's the type of content that you can do as well, and there's nothing wrong with that. And if you break it down even more, you can get to so many different types of content as well. It's not just blog posts. And even within that blog post, you can even make it more of a multimedia, different type of media, and make it engaging. Because nowadays, we kind of like to have just more than text, text, text, text. So don't just focus on text only. You've got so many different things that you can do. And you never know that one thing might make your audience absolutely love it. Because you have done something that your competitor is not doing. You just never know. So people always ask me as well, like, how can I find content ideas? We've seen an example yesterday that you can use the auto-suggest and get content ideas. Get searched, look at the results down below, look at the result, and can you do it better? Because I always believe that you can do it better than your competitor. There's no doubt about that. And start typing different letters at the end and see what you get out of it. You just never end in. Another way you can do that is obviously if you scroll down to the bottom when you search, you've got different type of search queries in there that people have searched for. It's quite valuable actually. You've got like related search queries that you never have think of it before. So I definitely recommend doing that for whatever topic you're looking for. And then one I absolutely love that very few people know and they don't use is the use of asterisks. And I'll show you an example here. So if you search for example like how to cook rice, find, got it, where if you put an asterisk in there, you can see it highlights more ideas there as well. And you can keep on clicking, put asterisks, get deeper and deeper and deeper, get more in each as much as possible. How to cook rice is very generic, but what if very specific. How can you provide that in your industry, in your kind of content? Because your audience you never know they might want something so neat that if you search like that you could find that answer. And then off you go. So asterisk is actually really, really powerful and nobody's doing that. And because nobody knows about it. And I have talked about it two years ago in the work camp back here. It is on work.tv but I've also written about it as well. There are dozens of ways of taking advantage of Google's search hack techniques, whatever you want to call it, and not just using asterisks as well. So I'll put that link in the end of it slide if you missed it and you can check it out. But at the end of the day your content, you have to have a purpose and it needs to do at least one of the things to make it work. It needs to entertain. And I'll tell you how to. Maybe it needs to entertain. It could be in any different format. It could be to educate in a very popular way, how to guide kind of thing. Nothing wrong with that. We can combine the two, make it entertaining. It needs to inform. And it's not just a blog post. I'm talking about here. I'm talking about even the e-commerce pages, the product pages, the descriptions. Make sure that the copy of the products that you're selling is good. And it could be inspiring to encourage your clients to come to you because they thought that is amazing. I want that. Or it could be in other format. And also convert to go. It needs to do at least one of these things. Because if you're writing for the sake of writing, well clearly you're not really thinking about what are your audience looking for. And you're not happening by just thinking about yourself only. If you're doing it for yourself as a journey, as a journal, as a diary, or as a private, you plot it, fine. You can have one with it and go for it. It's not wrong with it at all. But if you're looking to kind of grow with your audience, it needs to do at least one of these things. And combine them as well. Next step is obviously people think that they forget about the mobile. It's so essential now. And even more essential now because Google has said that there are more searches on mobile than desktop. And that article was three years ago. So you can imagine what they have right now. It's even more popular than desktop search because everyone has it on their hand. And then on top of that, they have their mobile first indexing. And what that is that Google is going to start indexing and ranking your website based on the content and the experience of your mobile version of your site. Before it was always desktop. But now consumer behaviour markets have changed. It's all about mobile. So the basic thing you need to do is it's very basic to make sure it's responsive and it works on all devices. If you have that, you've got a big chunk of it covered. If you don't, you need to check your themes, check your web repository or anywhere else, and make sure you get a responsive site. And if it's not responsive, then Google will kind of look at it and think the audience are not liking that experience. User experience is one of the reasons why Google is making these changes. So it's really important to make it responsive at the very least. So if we talk all about website, let's get out of the website and see what else can you do outside. And let's investigate what else can you do outside as well. Because it's not just about on your site only. If you have a local store, brick and mortar, office, whatever it is, it's essential that you are on Google My Business. Very, very essential. If you're not, you're missing out on being found on Google Maps. And we all know, and we've all done it, we walk around with a mobile phone looking for something that can apply to you as well. And people will search on Google Maps for whatever they're looking for. Restaurants, for example. If you're not on there, you're missing out. Because if you are on there, you optimize it, you get your reviews and everything, you get that visibility, and you can kind of stand out from everyone else. If you have, for example, pubs in Belfast, you've got lots of options there. Competitive, but if you're really working on it, then you can maybe think about getting lots of reviews, get all the content in there, and make sure that you have all the important information, like your phone number, the address and everything. And Google will realize that, okay, this name, address, and phone number is actually the most essential thing, but you can do better than that. Review is essential. That can help you with your ranking, and that can help you to stand out over other people in Google Maps. And if you are featured like that, then you can kind of dominate pretty much the half of the first page. And that's just from one pub in Belfast. So if you can imagine on the left-hand side, you know, you've got all these results, but if you have been searching for pubs in Belfast, you can maybe take half of it yourself. And that's with Google Map Business. The other thing that people don't think about is PR. I have to call it like a digital PR kind of thing. These three websites are very, very useful if you want to get some kind of PR for your site, for your business. And they all have different purposes. It's meant to connect with journalists and writers in different media. The one I use the most is the bottom one called Harrow, which is done for help a reporter out. And exactly that reporter is looking for something you have in mind. And basically how that works is when you sign up and it's free, you sign up, pick the category that suits you like it could be about health, it could be about business, anything like that, and there's so many more. You get about at least two emails a day of people who are saying I'm a reporter, I'm a blogger, I'm an author, looking for an expert in this topic. Could you, you know, I need a quote of this amount, and if you have any, get back to me. And if it's really, really good, you can get some really good mention in high-quality PR media publication. And if you think about it, we all know that back links are important in SEO, and if you get deep links and need really high quality media sites, then that's great. Another place you can use is Google hashtag journey request. Now, if you go on journey request on Twitter, you might get overwhelmed. But this is such a powerful place to be if you are looking for someone who, what, for people who are looking for someone to provide health quotes, research information about a particular topic on Twitter. And as for your few examples, when you search for a journey request alone, you're going to get a variety of topics. It's just a lot of them might not be relevant to you, but if you be specific, then you might be useful. So, for example, journey request space, anything else, for example, here is security. If you put journey request security, you've got people searching and saying, I am looking for someone who, in equity and security, for my piece on XYZ. And you'd be surprised by the type of people who would look for that. And I'm not just talking about blogs and that kind of stuff. If that's relevant to you, reach out. And you can see, in one case, the person in the third session got the blue tick. He's actually a well-known journalist. So why not reach out to him if you are that person. Another example would be this one, but Facebook, when there have been a lot of media attention, someone says, I'm just speaking to someone who did this or that on Facebook. And if you notice, at the top one, someone from Mashable is looking. And I've been featured in Mashable, which is a really major source of news. So why not reach out to them if it's relevant to you. And another example would be tech. A bit broad, but even I like this one, because someone from the BBC is looking for someone to help them about this tech news. Very specific, but you never know if that applies to you. Nobody reach out to them. And there are other hashtags you can use, like blog requests and PR requests, kind of similar principle as well. And they look the same, but journal requests is, for me, the most popular one. Also, don't forget your local papers. They are craving for news. You know, the kind of sometimes, when Devlan comes, sometimes he could rip their barrel. It's you can have that story. If you have a hook, reach out to them. He's definitely nothing wrong with that. But all that, you know, is all good, but you need to be what I call linkable kind of thing. There needs to be something on your side that's worth linking to. If you have, you know, you have any content, you have anything, you know, creative or not helping anybody, then you're not really, you know, doing yourself any justice. So you need to be linkable. That's why I like to say it. Really important to measure everything that you do. You have to talk to Google Analytics and it's very, very tech and over, but it's really important to measure every single activity you do in your site and I'm not just talking about traffic. It's more true as well. Every website, whoever you are, has a goal and it doesn't always mean revenue or product sale. Every single website has a goal. Now, of course, the most popular place to track is obviously Google Analytics. Most people use that. The way to create goals there is actually very simple and we've seen an example of how to do it yesterday, but there are different type of goals you can create. You know, it can be a destination, a duration, it could be, you know, a number of pages you visit, it could be an event, like click and play video. If that's a goal to you, fine. It's nothing longer than that. And the most popular one for most websites is destination. An example would be if you have a thank you page after making a payment. Most likely people who have reached that mean that they haven't made payment. That's a goal. Every website has a goal. It doesn't have to be failed. It could be any of these. It could be more. These are all applicable as conversion for your site. So if you're not tracking what's working, then how do you know what's not working and how do you know what can you improve? Really important that you should do that as well. And then testing. Also very important. It might be confusing for some people, but it is something that it's worth mentioning because a lot of people focus on by entering cruise traffic because of, for example, revenue. But sometimes if you test it and maybe just make a few tweaks to make people convert better, that actually might get your goal, get your objective more than an increasing traffic. And in some cases it's actually easier to do than getting more traffic. And I'm not just, you know, it's not always about user journey and converting engagement. That also applies to SEO as well. Because Google will know that if a person is on your site, they're looking for something. If they have achieved it, they'll get their hands. And that's why it's important for Google as well. Simple way is to heat map testing. It's to understand where people are clicking. That's on the left hand side and also how far they're scrolling down. If you have a big long page and if you do a test, nobody goes to the bottom. Is there any point having that? You know, maybe you should think about making it shorter. Put in for important information at the top. The two tools that users can do that are hot jar and crazy egg. Another obviously simple classic A-B test, which one is working if you do variation A, variation B, which one will convert better. I like to use VWO. They're quite good for that. The tool that I mean VWO is pay tool, hot jar and crazy egg to have a free version and a trial. But, you know, you don't have to pay for it because Google has their own version as well because Google Optimize and that's free. They don't have a heat map, but you can do A-B test and that kind of stuff. It's free. So you should always think about using that and the good thing about it is that it's kind of integrated with Google Analytics and, you know, that can get you the data that you want all in one place instead of having to think about a third party tool, sync it up, API, all the kind of things. Just keep it simple. After all of that, then just start again. There's nothing wrong is going back to your strategy, just remind yourself what you're doing, why you're doing this, get lashing, repeat again and again and again. Optimize your heat pages, optimize the old process, try a different test, what's working, what doesn't work, measure your performance. Remember who your audience are along that way. Just go back and forth, back and forth. There's nothing wrong with just rechecking your strategy, excuse me, all over again. People get confused when SEO is said by, you know, it can guarantee you traffic and conversion, I can't remember. If you don't have any value, and as I said, be linkable, then what's the point? Because SEO is not about creating value, it exposes our value. And, you know, you should think about that for your audience. So for something to succeed, value must exist, and that's why I love this quote. With that in mind, if your product and service is, I need to be clean, poo, then your audience also will think that you're full of, I don't know, and then all of that, then Google will think that you are, that's another way, do-do, who knows. I can't use the S-word in the camera. So that's important, Google will know, if you don't have that value, then SEO cannot do that job for you. So you still need to have that value in the beginning, and SEO can help you to expose that. But again, I'd always say it's all about the audience. You should always think about that as well as Google, but don't forget the essential thing, which is the audience. And that's the best way to start. Thank you very much.