SEO is hard. It’s a sub-section of the digital industry that has never found common ground. It's nearly impossible to tell who's good at it and who's not. Fortunately, you can lay a foundation for good organic search traffic by implementing best practices on your own website.

1. Optimizing Your Website
for Search Engines

2. Interactive Strategy Manager
Swanson Russell
Tony Sattler
teesatts

3. What is LAUNCH?
LAUNCHis an education and communication initiative that
aims to bring account teams and clients up-to-speed on new
trends and technologies in the digital space.

4. • Keyword Targeting
• Off-Site Optimization
• Website Optimization
Key Elements of SEO

5. SEO is kind of like whack-a-mole.
Something works for a while, and then
Google squishes it, and new strategies come
in vogue.

6. “Imagine your retail store was on a road that no one ever drove
down unless they found it on a map.
And then imagine that they redid the maps every week and the
mapmakers refused to tell you exactly how they went about
deciding which roads to draw and in which hierarchy to place them.
Could you imagine finding investors for that sort of store?”
Source: The problem with search engine optimization, Seth Godin

7. SEO is volatile.
Like chemical compositions, when the web
changes, it changes a lot. You need to constantly
adapt so that your rankings don’t suffer.

10. “A study of search engine results pages revealed only 15% had
no news, no local, no video, no image, no paid inclusion.”
Source: Beyond Ten Blue Links

11. SEO is hard.
It’s a sub-section of the digital industry that has never found
common ground.
It's nearly impossible to tell who's good at it and who's not.
Fortunately, you can lay a foundation for good organic search
traffic by implementing best practices on your own website.

12. 11
Website Optimization Techniques

13. #1
Generate Keywords

14. Build a competitive keyword
spreadsheet using Google's
Keyword Planner Tool.
Keyword Discovery
https://adwords.google.com/ko/
KeywordPlanner/Home‎

15. • Assess keywords for
relevance and competitive
opportunities. Use these
keywords in 2+ times in
page copy.
• Use high competition
keywords in page headers
and the first few sentences
of copy.
Build Content Around Keywords

16. #2
Focus on the Long Tail

17. Long Tail Leaders

18. Long Tail Strategy
• Find opportunities to write
content on very specific
keywords, rather than those
with more search traffic.
• A benefit of staying focused
on long-tail content is that
it usually delivers better
conversion rates.

19. #3
Clean Up Your Appearance

20. Meta Titles
• By far the most important
part of on page
optimization.
• The title should not be
longer than 77 characters
in length. Use Keywords.
• Use pipes to divide your
phrases so they look
natural.

21. Meta Descriptions and Keywords
• Descriptions have a
restriction of about
150-160 characters and
have the same weight on
the first several words of
a sentence.
• Need to be engaging to a
user. Add top keywords
but also convince them to
click on your link.

22. URL Structure
• Must be human-readable.
• Use URL paths to give
users a clear look at the
page structure of the
your website.
• Use hyphens to separate
words for readability.
They should not use
underscores, spaces, or
any other characters.

23. Image Alt Tags
• Images with alt tags
allow search engines to
match the description to
the site's content
possibly aiding in search
engine rankings.
• Over the past few years,
Google has placed more
emphasis on image
search results.

24. Content Management of Meta
• If your site has a built in CMS platform like Wordpress,
Drupal, etc., you should be able to directly input meta
content
• You also can have a developer build your meta content into
the page header code of static pages.

25. #4
Make it Easy to Use

26. Provide a Great User Experience
• Content and Navigation is easily
consumed and understood.
• Design is aesthetically polished and
fits the brand.
• Page layout makes scanning easy
and important content elements are
arranged in a clear hierarchy.

27. Responsive Web Design
Provide a friendly user experience for all site visitors,
regardless of browser or device being used (including
desktop, tablet, smartphone, etc.).

28. Text vs Code
• Search engines want your site to
be fast and efficient. Minimalist
is better in many cases.
• In general, it’s best practice to
use the least amount of code
possible. Unnecessary tags incur
additional page weight, slower
downloads and more inefficient
browser rendering.

29. Don’t Use Flash
• Remove all Flash from your site.
No flash banners, no flash movies,
and especially no flash website.
• Google hates it.
• Flash isn't iOS compatible.

30. #5
Crawl Before You Can Run

31. Generate an XML Sitemap
• Search engines use crawlers to index
and rate your site for search results.
• An XML sitemap can be submitted to
Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search
engines to help them crawl your
website better.
• Many CMS offer auto-generation of
XML sitemaps.

32. Submit Your XML Sitemap
• Upload the XML file into the domain
root folder of your site.
• Check that sitemap is working at
http://yoururl.com/sitemap.xml
• Create a Google Webmaster account
and add your sitemap URL.

33. Submit Your XML Sitemap

34. Useable = Crawlable
Search engines need to
know what menu sections
you have that will appeal to
users. Breadcrumbs links,
links to social media pages
and a text footer menu will
assist the crawl.

35. #6
Eliminate Errors

36. Crawl Errors
• Its important to have Google
Webmaster Tools installed. This
tool gives you information about
any specific errors your site has,
sitemap submission, and how
your site is behaving.
• Webmaster Tools displays a
variety of different errors that
can be easily fixed in content or
with redirects.

37. HTML Improvements
• Webmaster Tools also offers an
HTML improvements section
which will help your search
appearance.
• Google will point out issues with
title tags and descriptions as
they appear in their crawl.
• Again, most issues can simply be
fixed in content.

38. On-Page Report Card
http://moz.com/

39. On-Page Report Card
http://moz.com/

40. #7
Decrease Bounce Rate

41. Identify Bounce Rate Issues
• Sites with high bounce rates get lower
organic search rankings.
• Use Google Analytics to easily identify
pages that have bounce rate issues.
Examine to see if page content is
relevant to the keywords being searched.

42. #8
(Back)Links Are Your Best Friend

43. Ethical Link Building
• “Link Juice” - It’s a popularity
contest.
• Just ask vendors, partners,
clients, and any other credible
source to embed linked
keywords back to your site.
• Embed links in your press
releases.

44. #9
Be Social

45. Integrate Social Sharing
• Include sharing options to the
optimal social networks for the
page’s audience.
• As appropriate, employ 3rd party
meta data such as tags for
Facebook Open Graph, Twitter
Cards, etc.

46. Create a Blog
• Use the blog to write about your
niche content.
• Do keyword research to find out
what is trending in your industry
and include them in your blog
posts.
• Link articles back to the website
when possible and the blog will
increase your visibility.

47. #10
Give Them What They Want

48. Content is Everything
For SEO, the best strategy is, and will always be, creating
authoritative content that people like and want to share.
• Who’s your audience? Personas?
• Where are the gaps in content?
• Do you have the resources to build content?
• Where/how will it be distributed?
• How will you measure its impact?

49. #11
Be Patient

50. • Free
- Keyword Spreadsheet
- Google Keyword Planner
- Sitemap Generator
- Google Webmaster Tools
- Google Analytics
• Paid
- Moz.com
- SEMRush
- Compete Pro
- BrightEdge
Tools Round-Up

51. Questions?
Interactive Strategy Manager
tonys@swansonrussell.com
Tony Sattler