 Hello everyone. Thank you so much for waiting until the end of the day, holding on here. I appreciate it very much. I'm sure it's going to be worth it. My name is Audora, or Aurora, for the non-Spanish speakers here. And I work for Google in Trust and Safety Outreach. What my team does is we talk to the ecosystem about search and how search works and other different things, for example, security online and pharmacy. So different things, but we talk a lot to people like you and we bring information back internally to our teams. So it's really important that we're all here today. And after this presentation, I will be available downstairs. If you have any questions or any feedback, I'll be more than happy to have a chat. So that's the first part. Okay. Today I'm going to talk a little bit about how to manage your presence online. I'm guessing that most of you here have a website or a blog or some sort of presence online and probably want to make sure you kind of know how you can make a little bit more out of it. This is going to be the agenda. So first of all, I'll start with how search works. And then I'll go into a little bit more of the entrails of the search result. I'll give you four search engine optimization tips and I'll introduce you into some updates for a search console. Okay, but before we start, it is very, very important that we think about who's our audience and where our audience is. So some of us might have a website or a blog and that's a great starting point. But if we don't know where those people are and how they're coming to us, where their user journey starts, we're going to be a bit lost in this process. So first of all, are they coming through Google search? Are they coming through social media, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube? Where are they coming from? And secondly, once we have that clear out and we know what the user journey looks like, we need to think about the ecosystem. We need to think about this holistically. So the same is when you're opening a business and you need to study the market, the field, you need to do the same online. So we need to know who's there, who are the players already and what's going to make me unique when I'm getting into this new spot. So that's also a very important aspect of getting online. And also, once we've made it, it's important to keep the content up to date and engage with your users because it's all about the content and I'm going to repeat this quite a lot today because it is true. And now I'm going to talk a little bit about how search works. For many of us, search is just, we go to Google, we type in a question and we get an answer. But the journey starts way, way before that. So first of all, there's a crawling part. Think about a spider. A spider building a spider web. Google crawlers work a little bit like that. Google crawlers go page by page, following different links and bringing all of that information back to the Google servers. And once we get that information on the Google servers, we have a bunch of information. But imagine yourself in a library trying to find a book and the library's not categorized in any single, in any way. That would be a challenge, wouldn't it? Don't try it, it's impossible. So this is where the Google index comes into play. Google index is considered probably the biggest library in the world. It's over one billion gigabytes big and it basically puts a structure into all of that information that the crawlers have been bringing in. And so now back to you. You're sitting down in your living room and you're looking for something. You can enter. And do you want a billion of answers? No. You probably want something relevant to you at that specific time. And that relevant thing is something that Google's ranking algorithms try to figure out for you. So they take into account over 200 different factors. It's not just a few things. It's a lot of things. But for example, they take into account the freshness of the content. Or they take into account how many times the search query appears in your page or how the user experiences the quality of the page. So there are many more factors playing into this. But it's important that you know that the algorithms are there to serve you the best possible information at a given time. And as you know, search results take different shapes and forms. Some people here might tonight take a flight from Boston somewhere. Sadly we'll be able to attend the second day of work camp. I will. Some people might not. So you might be going online and searching for a way to get to the airport from here. Now you probably don't want a lot of links telling you different information. You probably just want a map with directions and schedules and maybe transportation options. Google is evolving constantly. As you evolve, as your needs for results evolve, we're evolving too, trying to mirror those trends. So if you need a video result for something, we will provide you with a video result and not just with a list of links. I'm going to ask you a very candid question but I just want to see who here has a cell phone? Okay. And who here has checked their cell phone today? So in average we check our cell phone around 150 times a day. I'm hoping that this is not happening during my presentation. But I can't control that. So Google is mirroring this trend by moving towards a mobile first index. And what does a mobile first index mean? Well instead of what was happening before Google index was checking primarily the test version of a website, it now checks or moving forward and rolling slowly, it checks the mobile version of the site. Now what does that mean to you, your content creator? You have to make sure that your content on mobile is pairing, is matching whatever is happening in desktop. And that sometimes doesn't happen. So to ensure that our users are getting the full content, the full picture, that you have a separate mobile version is up to date. Also speed is very important and very soon speed will be a ranking factor on mobile. So you want to make sure that your mobile site is loading properly and loading quickly. You know that when people are on their phones, when you are on their phones, you don't have enough time to stop and wait until to navigate from site to site. If there's no, you just want information and you want to really really grab your audience. Let's look into the entrails of the search result. So a search result, this is a typical page result. In this case we looked for a bakery. And first of all to your right-hand side over there, is the search result. And that's the business. Who here is a business owner? So you might have already claimed your listing on Google My Business. If you haven't, I really recommend you do this because it's a great way for your customers to find you very, very quickly. And it's completely free. If you do get someone contacting you telling you that you have to pay for this, you'll be a scam. So don't fall for a scam. It's for free and it's really, really useful. Secondly, you can find up here the page result. And how do you know that it is a page result? Well, because it's marked with sponsored and with app here. Sometimes it's not very obvious, but look for it. It's very, very different. And then we have the organic results with the 10 blue links. And it is, again, fundamental, essential to know that there's a separation between those two, the paid results and the organic results. There's no way that organic results accept any sort of payment. So, again, if an agency tells you that you can get, you can rank better by paying something, it's not going to be true. They're organic, they depend on the ecosystem. And digging even further into one of those organic results, let's talk about these terms. Because at some point you might need to debug your sites and these terms can come in very handy. So first of all, the title. So how your site is called. Secondly, the snippet. So that is the description meta tag. So if you're going to the HTML code of your site, that's where you introduce what your company is about or whatever you want to tell your user really. And then we have the site links which are navigation links that help your user get to a certain part of your site in a quicker way without necessarily going through the home page. Now these are also algorithmic and they don't always appear. They really help the users. And now that we know how search works, how the anatomy of the search result works, let me give you four search engine optimization tips. First of all, performing a site search. What is a site search? Well, a site search is actually it's a piece of mine many times. And it's just kind of a sense check to know how your site is being indexed, if at all. So if you want to know, if you're in Google, basically that's the question, am I in Google? You can easily go to google.com and then use the site colon operator and a URL with no spaces. You see, if you're being indexed and if you are, what pages are being indexed? Which is very interesting to know because you might find that there's pages in your site that are not being indexed at all. So it's a great starting point to troubleshoot potential issues with your site. Also, it's great to find out how Google is indexing your site in order to find well, maybe that's not the title I wanted to use or maybe that's not the description of the snippet I wanted my users to know me for. So then it's a great way for you to then go back to your code and change things. Code or to your theme or WordPress. Tip number two. Create a descriptive about a page. Now, this is really, really important because you want your users and the search engine to understand you, to know who you are. So it's great if you can give them as much information in a very easy way. So for example, if you're a business you want to make sure that the user doesn't have to dig in to understand what are your opening hours, where are you located, what's your contact information, you want to give them that very easy straight away. Actually, 96% of people who go into stores, into businesses have previously checked the opening hours of the information online. So you want to be there. You really want to be there and get your customers online. Also and this is something that people forget about many times, editorial. Now we don't give importance or some people don't give importance to grammar mistakes or spelling mistakes. This is our business card. This is our resume to the world to our customers. If we have any of these issues we won't be seen as well or perceived as well by potential customers or users or readers. And also one thing I do recommend is to go into Google Trends. I don't know if this is something that you've used but it's a really cool tool. In Google Trends you can find how users are looking for stuff. So for example if you have a company that's selling car parts you might want to run a comparison between how people talk about car parts versus automobile parts. And then you'll know whether you have to actually talk about automobile or not or just focus on the word car. So that's just a little example but Google Trends can be a really useful tool there. Thirdly, security. Now, many times people don't focus on security and it's a major, major aspect of managing a website of love. Your presence online. And people don't focus on this until something hits the fan and then they've been hacked and it's too late and recovery can be expensive can be long can be traumatic. So don't let that happen to you. Put in place these steps. First of all, don't just use a password but add an extra layer, add an extra layer of protection which is the two factor authentication the two step verification this will make it more this will make it harder for anybody to get into your credentials. So protect yourself. Keep your systems up to date. Treat these updates. I know that we all procrastinate and when we get those notifications you have to upgrade your system. We always say, yeah, remind me later. Yeah, we all do it. I do it too. I shouldn't. I don't. These system upgrades are almost like an antivirus. They're very, very important because they might be fixing potential security breaches of previous versions. So if you don't install them you might be making it really easy for the hackers out there and there's many hackers out there saying, look at this person so give your system up to date. Implement HTTPS encrypt your information especially if you're asking your users to share important data with you sensitive data make sure that no one else can access that information because if they will they'll be in trouble and your brand will also be in trouble. You'll also suffer. So make sure that you're not making it easy for anyone to breach your information. Verify your site and search console. I'm going, I think talking here about search console during this talk and I'll mention a bit more later but search console is a great tool for to message with Google. So for example if there's a problem with your website as you've been hacked or you've been injected spam anything can happen Google will notify you in search console and they'll tell you, hey this is going on and this is how to fix it. So I can only recommend it enough. It's for free as well. Have a backup. So you never know what can happen to a website just be ready to have it both online and offline. And offer training to your employees. If you do have employees make sure that everyone is on the same page. Make sure that everyone knows how to implement all of these other other steps in order to keep your company safe from whatever can happen out there. And finally my last tip for today is to follow the webmaster guidelines. These are an overview of different ways in which you can create sites that have good quality for your users, that have good content and that essentially do well because they are they're playing in their terms. Unfortunately there's a lot of users out there who don't have that mentality who don't follow the webmaster guidelines and who add spany features into their websites. They can be hiding content from users in order to rank higher. You probably have heard about all of these measures before. Don't fall for that. We will catch you. Also if you are not going to be developing your website, it's very important that you know about the guidelines so that you can ask the person who's developing your website to implement them and to ensure that they're on the same page. And I was mentioning that I was going to give you some updates about search console. First of all who here uses search console? Because okay, okay. Around half of the room, that's okay. So search console for whoever hasn't heard about it yet. It's a great tool as a dashboard that gives you all of the information about your site's activity. So you will have information about the traffic that comes in and out of your page of your site. Where the traffic is coming from. Whether there are any issues with the indexing or the crawling. Whether you have any security breaches. Whether you've been attacked by a hacker. So all of those things can be accessed through search console. And also a major thing that happened in search console this year is that it went through a major facelift. And it's now a new tool out there that's well more friendly. And it's updated a lot of its features and it's adding new ones. So it's currently on the beta. So I don't know who's using the beta already. Okay, so some people here in the room will definitely know what I'm talking about. Others might need to wait a little bit longer. But it's definitely worth knowing what's coming. So search console this year and actually this month has launched a URL inspection tool. And what is this? Well by introducing a URL to this tool Google tells you exactly how it's reading that URL in terms of crawling in terms of indexing. If everything is okay it tells you about the enhancement. So if you're using AMP or if you're maybe implementing structural data in order to appear in rich cards like for example job postings or recipes or reviews it tells you how that is doing too. And if there are any problems they're going to tell you what problems they're seeing and how to fix them. So it's a fantastic tool that offers transparency to you and full control of your site. And secondly there's a very improved performance report. So all of these new features and all of these improved features are all coming because of user feedback. So if you do get to use these features there's a feedback tool where you can offer your feedback straight to that team, the search console team who's super happy to receive all of these comments because they're building this extension for you for the users. If you're a WordPress it's very easy to get your site verified with search console. I can show you afterwards on the laptop how to do it. And it's no big deal. About the search about the performance report we heard you loudly clear a number offering 16 months of data. What does that mean? It means that you can go there year by year how your site did and make informed decisions on future strategic decisions. Or you can also see where the traffic is coming from if maybe it's coming from mobile and oh you were not focusing on mobile so maybe you actually have to because all of your users are coming from there. So it's a place where a lot of information is gathered not only that but now there's information about errors so if there's any error for example in crawling there's a age that's not being crawled or you will get an error on the exact links that are being affected by this error and and this is a favorite of mine because I like sharing these things you can share these errors with people who are not even on search console. So sharing is caring share your issues with other people you can get involved developers you can get a lot of people involved in your company units. It's a very useful tool and finally you might have heard about this one it's a mobile friendly test since we're all very focusing mobile it's a great way of knowing how Google is seeing your site on a mobile device but it gives you a score it gives your site a score in terms of usability so I don't know maybe your writing is too small or maybe your buttons are not placed properly so it gives you a score and it also gives you a score in terms of speak so how long it takes for your site to load it so that's all from me these are some of the resources that I talked about today you can take this picture to take this home with you on and others that I didn't mention for example there's the SEO starter guide which is a very thorough guide on different tools and different things you can do when you're starting in SEO and yeah you can also check us in YouTube where in YouTube we have video office hours when we answer questions there's forums that I manage English forums there's a lot of different resources that you can definitely use and they're all public and you can share them with your colleagues, your friends and yeah I don't know how we're doing this time so I can take questions here and if we don't have enough time we can go downstairs and continue doing this do they walk to the mic so if you can walk to the mic I'm curious about the Google My Business the one on the right does that need a street address because if you work from home I'm curious about that I don't think that is I don't so the question was about Google My Business whether there's a need for a physical address I don't believe there's a need for a physical address in the Google My Business so there's a lot of people who work remotely nowadays so if you have a question what you can do is you can just stand up at the microphone so that I can hear your question I'm curious you didn't talk about Google Analytics was that for any particular reason or you just wanted to focus on Google which I think is awesome by the way but I'm just curious if you can talk about it that's a great question she asked about Google Analytics and whether I didn't mention anything on purpose I personally I don't work in the Google Analytics team I know that they're doing great stuff here and great integrations with WordPress Google Analytics can be accessed on Search Console as well so I didn't mention it not for any particular reason but just because it's something you can access through Search Console as well I have a question about the site pages how do you think the site pages come up as well if there's certain things that can be built in the pages so that the user gets more than just the one result that those listings of the site pages come up as well under their search results when you say site pages do you know what they index under the SERP the links like about us okay I will need I'm getting a little bit you have a slide of it oh the site links so you're asking about what can you do in order to appear in site links so as I was mentioning before site links are completely algorithmic and sometimes Google picks on them and sometimes Google doesn't so unfortunately there's nothing more I can add here because it's something that we can't really control but sometimes I do appear and either really useful so one thing that I would recommend if you're managing your website is to ensure that the sections are very clearly marked and that Google identifies that these sections exist in case you are a candidate for site links Google will know exactly what are the relevant the relevant sections to highlight so does it also the word that the search terms play into it as well because they're not going to serve it up right if it doesn't then I'm asking about a particular thing right something the user doesn't need all that other information is that part of the algorithm so usually it depends on what users are looking for for example you have a business for opening hours this might be something that appears in the navigation as a help for users to find you I'm afraid that's what I can say do you have a question well I was going to ask for have you tried the YAS blogging WordPress for the search console very good and it helped you to really show on your website the keywords, the descriptions the writing for each of you and there is another blogging for the analytics you can see all the analytics realistic daily on your dashboard very good very good one thank you, that's a great tip hi, I'm pretty much a content generator and my web team when I'm trying to put stuff in a post there's a bunch of stuff on WordPress that goes below it some of it's like all text and other kinds of like sort of metadata oh you don't have to put anything in there and I think that he's something wrong and I'm wondering if either you or someone else in the group has a sense of which of these kind of like below the fold feels are essential to populate in WordPress I would have to have a look at your specific case to know what thing you're using or what type of content you're creating and I can't say without seeing this and that's Y.O.S. Y.O.S. like Y.O.S. kind of toast thank you I have a quick question the organizers are always the worst right so my question is you have a search term that is pretty big but it's a new product nobody really knows it shares the same terms as another product indicating a color of the product but what the new product does is not what you think it does is there a way to submit something that does something different than what Google may know I am going to meet you to ask that question again basically you have the product that is a product and a color and you have the same name but meaning something different because it does something different how do you submit something to Google to say okay that's quite not what people are searching for but it's not the right term you know what I'm saying like pink elephants alright so I'll tell you if you Google search aqua balloons what's going to pop up is an aqua colored balloon but there's a balloon in Japan that's being made called an aqua balloon and it actually you put water in it and it heats seal it and it heats it blows back up so how do you make a correction to something that make it bigger search terms is it an SEO or is it can you submit it to Google that it's a different product so okay several things here sorry no you're fine it always depends on the context I was mentioning before when I was talking about ranking how Google will how the algorithms will read it to who you are and where you are and will try to interpret what type of aqua balloons you're actually looking for so maybe you're in Japan and maybe I'm going to serve you that brand because I find it relevant but maybe you're over here in Boston or that doesn't really make much sense so there's there's different factors that will contribute to making that call in terms of the ranking you can always what I find that's very very important is that you describe whatever you mean for the search engine to understand as much as you can in your content so make your descriptions really understandable not just for your users but for Google to know whether you're talking about aqua balloons the brand or aqua balloons correct and the second part to that is what dictates foreign countries listening coming up on a US Google site based research so because I'm from Japan and it's in the US when you asked what's bringing that data from Japan to the US that's the right question Google searches are I mean Google is not just a local right sorry it's universal exactly so this is why somebody is welcome somebody in I don't know in India can access information from so that's the video that we put tenses into it and we would be cutting that access to information that we have doesn't the search results depend on the device you're looking on? how much time do we have? 4-5 minutes how important is a site XML file you mean a site map oh a site map I think it's an important thing it's the structure of your site so very important for Google search results? I think it's very important for you not just for your website to have a search a site map it's not fully necessary so that depends on your on your role that depends on all the objectives so I'm just curious if you had any opinions about AMP the accelerated mobile pages project and any implications on SEO you have to be a little bit more specific in your question so you have the accelerated mobile pages so does it make sense for let's say a small time blogger or an independent person who is just putting on content to really implement what it really is for their blogger website AMP has a lot of benefits so in every single yes it has benefits on desktop or mobile especially it's very quick science they load really quickly they're very good quality so AMP is something that in Google we recommend to adopt but this again your website will be completely fine if you don't have an AMP version to it so this is again a lot of my answers are going to be it depends on your own business model or your own objective there's no right and wrong totally understand what is complex so my question relates to you again because a lot of people I think use you as a comment my assumption is that yours is talking about Google search but they're very specific about if you have a meta description and then they use these but they use your red light, green light or whatever and they say this meta description these words are not reflected in the first paragraph of that page for example so how specific is you really need to be exact with that or is that just Yoast's interpretation of Google search how much do you need to follow this plugins parameters and what are they using Google to create those parameters so first of all I don't work for Yoast so that's something probably you want to ask them for me what resonates with me is if you want to use a certain type of description because it makes sense again to make a content you want to put out there use it go ahead and go to Google Trends and see how your users might be finding your content or are talking about similar content and maybe that gives you a good hint about what to write in your description apart from that I don't quite know about Yoast but the question is whether your native descriptions for example your keywords need to be directly reflected in what you have in your content absolutely have that exactly like pretty much exactly actually if you have that in your header it will pull off immediately 10% before any other website that doesn't happen as a keyword the description and the heading you are without paying anything yes so it's very effective so what you were asking as well is whether the description has to have anything related to the content on your page well this question obviously it's a big thing it doesn't have to be the carbon copy that's the question okay when you have you compare the two sides the fifth option that you have and another without not writing towards your report if you want to if you want to continue talking about this downstairs let's listen to the last question hello thank you for the talk I actually have two different questions I've been following a company it kind of relates to that aqua blue question as well there's a company called keto length they do subscription they're actually based I think in Cambridge they recently changed their name to sated S-A-T-E-E-D if you search that name on Google now all that comes up is the definition of sated so that company website is no longer sated.com but that domain doesn't show up on the organic results sometimes I'll see it on the paid ads but that's kind of every component so my question is kind of what would it take for that domain to show up on the organic surface and did the domain name change, company name change have any effect on like SEO for that company in general? that's a great question there's a lot of domain migrations and people might change the name of their company when site migrations happen it's very important that they happen in a way that the traffic that the old site had is no plus so redirects are very important here it's very important that you find the equivalence if there are any of the old site to the new site so that users are sent to the new site in the seamless way of course if there's 10,000 redirects then there's a point in which the redirection changes breaks or just doesn't work as well but redirects is a very big way also if there's a page a site that is creating new pages, new links URLs they can always submit new URLs to index and this is something that companies can do so that would include let's say that some new customer just found out about this company but they don't know about keto links so they wouldn't necessarily benefit from their redirects from searching for keto they might because if they search for the old site they will automatically be they don't know about the old site because they know the new company name not keto so if you search I'm saying the old company name wouldn't come up and they wouldn't be redirected because they would never see that old website and is the old website active? yeah it is but I'm talking about just like how long would it take for a customer to Google to this company or future so okay we don't have a specific number of time but definitely it's something that takes its time to for Google to pick up the fact that the company is now doing something different and that comes with the branding there's a branding campaign that comes with all of that effort well thank you everyone for this Megan for holding on