 Hi everybody. My name is Wei Lin. I just want to get a quick understanding. How many of you know why I'm here today? Know what? Know why I'm here today? Thank you. Good to know. I see a few hands. So I guess I should do a very quick introduction. I'm here today because I'm going to talk about how I got to top of Google search for wine related keywords. Narrowly defined keywords. But it was fun to know. It was interesting and there are some things that I can share about maybe you being will do this for your own work or your startup and it's just some everything I did was free. So no cost involved except your time. So without further ado I'll just jump right in. Okay. Now I have to start by showing you my blog not because I'm trying to plug it but it started from here and the material is here which makes it a lot easier for me. Bigger. Yes. That's not bigger. Text is big enough. But the image I will show here. So what happened was that okay one day I found out that hey on Google Analytics I have some traffic coming from organic search results for what is this? Sparkling Riesling Singapore. Which was fun to know because up until then you get a lot of if you're familiar with Google Analytics and you're trying to see the SEO no you always see not provided or you get some really random string like my wine website's got bottles of joy maybe I get like a joyful bottle or something like that and it just turns up a weird result. So when you get something good and they're like maybe five clicks or something it catches your attention. So I saw that. Oh great. What exactly led to this? So I will go through a little bit about how I what I think are factors involved because there's no public it's not public knowledge exactly how Google ranks their results so inevitably we have to guess a little bit. I think the guessing is also informative and there's only so many factors that we can hypothesize or involve. So I'll just share them with you. So what I have over here is the blog post of me tasting and reviewing one of German actually Germany's like second most popular Sparkling Riesling. It's kind of niche actually so it has to be said that it's not as if Sparkling Riesling are as popular as beer. So to in order to rank well for this it's not impossible it's not something that will cost you a million dollars and that's why this even works in the first place. But let's take a look at the blog post itself so you can see what actually looks like and you can probably tell the elements involved. Yes, I think this is the one. So the most interesting thing for me is that rather than write a 3.4 blog post this one actually has a video. So the quick the most obvious takeaway is that gosh I think video probably makes a big difference because I did actually a test and I think the results verify that video can actually give you a big boost for your rankings. Now how did I verify that? So you see I did a search for very very popular brand of champagne. Very quick one and you see that the organic results begin here. Everything above that is ads. You may not be able to see the light yellow box because of the projector and where the projectors colors work but this is where the organic results start. And number two and three results number two and three are just ridiculous four second videos just so that they can put the phone number that you can call and you can order. But this illustrates something that just because you have a video it counts as something. It counts more more so than a very respectable wine shop from Australia here because our search includes the term Singapore. This of course will not be considered as authoritative. So these guys are in Singapore and they have a YouTube video. So the outright that even though this is a very very decent website. Look at this. I have this SEO plugin that tells me metrics like PAs, Page Authority and PAs, Domain Authority. For the purpose of this discussion we only need to know that Domain Authority is like how influential your domain is. So domain is pretty decently influential 34. This is like Wikipedia of wine surface like the Wikipedia of wine. So it doesn't really matter. It's not extremely targeted. But I'm trying to look for by Vue Champagne. So of course I don't expect Wikipedia to be the first top result. I expect something more about e-commerce something where I can actually purchase a product. So this just this quick search helps us understand that YouTube is very important for getting you a better result. If nobody else is doing it and you do it instantly you got a big leg up. And which I think is demonstrated over here because I have a video. What I also did and which I think is also the great help is video transcript. So you can keep it below the fold because if people are browsing your blog they don't necessarily have to read your transcript. But if you put it there it gives them Google something to crawl which otherwise they would not be able to. I understand that YouTube now has they have some kind of speech recognition so they can try to give you try to give you a transcript but it's not 100% accurate which is why I did this because it's just giving me weird results. So yeah very simply the first thing first takeaway big takeaway is the YouTube video. Then I think there's only like two. This is kind of long. The second takeaway is the picture there. If you have Google authorship set up you also get a boost to your SEO. So who here doesn't know what's Google authorship? It's okay. Alright that's great. So Google authorship is just Google's way of trying to let you carry your authority around your social authority the person that you are and all the writing all the stuff that you do which Google can index whether it's on Google plus whether you plus one something whether you wrote a blog post somewhere. If you tell Google that you know this is me this is linked to my profile they can give you credit for that. So if you are like Robert Scoble or you are like Mike Harrington then it's great when you write somewhere they know okay you are a very competent very popular writer and I will give you credit accordingly and even if you are not I have I think there's actually good reason to believe that simply having a Google plus profile even if it's not a genuine human being actually helps. So it's something to consider if you are wanting to start a company blog but you don't want it to be associated with you personally because you like to keep your work and personal life separate it's entirely valid it's okay for you to create alter ego you can give whatever name you want doesn't have to be real and this profile can be the one to show up here for your work and you will get benefit of a better SEO better Google ranking because of it yeah and okay there are only two more things I'd like to mention so quick recap first thing I mentioned was the video use YouTube second thing is set up your Google plus authorship I think I should just show anyway it's a big help and it's pretty easy to set up and then the two things remaining that I will just quickly go through are distribution, distributor content and keywords so let's talk about the distribution first so if you have content and you want to you want to get credit from Google for creating content good content but maybe you don't really know what is that entail does it mean I have to commit to maybe writing stuff that I put on some public directory of articles you know or I have to write on Quora for instance and keep going at it in order to get consistent results I can give you a short answer to that short answer is no you don't really have to you can in fact just write fairly short articles about 500 words and distribute them on you can just create one post blogs this can be on blog spot you can put on WordPress and Quora and so on so far each the way that the Google ranking algorithm works it gives you credit for links coming from each of these domains so if you have like okay I have one from blog spot one from WordPress one from Quora it's like a checklist gives you the credit gives your profile credibility and that is sufficient at the basic level if you find that of course that these are viable traffic sources and you can develop it further then by all means go ahead write more content and you'll get even better result and that brings me to the last point right one thing that in the synopsis on hackers and painters I mentioned the last thing is you can if you could just take a minute more to craft your message you can actually improve a lot the results that you get so one of the things that I think is a very common mistake is that when we write stuff we have title you have these headers right h2 tags and too often we just go with the flow and you think that okay I just want to write something that makes sense coherence useful to the user but if you could just offer a little bit more take a minute then you can write something that perhaps will rank better for SEO because there are keywords involved like if I want we're even writing this blog post I could have named it anything I could have called it how are you should top of the pile on Google you know how I beat Google at its game but the thing is if you can the more descriptive that or rather the more closely the keyword you are trying to rank for you know matches exactly the stuff that you write the better the outcome so if you want to rank for say top Google search results then you ought to find a way to put it in one of the first bodies of text to show up so in this case I put it in the title and then also I put it here so if you're able to just observe this simple rule try to put the keyword in the title or early in the body that gives you also a big edge text that comes earlier in the body actually is considered more valuable than text that comes lower so if you are sometimes it's really nice for one kind of weird thing sometimes we have a lot of difficulty writing an introduction like you want to write a really nice one forget it just write something that has your keyword and it gets right to the point it's fine if you want to prettify it later on it's fine you can do that but later to to be maximally effective with your time and your writing just make sure that your words are there and for me I think that about wraps up the main points I try to keep it short because I know that we have something who's waiting for his turn and also text is already on the blog so if you want to read it please go ahead and I think do we have Michael do we have some time for any questions okay yeah I hope I kept that really short so does anybody have any questions yes where is it hosted are you using some like flow player video daily motion yeah that's a really good question unfortunately I don't really know it's a I've read I've read that I mean I follow a few blogs that I really respect and I've read that some people say it doesn't really matter and Google's own policy on this is that all these web properties are treated equally the search the search on search you'll say we have we we is not our policy to favor the Google properties because if you do that it's just makes really everybody else really angry like you know I'm not only Google therefore I get a worse outcome then also that people who say that clearly has to make a difference because you know YouTube is fully optimized the team will tell them when something is wrong so I really don't have a straightforward answer that's a good question anybody else when you say when you say like use multiple make something on global make something you work for us yeah you mean actually write different posts or actually copy paste and actually stand from all thank you that's also a very good question so you should write different posts but there are fantastic tools out there that are totally free and which give you a nice benefit of not having to show it doesn't really matter so since it's my history obviously you know that something useful so you have this really simple tools they give you something like let me just make this so here you see have one block that is it will permute permutate between these four words no these four phrases running creating publishing constantly and then you have this is it's always unique and then after that again it permutates between these so if your articles written in this format it will always create something fairly unique and then you spin it and you have several different it's yeah it's really nice and if you are having a lot of difficulty with creative writing you know a synonym a synonym generator also helps yeah thank you anything else yes that has the that has the potential to get you into more trouble like the ideal way of doing it might maybe assume right something that's totally yours unique then after that you could try to create variations of it but you should at least try to do it one time fully go on yeah then some effort put in to make it unique as much as possible would be very helpful might also be worth mentioning that there's stuff like the markup they can use like open graph the open graph protocol to designate this this text description is the image to show on Facebook when people share it and there's also Twitter cards Twitter has a protocol for the same purpose called Twitter cards that right there you go so anything else that seems to be about it okay if you have any follow-up questions on can talk to me later or just tweet to me Twitter handle Twitter handle is so I guess that's all thank you all very much