 Basically the plan for this afternoon I'll introduce myself briefly is we're gonna do 50 minutes of some basic theory groundwork just get everyone on the same page when it comes to what SEO is how it works why we do it those sorts of things and then we're gonna have 40 minutes of I'm going to come and help you answer questions queries you can look at things things you might not understand there's a couple of different areas that we can look at but we really just going to try and make it work for for you guys and try and address the problems that you have so if you can bear with me for 50 minutes we're going to go through quite a few slides hopefully they're entertaining and then we can break up and do some more things a little bit more practical my name is Choles I am a digital strategist at a company called Flickleep recently just finished doing my masters in digital advertising digital marketing which I think I finished last week so I'm still recovering from that one thank you I appreciate that so I think I know one two things about what I'm talking about if I am wrong why say something incorrect please just tell me otherwise so let's get going there we go all right so an overview of search engine marketing so search engine marketing is pretty much anything to do with advertising or marketing through search engines so there's two or three main categories you've got paid search which is where you're paying to put your adverts into a search page set of results then you've got local SEO so that's things that help you find things that are close to you so Google Maps for instance or Waze or things like that if they show an ad or do something that's local SEO you're trying to find something that's right where you are or where your company is and then you have search engine optimization and that's broken up into two subcomponents so the one is called on page and that's all the technical boring stuff about have you dotted the dotted your eyes crossed your T's put everything that you can put in place in the right place and that's on your website so it's completely within your control off page SEO is a whole nother animal that's everything that happens off your website but points into your website and I'll explain a little bit more about that as we go so here's an example it's quite a nice one of all the different components so at the very top you can see there's an ad so I searched for Kea Bryanston so we've got a paid search ad up at the top here then below that we have an organic results so this is not paid for and that's their actual website below that is a cause dot co dot z a website so this is an off page SEO someone else is linking to their website so it's not on their website their website is this Kea Bryanston this is something else but it points to their website and then on the right-hand side here so this is obviously for desktop you can see it says Kea Bryanston so this is some pictures if you want to get directions some reviews around the branch and a couple of other different things you're unhappy you've probably seen this before maybe once twice in your lifetime cool so here's an introduction the first thing you need to know is who's who when it comes to search engines the short answer is everyone uses Google and forget the rest right why is SEO important so SEO is all about trying to get your website to be optimized or ready or in the best possible shape for a search engine to come and find you and the better you can do that the more you can optimize it the better you will come up in search engine results so people are searching for things all the time stats are people use their phones 200 times a day so people are always picking up their phone they're always searching for something all the time it never stops if you're to bribe someone says something silly you like well we should research that what do you do take out your phone and you search for it it it's part of what we do I think one of the things that we find with SEO and websites and those sorts of things is people don't even realize how much they do this you do this all day I'm gonna say something or you're gonna see something and you're gonna go like hey I wonder about that they might be like a shiny object someone's probably going hey there's a pot plant where do you get pot plants for your health that's gonna happen during the course of today you do it all the time and so to get this right is quite important for your business I'll change some people at lunch and we're saying you know one of the nice things about SEO is that when the ads stop you stop paying for your budget your SEO still runs and you don't have to pay for it so that's also very nice so the key thing here is where you come up in the results stats are that if you come up number come up first you're gonna get 38% of the clicks on average then roughly half of that for second place and then in some results it halves again almost about 11% in your third result and here's the most important one if you're on the top of the second page you're gonna get 2% of all the click-throughs there's a very old very bad joke that I tell all the time where do you hide a dead body on the second page of Google because no one is looking there so this the important thing that you need to know is you need to be hopefully in the top three results beyond that you're not gonna get too much love from your search engine results and also just to bear in mind if we go back to this example this is my this is a screenshot of my computer screen you've got an ad so that's at the top then we have the first result and then we have the second result if you were in third place you don't even come up on the home page on my screen you've got it I've got to scroll down to get to number three forget number 10 number 10 would be like in the parking lot okay cool so how do search engines work before we get completely and horribly distracted there's three things that happen the first thing is Google sends out what they call the Google bot and it goes all over the internet and it finds things it just they call it crawling it's a bit creepy but it goes around trying to find stuff and literally what it does is it goes from one link and then it goes to that page and if they're links on that page then it clicks through all of those links and goes to another link makes sense and then it just bounces around and starts off until the trifle tries to find everything then once they've gone in they've crawled all the websites that they can find they then go and index them so it's a little bit like a library where they've just got cards for days and these are all the different things and that's what they say and then this is the real magic of it you go and search for something how high is it to space it's four kilometers in case you're wondering I got it horribly wrong and and I'm distracting myself they're going to show you the search results so they crawl everything then they order it and sequence it they call it indexing and then when you want to look for it they come and serve you with the results that they find are most relevant to what you are searching for there's rumor of this mysterious 200 factors that Google uses to rank things the reality is is that no one actually knows it's Google's proprietary special secret magic mystery thing that they use to make lots and lots of money they don't let people know they don't tell you because if you know you can then find a way around it to cheat and they don't want you to cheat because they want people to trust it which is something I'll talk about in a bit so no one knows so if you've heard of 200 factors or any of those sorts of things I'd just like to use the quote from Pirates of Caribbean's where they say that there are more the code is more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules no one actually knows people have ideas there are lots of commentators with lots of theories but no one really knows so when people want kittens we give them puppies it might sound silly but this is really the crux of the entire search engine industry and if you have a look I typed in I actually had to go and do some Photoshop skills here we very proud of me I wrote kittens at the top there but then I took the search results page for puppies if you wanted a kitten and you typed kittens into Google and they gave you puppies what would you think of Google they're not switched on they do not they're doing are you gonna go back and use this again if this is the results you keep getting no you're not so this is what Google does when people want want kittens Google gives you kittens and you can see there's some I don't know somehow that puppy snuck in there because there's a kitten but anyway it's a little cheeky Dutch one so that's what they do they give you what you want so if any if you take anything out of today forget everything else I say please just remember this one simple thing people are happy when they find what they are searching for you are a person apply this to yourself happy people will come back to Google because they know that they will find what they're searching for yes everyone with me so far okay cool if people keep coming back to Google Google can auction ad space and earn revenue so they make money if you keep coming back and then lastly the higher the number of people using Google the more value their ad space so there's a reason why Google sells more advertising space than any other company in the world by quite a large factor and it's because they're very good at giving you what you want so the short answer is happy people means happy Google so if you have a website or an online store or anything that's on the internet you want to make people happy if you make people happy you will make Google happy make sense so with all the rules and the ideas and the coding and the tips and the layouts and the this and the that and the funky metadata goodness funky metadata just make people happy what is your page about what is your website about use those words if someone is looking for you what words would they use use those words make sense because if that's what someone's looking for Google's gonna go through your site and say hey this is what they're looking for and they're gonna match you up and you're gonna you're gonna get people who want what you have so I know it seems overly simplistic but if you can use this one thing as a guide for everything else you do you should get pretty good traction and pretty good results happy can I ask questions I'm afraid and this they're gonna distract me horribly and this I don't want them alright so there's two sides to this we said there's on-page SEO and there's off-page SEO and we're gonna go through the two different types so say all the right things and that's on your website so if you've got a page what is that page about what are you trying to achieve what who you trying to reach write down the words what is this page about this page is about you'll see I've got an example writing a blog so if it's about writing a blog use the word blog and how to write a blog and then use that consistently throughout the whole page so don't go and change from blog to article or to story or to use other words and swap them out because now you diluting what it's about whatever it's about just make it about that one thing keep it simple alright so here's an example of a page so in the title tag up at the top it says blog SEO 101 then in the URL it says blog SEO 101 you guys seeing a theme here hopefully you are in the meta description I'll show you how to do this later if you don't know how to do it you can't see it on the front it's in the back it says take a look at some basic blog SEO tips that will help you get your articles higher ranked on search engine page search engine result pages and therefore more widely read so that says SEO blog cool in the H1 tag the first heading it says blog SEO 101 alt tag so that's because Google can't read pictures or see pictures it reads the text behind it we've labeled this picture as a blog SEO picture then we got other headings that refer to it and then in the body the actual text of the page we refer to blog and SEO there's no confusion what this page is about when Google goes and has a look at this page there's no way on earth they could miss the fact that we are talking about blog SEO it's nice and simple it's consistently applied through everything and if you're a user you can read the title and you know what this page is about you can read the URL and you know what this page is about you can read the heading you can read the text you can look at the image doesn't matter where you go you know what it's about it's easy to use so hopefully people who read this are happy and the people are happy Google is going to be happy make sense we can make these slides available so don't worry too much about making too many notes if you need to cool so couple of tips that we picked up along the way use your company name as text this might sound a bit strange but there are a lot of companies out there whose logo is a picture and then they go and put the picture everywhere on their website but Google can't read pictures so what happens when Google goes through the page is your company name is not mentioned once this often happens on home pages because you've got like this big picture of your logo in the middle and then you say we are all about super fast service and wonderful results and a whole bunch of other thing we started in 1922 or something but you never go and say the name of your company so if Google reads that page how they gonna know it's about your company put your name in there write it down cool then use re redirects okay so if you don't know if you've got the WWW in front and you don't have the WWW in front Google sees that as two websites Google hates doubles or duplicates because now they don't know what to do do I send people to WWW or do I send people to non WWW make sense but they don't know where to go so they don't like you can you just choose one and then they're happy because they're like okay so you want everyone from here to go today it doesn't matter which one you use just have one make sense general rule of thumb it's got the same sort of thing happens with canonical pages you've got two products in two different categories just have one that gets pointed to because otherwise they don't know what to do Google doesn't like confusion they want people to be happy and they want them to get the best result they don't want to have to choose have an SSL certificate I don't know if you've seen but some browsers now actually have like a little not secure thing that comes up that doesn't really make people happy when they go to your website and the browser says not secure so that will help you it's also good for your search results Google is very big on mobile most people we speak to you don't think about mobile they design on their web on their desktop computer they test it on the desktop computer they show their clients it on the desktop computer the client checks it on the desktop computer and 75% of the users are going on their phone take your desktop kick it in the bin and take your phone out and start testing stuff because that's where people are and Google ranks you on your mobile friendliness and they've got a whole bunch of cool tools to help you with that so don't forget that page load speed again happy people happy Google if your website takes 30 seconds to load Google is going to say I don't want to send people there because they're going to have a bad experience so make your website fast link your website to Google search console I'll show you how to do that submit your site map to Google I'll show you how to do that just one thing just to bear in mind there's almost like a misanoma around the internet it's almost like if I make a website and I put it on the internet people will find me no they won't no one knows and probably no one will care until you make them care when you make them know it's the equivalent of going and building a Gucci store in the middle of I don't know Mulder's drift or somewhere in the bush if people don't go there you're going to know in your store you have to get people there you have to tell them that they exist and the easiest way to do that is just to tell Google that you exist just put your hand up and say hey Google I have a website come and crawl it they will find it eventually because they got that little bot that crawls around everywhere but you don't want to have to wait three four months for Google to find you as soon as your website's up just go say hey here we are make sense I am using strong and emotive language so please do not be too offended with me if you use a desktop computer or you don't any of these things I am just trying to make a point then there are some cool things don't worry too much about this when it loads where you can tell Google specifics so if you have a recipe there's a whole library around that says well this is the recipe title and this is the ingredients that are used and then when Google searches it I don't you've probably seen this like these things pop up and it says like all this like extra information in the search bar it's called oh wait this is not even that that's another slide I just saw code and went off on the tangent that one called micro tagging so this one is a movie so you go and say well this is the name of the movie and that's the description of the movie and this is where the movie is showing and that's the cinema number it's on and you go and put all this extra information into it and you give it like these little tags and then those tags tell Google a little bit more about what it is it's called schema schema.org there are libraries for days about what you can and cannot do and all that kind of thing if you do have very detailed information these are really worth having a look at but they are a little bit more advanced another nice thing to do it's called social recognition is you actually on your website you tell Google that you have social platforms so I think we once had a website where there was a company with a similar name and they had a Facebook page in Brazil and every time you search for the company there this Facebook page for another company in Brazil would come up and their website was quite good-looking and the Brazilian social profile was quite not good-looking and so this is a way that you can say hey Google here's my Facebook page or my Twitter page or my Instagram page or any of those sorts of things it's just a nice way of giving them a little bit more information like I said we can give you all of this so you have to write it all down some tags so I mentioned canonical or duplicated content literally what it means is you have it in two places and you just tell Google just use this one again they don't like doubles they just want one no index tags basically say don't read this page so if you've got a test site tell Google not to index it if I need story out today we did what we would do work for some company a little while ago and they're hosting company for some reason took a snapshot of their website and then hosted it on some weird subdomain and then what happened it got indexed by Google and people started going to their website and they kept phoning us and saying people are filling out forms with pricing from two years ago and we're telling them the prices are wrong and that they have to pay more and the people are saying no it's on your website and we're like what are we like we have no idea what is going on we can't find this thing anywhere then it goes and finds out that actually there was this whole other website that the hosting company had created the people were finding filling out the form and then trying to pay fees from two years ago so this one's quite helpful for testing pages you can choose your language so that's kind of helpful especially if you've got multiple languages on your website so English, Afrikaans, Zulu, French, whatever it might be and then you can also just tell them who you are so if it's you do a lot of content like you can tell them that you're a publisher give them some information you got all these little extra things you can add in just to give Google a bit more information about who you are it is more advanced stuff you don't normally need to do this okay cool things to avoid so I did say please pay attention for 50 minutes because I'm gonna talk about a whole lot of stuff so bear with me we're doing well good stuff all right so keyword stuffing don't go and use keywords as many times as you can use the word keyword as because you want to get as many keywords into one sentence because then the lots of keywords are there for people to read because you want them to read the keyword no one reads that people give make people happy give them language that they understand don't go and stuff stuff in there because you think if you use the word lots and lots of times Google go look they use the word 10 times that must be the website we must send people to you no is it relevant does it add value is it people gonna find it interesting Google's not just sending people to places where they think there's lots of information they want to be relevant because remember you were searching for kittens and if Google sends you somewhere that has puppies you don't like Google Google wants you to find what you're looking for so don't go and try stuff things in there hidden text is something from the old days basically you go write a whole bunch of things in white font on a white page you can't see it but the words are there Google's on to you don't do that cloaking it's when you there's a little bit more advanced you get your website to show one page to the search engine bot and then you swap it out with something else when the people come it's like bait and switch Google's on to you don't do that either sneaky reader X so this one's like you get someone to go to your page and as they get to your page you send them somewhere else don't do that either again Google wants people to find what they're looking for they don't want them to go to a page and then get sent somewhere else to see something they shouldn't poor or fake content there's lots of fake content in the news at the moment don't do that automated automatically generated content again not helpful don't try and be too clever about this spamming comments backlink farming or link schemes so you probably got an email from someone from another country in Asia India where they said hi I saw your great article if you put my article on your websites I'll put you on my website it's it's basically what you're trying to do is trying to create links for the sake of creating links it's not actually helpful so that was everything about what you can do on your website there's no reason for you not to get full marks for what you can do on your website because it's completely within your control things that happen outside of your website not so much control over because someone else could put your link on to another website recently I was going through backlinks to our websites and I found another website where they had copied our website with a link to our website we can't do anything about that it's somewhere else on the internet and there's nothing we can do other than buying as many domain names as possible but so outside you don't have too much control on your website you do have control so do take time to try get that right but you'll see this is also quite important so Google invented something called page rank basically it's a large interconnected system where everyone points to everyone else and everyone else's rankings give you weights based on what everyone else says so it constantly updates and changes but effectively what it boils down to is references so the example I like to use if I went for a job interview and I had a lecture of reference from my old boss and I had led to reference from my mom the person who's interviewed me would say well the one from your boss has probably got more authority it's got more value more weight behind it the one from your mom that's quite sweet and nice but I'm not really gonna put too much credit into what your mom says make sense and Google does the same thing so if there's a website out there that's got a lot of authority or Moz calls it domain domain authority then they'll say well if they're pointing to you then you must also have authority does that make sense so if my boss would recommend me and my boss has authority then I must have authority because my boss said I do make sense and basically that's how most of it works so maybe the best way to explain this is an example we had a client they are a tertiary education and they registered as CFA don't know if you've heard of CFA Institute of America child of financial analyst it's a very big program it's similar to CA's and they were registered as certified trainers for the CFA Institute in South Africa when that happened the CFA Institute put a link on their website to this institution's website as an accredited partner you guys got me CFA Institute puts a link to these guys on their website the moment that happened our clients search engine results all of them went up because all of a sudden they had this naughty badge or this vote of confidence from a very large well known very big public American organization doesn't make sense so like it that's authority got transferred down to them all right make sense okay cool I'm getting nods so this is good and that's pretty much how it works so Google assesses your website based on the other websites that point into your website and you can actually track and see all the websites that point into your website and you can get us you can see how they are you tracking from that point of view they call that a backlink so it's a link back to your website from another website that link that points in so what happened in the old days everyone went and got as many links as they possibly could and that's where that link farming thing came in they just go make websites for days that just had links pointing into your website because Google is just counting the number the number nowadays doesn't help you so much it's more about the quality so Google actually assesses they go have a look at that link and say are these guys any good yes or no if they good okay and then they pass it on to yourself you guys following me so do you if you have an agency or you make websites for other people put a link at the bottom of your website no do you put a link on every website that you make in the footer to your website do you do that did anyone done that okay you've just gone and put your website onto a whole bunch of other websites that are completely irrelevant to your website so now you've got lots of links but they got nothing to do with you and unfortunately with this new algorithm that came in from Google they now say oh your website's out there but if I have a range of clients so maybe it's a vet for instance what is your website got you're an agency what have you got to do with a vet nothing why do you have that pointing into you and actually what it looks like you're doing is link foaming because now you put your website onto a whole bunch of things that are nothing to do with you so you can keep it there but then you need to add that little no index tag that says to Google don't it's actually no follow don't don't give me any credit or take it off but just something to we notice that all of a sudden our results just tanked and we were like what happened and then we didn't find out that actually we had just shut ourselves in the foot so one of the things we'll talk about is backlink strategies how do you go about getting they actually so it's called link juice so what happens is you've got all these other websites are honestly people in the digital domain come up with the craziest names for things why could we have like simple names like link juice I was turning to someone at lunch about a monkey bot or something like no one can name I think there's a SEO tool called screaming frog like it's a legitimate business screaming frog anyway I don't know you come up like I think it's like a competition to you can look this sound the silliest anyway that's a little personal thing don't mind me all right so all these different cups represent other websites and then what happens is that juice passes through down to your website so a great way if you're struggling to get your to get good traction from your SEO or the content that you have is a press release because news agencies have very very good domain or link juice because they've got a very big cap they've got lots of followers so if you can get an article on their website that links to your website that's all that good good link juice passes down to you it's also if you get some bad press so we've had one or two people where a news story gets out that's not good for them or whatever it is and now whenever you search for them that comes right up at the top how do you compete with that well go to a newspaper and pay them a little bit of money they can write an article about you and then you can try and push those results if that ever happens hope never so this is the second time I've done this talk I'll show you into some of my sneakiness we did this talk at a meet-up early in the year if you don't know about WordPress meetups I highly recommend you join they happen once a month and it's a really good place for you to come and meet like-minded people like yourselves and there's some really good topics it's spoken about a whole range of excellent people come and speak at them I was one of them and it's also really nice place just to find out how things are going and using the industry all that kind of stuff it's called meetup WordPress so we were doing a talk on SEO so I gave my little description about what is and I put a link to our website in there and then guess what Google picked it up so how do we track it I'll show you well this is the old search console Google's now made a new search console well they're in the process of making it they're like halfway in between the two so it's you can't really read it yet but it says meetup so we were sneaky we went to got our website on another website and meetups are pretty good website so then they linked you started coming through to us just so think about it what can you do to get your website and again relevance is key so we're talking about SEO so this is all about SEO and this is all about SEO and that links through to us and we do SEO so it's relevant this is a nice one I was very proud of myself for this case you're wondering cool so Google has a couple of algorithms I called it the birds and the bees they've got penguin panda hummingbird and pigeon this is basically updates they've made over the years basically what's happened is over the years people have come up with ways to try and circumvent how Google does things to try and get themselves artificially higher in the results when that happens Google works at art they release a new algorithm or do something to make it better and that's why when I talk about relevance I think that was was panda yes panda sorts improve the quality of Google search results by removing or reducing the ranking of duplicate duplicate content than pages and low quality domains so panda was all about trying to get rid of lots and lots of stuff that's not necessarily a value and focusing on the quality cool and then you're asking a question about spelling words correctly and things like that hummingbird was all about trying to get the context so let me think of a word that could be used in two ways space so you got space stars in the sky you've got like space as in like on the ground like you can have like a workspace it's the same word but it's got completely different context so Google actually started saying well we need to understand the context because so many types in space we need to give them the right space make sense so they had a algorithm around that and then pigeons all about local stuff okay cool so for the practical section I don't know how many of you had a chance to prepare for this to look at it but there's a couple of different things options that we can look at the one is Google my business if you don't have a Google my business profile I highly recommend that you do type in focus rooms Sunning Hill or Brineston or something like that and you will see that one of the results that comes up and takes most of the page on your mobile phone is a Google my business profile it's free so you want it doesn't cost you anything it has all sorts of good information on it's like if you've got a store what time it opens or closes directions to it reviews there's a whole range of different things you can do on it if you don't have one today is a good day for you to do it keyword research so which words should you use and which words shouldn't you use we can have a go at that how you can review your websites SEO from top to bottom so how are you tracking on your on page stuff we've got some tools for that one WordPress plugins what can you do on your WordPress site that's quick and easy just to make sure that your SEO is all in order how to submit your site map to Google review your SEO performance on search console so the questions about how do I see the links that we have backed us I can show you how to do that and then ideas for generating backlinks because it's always a tricky one how do you get your website so that was the list I'll run through it now cool so option number one setting up a Google my business profile if you don't have one you really want to get one of these it also works on Google Maps so that's other nice thing so you can get found on search results and then also this finds its way into all sorts of things so I don't know if you guys made an event in your calendar if you typed if you got Gmail or something like that and you type in focus group as location this profile would have popped up you didn't have to type in the actual address so it has a whole range of applications keyword research so there's a whole bunch of different options some of the guys are we rank I quite like we rank because they're really simple and not that expensive there's moz hugely comprehensive probably the market leader there's Amazon's version called AH refs and then there's another crowd that I found that's not too bad with free option called KW finder if you're trying to look around what keywords to use and here's an example of why you want to do this research so this is the Google ads platform it's free to use so if you don't have access to it you don't have to run ads you can just go on onto Google ads and open up account and if you click on tools up the top there yeah I'll come help you with this you can go find a keyword planner so I went and had a look in Santon so just in Santon in English over the last year how many people searched for the word online store and there was 70 people a month and online shopping was a thousand so we'll take 70 that's kind of the average number of times in Santon someone searched for online store the question about how do you work out the click through rates it's probably about as close as I can get to giving you an answer on terms of like how many people search for things so online store we got 70 did the same search for e-commerce and I got 110 140 so there were twice as many roughly you take the 140 versus the 70 so if you're going to write a page about shopping online you can either talk about having an online store or you can talk about an e-commerce store and you can use the one as your thing if you had to choose between two and you were focusing on the Santon area over the last year I would say based on this write it about e-commerce because there's twice as many people looking for it as there are people looking for online store and you can do this for anything we once had a company the whole big spin was on insight everything inside inside inside we went into some research in terms of what keywords worked and we found that there about 300 people a month who searched for marketing insight we went and looked for marketing research and they were 3,300 people who searched for marketing research so our suggestion to them was we know you big on insight but maybe try using marketing research you're going to reach 10 times the number of people small change but you can have a big result and the other cool thing about this it tells you what your competitions like so there's not too much competition around e-commerce medium whereas online store it's high so actually maybe you want to try e-commerce they're more people and it's easier to get to the top cool so that's keyword research we can do some player on that a good SEO tool so there's lots of little bits and pieces and to get it right is quite hard so be lazy or as some of my colleagues say be smart lazy and if you want a free tool to use we hooked one up on our website it runs off an account that we have that's the domain flickly com forward slash free dash SEO dash report and you can get a free SEO report it'll look like this and basically what this thing does is it goes through your whole website it gives you a score so how you doing and then for every single factor that you need to worry about it gives you like you need improve this or fix this or tweak this and you can also do it for pages within your website so you don't have to go and try and read the metadata on the page and try unpack every alt tag and go through all that kind of stuff you can literally this is we rank in case you're wondering you can literally just pop it in here and it will give you a checklist that says maybe you should fix this or change this or do this and then they often come up with like little helpful hints so if you don't know what the words mean they actually have a little thing that says title tag and it explains a title tag is this should be this many characters long and this is the purpose of it so if you completely unprepared pick a website and go through this will help you then we can talk about plugins this is all in one SEO and just SEO two plugins on WordPress both very very good segan says that we must use that one so we do segan is segan davis he's like a word press hero cool so yo just SEO looks a little bit like this so coming back to that page I showed you it literally breaks it down and it helps you to put in all the things and then it gives you nice little indicators so this is good this is bad and again the whole idea behind is to make your life easy so you don't have to understand all the technical things you literally just pop it in you and it says oh this is too long this is too short you know do you have enough words in it we're talking about keyword stuffing we'll actually tell you maybe a little bit less keywords more keywords you know that sort of stuff all very very easy to use if you have a word press website submit your site to Google Google has what they call search console very interesting if you want to know how Google has indexed your website go to the Google search bar and put in site colon and then your website address so site colon and then whatever your website addresses and Google will show you search results of all the page pages on your website that they have indexed so if you're wondering why something's not coming up or you don't know you unsure you can literally go and see everything in Google search just by adding that little site colon thingy right and search console looks like this so if you're using WordPress and just SEO your site map was actually got a different name but literally you just say this is our website this is where our site map is and you Google say hey we we checked it we found all these pages happy please please please do this if you redo your website go do this again if you add a whole bunch of content to your website go do this again don't wait for Google to come find you when you can just go tell them hey something big's happened and depending on how often you update your website Google either come back daily weekly monthly or whatever it might be but it's really easy to do it's worth bothering cool and then you can also track things so your backlinks you can see how your performance is so you can see you can like choose dates and countries and times this country filters often really important you can have all sorts of people coming from all over the place but if your customers are all in South Africa you only really want to know about South Africa and then you can see how many people clicked on stuff how many times did you come up in research results what was your average position that's not very good you know an average page 30 that's mean page 3 so no one's there but you can track it over time and see how things are going and just helps you keep an eye on these things okay and through search console it's quite nice easy to do and then things like this you can actually go and say on this page how many people are pointing into pointing into it I told you about those guys who copied our website and then just had a link to us because these chops so maybe I shouldn't say that he's erased the tape but again you can see who's pointing into us what's happening where's the sort of traffic coming from cool and then lastly we can brainstorm some ideas if you want about building backlinks so generally have good content have content that people want to share if people aren't interested no one's going to share it make it interesting alright some things that are really helpful so like biz community it's like good lots of South African businesses it's just a nice easy way of you getting your website onto another page so business listings can help press releases like I mentioned these are great if you can get free free press releases that'd be amazing sometimes you have to pay for them it really depends and then partner with other companies and influences again with this type of thing it's really you want to be thinking out the box what can we do how can we get someone to talk about us and there's a whole range of different ways that you can go about doing that so those are my practical options do you want to pick one I can go through one at the front or you guys can do stuff where you at so I can come help you okay cool so this is an example of an SEO report lots of companies can do this this is just one way of doing it you don't have to do it like this it's more about just saving yourself the time and the effort of having to work all these things out yourself so if I take our company's website and we got a score of 71 which in this is not too bad but yeah alright so title tag that's the title tag so we got that right and it gives us a tick and then made a description it explains what that looks like it then goes and says this is what it could look like in Google so you can very easily see the important things you don't have to go and try work all of this out or search for it or any other kind of stuff headings okay we've been naughty we've got two h1 headings so Google doesn't like that because what's this page about is it about the one heading or the other heading so we should have one I hope you someone will fix that keyword cloud so here you can see this is all the words that are referenced on this page and this sometimes is very very interesting so you know saying people don't use their name of their company on that page if that's not coming up in this then you need to go and put your name or your company because Google is checking that yeah so this keyword cloud you can quickly see tell you what the page is about alt alt tags so have we gone and put alt tags on every single image yes we did on all 82 so that's a nice one in page links so are we linking to other people broken links then a broken links do we have that ww resolve that I was talking to you about yes we fix that okay we do have a robot txt file then listen to this thing we do have a site mapped and listen to this thing underscores and URLs it's an interesting one if you use an underscore it joins the two words to make one long weird word whereas if you use a dash it's two separate words so if someone's searching for something say it's like dog parlor if you use dog underscore parlor for someone to find that page they would have to type into Google dog underscore parlor because Google sees it as one word if you used a dash you could write dog parlor because it sees the two words small thing but can have a difference in how your URLs work and then literally this thing goes through everything is it mobile friendly how fast is it are using technology like these are all things that have an impact on your SEO so Google have a mobile page speed test which is all about testing our fast your page speeds is if you have an online platform there's a direct correlation between how much money you make and how fast your website is a contract remember the stats are for top my head but literally for every split second on average that an Amazon page loads faster they make like an extra hundred thousand dollars or something like that like it's crazy because literally people if they don't if it takes too long they're not interested and the same goes for just browsing websites and searching for things so as right now you can see that we're frustrated while we wait okay let me just swap out yes yes actually most of our people who come to our website are on desktops I think that's because they're looking for it at work yeah well I think I would just suggest using the Google one the only problem with the Google one that we found I'm having issues with the internet I was not gonna have this problem anyway you are gonna break down it's not me I'll just hit my back so there we go okay cool anyway we're gonna swap over to Boston bit okay cool I guess this one test your mobile site speed so what's nice about this is it actually gives you no idea of how fast your website is because it puts it against the benchmark internationally and it tells you how you can improve it the one thing that we found with these tests it doesn't always work well if you're using a caching server so if you've got cloud flare or something like that's in your website and you it's caching your site if you don't know what I'm talking about go talk to the guys in that room and it doesn't always pick it up so your website slows shows are slowing slower than it actually does another thing that can affect these scores is if your page loads asynchronously so what that means is it doesn't go in an order things happen at the same time because then what can happen is your website could actually load at the beginning for what people see and all the other stuff happens in the background but to give you an example cool so this is not so bad if we're to go through this thing okay cool so your title tag is probably a little bit too long and the reason why that's probably not a good thing is that when you're on Google search it will cut it off at a certain point so you could be a professional fine art port is what could show up or something like that like you can do funny things so if you get your character limit I think it's 60 to 70 characters so it's probably doing that then it'll show up nicely in Google search you don't have a meta description so this is basically what gets pulled through into the Google pull the next available piece of text on the page when they when you come up in search results so that could be anything and if it's a photography site you probably don't have very much text which means it could be a combination of things and it could end up looking a little bit like gobbledygookie so I would suggest you want to write a little story about what if people are going to look for you what is the one thing that's going to be of interest to them and I remember the key thing about all of this is relevance if you're looking for a photographer what's important to you what are you looking for that's what you want to see because you're going to see a whole bunch of other photographers and you say well why why am I choosing this one out of the search results so your headings aren't don't have your company name in it so if Google was to look at the headings on this page and say it's about us but it's actually about your photography company keyword cloud cool so the most sad thing is your name of your company that's great you tell people a lot about income streams in August free I don't know if that's what you want to be advertising but you tell people a lot about free creative director that's good code words that's quite cryptic but you get the idea of what this page is about it's it's more about a photography company and less about other sorts of things like copying strategies or coping strategies I don't know what you up to there creative exploration well as long as that's free so I'm just teasing you because I can but you get the idea it doesn't take long to work out maybe the text on this page needs to be tweaked a little bit to be more about the business all tags well done you've got a redirect great stuff the site map on this thing's not always working so you may or may not have one and we can go through blocking factors that's fine domain you've got a blog cool it's mobile friendly excellent I can't stress the importance of mobile friendliness enough people everyone has a phone everyone here searches on their phone but I'm probably certain that not everyone's website works nicely on a phone if your phone if your website doesn't work on a phone people will not use your brand they'll go there and say these people are unprofessional they're hard to use I don't like them so please if you don't have a mobile responsive website please fix that so well done those okay so this asset minimum of minification so this has got to do with things like your pictures are quite large funny story we once had a client in Singapore or Malaysia and they thought of it they were the experts and they went and loaded a 5 megabyte picture onto the homepage of their websites and they got a couple of thousand visitors a day and within a couple of hours that crashed their website server because they had used all their bandwidth and then they want to know why their website broke so you do want to pay attention to this especially on mobile data if you're trying to reach people who are very conscious about the data use so data in South Africa is expensive not everyone has access to Wi-Fi so then you need to pay attention to that because you don't want people to have to pay too much to see a website there's a nice little program called I think it's a tiny PNG it's got a little cute panda on the page if you like pandas but tiny png.com I think will help you to reduce your file sizes if you've got very big images they also do JPEGs so Liz you could go and pop some of your images through there and that will help you to get your page lose faster cool asset compression so again there's a couple of different things that you could do you might want to start caching your website so for those of you don't know what caching is basically what you do is if you're I'll use an extreme example your websites hosted in America what you do is you have like a mini temporary version of your website in Johannesburg so when people look at your website they look at the Johannesburg version so it's quicker and closer because it's closer and then every now and again the Johannesburg version updates to the main one so it helps your website to load faster by making it closer there's a few other things involved the guys in the development room can explain them to you cool languages cool so yeah there's a couple of different things the one thing you would know chairs so backlinks so you don't have very many backlinks you got 24 websites that points into you and you don't have a very high score so you can sort out the on-page SEO do some things there because that's within your control but if you get like a couple of good links in so maybe if there's like a local magazine or local newspaper and you go do a photo shoot for them and they write an article about you that's a great way you can get a good quality link that one link can maybe help you jump your score up and then other things you can do so they can't find your Facebook page so I'm sure you've got one so that's one tag that I had about forcing your social recognition you add that to your websites and now Google will say oh that's your Facebook page and then they can index that as well sometimes LinkedIn profiles Facebook pages and things like that come up quite high in search results because those are white quite well known websites I hope that was helpful thank you very much