Advanced SEO technique slide deck for Leeds Digital Festival 2016 - tailored to audience and handouts. For more thorough and better guides please see Moz or Neil Patel.

1. SEARCH ENGINE
OPTIMISATION
AN ADVANCED GUIDE TO

2. CONTENTS
• How does Google populate a SERP?
• Google Rank Brain & Knowledge Graph
• Technical SEO
• Google’s Search Quality Guidelines
• Maintaining a healthy link profile

3. HOW DOES GOOGLE
POPULATE A SERP?

4. SERP
A search engine results page (SERP) is the list of results that a search
engine returns in response to a specific word or phrase query.

6. SPIDERS - CRAWLERS - BOTS
SPIDERS CRAWLERS BOTS
A browser like program that
downloads webpages and
websites
A program and follows the
links on a webpage
An automated computer
program that visit websites
& perform predefined task.

7. SERP FEATURES
• Spelling suggestions, definitions, related searches, related questions,
calculator, translator, answers, featured snippets, maps, images,
videos, movie showtimes, sports scores and fixtures, weather, flight
statuses, news results, tweets
• The Knowledge Graph

8. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN
A USER SEARCHES?

9. • QUERY UNDERSTANDING AND EXPANSION
• RETRIEVAL AND SCORING
• POST RETRIEVAL ADJUSTMENTS

10. (PRE-QUERY)
• Crawls all available pages and URLs on the web
• Analysis of crawled pages (extract links, annotate semantics)
• Store this data and build an index
• Index is like the index of a book
• For each ‘keyword’, there is a list of pages it appears on
• Broken up into groups (known as shards)

11. UNDERSTANDING THE QUERY
• Does the query have any known entities?
• Beyonce, Cristiano Ronaldo, Sydney Opera House
• Are there useful synonyms?
• Are the synonyms ambiguous? (gm = general motors, genetically
modified)
• What’s the context?

12. RETRIEVAL AND SCORING
• Send the query to all the shards
• Each shard then:
• Finds matching pages
• Computes a score (S1) for query+page
• Sends back the top N pages (by S1)
• Combines the top pages and then sorts (ranks) by score

13. POST RETRIEVAL ADJUSTMENTS
• Too much duplication in results?
• Negative user interactions?
• Search abandonment
• Need for spam demotions/manual actions?

14. RANK BRAIN &
KNOWLEDGE GRAPH

15. RANK BRAIN

16. KNOWLEDGE GRAPH

17. KNOWLEDGE GRAPH
Depending on the brand and business model, these panels might include:
• Basic info and a brief description from Wikipedia
• Photos from Google Plus
• Stock prices from Google Finance, Yahoo Finance and MSN Money
• Reviews from Google
• Social profiles
• Competitors
• Related searches

18. KNOWLEDGE GRAPH
https://developers.google.com/structured-data/customize/overview

19. TECHNICAL SEO

20. TECHNICAL SEO
• Indexation & Accessibility
• Site Speed & Performance
• URL structure
• Search Verticals
• Search appearance

21. INDEXATION &
ACCESSIBILITY

22. HOW DOES GOOGLE VIEW YOUR SITE?
http://www.browseo.net/

23. WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR
• Can you see all of your menu links (drop downs too!)?
• Do all of the menu items and links appear as plain text?
• Are all the links clickable?
• Does this reveal any text that was previously hidden? (Hidden text can
send a red flag to Googlebot. It might not always be there maliciously,
but it shouldn't be there.)
• Is your sidebar or widgets content all the way at the top? Remember,
your most important links and content should be at the top of the
HTML. This is more important the bigger the site is.

24. BROKEN LINKS & DEAD ENDS
• Broken Link Checker
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ojkcdipcgfaekbeaelaapakg
njflfglf
• Site Liner http://siteliner.com/
• Dead Link Checker http://www.deadlinkchecker.com/

25. SITE SPEED &
PERFORMANCE

26. http://tools.pingdom.com/

27. SITE SPEED & PERFORMANCE
Website performance radically impacts our success, 64% of smartphone
users expect websites to load in under four seconds.
• Avoid plugins where possible. Features like carousels, tabbed
interfaces, lightboxes and scrolling are often implemented using
plugins, but these plugins are heavy, as they try to solve every
scenario imaginable.
• Optimise Images
• Optimise fonts

28. URL STRUCTURE

29. URL STRUCTURE
homepage.co.uk
homepage.co.uk/volunteering-opportunities
homepage.co.uk/volunteering-opportunities/leeds
homepage.co.uk/volunteering-opportunities/leeds/elder-care

31. SITEMAPS - XML
• www.homepage.com/sitemap.xml
• https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
• Upload via Google Search Console
• Helps Google identify all the pages on your site
• Only include indexed pages on the sitemap

32. SITEMAPS - HTML
• Allow bots to navigate the site better
• Can help Google establish a page hierarchy

33. MAINTAINING A
HEALTHY LINK
PROFILE

34. LINK THEORY
The more links you have to your site from other relevant sites, the higher
your rankings will be (especially if the Anchor text used is optimised and
targeted).

35. LINK THEORY
Vary your link anchor text
Don’t submit to too many directories online

36. SEARCH
VERTICALS

37. SEARCH VERTICALS
• Mobile friendly sites
• Optimising online slide decks
• Deeper social integration
• Image optimisation

38. MOBILE FRIENDLY SITES
• April 21, 2015 ‘Mobilegeddon’
• March 2016, Google announced it would update the algorithm in May
• April 2016, Google warns webmasters that their site’s aren’t mobile
friendly
• May 2016, Expected slow rollout of algorithm update
• Google Mobile Friendly Checker -
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

39. SEARCH
APPEARANCE

40. SEARCH APPEARANCE

41. SEARCH APPEARANCE
TITLE TAG
META DESCRIPTION
URL

42. SEARCH ANALYTICS
Google Search Console: