Advanced search engine optimization (SEO) training and workshop in New York City for Webgrrls International.

1. Advanced SEO
Foundation & Deep Dive Techniques
Etela Ivkovic, GM, DragonSearch - @Etela, +Etela
Josepf Haslam, Biz Dev, DragonSearch - @Josepf
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2. Background on SEO
What/Why
• Context of SEO: looking at
it’s influence and history
and tying it all together
with
“How to grow your
business online” infograph
Resource
• The Complete Walk-Through to Grow Your
Business Online #Infographic
• The DragonSearch Online Marketing Manual
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3. Context Slide from infographics
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4. 97%
of online consumers research products & services
online before buying
Source: BIA/Kelsey Group, User View Wave VII, May 2010
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5. Promise of Google
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6. Context slide SEO/Social
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7. Evolution
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8. 0. Self Published Indexes/Directories
1. Human Published SERPs (Yahoo)
2. Counting Words on a Page (AltaVista/Lycos)
3. Counting Words & External Links (Google)
4. PageRank and “Voting” with Links (Google/Bing)
5. Social Voting, Site Authority, Awesome Content,
Citations, Connectedness, Author Citations/Rank
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9. Step back
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10. Why Social Recommendations
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11. What is SEO
• We take a deeper dive into the technical side of SEO
• Explaining how it has morphed from a three legged
stool to four legs and then turn to our learning
objectives
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12. What is SEO?
• Search Engine Optimization is the Art &
Science of helping your site be crawled,
indexed and be found in Organic/Natural
(nonpaid) Search Results.
• SEO is a process & a mindset
• Expands into site architecture, coding
performance, usability, content quality, user
interaction, sharing and conversion
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13. Optimization
The 3 legged stool of SEO just got another leg
1. Site Content
2. Site Code, Structure &
Performance
3. External Backlinks
4. Social Signals
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14. Learning Objectives
• We will clear the major elements of SEO in this
order:
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15. Learning Objectives
• The importance of and how to conduct advanced keyword research
• Advanced on-page optimization with cross linking strategy
• Advanced off-site factors including link building and maintenance
• How to evaluate the health of your back-link portfolio
• How to assess the strength of your competitor back-links and where their
visitors come from
• Discover how to identify the demographics of your top competitor sites
• What is Google Panda & Penguin updates and how to use them to your
advantage
• How to overcome common problems associated with CMS driven sites such
as duplicate content, spider traps
• SEO & Social Media
• Understand Google’s vision for the future of search to gain a competitive
advantage
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16. But first, the Goal
• “Start with the end in mind” Dr. Stephen Covey
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17. What’s The End Objective
THE MONEY!
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18. Be Found Online, Drive Results!
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19. How Do I Get More (and Better)
Organic Traffic?
• Understand keywords (search phrases) that
are important to you
• Understand how Google determines relevance
• Build and optimize your site based on keyword
research for all 4 elements of SEO (later)
• Get citations / shares / back-links to improve
positions over time
• Measure, tweak and test based on Analytics
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20. Take a Deep Breath
• A website is posted, linked to, or updates its
content
• Search engine “spider” or “bot” crawls the page
• Skims URL, page titles, meta data, text, images,
etc.
• Follow links, counts in/out
• Indexes keywords, SEMANTICS, notes frequency
• “Weighs” the page relative to others as well as
based on user behavior for topical relevance &
quality
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21. Advanced Keyword Research
• It all starts here, you have to understand what
people are searching for and how that is related to
your business.
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22. Advanced Keyword Research
• It starts with your own Analytics
• Track your internal site search
• Google Suggest
• AdWords Keyword Tool
• Google Trends
• YouTube Keyword Tool
• Keyword Spy
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24. What is Google Analytics?
• Free, easy-to-use web analytics tool
• Provides reports showing how visitors found your website, and
what they did when they got there
• Measures the effectiveness of your online and offline marketing
campaigns
• You STILL may need to build a Marketing ROI Dashboard to
integrate offline channels!!!
www.google.com/analytics
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25. What Answers Can Google Analytics
Provide?
Where are visitors
coming from?
What keywords did
they use?
Am I creating
effective content?
Where are visitors
abandoning my
shopping cart?
How can I improve
site interaction?
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26. Set goals and track performance

27. Multi Channel Funnels –
Tracking the Marketing Mix
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28. Using AdWords for Keywords
• How does Google make 98% of its revenue?
– PPC
• Google’s AdWords will show you how Google
evaluates your site for Paid Advertising
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29. Image copyright: public domain
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30. Research
– Body Text here
– Body Text here
– This is a test
– 123
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32. Focus
Rumplestiltskin
Big Bad Wolf
Cinderella Sleeping Beauty
Mother Goose
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33. Google Trends for Search
View what the world is searching for and gain insights for your business
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34. Applying Trends to Predict Product Sales
• Compare interest between states or regions:
o What type of jeans should a Wyoming retailer stock?
o What about Oklahoma?
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35. Google Suggest
What people are searching for on Google
• Drops down a list of suggestions as you type
• People are asking Google..
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36. How to Use Google Suggest
• Type s-l-o-w-l-y, pay attention, be creative
• Keep typing letter by letter and the suggestions will change
• Try it signed out
o Google pulls from your history (if signed in) and other users, indexed sites and
ads.
• Great way to get ideas to expand your topical relevance, attract new
relevant traffic and consider paid ads
• Write down the ideas and run them through the Google AdWords keyword
research tool
o Experiment by checking “Don’t show ideas for new keywords”
o Compare the results, take them to Google Trends
o Watch Suggest for reputation management purposes
Resources
• How Google’s “Search Suggest” Works Video
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37. Short Head – Long Tail
Beast
Mythical Beast
Mythical New York Beast
Mythical New York Subway Beast
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38. Think in Neighborhoods
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39. Checkout Competition
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40. Recap of Keyword Research
• Start with your site’s analytics
• Study your internal site search
• Play with Google Suggest
• Get search volume and competition data from
AdWords
• Check and compare key phrase performance over time
in Google Trends
• Map out your site and document your keyword
strategy
• Use the long tail
• Pay close attention to related terms and synonyms
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41. Advanced On-page Optimization (1)
• Search engines rank pages also factoring
o usability,
o social signals,
o site authority,
o user interaction with the site,
o speed, etc.
• Google factors in UX (User Experience)
o Running a CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) program will help focus on UX
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42. Advanced On-page Optimization (2)
• Research, benchmark, compare to competitors,
plan goals, prioritize
• Continue on-page optimization best practices!
• Use semantically related words and synonyms
• Get UGC (user generated content) like reviews,
comments, etc.
• Enable and encourage social sharing
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43. Advanced on-page optimization (3)
• Use Schema (more on this later)
• Pay attention to your entire site’s theme
• Create and publish awesome content on a regular
basis
• Make sure your site is structured well around your
audience’s needs and your important pages
• Use CRO to improve site performance and UX
• Ensure your site was built with clean code, is fast,
accessible, content is indexable
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44. Doing Things the Right Way
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45. Spiders read the HTML
<HTML>
</HTML>
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46. Organized HTML is Important!
<HTML>
<head>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</HTML>
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47. Dual view of code/SERP
<HTML>
<head>
<Title> My Title </Title>
<Meta Name=“Description” Content=“This is my page”>
<Meta Name=“Keywords” Content=“this, that, other”>
</head>
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48. <h1>My Top Header</h1>
<p>A bunch of paragraph text</p>
<h2>A Secondary Header</h2>
<p>And a lot more paragraph text</p>
<h3>A Tertiary Header</h3>
<p>And perhaps some more text</p>
<p>A List:</p>
<ul>
<li>A list item</li>
<li>Another list item</li>
<li>Yet another list item</li>
</ul>
<p>And this is a <a
href="http://mylink.com">LINK </a></p>
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49. Schema.org
• Structured data
o Helps search engines understand data & provide better search results
• Major search engines need and support it
• Enhanced search display – stand out
• Sites are already benefiting from it
• Events, products, recipes, reviews, videos, etc.
• Go through the list and use what applies to your site
• Tag your data
• Test your code, preview your snippet
Resources
• Schema.org - Full Hierarchy
• Schema.org's FAQ and blog
• Structured Data Testing Tool
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50. Recap of On-page Optimization
• Research, benchmark, plan
• Make sure your site is accessible to spiders, loads fast, is well
structured and coded
• Keep your site’s theme focused
• Follow traditional on-page optimization best practices: title,
description, headers, copy, images, link out to high authority
relevant sites, cross linking, URLs, call to action, etc.
• Do not over-optimize pages, links
• Use natural language: synonyms, related, relevant terms, stemming
variations, singular/plural, etc.
• Use Schema
• Get UGC
• Get social
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51. Resources & Tools
Tools
• Webmaster Tools
• Google Analytics
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
• YouTube Keyword Tool
Blogs
• DragonSearch Marketology Blog
• SEOmoz – Blog and community
• Matt Cutts – Head of Google’s Webspam team
• Search Engine Land – News, insights
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52. Advanced Off-site Factors
• If you build it they will not come
• Unless you are the only one in the world with
your unique content
• We turn to off-site factors in SEO in this next
section
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53. Advanced Off-site Factors
• Off-site begins with “real”, great content
• Get your great content in front of the target
audience
• Where are they?
• Do real life stuff
o Get involved with on and offline communities, sponsor,
donate, help, etc.
• Be a guest author
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54. The Back Link Portfolio
Link building changed but is still very important
High
Special Sites
Easy Difficult
Low
Directories
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55. Not All Links are Equal
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56. Why Links Are Important
• Links to your pages confer authority and
relevancy to that page
• The more important the page linking to you, the
more beneficial for you
• The more relevant the page linking
to you is, the better
• The more relevant the wording
that people use to link to your
site, the better
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57. Why Links Are Important To Google
• Links tell Google what a website is about
• What keywords are relevant to your site
• How important your site is
• Where your site is
• What content niche the site occupies – what the
context of your site is
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58. Old School vs. New School SEO
OLD SCHOOL
NEW SCHOOL
SHORT HAND OPTIMIZATION BROADER LONG TAIL
Fueled
BACKLINKS
Reciprocal Linking RELATIONSHIPS by
Social
RELEVANT CONNECTIONS Media
RELEVANT CONNECTIONS
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59. Google Webmaster Tools
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60. How to Evaluate the Health of Your
Backlink Portfolio
• Walk-through SEOMOZ’s OpenSitExplorer.org
• A tool to evaluate your own site and your competition
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65. How to Assess the Strength of Your
Competitor Backlinks
• We continue our walk-through SEOMOZ’s Open Sit
Explorer to take a closer look at competitive back-
links
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66. Review Linking Domains & Anchor Text
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67. Local
• On-page
o Local signals - Address, local phone, geographical relevance, etc.
o Traditional SEO best practices – geo-modified
• Off-site
o Local links, listings, maps, proper categories, etc.
o NAP – name, address, phone number consistency
o Google+ - verification, accurate category, local address and phone number
o Who is ranking for your terms?
o What are they doing?
o How can you be on their site?
• Reviews
• Ratings
• Citations
• Social mentions
Resources
• 2012 Local Search Ranking Factors
• Glossary of Local Search Terms and Definitions
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68. Google Panda & Penguin
• We focus on the big two named changes, but, Google has
fundamentally changed how they index the web. Wake up
and pay attention!
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69. Google Panda Updates
• First released February 23, 2011
• Panda #24 released January 22, 2013
• Target:
thin content, content
farms, sites with high
ad-to-content ratios, quality,
authority, trust, integrates user
signals
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70. Panda – What Do I Do?
• Vision for your company and content. Differentiate yourself.
• Create awesome, unique content. Good content is not good
enough.
• Remove duplicate content
• Remove low quality pages
• Improve or merge shallow content into high-quality content
• Low quality content will affect the high quality pages and the entire
site’s rankings
• Strategic cross linking strategy
• Stop chasing the algorithm & focus on the user and
long term business development
– do #RCS: real company stuff
Resources:
• Google’s guidance on building high-quality sites
• Panda Update News
• Google Panda Update, One Year Later, Infographic
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71. Google Penguin Updates
• First released April 24, 2012
• Penguin #3 released October 5, 2012
• Target:
webspam, link schemes, over
optimized anchor text, keyword
stuffing, cloaking, low quality
content
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72. Penguin – What Do I Do?
• Did your traffic drop right after 4/24/12? Hit.
• Did your traffic increase? Benefited.
• Clean up on-page spam
• Remove spammy links – also check for WordPress
plug-ins that may insert hidden links
• Don’t stuff keywords in your anchor text for both
internal and external links
• Only use the Disavow Tool if you have to
• Diversify and build high-quality, relevant links
• Get social media love
Resources
• Report errors if you think you were penalized by mistake
• Google’s Disavow Links Tool – To Use or Not to Use?
• Link Building Strategies of Yosemite Sam Meet Google’s Disavow Tool
• Penguin Recovery During Panda Update Case Study
• Post-Penguin Anchor Text Case Study
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73. Do Not Do This! Please!
Resources
• Google’s Link Schemes Guidelines
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74. Panda <3 Penguin
Why I think they got
married
• Target spam, link
scheme
• Low quality content,
keyword stuffing
• Low quality links
• Authority, trust
• Social signals
• Moving towards
quality, unique
content & authorship
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75. Other Updates
• June 2010 - Caffeine rollout
o Index freshness: nearly real time
crawling and indexing
o Set the stage for Panda and Penguin
• May 2010 – Mayday; returning quality results for long-tail queries
• February 2011 – Panda
• April 2012 – Penguin
• May 2012 - Knowledge Graph
• August 2012— 7-Result SERPs
• September 2012 – Exact Match Domain Update
Resources
• Keyword Rich Domain Names – Should You Invest?
• 7 Is The New 10? Google Showing Fewer Results & More From Same Domain
• Search quality highlights: 65 changes for August and September
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76. How Do I Deal with Constant Updates?
• They are here to stay and more is coming
• Panda/Penguin changed the way many businesses approach
online marketing
• Understand your niche and audience; set yourself apart
• Focus on doing real business development = be update proof
• Google will crush algorithm manipulation efforts
• Have a multi pronged approach
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77. Overcoming CMS Problems
• Wordpress example using an SEO Plug-in as a
best practice
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83. Not All CMS’s are Created Equal
• Open Source platforms like WordPress typically
have a wider variety of options
• SEO is critical to your website being found and
therefore your business results
• You may want to consider a platform move
before investing a lot of time into site
optimization…
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84. SEO & Social Media
• “The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind, the
answer is blowing in the wind.” Bob Dylan
• SEO & Social are merging in ways no-one can
accurately predict, however…
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85. Evidence of Social Influence
• 71% to 83% of people Social Influence on Purchasing
use “Reviews” to
influence purchase 17%
decisions Does not use
Uses Online Reviews
83%
• 80% will change a
decision based on
negative reviews
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86. Why Does Social Add so Much Value?
Revenue per Order % Difference
Social/Others $ 280.00 107%
Social Primary $ 249.08 84%
Paid/Org $ 230.07 70%
Display $ 206.00 52%
Organic $ 135.37
• A study of 56 billion impressions, 2.7 billion
clicks and $13 billion in revenue concludes that
inclusion of Social Media increases revenue 84%
over natural search alone.
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87. What it looks like

88. McGinnis Example

89. McGinnis logged out

90. Virtuous Circle of Social Media for SEO

91. Enterprise Level Social Monitoring
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92. Sysomos
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93. Illustration from Ric Dragon’s Social Marketology book

94. How Do I Measure Success?
• Install Google Analytics
• Set up goals
• Set up Google and Bing Webmaster Tools
• Your goal is not to RANK!
• Increase in visitors to the site
• Bounce rate
• Visit length
• Number of pages visited
• Engagement and sharing
• Comments, reviews, social sharing and mentions
• Conversions
• Sales, form submissions, leads, phone calls, etc.
• Measure, tweak, test
Resources
• Website Search Engine Rankings Got You Down? Stop the Insanity!
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95. The Future is?
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96. The Future
• Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and
make it universally accessible and useful
• What Google believes:
o #1: Focus on the user and all else will follow.
o Knowledge Graph - "the semantic web", the system that has
understanding as well as data
o Moving from an information engine to a knowledge engine
• The only constant is change
• Information will come to you
• Personalization, studying user behavior
• Adapt early
• Diversify your marketing efforts; don’t rely on Google only
• … It may not be Google
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97. Q & A!
Any and all questions entertained!
Josepf Haslam, Etela Ivkovic |
DragonSearch.net/blog
Josepf@dragonsearch.net |
Twitter: @Josepf
Etela@dragonsearch.net |
Twitter: @Etela
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98. Appendix - Useful Links and Resources
• DragonSearch’s blog
• Josepf’s Scoop.it and Josepf’s Pinterest
• Keyword Rich Domain Names – Should You Invest?
• 7 Is The New 10? Google Showing Fewer Results & More From Same Domain
• Search quality highlights: 65 changes for August and September
• Report errors if you think you were penalized by mistake
• Google’s Disavow Links Tool – To Use or Not to Use?
• Link Building Strategies of Yosemite Sam Meet Google’s Disavow Tool
• Penguin Recovery During Panda Update Case Study
• Post-Penguin Anchor Text Case Study
• Google’s Link Schemes Guidelines
• Website Search Engine Rankings Got You Down? Stop the Insanity!
• Google’s guidance on building high-quality sites
• Panda Update News
• Google Panda Update, One Year Later, Infographic
• Schema.org - Full Hierarchy
• Schema.org's FAQ and blog
• Structured Data Testing Tool
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99. More Resources & Tools
Tools
• Webmaster Tools
• Google Analytics
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
• YouTube Keyword Tool
Blogs
• DragonSearch Marketology Blog
• SEOmoz – Blog and community
• Matt Cutts – Head of Google’s Webspam team
• Search Engine Land – News, insights
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102. Thank You!
Social Marketology book
Available on Amazon!
Josepf Haslam, Etela Ivkovic | DragonSearch.net/blog
Josepf@dragonsearch.net | Twitter: @Josepf, Google+: +Josepf
Etela@dragonsearch.net | Twitter: @Etela, Google+: +Etela
Get these presentations here: http://drsr.ch/webgrrls
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