An introduction to Search Engine
Optimization (SEO) and web
analytics on fao.org
Nicholas Waltham – Federica Marano
Office of Corporate Communication (OCCI)
30 May 2017

Did you know?
 FAO web pages cover the 6 official
languages: Arabic, Chinese, English,
French, Russian and Spanish.
 Plus Japanese, Italian and
Portuguese in some website’s areas.
2.7 Millions
of pages in
2017

Outline
 Learning objectives
 Understanding the importance of optimizing pages for site visitors and search
engines
 How to apply basic concepts of SEO to your website’s content
 Analyze and monitor the user intent and behaviors
 Questions and answers

Learning objectives
By the end of this webinar, you will be able to:
 Understand the importance of optimizing web pages for site visitors and
search engines
 Incorporate the basic concepts of SEO in your website’s content
 Understand the linkage between your website and the search engines
crawling/indexation
 Understand the importance of focusing on the user experience and behavior
 Incorporate the basic concepts of web analytics in monitoring your website

Understanding the importance of
optimizing a page for site visitors and
search engines
Section one

OCCI & SEO
 For corporate pages OCCI takes care of SEO
 For the many technical aspects of SEO,
CIO ensures compatibility/compliance
 SEO best practices change over time, together
CIO and OCC keep abreast of developments
 Please consider OCCI your resources for
up to date SEO advices and assistance

Search Engine Indexation
 In order for your website to appear in the search engine results pages, they
must be indexed by the search engine.
 Search engines can read and crawl HTML and PDF text format. So, if your
content is written in well-coded HTML, there should be no problem.
HOW DO I KNOW WHAT CONTENT
SEARCH ENGINES CAN CRAWL?

Avoid Orphan Pages
 Search engine crawlers follow links from one web page to another to find and
index pages.
 A page must have at least one inbound link which search engine crawlers can
follow in order for the page to be discovered and indexed.
 If a website has pages that are not linked to from other pages of your site,
that page becomes an “orphan page”.
 Orphan pages typically perform poorly in search results or may never be
discovered at all by search engines, in which case they won’t be indexed.

Keywords
 Keywords are at the heart of SEO
 They play a vital role in search engine indexation
 Search engine spiders crawl a webpage and extract the most frequently used
words on a page to determine the page topic (page title / header tags having
special significance)
 A page frequently uses the term “climate change” and includes it in title
tags, search engines will index that page in their “climate change” database

What then happens when a person types
in a query?
climate change
climate change
climate change

Write for people, not search engines
 You don’t need to repeat the keywords you want to rank for over and over
again
 YOUR CONTENT SHOULD READ NATURALLY
 Write for people, not search engines
 Keyword “stuffing” doesn’t only lead to a negative user experience…
…it can also penalise a website in search engine rankings

How to apply basic concepts of SEO
to your website’s content
Section two

Keyword Mapping
First step
• Think ahead about Page Title creation/length and Page Content
edits while mapping keywords
Second
step
• You should target a maximum of 3-4 keywords per page
• Don’t target the same keyword as primary on multiple pages
Third step
• List keywords in their order of importance e.g. ‘Keyword 1’ is the
primary keyword, ‘Keyword 2’ is the secondary keyword. This will
keep the Page Content Edit process consistent and effective

Page Titles
•are a very important part of search engine ranking algorithms.
For this reason, it is vital that Page Titles contain target
keywords
Page Titles
•The contents of the Title tag is also what’s displayed as the link
in the search results. Since there’s a limited amount of space,
ensure keywords display roughly within the first 65 characters.
Search Titles
•The earlier you can include your target keywords in your page
title, the better.
Include target keywords
as early as possible
•Ensure every page on the website has a unique Title. It is better
to avoid duplicate titles.Unique Titles

On Page Optimisation - Page Content Elements
•They are used by search engines to help identify the topic or
subject of pages on the website and are a valuable tool to
enhance prominence of target keywords within your pages.
•The top-level heading tag (H1) is the weightiest heading in
terms of SEO, and should include the most important keyword of
the page – preferably at the beginning of the heading text.
Headings
• The text of the webpage should include the
targeted keywords. However, moderation is
required as to keyword density; the content
should read naturally or the page may be
penalised by search engines.
Body
Text
H1
H2
Body Text

•Alt tag and title tags – all images on a website can be given
descriptive alternate tags and title tags, which enable
search engine crawlers to ‘understand’ an image. This can
improve rankings if you include relevant keywords.
Image
Tags
• The meta description is the text displayed below the title and URL of
a search result. Inserting keywords in the meta description of a
webpage has no effect on rankings. However, it can improve click-
through rates as keywords are being highlighted by the search engine
(as shown below).
Meta Tags
On Page Optimisation - Page Content Elements

PDF
 Much of the same techniques apply with relation to content
 Embed the correct metadata
 Keep file size down (compress graphics)

Analyze and monitor the user intent
and behaviors
Section three

How Google Analytics works
 Google Analytics is a platform that collects data and compiles it into
useful reports
 A piece of Javascript tracking code is added to each page of your
website
 Every time a user visits a webpage, the tracking code will collect
anonymous information about how that user interacted with the page
* All the information are taken from the Google
Analytics academy courses, and the examples are
taken from the FAO.org profile in Google Analytics.

Exploring the left-hand navigation
 Website profile name
 Dashboard and customized reports
 live user behaviour
 Main generic metrics (sessions,
users, page views, geo, language,
browsers, etc.)
 Source channels (organic, social,
referrals, etc.)
 Most viewed pages (speed, search
terms)

Audience overview

Main metrics
 “Sessions” are the total number of sessions for the given date range. (Default setup: Session = 30min)
 “Users” are the total number of users that visited for the given date range.
 “Page views” are the total number of times pages were displayed to users. This includes repeated viewings of a single page by
the same user.
 “Pages per session” is the average number of pages viewed during each session. This also includes repeated viewings of a single
page.
 “Average session duration” is the average length of a session based on users that visited your site in the selected date range.
 “Bounce rate” is the percentage of users who left after viewing a single page on your site and taking no additional action.
 “Percent of new sessions” is the percentage of sessions in your date range who are new users to your site.

Location

Location

Acquisition – Source/Medium
 You can use the Acquisition reports to compare the performance of
different marketing channels and discover which sources send you the
highest quality traffic.
 The medium is the mechanism that delivered users to your site. Some
common examples of mediums are:
 “Organic” is used to identify traffic that arrived on your site through unpaid
search like a non-paid Google Search result.
 “CPC” indicates traffic that arrived through a paid search campaign like
Google AdWords text ads.
 “Referral” is used for traffic that arrived on your site after the user clicked on
a website other than a search engine.
 “Social” represents traffic that came from social media platforms.
 “Email” represents traffic that came from an email marketing campaign.
 “(none)/direct” is applied for users that come directly to your site by typing
your URL directly into a browser. In your reports, you will see these users have
a source of “direct” with a medium of “(none)”.

Source – detailed information
 “Source” provides more information about the medium.
For example
referral
the URL of the
website that referred
the user to the site.
organic
the name of the
search engine such as
“google”
Medium Source

Acquisition - Channels Report
 It is the easiest way to report the source traffic of your website.
 Using the “Channels” report, we could view traffic by channel, which bundles
the sources together under each medium.
 Traffic sources are automatically grouped into basic categories (or channels)
like Organic, Social, Direct, Referral, etc.

Organic

Referrals

Social

Left-hand navigation
 Main generic metrics (sessions,
users, page views, geo, language,
browsers, etc.)
 Source channels (organic, social,
referrals, etc.)
 Most viewed pages (speed, search
terms)

Most viewed pages

Useful links
 The beginners guide to SEO by MOZ
 Google Analytics for Beginners
https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy/course/6

Contact OCCI for assistance
 How to integrate few SEO tips into your website
 How to optimize text and content in your webpages
 How to properly use keywords related to your topic
 How to extract the data for monitoring
 Which metrics to monitor for a custom analysis on your website
 How to make comparisons between reliable/comparable data
Nicolas.Waltham@fao.org Federica.Marano@fao.org

Thank you!