 She's like a big star and is not welcome in the house. S.C.O.Hub, a S.C.O. here at your self platform. She also is a co-worker with Web Shine, and she's an S.C.O. member of the U.S.A. S.C.O.Hub, a S.C.O. member of the U.S.A. S.C.O.Hub, a S.C.O. member of the U.S.A. Good afternoon to talk search engine optimization last session of the day, and I really appreciate your time and attention. I will do my best to keep this action active lively. For the next 45 minutes. So today we're going to talk about S.C.O. and I'm going to share with you five actionable steps you can take to drive more traffic to your website from Google, Yahoo, and Bing. And our goal is a positive, measurable, angry, and sales. Let's take a step back before we dive in and talk about the anatomy of the search results page. Something we're all very familiar with, but it's always nice to dissect. So in preparing to come from Colorado to San Diego for WordCamp this weekend, I did a couple of searches. The first was for lodging, a San Diego hotel. And I'm greeting you with four pain search results that are controlled by business owners via Google AdWords. If I click on any one of these four listings, the business owner is going to pay Google on a cost-per-click basis based on a live auction that's taking place with every search query you enter. Right below that, I'm greeted by three local search results. We call this the local pack. It's a great opportunity for businesses that have a pin drop around the map in the area of interest to compete against large national brands. Visits from these searches are typically free and they're influenced by the location of the searcher, the intent of the search query, so the fact that I put San Diego, the quantity and quality of reviews, SEO, and then also the categorization of the business. And then we get to the heart of the matter and what we're going to be speaking about today, and that is organic search. This is traditional SEO and it's influenced by a myriad of factors and controlled algorithmically by each of the search engines. Some of the factors that we're going to talk about today are technical SEO, on-page optimization, site speed, and off-site factors, such as backlinks and social media. Once in a while, we'll do a search query and we'll get an instant answer. Here, we're looking for weather. We're actually going to leave Google. My answer is quickly given to me by Google to let me know that the weather in San Diego is going to be beautiful. Google's goal is to provide relevant, timely results. And so some may feel that instant answers like this or a packing list that's extracted out of a website and put into Google takes away traffic to your website. But I like to look at it a little more positively, which is for myself and for my clients. Whenever instant answers appear, it's an opportunity for me to better communicate quickly relevant information to people that are looking for my services, my product, and beyond. Let's also talk a bit about how the search engines work. In simplistic terms, search engine crawlers crawl and index web pages, and then they provide ranked results. Their goal is relevancy. And so that is also our goal. So now we can dive into tip number one. Know your space. Ask yourself what keywords are relevant to my business and website. As an SEO consultant, I'm often the phone rings and I pick it up and I'm greeted with somebody asking me to help them with their SEO and we start to talk about goals. And the first goal and the most common question is I'd like help ranking for a specific keyword. So they're not thinking ahead to the traffic they're trying to get or the revenue, but they start to fixate a bit on a keyword search where they'd like their website to appear and they're not seeing the results they want. And the two common pitfalls we see in these conversations are either someone suggests a keyword that's far too competitive for their brand, or someone suggests a keyword that's far too specific and nobody's actually looking for it. So even if you were to rank number one, you'd see no increase in traffic to your website and no increase in sales. So we start with this concept of needing to know our space before we go anywhere in the space. A recent conversation I had was with an artist friend of mine. She's based in Maui and she called and said hey, Lindsay, I need to be ranking for the keyword artist. She's a phenomenal artist. There's no question. Super talented. Her work is all over the world. And yet, she did a quick search and noted that there are 600 million web pages indexed by Google that would like to be number one for the phrase artist. So we had a quick discussion and I said Tim, that's great, but we need to take a step back here. Let's get more specific. What are you really good at? And so she gave me another keyword that she was interested in ranking for. Maui post-impressionist artist. Okay. I grew up a bit in the art world with my mom and I just thought about that for a minute and said I think now we've got a bit too specific. Let's run this keyword through a keyword research tool and see how many people each month are searching for it. And we found zero. So while I might be able to help her achieve this goal, she would now rank number one for the keyword of her dreams and nobody would come to her website and no one would buy her art. So we try to find that just right, happy medium via keyword research. And we find the phrase Maui artists. 720 people each month in the US are expected to search for this phrase. That seems a little bit more reasonable. And yes, the competition is still steep, but she is one of the best artists on Maui, so I think we can go up against the one million other pages that are trying to compete. So for your business, I'd like to recommend you start your keyword research and getting to know your space by making a list. Turn to Google and use the Google search suggest tool to see what they are telling you other people are looking at for your business. In this case, we started with Maui artists and we found some other phrases that are really commonly searched for. Words like famous, directory, paintings, local. These all give you context and additional phrases that you may want to expand in addition to ranking for just Maui artists for. The next step in our process is to make a list of your top web pages in a spreadsheet. I mentioned earlier that web pages get indexed by Google, so it's actually web pages, not websites, that way. So what we're going to need to do here is to start to think ahead. We have our list of keywords that we're starting to think about of interest for our business, but we need to start to map keywords to pages so that when we get into on-page optimization a few steps down the road, we really have a good focus of where we're going. So I start with a list of, this is a pretty simplistic website, four pages, and then I'm going to start my wish list of what focus keywords I'm going to apply to each. And I'm going to turn to a more quantitative tool set. My qualitative research gave me a few keywords and now I'm going to start to go and use a handful of tools that are out there that are going to help me to estimate monthly search volume. A keyword research tool, they're all relatively the same. You enter a keyword, you have a target area, you click the button and it exports to you, typically the monthly search volume, some have competition, and then some may suggest other terms that you might consider. So I start to collect the information. The more in-depth the keyword space, the larger the product or project, the more keyword research tools I may collect data from to try to find the trends between them. Once I have my list, I can start to think about how I'm going to map these keywords to my web pages. I'm going to go for typically my mothership keyword on my home page more often than not. Although SEO is an art and science, you've got to take all of our advice with a grain of salt, but it needs to be something that you think through for yourself. And then I'm going to go through some of my deeper level pages and pick some other phrases that are relevant to the content there. Two concepts that are important when you're starting to map keywords to pages. One, you want to avoid duplicates. So you don't have two pages on your own website competing with themselves. If those two pages compete, you just made the game a lot harder. A lot of times what we see in this situation is people says, okay, you want to rank for Maui artists. Is it your home page or the portfolio page that I should be ranking for that? And if those two pages are competing against, I'll either just randomly select one or more often than not, you see Google take a turn and go display another result where they have to make less choice. The other concept is the idea of combining like terms and ideas. So if I had given this talk five years ago, people would be building websites or maybe ten years ago. Five to ten years ago. Where if I wanted to rank for the phrase Aspen Yoga, I might have a page that's dedicated to Aspen Yoga and a whole different page dedicated to yoga and Aspen. And Google basically was so literal that you had to use the same keyword over and over again on a page for them to understand the context and meaning of it. Now Google and the other search engines have a much broader understanding of language and semantics. So we can start to apply like terms and ideas, things like Maui paintings and Maui prints, potentially in that page to rank for a multitude of keywords that are related and that don't compete with each other. We're going to set aside our keyword research and move on to some other tips and we'll circle back around to that later. My second tip for you is established benchmarks. The best tool for establishing benchmarks for many websites is going to be Google Analytics. It's free. It's enterprise level. And it's easy to install on your website. Why do we work with Google Analytics? To track performance. I want to know where I am today to know where I'm going and to be able to report back on the successes of my SEO initiatives. The how is quite simple. We go to Google Analytics and sign up for an account. They'll give you back a code and that little line of code in there that says UA- a whole bunch of numbers. That's what's going to be unique to your website. You take your code and you're going to apply it to the header of all pages on your website. You can do this directly in the header file in WordPress or you can utilize a plugin such as Monster's Insights to do it for you. Once I have Google Analytics script running on my website you can take a look and read some online documentation of some advanced setups and configurations you may do things like excluding your own visits to your website so that you don't screw your traffic. But you're essentially good to go and you can start to think about a few other benchmarks you may be interested in. As an SEO, I also like rank tracking. Many over the years have considered rank tracking to be somewhat imperfect but it is data nonetheless and so I'd recommend taking that keyword list that you generated in tip number one and getting it into some kind of rank tracking software which is going to help me know where am I today in the keyword rankings and where am I tomorrow? Here's a quick snapshot of what tracking that performance looks over time for a small business website that's actively engaged in SEO. Tip number three make sure your website is indexable. That's short-hand for make sure the search engines can find it. So more often than not the second conversation we have when people are having a hard time with SEO is they say, I launched my website a couple weeks ago it's a new website I had great SEO coverage before I made this change and now I can't even find it when I search for my brand. And it's actually something that I deal with typically about once a month I have two young kids at home and our pediatrician's office I'm looking for their phone number all of the time and I turn to Google and I look for it and I see that no information is available for this page. Well they're actually pretty lucky. They launched their WordPress website over a year ago so I've been following along and Google at first ignored their website and did not include it in their index and over time enough people looked for it that they said yes we'll include it but we're not going to give a lot of information here. And it's a little bit awkward for me to tell, I have mentioned it to the pediatrician when they're checking my kids' ears or ear infections and things like that but talking SEO shop while you're in the doctor's office is not standard practice. So this is continued on and something that I want to help you guys solve for your websites. What's happening here is that the robots.txt file which is a file in all websites is telling the search engines to not index it. We like this when a website's in development we don't want it to get indexed before it's spread and so there's this directive in the file and in WordPress it's typically controlled under settings, reading and this box is checked while you're in development. So when the new site goes live the low hanging fruit and an essential task if you want the search engines to find it is to make sure you uncheck this box and hit see. Once you've removed that directive the search engines have fair game to come and index your website and your web pages and we can start to ask ourselves how else do we want to communicate with the search engines? We want to provide them with a roadmap of the pages on our website and how we would like them indexed and one of those road maps is an XML site map. This is a file that has no user facing value it's purely for the search engines and the reason behind it is if we can give them a roadmap that gives relative priorities and some indexation instructions and when the pages last updated we're going to help their trawlers along. They do have limited resources and so it's really important that we utilize their bandwidth with respect and send them down to pages and taxonomies and different parts of our website that we want them to show and remove the needs for them to go to the places that we don't want them to go. So here's an example of an XML site map generated by ghost which is one of our favorite WordPress SEO plugins and once you install Yoast on your website they ask you a really simple question for each content type do you want to show this content type in the search results? If you answer yes they're going to create an XML site map for you of that if you answer no there's going to be no XML site map with this case log process. Once you have your XML site map you actually have to tell the search engines where it lives. The robots.t file is universal it must be named robots.txt but your XML site map can be named just about anything.xml So you're going to want to turn to the Google Search Console and let them know what you named your XML site map and drop it in here. The Google Search Console is your communication channel with Google. No you can't jump on a phone call and say why don't I rank for artist but yes you can get feedback from them and request things like getting your site re-indexed along the way. Once your XML site maps are in the Google Search Console you're going to get that first bit of feedback. Here I submitted eight web pages and about three images via my XML site maps and I can listen back and see how well Google is interpreting that data and how much they like it. Here we can see I'm 8 for 8 so that's a really good ratio. If you have a large WordPress website say you're submitting 1200 pages I wouldn't expect that necessarily all 1200 of the pages that I think are important are interpreted by Google to also be important but I'd like to be sort of within that 95% indexation. We've already talked a bit about that robots.txt file with what not to do but sometimes you'll see robots.txt files with a few more complicated line items in there. You can edit this file with Yoast as well if you want to provide a little bit more specific direction like if you want to keep them out of a sub-folder or a section of your website. In general the robots.txt files simplicity is best so make sure that the search engines can get in there and provide them with minimal directives and let them kind of take it from there. You really want to confirm we got it right because if our on-page optimization and everything else is perfect but the search engines are still struggling to index our website my web pages are not going to appear. In the Google search console I can use the index status report here you can see a site that was in development for a while and then went live and you can see how quickly Google indexed that content and then see how the traffic started or the indexation grooved us to touch and I can also turn to Google itself and put in the directive site, semi-colon and then the domain and see how many results I get back. That number about 26 results should be in line of the general framework of how many pages on your website you'd like Google to know about. Next up, optimize for speed. Site speed matters for SEO. Why? A faster website creates a better user experience and search engines care about user experience. So I hope you caught my friend Chris Lemme's talk about two hours ago about speeding up your root commerce website because a lot of the tips are applicable to all the WordPress websites and things you should be thinking about. For optimizing for speed I'd recommend you start with a benchmark and evaluation tool. Something like Google page speed insights or PINGDA. Go and get a grade and start to get feedback. And then start to address the issues. One, ask yourself are all of the plugins on my website in use and required? Another is is there anything I can do to improve performance by using a plugin such as WP Smush or Auto Optimize to improve caching, image size and other performance issues? Another might be considering a content delivery network. So these are a few tips and a very cursory overview of some things you can be doing to talk site speed. If you're a site owner I'd recommend you speak with your developer about this as an important topic and something they may be able to assist you with and also speak with your host to see what they can do to help you speed up your website. Tip number five update your page titles and meta descriptions. So we started with one of the most challenging aspects of SEO which is keyword research. This is where that art and science component collides and leads to a lot of questions. We're going to circle back around now on what do we do with that research in hand. Page titles and meta descriptions are HTML tags in the header of a web page and they provide the search engines with information about that page that you can get into the body content. They often extract this information and display it in the search results. So here you can see the page title and the meta description from a Google search results page. Why are they important? Sorry, I think there's a question back there. So the meta was really long. So should you do a long meta like that like almost a paragraph or should you do like keyword focused meta? Yeah, so I'd recommend utilizing the full length of the meta description and I'll go ahead and give you a handful of tips for how to write these. So page titles and meta descriptions why should I care about them? They influence ranking and improve click through rates. And to get more specific the page title has an influence on rank and click through rates meaning how often someone's actually going to click on my listing when they see it. The meta description only actually impacts click through rates and doesn't have an influence on your rank. But they're really important because you're given two search results here and people are being asked to make a split second decision. Which one am I going to click on? These two listings are fairly similar but I can see the meta description on the first is something that I can easily read and digest whereas the meta description on the second feels a little overly optimized. There's lots of phrases stuffed with commas separating them and I actually have no idea what I'm about to experience when I go and visit this one. So we're going to go back to our spreadsheet. I like to think of it as sort of my SEO workbook something that I keep going on an ongoing basis and we have our pages listed we have our focus keywords we're going to add a column for page title and meta description and start to think about how we want to craft these. Page titles influence rank and click through rates and there are some basic parameters that you can think about when you're writing them. The first is we're aiming for something 50 to 60 characters long if we want to maximize the space given to us. They're typically formatted like the title of a book with capitalization. Most page titles you're going to see have some type of a standard separator that's consistently used throughout the website such as a vertical bar or a dash. They need to be unique for every page of your website and if you need sort of a rules-based approach you can often think about placing the keyword of importance that focus keyword first followed by some kind of a separator and your brand. The one exception I tend to make to that is on my homepage I tend to flip-flop that around place my brand first and my most important keyword after the dash or the vertical bar because the majority of most people's website traffic is coming for the brand and not necessarily the keyword that you're optimizing. Here are a couple of examples to help explain some good, better and needs improvement. We'll start with this same phrase of Maui artist and you can see here we've placed the keyword first in our great example with the vertical bar and then the artist's name. What I like about this is the search engines actually wait the keywords that come first were on the left with a little bit more weight than what's coming second which is the brand. So if I'm really trying to aggressively go after this keyword I could place the keyword first there and then follow up with the artist's name. A good example uses the character count maybe a bit better gets closer to the 60 character counts but starts to put in some other phrases like Maui art by a Maui artist Kid McDonald. Yes, this is great you've included two keywords in your page title they're related and maybe in the old school algorithms they needed that literal usage of the keyword in different permutations so closely together but for me it's a bit of a mouthful it feels a touch over-optimized so it's good but I think we could do better by actually being even simpler. The needs improvement we see all too often which is the word home and then the brand and something that you want to try to avoid because we all know that the homepage is the homepage and the search engines don't need you to remind it up either. Let's talk a bit more about meta descriptions these are going to influence click through rates and not break. New in 2018 is the target length. We used to be limited to 155 characters for our meta descriptions and Google is now showing 260 to 320 with around 300 being the kind of new industry standard of how long your meta descriptions should be written towards. Typically they're written in sentence format so we saw earlier what it looks like when you just put keywords with commas not super engaging they need to once again be unique for every page on your website and I like to think of them as something that's going to lead to conversion so I'm going to include some kind of a call to action that tells people not only what they're going to experience when they get to that one page but also what I want them to do and there's been studies that show that if you need people into that action before they ever reach the page they're more likely to buy they're more likely to engage with the page in whatever it's true intent is. So let's look at two examples in this case great and needs improvement the first is more captivating it's written in sentence format and it includes important phrases like the artist's name and what you might expect to see and what we want them to do explore her work and see what makes her stand out. The second is something that needs improvement it does hit home it tells you we're about to go see an artist's website and we want you to go explore her artwork but there's no other context and I'm very unlikely to engage with this page and click to the search result once I have my page titles in my meta descriptions typically written in that SEO workbook now I need to get them into my website and here's where a ghost comes in handy yet again I can go into each page and simply copy and paste my page title in my meta description and I can even drop it my focus key points to get some of the content grading tools working into the page and hit save so we have a couple of extra minutes this afternoon to share with you one bonus tip and this is going to start to move outside of the world of what you can do on your website to improve your organic search and start to think about this world of offsite SEO so there is a world beyond your website that gives the search engines context around your brand and around your website and one of those big things for a local business is Google Maps why do we care about Google Maps? Customers are looking one in three searches are about a place and 97% of consumers search for local businesses online in the beginning of my talk we saw the very competitive search landscape for San Diego hotels hundreds if not thousands of hotels competing to be number one and then also having to compete against things like Expedia or hotels.com where a local business can stand out and rise above the crowd is via the three pack and via local search so these three businesses are doing a great job of managing and maintaining Google My Business listing. Here's how you can I guess the second reason why is it's great for branding and the search so if someone searches for your business by brand name often times if you have a solid Google Maps listing in addition to seeing you in the organic search results they're going to see your Google My Business listing in the right hand column with additional information about your business things about where you're located how many Google reviews you have hours of operation and beyond to get a Google Maps listing you need to go to Google My Business improve not only your association with the business but also the business's location information depending on how much trust they already have in your business they're going to give you one of these five options to allow you to proceed often times and for almost every business they'll let you verify via postcard so you say here's my address here's my name this is my login in Google they're going to send you a postcard it takes a week to two weeks to arrive it has a six digit pin on it you better this digit pin back into Google My Business and you have access to start managing your listing the quicker solution is by phone they're going to give you an automated phone call and you're going to go through that process just via a quick phone call to your business line sometimes you get the option of verifying via email more often than not they tell you what email they're comfortable sending it to you you don't get to control it and so this is one that a lot of times it ends up being some kind of an admin or a systems email that they may have associated with your business and depending on the size of your organization might just get lost into cyberspace if you've gone through the process of verifying with the Google search console where we were doing the XML site network you may get super lucky and get the options instantly verified via your business listing and basically they'll say okay you've shown us that you're a webmaster for this website and we have such trust that this website is associated with this physical address that we're just going to go ahead and give you access to your Google My Business listing we need no more group about you bulk verification is a seldom used option for most local businesses because it's for people with more than 10 locations but something to think about if you're a chain and you need to go through this process in volume once you have access to your Google My Business listing the top tip is to try to go out and get reviews and high quality reviews so now what I hope today's talk leaves you feeling like you have a bit of an SEO process in mind some solid steps that you can go take action to drive new customers to your website thank you again for your time I'm Lindsay Halsey I live in Colorado and I am an SEO consultant whose latest venture is distilling 10 years of SEO experience into an SEO process check it out at WPSEOHO.com thank you take some questions here and then turn your list for closing remarks it's across the courtyard awesome yes the slides are available I put them up on Twitter and you can grab them and my contact information is there as well so if you shoot me an email I'm happy to send you the link as well thank you go ahead I have a local question I have a client that has one physical location it's in the office they have three separate practices three separate websites from the SEO on all three sites do they have one local listing or do they have three local listings to see if it's progressed that's a really good question this is an issue that happens for doctors' offices sometimes for attorneys do I have one for my name and then also for my attorney's office when we pick them up they accidentally have to shoot me an email the listing is not free on one side do you expand or do you contract? the Google policy is most likely going to be to contract is what they would recommend there is a support line so everything is a little case by case without actually looking at it I don't necessarily want to make the recommendation but Google does have some pretty strong policies there so you can actually request a support call they'll give you a call back from Google by business and you can have them actually look at the system they may need to tell you some other duplicates you didn't know about and they're going to help you sort of work through what the best scenario is the phone number so if you go in I can show you after when you go into Google by business and you start going through help, help, help and you just keep going after help at a certain point you'll see sort of a request to call back it changes you know every sometimes like once a month the kind of process of how to actually get in but they're certainly there and you can also send them an email and they're pretty quick to get the support line going for you