 I've been a web developer now for over 20 years, so got quite a lot of extensive expertise in SEO because as being a website developer you need to also know a lot about search engine optimisation. So I'll give everyone an overview today and hopefully you'll be able to take away a lot of useful information about what you can do to help optimise your website better to rank and list better on search engines. So there's a little bit of something for everybody in this presentation. My SEO skills started back when I had my own small business website about six years ago where I didn't have much of funding to start up with my business, so I was looking at free cost effective ways to be able to help enhance my listings above my competitors on search engines. I used a lot of free information that I found online about search engine optimisation to improve my rankings above my competitors and was listing my own business site at the time, which I've since gone on to sell, above some of my major competitors. So some of this information is based on factual information that I learned along the way. So these are some of the topics that we'll be covering briefly in this talk, so understanding of search results, so the difference between organic versus paid, search engine optimisation versus search engine marketing, so for those that don't know the difference we'll be clarifying and showing the difference between the two, understanding what search intent is, keyword research and looking at some of the ways and tools to do keyword research to get appropriate keywords and phrases throughout your website, ways to improve your search engine ranking, so there's some key areas that we'll look at there and also dabbling a little bit because we're here at a WordPress conference of course, some of the SEO plugins that are really helpful for improving SEO in WordPress. Nice little common myths, I thought this little animation was quite appropriate for the myths because whenever I hear and see these myths that's kind of the image that I tend to visualise. So Google is the only search engine worth submitting my site onto, this is obviously incorrect. There's Yahoo, there's Bing, there's numerous other search engines that you can also list on depending on your region or country that you're focusing in as well, so you may not just be focusing your website in Australia, so Google is not the only website to be listing on, obviously it's the most popular probably especially here in Australia and maybe even in a lot of other countries around the world, but it is worth looking at listing your site on numerous search engines as well as directories and so forth relating to your business. My homepage needs more content, the kitchen sink approach as I like to call it. There are a number of businesses that I've dealt with over the years that like to try and put everything onto their homepage, but when you have your site listed in a search engine you actually don't need to have everything on your homepage because when someone searches for a product or some information about your site they usually end up completely bypassing your homepage, so if you're wanting to put your top products, you know your most competitive information, you don't need all that on your homepage because you're just bombarding your homepage with all that information. Another very common one that I hear regularly is he or she has guaranteed my site the first position on search engines. Yes it is possible, yes there's companies out there that will charge you a lot of money to do that, but nine times out of ten you're paying for paid advertising to rank above your own natural listing, so we're going to look at the difference between those a little bit later on in some of the slides. My site changes will show immediately on search engines. Obviously this is incorrect. If you've got a site that is quite large, maybe like a news aggregated website, Sydney Morning Herald, Nine MSN, some of those kind of sites, as soon as they publish new content it is likely to show up in the search engines immediately. Smaller websites, you're not going to have the search engines scanning and scouring your site as frequently, but I have got some tools and suggestions on how to help get your site to be reviewed and looked at quicker. A couple more myths, these top two are quite similar. More links are better than more content. So if you've got heaps and heaps and heaps of links throughout your website, you know all these different links you're going to cross link everything and have, you know, heaps more ranking improvements on the website, definitely not true. More pages I have the better. No, it's not about having lots of pages for this website. Having better content and quality content is what's more important. Lots of links back to other websites that will help increase my ranking. Again, you could list your website on thousands of other blogs, other websites and vice versa, but unless it's quality linking that you're actually doing it may actually penalize your rankings and not help you. And one that I heard only just recently, which does come up a lot as well. I don't need my website mobile optimised. This was also mentioned by someone in a recent talk earlier today. If your website's not mobile optimised these days, people tend to be looking at websites on their mobile devices, their phones, their tablets. If it's not mobile optimised, they will likely go off your site and go to one that is. So that's quite critical to be mobile optimised as well these days. Search engines are now also ranking you higher if your site is mobile optimised against those that aren't in their algorithms. So understanding search engine results. Where's the difference between organic, which is also known as free and paid search engine results? So this is a little bit wordy, so feel free to take a photo or screenshot. If you like, I think the slides will be being shared later as well. Is that correct? Slides being shared later down the line, are they? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, so a couple of these slides are a bit word heavy. So yeah, so organic search results are the pages that are most closely related to what someone is querying. And I'll show you some screen examples of these. So these are the natural search rankings. So this is the search engines picking up the keywords and phrases and information, texts that's on your actual pages. Paid search results are the advertised paid listings that are coming up, usually above the natural listings on search engines, sometimes down the side bar. So this is, and I know it's a little bit blurry, but if you're bringing up a search engine on your own devices, you'll be able to see the difference. The paid advertising in the example on the side there is colour coding. There's also paid advertising down the side. Search engines are starting to become more and more clever with disguising the way that the ads are actually shown to try and trick people into not knowing what's an ad and what isn't. However, they have to still symbolise it in some way, so that people do know what's an ad and what isn't. This one's a little bit more of a colour-coded visual reference. There's an older screenshot showing the difference between the paid ads or also known as pay-per-click ads. If you're going through paid advertising with Google or Bing, and then this one here, this one also again shows it's really, really subtle, but they're actually, and this doesn't have a marker to show on the screen, but we've got a little tiny icon next to the ones that are ads on these two designs. And you can see Bing and Google are both looking almost relatively the same, just two different searches there. So it's starting to become hard to distinguish the difference between what's paid and what's not. Those that are familiar with the paid advertising will usually ignore the paid advertising and refer to the natural listings because they know they're better results usually coming up. So what's the difference between SEO and SEM? So SEO is the process of optimising the site for the purpose of getting free, organic traffic to your website. So optimising your site so that the search engines can crawl it better and rank your website preferably higher above your competitors. SEM, on the other hand, goes beyond that. It's the SEO plus the marketing component that's the search engine marketing. So it's a complete strategy of looking at SEO and the paid advertising together. So this is, again, just a diagram showing you the difference. So you can see the natural listings being the SEO, which is down here. And the SEM is the natural listings and the paid combined. So this little tip that I've got here is just an example of how your search results and your paid advertising are not always the same. So for example, you might be searching for a red sports car and you might get a paid ad result for a Porsche or a Ferrari. Those particular brands have chosen to advertise, pay for an advertisement to appear when someone searches for red sports car. It's not an exact match for a red sports car because it's a particular brand but they've paid to list for that. So that's just giving you a comparison. Whereas the natural listing would actually be searching for the terms red sports car or whatever words you're searching for at the time. So how to optimize your content for search intent. SEO is a way to get more traffic to your site by ranking higher in the search engine track more visitors. Eventually the goal is to sell something, to get people to subscribe to your website, to attract more visitors. So we need to understand the search intent. So the best way to get more traffic to your website is by optimizing it. And we're gonna break down some of the ways to optimize the website shortly. And once you've better optimized your website, you'll be getting people coming through to look at your site, to hopefully buy something, subscribe and so forth, which is the search intent. So search intent has to do with the who, what, where, when and why and how. So why are they searching on your site? What are they searching for? Did they come because they're asking a question? Because they're after a specific product? Are they searching because they want to buy something? So you've got to think about what keywords, phrases, information that they've searched to come through to your website. So then that leads to doing keyword research. So doing keyword research is a vital part of the SEO strategy. You need to think about what words and phrases your audience are looking for and what their intent when searching. And check whether it's a realistic word to rank for. So you don't want to pay, for example, for paid advertising or even rank in natural listings for keywords that might be highly competitive because then you might be trying to bark up their own tree there, trying to continually rank against a word that big major players might be ranked for. Try and look at some of the more niche words to describe your product or something a bit more unique. The keyword research is important because it'll make clear the search terms that are available to your audience. This image, though related to marketing, reflects the same purpose. If you're not marketing or optimizing for the right keywords, then you're going to be advertising to the wrong set of people. So often businesses will use one type of keyword or phrase within their business to describe something but their customer using something completely different. One example, out of many that are probably around, let's say you've got a candy store. Everyone inside the company knows that particular product as candy but we also know it as lollies, we also know it as confectionery, we also know it as chocolate. So optimizing for all those other words, making sure all those other words are throughout your website will help when someone's searching to eventually end up to your website. Just focusing on the word candy, for example, would be isolating your attracted audience. So some of the tools that you can look at for keyword research. So Google AdWords Keyword Planner is a great tool for being able to plan your keywords. Some of these links are quite long, so feel free to screenshot. Free keyword research tool by SERPs and there's another one there at the bottom which is keyword tool IO. These tools allow you to go onto their websites and be able to plan keywords and they'll give you other suggested related keywords to use. So again, using the candy store as an analogy, you can type in the word candy and it'll give you all related keywords to that particular word or phrases related to that. So you can then expand out your keywords to go through your website and be able to update the content to make it more rich to be able to search in the search engines. Couple more useful tools here. So keyword finder. Google Trends is also really handy if you're starting out with a business or even if you do have an existing business as well, you can look at other trending phrases, keywords, terms on the internet. So that's a really good one to be able to search and see what terms are ranking really well at the moment. So you can then see competitor sites and so forth. One of the other really useful things is look at what your competitors are doing as well which is the last point that's there. So have a look at the words and the keywords, the phrases. If your competitors ranking higher than you, what are the title tags of their website? What descriptions do they have? What information is on their website to be helping them to rank better? There's no harm in using those same words in a different way on your website as well. So one of the questions that was back in the myths, why are my changes not showing up on search results? So a lot of people do tend to ask this when you make a change on your website. The search engine doesn't scan your website every single moment of every day immediately. It can take time for it to come back and scan again but there are ways that you can help tell the search engines to come back and scan your site a little bit sooner. So here's a couple of tools that you can use. So you can set up a Google webmasters tools account if you don't already have one. And you don't need that full link. You can also go to just in Google type Google webmaster tools and find that tool. There's also a Bing webmaster tool and most likely a Yahoo one. I don't quote me on that though. I haven't used it. And you can submit your website sitemap. And if you're using WordPress, which hopefully most of you are, you can have sitemap auto-generated in your site as well. So that can then be submitted to the search engines. This will tell the search engines that you've got new pages that you've added. You can also tell it how frequently to scan your pages. And as you've got stuff updating, all that information will be sent to the search engines. Ways to improve your search engine ranking. So some of this information you can also get out of Google webmaster tools and also Bing webmaster tools. So if you haven't already got one of those accounts set up and synced to your website, it's really, really useful. This will give you facts and figures on this information on your own website. But to help your website improve right now if there's these things that need to be fixed, look at resolving meta description tags or including them if you're not using them yet. Improve and fix your title tags. There is also a number of character length to title tags. So if it's too long, it'll get chopped. So your entire title may not actually be being used in the search engines. Keywords and also the body copy. So it will actually tell you if there's two pages that might have the same body copy or the same title tags. So the reason why that's important is because the search engines can penalize you if you've got too much duplicate content. Also eliminating broken links sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised the bigger a website gets, how often there's broken links throughout websites that need to be cleaned up and removed because search engines will still continue to have them indexed if you're not removing them properly. Increase pay not to increase, but to improve page sites load speed. So if your site loads quite slowly, the search engines will also be penalizing you for that as well. So you need to look at making sure your site is loading quickly and efficiently. There's a number of tools online that I'll show you one of those that you can look at that can help with that information as well. Updating your sitemap file as previously mentioned. Improving your website's mobile friendliness, as I mentioned in one of the first few slides as a myth. If your website's not mobile friendly or mobile optimized, search engines will start penalizing you for that. And if your competitor is mobile friendly, they will be ranking higher than you for that reason as well. Making your website user friendly. Though this isn't an specific SEO thing, if your website's hard to use, people are gonna jump off it and go and find it easier to use websites. So that's gonna in turn eventually affect your search ranking because people are going to site and not staying on it long. Bounce rates will increase, which will get recorded in the search engines. So useful tools. So as mentioned before, the Google Webmaster Tools, again you can just Google search for Google Webmaster Tools, the same with Bing Webmaster Tools. Google Page Speed Test. So this one is the one that will tell you if your site is running too slowly, it'll actually give you a score out of 100 for desktop view and for mobile view. But what it'll also do is it'll give you a whole heap of pointers and tips on things to look for of how to improve. So if you've got a number of large images through your site, it'll suggest how many of them should be reduced and by what percentage. It'll also tell you if you've got scripts that are loading at the top of the page which are slowing down the entire load of the page as well. So that one's a really useful one if you need to find that information out. So specifically moving on to WordPress. So two of the most popular SEO tools are the All In One SEO plugin and Yoast plugin. There are a number of others but these are two of the more feature rich ones and the free versions have a number of things available in them that are just amazing and they do have both premium versions that give you a whole lot of extra stuff as well. And again, you can just search for these tools online to go directly to their links. So post title versus SEO title. So there is a difference between the two so stepping right into WordPress here. So you can have the same title for both, don't get me wrong. However, your post title is usually meant for people that are on your website. So this is the title tag that you would see displaying on the page when someone visits your website. Search engines also find this useful because it's text that's on the page that they read so it's telling them something meaningful. But where that differs from the SEO title, so this is a screenshot of the Yoast plugin where you can edit the SEO title, is the SEO title will be what search engines will be seeing. So that's where if someone's doing a search for a product or a blog post or a bit of information they're gonna see that snippet come up in the search results. So that title that was on the previous page may not be what you want to actually show in the search engine. You might want something that's more keyword rich that describes it better that entices someone to click on the link. So that's where you have the difference between the two. So some further reading there. So Yoast's website for that Yoast plugin has a number of useful articles you might wanna read on their website, highlighted a few of them throughout here. The Moz website also has some beginner guides to SEO. If you're wanting to learn a little bit more about on-page SEO and off-page SEO, the link that's there at the bottom is really, really informative and it's got a lot more detail in some of the areas that I've covered today as well. And again, a couple more Yoast ones. So these ones are specifically talking about keyword research. And that's all, thank you. Any questions? Awesome, thanks a lot. All right, so who's got some questions? Up the back corner, run, run, run, forest. Hey, thank you for that. Just a question about Google AdWords now. In the example you're giving, you're saying that they're looking similar like the organic version paid version. But how do you think people's attitude is towards paid and organic now? Is you seeing a shift in that? Yeah, interesting question. I think it depends on the person from two sides. So if you're a business, they're still definitely an area to focus on with paid advertising because you can niche market your advertising and get to your audience or customers quicker if you're doing SEO updates to your website and waiting for it to rank well in the listings. You could be three, four, five pages back for a particular keyword that you're wanting to list on page one. So it might be beneficial to pay for the AdWords to list right at the top. So from a business perspective, yes, it's useful to still have the AdWords there. From a visitor's perspective, looking at AdWords, you still may get ads that come up that are relevant to your search. There's still many a times even myself, I've clicked on an ad because it's been the most relevant link to what I've searched for because the natural results may not be. You know, the search engine have got a massive algorithm of all the results it's trying to aggravate to try and get that correct information to you but it still might not be the most accurate. So the AdWords might fit that better to some degree. Does that answer your question? Yeah. One quick question for me and then over that one. Sure. Paying for some ads, does that actually help your organic results as well? Not in my knowledge, but I'd need to double check that for you because I'm not sure, but yeah, I wouldn't imagine it does. I'm sure having paid information in Google's system to some degree probably helps a little bit but yeah, I don't believe it has any relevance. Thanks for the presentation. You mentioned Google and Bing and so when I'm considering things, I'm always thinking about it from Google point of view because I'm always using Google. A friend of mine asked me the other day whether I used DuckDuckGo. I said, no, I hadn't and he explained why he had used it. I mean, is there a generic way you can approach this without then saying, you know, I've got to focus, I've got to present it this way or load it up with keywords in my content this way for Google and then I've got to think about it in another way for Bing and then I've got to think about another way for DuckDuckGo or whatever other search engine might be. Yeah, I don't think you need to specifically focus on each one separately if you've got a particular region that you're focusing in and they've only got, you know, certain browsers that the majority of that region use, like for example, Asia might not use Google, they tend to focus more on Yahoo then you might adjust your criteria on your website to better fit what their recommendations are. But if you're going for broad for a number of search engines, then you try and tick as many of the boxes that cover each of those search engines and they've all got a lot of the same kind of guidance and information that they provide for how to improve your website. Thank you. Hi, earlier when you gave the example of the candy store Yes. And you used the different names to describe or synonyms to describe candy. You said the word optimize, optimize your page. Can you tell me more about what you mean by optimizing? Yeah, so with regards to that, looking at the different tags and information that you can put on your website. So you've got obviously when you first write a page or a post on a website, you've got your title tag. You've also got your SEO title tag. You've got a description tag. If you install one of those SEO plugins, you have keyword tag, you have a meta tag. So there's a number of different fields you can fill in as well as the entire body content of the page. So to optimize the website using those keyword research tools, you'd be using those tools to help you determine what keywords and phrases to put throughout the context of your title tag and your description on your page. So obviously you'd use all those descriptive words throughout. You wouldn't bombard it because if you overdo it, you can also get penalized. But that's what you'd use it for. Any other questions? One for myself. What about public broadcast networks? In what way? So as far as using them to link back and flooding articles and things like that? Yeah, look, I did sort of briefly tell you not specifically that platform. But yes, you can obviously list and go, whether you find a blog post that you want to make a comment on and link back to your website or you find another website that you email them and ask, can you post my content on there? You can do that as well because that will eventually help the more sites that you're listed on will help boost your ranking. But it's also a matter of making sure that it's quality sites that you're listed on. So if you're just randomly going to any website or any forum to get a listing on, you're gonna actually saturate your result and then it could potentially cause your ranking to go backwards. Hi, thank you for the presentation. Any high-level tips even around podcasts or videos in regards to SEOs? Yeah, look, probably my recommendation if you're looking at putting videos on your website, again, depending on the region that you're in, but if we're focusing primarily Australia or the regions that use Google, I'd recommend looking at putting your videos on YouTube because that's owned and run by Google. So that will then get indexed in their search engines and help, again, to increase your results. As for podcasts, I haven't used podcasts myself, but I'd be researching which podcast platforms rank more appropriately. And Google may also have a podcasting platform or something else that you could probably use. And Nadia, would you recommend doing captions for videos? Yeah, definitely. So wherever you can put information, you know, again, title tags, descriptions, anything that's keyword rich to help with that. And if you can put a link back to your site to kind of full circle that. Couple minutes left. I'll make this all close by. I was reading on one of the American sites because I'm an artist that if you put a lot of photos into your blog, it hinders the SEO. Look, it can because there's obviously not much text in the website for the search engine to read, but there's various techniques and things you can do to help with that. So where you can, if you can put some text around it or in it, but you can also put alt tags, which is something I didn't mention throughout this talk, which is like a hidden tag that you can put to describe your image. Also use particular naming conventions when you have your file name, put, you know, your business name or the description of it in the actual file name so that when it gets indexed in the search engines, that'll help as well. So number of those things will help. Because a lot of them were saying that it should be at least 1500 words. Yeah. And I thought, oh, adding photos as well, I thought. Look, it depends, again, it's a type of business. If it's a photography business, you're not necessarily going to have words to put on every single page. If you've got a photo gallery, you're not going to be putting words on a photo gallery page. So hopefully you've got other pages throughout your site that make up the content. And then when someone's searching, they'll get to your website by those content pages and then eventually through the images. Thank you. Thank you. A couple of minutes left. Any one or two more questions? Hi. How do you know you've got value for money? Say if you're paying someone to do your SEO and they're charging you thousands, I guess they could be bringing you up on SEO, but it also could be your fault that you're not converting. So I guess how do you know you're getting your value for money? Yeah, look, I think the best way is to always be measuring your results. When I've worked doing SEO stuff for third-party companies, I usually always give them a report at the end of every month, not to say that's necessarily the preferred way, but that will then show them how their rankings for particular keywords and phrases are changing, whether it's going up or down on graphs and so forth over that period of time that I'm continually doing the SEO work. So you really need them to be able to show you how the money that you're spending is actually resulting in improvements in your ranking. So as long as you're going up to the top of Google, then they're trying... That's right. And it depends on the keywords and phrases. They're always going to be, depending on what business you've got, keywords and phrases that you may never get position number one. So if someone's guaranteeing you that, again, I'd be questioning that and what keywords and phrases they're offering that for. But it is possible, but it takes time. No one can optimize your site today and see you at position number one tomorrow. So it takes progression to move up through the ranks. How long do you think is... I can't put a timeframe on that. So that's something that you'd be looking at, again, depending on the words and phrases, you could be looking at weeks, months, a year. Depends on how much is on your existing site and what needs tweaking along the way to help improve that. Thank you. No worries. Got about 30 seconds left. Anyone got a very quick question? Yeah. What's your opinion on these content mill businesses, whereby you pay someone one cent per word to write a blog piece? Perhaps not such good quality, but to boost your SEO? Yeah, I think it all just comes down to quality of content. If they're writing fluff pieces that are not quality, then it's probably in the end going to eventually have negative effect on your business. The same with, again, putting links through on a site, put a blog, and have links going back through to you. So if the content is not quality, eventually that's going to come through as a result to penalise you, eventually, with the rankings. Excellent. Well, thank you for so many tips. So much to do with SEO. APPLAUSE