 Ya. That's how it goes. So, the outline of today's sharing basically, you know, what is SEO. You guys know it as Search Engine Optimization. A quick intro on what it is roughly about. So, I was told to share for 15 minutes. So, the content is actually very... I tried to put at least 4 hours of content. I tried to string it into like 15-20 minutes. So, it's very, very concise, I'm sorry. On-site optimizations, off-site optimizations, and of course WordPress, right? So, we will talk about the YAUS plugin. Simple sharing on the YAUS plugin, which is what I specifically love to use. Okay. So, what exactly is Search Engine Optimization? Basically, textbook answer is, you know, the process of making yourself more visible on Search Engine unpaid results. So, there are two main types of results that you can find yourself on. You can pay. So, your PPC, your Search Engine Marketing, which is, you know, all your yellow color ads-ads-ads versus, you know, ranking for organic results. And why do people focus more on SEO as compared to say SEM? I don't know about you guys, but I don't really like ads. So, I don't click on ads, but people do click on organic results more often. So, I think it's... For me, if you compare SEO, SEM, I'm more of a SEO person. I don't really do SEM at all. So, how do you actually rank for SEO? I'll go on to share a bit more. Okay. So, Search Engine, you guys know the three big players, Google, Yahoo, Bing. Okay. In Singapore, Google takes up about 70% of the SEO search traffic, which is why we are going to share more on Google instead of Yahoo and Bing. Yahoo and Bing actually do share the same results. So, their search system actually is linked together. So, if you do search something on Yahoo, say you search SEO, the results are actually the same if you search it on Bing. They kind of link themselves together already. So, generally, how do Search Engine work? So, we have this idea of a search spider. You think of yourself as a no little spider crawling around in your little web. So, people always say the worldwide web. So, how the whole thing works is basically one website is actually linked to another website through links. So, for example, I have a website SEO.com.sg, for example. And I link to Robert. Okay, Robert over here. Robert.com.sg. And Robert links to John.com.sg. And he links to everyone else. So, somehow I am linked to him maybe because he is my best friend. So, I link to him as bestfriend.com. Okay, best friend. Okay. Then he links to him as good friend. So, we are somehow linked some ways. So, search spiders actually crawl from my page to his page to his page. And by running through the web from one link to another, it records all the information on the site as well. So, on my site, maybe he sees no atomic hole, likes to do SEO, been doing it for three years. So, this is the information that the search engine actually looks at and records. Okay. So, after recording it, it makes sense of it. It realizes that, you know, this person is talking about good content about SEO. So, I want to rank him for SEO. So, it presents its information onto your search results. Okay. Very brief. Okay. So, how you actually rank higher in SEO, there's this thing called the page rank. And there's this other thing called search engine ranking positions. But there'll be something else later on. But basically, this is how Google differentiated themselves from the rest, which is Yahoo and Bing. Because Larry Page, which is one of the founders of Google, came up with this formula. You guys don't really need to understand this formula. This is not a mathematical class. But the idea of it is basically a way to put it is high quality pages. The more good pages linking to yourself, you get a higher rank. Okay. And what do I mean by good pages? So, for example, if you are say Apple.com, you are say Amazon.com, you are say Google.com. If I get a direct link from Amazon.com to my site, I am a very good page because Amazon endorses me. That's how it works. So, for example, if I have Robert.com linking to me, it might not be so valuable. So, how it goes up, I mean, more people will link to Amazon and therefore Amazon ranks even higher. Amazon ranks to me and I do well. So, it's the quality of the page and how popular you are. So, I think another image is easier. So, think of it like this. So, for example, you are you are this page. You get links from Robert.com, you get links from Amazon.com, you get links from Apple.com, for example, and you do well. You get 3 votes. So, it's basically a vote of confidence that ranks you better in Google. So, so, for example, this site has 3 votes coming to this page. This page comes over, you know, it's 3, you get 6 votes, 4 votes. Very simple. We're putting it technically, technically, this page is supposed to do better than the other one because based on page rank and based on all being, you know, in the terms of equations, this being once value of once you get 6 votes, 4 votes. Technically, this page is supposed to rank higher. So, back then before Google came up with algorithms to try to 1 million links you get, you get, you know, like 1 million links overnight you rank for funny results. You can be, you can be, you can be tomiko.com and you'll be ranking for keywords like Apple, for example. You can do such things. That was how things were working back then. But of course, there are new algorithms that came out to penalize such spammer and people who tried to game the system. Okay, so what's SERPs? So SERPs is basically search engine without pages which is what you get in your results pages. So, it's not the same as PageRank but PageRank is basically you getting more quality links, getting more links and getting more people to endorse you but that does not translate into actually ranking in the search engines because there are also other factors that methods on why you rank and not someone else. Okay. So, there are various signals but what I can share today will be a few things. You know, the PageRank source so, a high value website is linking to you you rank higher. Okay. The number of links you are getting the speed of your link accumulation so someone who who gets, you know, I'm a new site today. You know, I'm one day old, for example and I suddenly get 10,000 links. It looks funny as compared to a website that say one year old and you slowly accumulate 10 links every day. So by the time you are one year old you get legit as compared to someone who, you know, your first day and you get 10,000 links. It's obvious this person is trying to game the system so that's how speed of accumulation works. So the types of links as well. What I mean by types of links links can come from many places. Your Facebook page is a link. Your Twitter page is a link. Pinterest is a link. You can go to forums and go hardware zone and you share something and you, oh, click here. So you see random people always asking you to click here, you know, because these people are just people who are trying to build links through forums and they are what kind of other links can we talk about? WordPress blocks. So for example, WordPress blocks are block spot blocks. You know, you can share links, you can have a block role, you can have a content share. You know, when a blogger says, visit this website, www. Blah, blah, blah. He's kind of like passing on some link value over as well. So, yeah. So there are different types of links. Okay, so what is on site optimisation? So, okay, very quick explanation basically on site optimisation to have good content because most SEO believe that, you know, content is king. So good content. There are many factors affecting ranking but what do I mean by good content? You know, you go to websites, some websites are just blank pages. You don't have a lot of quality content or anything that's useful for you. So when you Google say for example, what is SEO I do better as you. You get articles that are coming up with, you know, say 20 suggestions, 20 topics, you know, 20 points, I mean, 20 points and each point is well elaborated with a nice paragraph of well researched content. So this the kind of content that Google likes and Google wants to present to you guys and this is how Google gives you value and therefore you guys will continue to use Google because it gives you good value articles and good value content so so if you wish to rank for certain keywords you have to have relevant content. You can be, you know, I want to talk about what is SEO today but actually inside the content I'm talking about where is the best chicken rice or where do I get the best beer in Singapore. If you are writing about such content and you wish to rank for what is the why are you good at SEO for example then it's not relevant. So this is not something that you know. So if your whole content is about chicken rice you don't expect yourself to rank for SEO. If you want to rank for SEO you talk about SEO you talk about you talk about ways to do good SEO who is the best SEO guru you know where do you going to learn SEO. You don't talk about where's the best chicken rice. So relevant content is very important for on-site optimization. Okay so content is signaled through if you want to rank for Amazon you talk about Amazon and you want to talk about so for example I was recently told by my friend that which website is this but anyway through the use of keywords so within your content you write a 5,000 500 word blog post for example within your blog post if you want to say rank for where is the best chicken rice it would be good to repeat this keyword a few times so where is the best chicken rice in Singapore you repeat it probably 3 or 4 times so that the search spiders actually coming into your website sees these keywords and they understand that you're talking about where is the best chicken rice in Singapore and you should rank doesn't mean that you would rank but you should rank for these keywords okay so there are few places that you can also put your content into so for example if you're writing a WordPress blog you should be talking about where to find the best chicken rice okay in your description you should write where is the where where you can find chicken rice or you know best chicken rice in Singapore where you can find it you have to rephrase it a bit doesn't make it look not so search engine-ish but as much as possible try to have the relevant keywords as well okay your image alternate text so when you put an image of a plate of chicken rice behind it you can use those who are familiar with WordPress you can put an image tag and share this keyword inside as well and also within your content but one point about onset optimisation do not over-optimize so for example if you're a 500 word article you don't have 500 words of where to find chicken rice to Google that would mean you are trying to spam you are trying to over-optimize and this is something that Google doesn't like and basically recently they came up with Google Panda which is one of the Google animals we have three right now but two are the more relevant one so don't keyword staff and you don't duplicate content so keyword staff is basically having 500 words of where do you find chicken rice okay and duplicate content you don't go copy like one of the other bloggers chicken rice manual and you copy it over and you treat it as yours no duplicating content would signal to Google that you don't have high quality content and if you do not have high quality content you are not creating your own content then this is something that they wouldn't like they wouldn't want to rank you URL itself is one of the ways as well so for example you are amazon.com slash SEO you will rank for SEO better than someone who doesn't have that inside their URL so slash ABCDE that's one signal as well that's one signal so thanks for the tip okay off-site so basically we talk about on-site you are signaling to Google that you are talking about chicken rice but the other point where Google wants to see you being endorse from relevant websites and from having relevant of course anchor text so I talk about links okay most people believe that content is the most important thing but I think to me from my experience I think links actually still pay a bigger portion to it than than content I would say probably the whole signals close to about my base on my own experience about 60% is still links 40% is content but people say that content is king I don't believe that so that's my own personal thought but links are important in the sense that you get I was sharing you get good quality links from good places and relevant websites what are the relevant websites websites so if I am a website talking about online marketing I link to you which is your chicken rice site I like to talk about chicken rice so I link to you as chicken rice site as compared to someone who is doing a food blog a food blog linking to your chicken rice site which one is more valuable so the food blog would be more valuable in terms of link value because the food blog is talking about food I'm talking about digital marketing so if you want to look from the point of Google which link does Google value more of course the food blog would mean more to Google to signal more about food related articles or food related websites than my own website so where they are from the patreon of the site so a high patreon website linking to you a high patreon food blog versus a low patreon food blog of course the higher patreon one has more value so the anchor text so when you go to forums and you see people like to put click here or it can be www.abc.com or it can be a food blog or it can be you know the blue colour link that you actually click on the actual text itself signals something to Google as well if I link to you if I link to you as good chicken rice you have a higher chance of ranking for this keyword actually so good chicken rice exactly this keyword so because I mean to Google someone is pointing to you and say you are a good chicken rice I should rank you for good chicken rice but of course you have to watch out for not having too many links coming in as good chicken rice you get your friends to go no 10 of your friends go to 10 blogs and start writing good chicken rice good chicken rice you might optimize as well so this is something Google can green as well so if you have too much of the same anchor text it's not good for your website so most people try to I mean for SEOs like myself you try not to do too many of the same keywords you try to what we call dilute it a bit sometimes you just www.abc.com sometimes it can be click here but these are older methods you can link it for other forms of keywords as well so instead of good chicken rice you can talk about you have a longer keyword where to find the best chicken rice in Singapore it looks more legit than having specifically always targeting one set of keywords and of course the anchor URL you are linking to the front page or you're linking to a deeper blog page so if you want an article to rank for a certain keyword you link to that page directly you don't link to the home page for example then you guys can find out more about Google Penguin but the idea of Google Penguin is basically on keywords unnatural links are basically having links coming in too fast or coming in from multiple sources or links coming from only one site but every page of that site so if you have a WordPress blog you put it on a blog row you have a thousand page WordPress blog you have been blogging for 10 years and suddenly you put it on a blog row it might damage you as well and whack you that can work there's no real way to actually prevent this if your competitors are so so lame and they want to do such things to you they can't do that but there is this tool in Google webmaster tools that you can actually disavow such links so if you do find out but the I mean SEO is a very dynamic thing you have no idea whether this link is harming you or actually helping you you don't even realize where the links are coming from sometimes so it's very difficult to find out I can decide to I don't like Robert for example I can just throw like 10,000 links and rank him for some funny keyword that I hope he people searches and finds him I can but you can actually disavow it so Google webmaster tools is one of the tools that Google actually provides you with that you can use to check your back links from but it's not very updated it's not very strong there are also a lot of other paid and free services online but I would say if someone really do do engage in such activities then you are if you are able to find out where it's coming from you can disavow the links so if you're telling Google don't count this it's not done by me or I don't want this links to be endorsing me or it can be coming from say a porn site you can have links coming from a porn site that's not good it's coming from a rubbish site it's not good so no count it you can do that if you can find out where it's coming from if you can find out where it's coming from good question if you're talking about ranking because there's google.com there's google.com.sg so what is relevant for us when we are using Google most of the results come out from the .com.sg site so it's a Singapore targeted site so if you're getting you want to rank in Singapore it's good to get links from .sg website because it's more local based so for example I'm trying to rank for SEO Singapore so getting links from .com.sg site are more favorable actually because you're more relevant to the Singapore based kind of keyword harmful it works so it's actually good if you are saying it's not from harmful sources so it's not like ponsites or highly unrelevance sites so if it's low patronage sites actually having a lot of low patronage it's actually good for you because you know like 1 plus 1 plus 1 vote you get 10 votes so not necessarily you must get a 10 vote website coming to you all the time you can get a 1 plus 1 plus 1 vote and slowly work your way up so it's good as long as it's not harmful as long as it's not not having a page that has 1,000 pages 1 time linking to you 1,000 links it's not good so if you have 10,000 links coming in of low patronage no that's not good bye 10 every week slowly accumulating it looks natural it looks nice let's say I have a blog and I do all the hard work to produce original content content is very good and for some reason a lot of people copy my content put it on the website so who will get penalized you know like how will Google recognize like okay I'm the first person to post it and would like be equally penalized or only my competitors will be off the person who copies from the site to penalize it okay good question okay so Google's algorithms are able to actually compare whether of course someone is duplicating your content and basically copying it over and just using the content so even if you which is why most websites you actually see copiescape protected and all this kind of thing you know even copiescape can actually run all the searches on the whole internet and crawl and find out whether someone is duplicating Google can definitely do that okay but one sadly for those people who produce original content unless you know like the guru in the field itself myself what I can do is I can rewrite your content so you know you have 10 reasons why you should come to Singapore and travel okay I can take 5 reasons I can rewrite it in my own way you know I mean English you can rewrite it in so many multiple ways you can change the content slightly you can change the topic slightly and it's still your article and Google might not be able to actually differentiate that very well because to him to Google you know like because Singapore has good shopping then you change the topic into shopping is good in Singapore Google gets a bit confused yeah so they are not that perfect yet so some ways of redoing good content on your website can be going to 3 different websites getting 2 topics over here 2 topics over there and rewriting as if it's the whole thing it's yours and it can actually work yeah at least speaking it can actually work so this is how some people produce good content on their websites but of course you get articles that are only yours you know your own opinions or something that someone can't copy your guru in the site and everyone knows it's your your own intellectual property but if you are just a small-time blogger with good content highly likely you get copied and you get lost you will lose it it's a legend so if you can go to direct trees you pay for it high-paid trend direct trees yes it counts but it used to count even more but now they're kind of like discounted already but that is one strategy that's one link source as well so you can go to the most famous paid ones are your Demos, DM, OZ your Yahoo or Yahoo is very expensive they recently shut it down but there are a lot of direct trees they are very expensive but they are very very smooth as well Yahoo used to be very smooth one of the top direct trees no doesn't help doesn't help so if you are doing at words and you are doing SEO at the same time does it help you to rank for SEO no I think it's a conspiracy theory one thing I've read somewhere is that Google ignores everything past so many characters on the website is that the case anymore explain that if the page is say 4 pages long they only read so many characters and stop or do they read the whole thing you're talking about the content the article itself right actually no the more content you have the more Google actually likes it so of course the optimum point to actually write an article for your blog for example I always advise to go more than 500 words at least of course the best best optimized lang is about 1000 so if you want to treat it as a good article if you have content that is lesser than 300 words it's actually not very useful in SEO terms basically to Google lang is also one thing so if you try to write articles that are at least 500 to about 800 words that would be nice so the longer you are but of course if it's repetitive and it's not useful then of course there's no point writing it so a good article 1000-2000 words I think write articles for humans what Google always like to say write things that humans would really want to read and you will keep the human staying on the site long enough because that's also one signal if you guys use analytics Google analytics they are able to trace how long someone stays on your site as well that's also one signal you come in it's not relevant I go up I bounce so within the first 10 seconds I don't stay I bounce to Google you guys you are not a good site as well you are not writing for humans you are writing for the for the spiders to see people come in you can tell you go in this is not what I wanted so you click back when you click black it's a bad signal to you so it's beneficial to you to Google analytics so if you see your bounce grade is 70% then you better do something about your content but if your bounce grade is 20% wow, perfect that's good 10% lower bounce grade so just now we are talking about source of links so there are a lot of source of links that we can talk about so it can be social book marking which is your Pinterest LinkedIn Twitter Instagram these are all your forums your hardware zone YouTube command marketing you can go to a lot of places and write stupid comments and get links as well blogging WordPress Tumblr good question let me think of it let me get back to you later okay, news news PR pages so you know like free PR submission pages you can write oh I'm gonna have a discount day for my chicken rice store today I'm gonna write a nice PR press release and I'm gonna go to the free sites and I submit those count as well okay, the rest infographics social networks document sharing there are a few document sharing sites but I can't remember of hand stupid sites yeah, slide share slide share okay, so let's talk about your SEO plugin so when you when you actually use SEO plugin on your websites this is more relevant for your pages and also your post pages those who use WordPress so when you write an article how you roughly okay, I only have two very simple pages on this so you want to let Yau's help you optimize for certain keyword okay, so how they help you optimize is you let him know that your focus keyword WordPress SEO plugin so what Yau's would actually force you to do is to repeat this keyword a few times at a few places okay, so for example within the URL itself so now it's yau's.com slash WordPress slash SEO so you see page URL it says no but if it's actually slash WordPress slash SEO slash plugin it will say yes so you optimize for your URL your article hating so WordPress SEO plugin it's appearing and it's bolded so it's a yes over here on your page title within your content which is probably within your blog post itself it repeated 13 times okay and in your meta description so this when you search Google you see the title you see the description it say something like this website is the leading website for blah blah blah blah so this is what we call the meta descriptions so within the meta descriptions you repeated it okay, normally we don't do it two times we do it once two times is a bit too much then you can use the yau's plugin to actually re-edit your SEO title as well so your actual title can be something and you can use it to rewrite the title and put in your descriptions so so the second page of yau's is your page analysis so it will actually tell you things like it does not appear in your URL which is search questions over there so if it's not in your URL go and edit in your URL change your URL your website doesn't have any outbound links so good sites share bring traffic to other sites so in the eyes of Google the spider always wishes to be climbing to be crawling around the whole internet he doesn't like to reach a room and there's four walls and he has nowhere to escape so you'll always be good if you have an outbound link but of course it must go to a relevant site if it's not relevant then it's not very useful for Google and they don't like it okay copy score this basically wants you to forces you to write in a way that it's good English for humans to read if you are writing in very complicated words that like very colorful languages that only you understand and it's not simple language that everyone else can understand which means you're not a good teacher for example then it's not good so write and content that is simple understandable idiot proof images do you have the keyword itself in your image tag is it in your first paragraph so all this kind of suggestions will be green so you want to use this plug-in see all the greens if everything is green great you are well optimized and there's a lot of signals that they will actually to improve on your optimization which is what I shared in front so having it in your meta description having it in your phrases you know the keyword density you don't want it it's 1.3% so out of 500 words maybe you only have 15 words or like 10 words of it being this keyword if it's 100% then you are basically repeating it the whole 500 words that's not good so you guys can go back and play with it so I think that's all for my sharing today so if you have any questions it took so long if you have any questions I don't mind for WordPress bloggers how many percent of them actually make money for their blog? how many of them actually make money I wouldn't really know because it depends on how you make money bloggers have various sources you have your AdSense money and you have your you're getting sponsors and whatnot I cannot tell how many of them actually make money from SEO unless you're writing financial related content that a lot of people you know how to make money kind of articles and you can rank number one in the world probably you will get some money but if you want to optimize yourself to be number one for how to make money you'll probably take you lots of time and effort and if you really fix it in your post okay this is a very gray feel so if it's sponsored you can declare it on on your website but Google doesn't care whether you actually say that it's sponsored or not but you can get penalized you cannot get penalized it's a very gray area but it counts so if you get sponsored links and from Cache for example Cache has a lot of people linking to her she links to you well done you're probably gonna rank very well in Singapore or some other good blogger what I normally do is you must try to find out why you can't get that score normally it's if it's one or two rate dots for example just now you know three orange ones and all green so you're most likely gonna get green but if you do your best and you try to do and you can't get it to even a green I think that's the best that you can do on your own side then you just focus more on your off-site link building because there's some limits to some templates for example some templates somehow they don't record that you have actual content on your page some templates don't reflect that for yau so you just have to do more off-site actually counts but you just don't see on yau doesn't capture everything so it's only for those page pages or the post pages some templates don't work very well I get what you mean Search traffic versus the links you can be a very popular site but I would say links are still more important so just watch out on who's linking to you and how people are linking to you so if really another penguin algorithm comes in and realize that your links actually fishy then you will still lose position apple.com can still get a lot of sites but not rank for apple keyword because they are doing something fishy I'm not saying apple but just an example what app is this? you mean for WordPress is it? I'm not very familiar with Are you talking about Calypso? A lot of plugins designed for WordPress nowadays are not yet fully integrated in Calypso Give it time eventually it will go there but for now I think you're quite restricted if you ever know it's not yet I think of it as a progress eventually Calypso will get there but it's not yet there yet so we have one last question for him and then afterwards you can catch him after all the talks okay I'll let him decide performance in terms of loading speed and I don't think it affects that much I don't think it affects your loading speed and transition speed I've been using it for a while The base YAUS SEO plugin is a pretty well written functionality Others have not tried it for the specific SEO plugin that you can download for WordPress.org that's quite well written one we should be able to use it on a typical chat post and it shouldn't affect your loading speed and sometimes plugins conflict with each other so it looks like maybe it's that one might not be that and the plugin is more of a suggestion to help you optimize and change your content so I don't think it comes off as something that affect any of the loading speed it's just more of a on your side kind of plugin so surprise that is 70% people using Google and then the rest you using what they're doing and so if anything you should take away I've read that content is important link billion is important too so we'll work on those two Google changes the algorithm once in a few months so keep it up but working on those two will probably take bets so thank you Tommy Thank you everyone I don't think I studied it all I don't know everyone