A collection of search engine optimisation tips covering off the following broad topics: Building A Strong Foundation Keyword Research Website Performance Great Content Rich Snippets Link Building Mobile Social Learn why getting the basics right is an absolute priority, allowing you to move into more advanced topics such as URL canonicalisation using rel="canonical" tags and HTTP 301 permanent redirects, outpacing competitors with great content, leverage rich snippets, website performance and more!

1. Unbeatable SEO Tips
Learn what it takes to compete online, beat down your competition & win!
KNOWING WHAT MATTERS

2. Who is Mantra Group?
Mantra Group is the largest Australian based hotel operator, with properties in
Australia, New Zealand and has recently expanded into Indonesia. Mantra
Group has a 3 year pipeline to deliver 20 new properties into Indonesia and a
further 20 properties into Thailand in the following 3 years.
Some interesting figures about the company:
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110+ hotels
Over $7 billion of assets under management
15000 rooms for sale every night of the week
Employees ~4000 staff
$500 million per annum turnover

3. Who is Alistair Lattimore?
Alistair Lattimore - Ecommerce Analyst
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9 years with Mantra Group
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Software development background
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Founding member digital/ecommerce team
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Mad keen about search since 2003
I wear a few hats:
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Search Engine Optimisation
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Conversion Rate Optimisation
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Product development
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Analytics
http://www.convergentmedia.co
http://au.linkedin.com/in/alistairlattimore
http://google.com/+AlistairLattimore
http://twitter.com/alattimore
Support my mo, http://mobro.co/alistairlattimore

4. Agenda
Unbeatable SEO Tips
Building A Strong Foundation
Keyword Research
Website Performance
Great Content
Rich Snippets
Link Building
Mobile
Social
Download this deck, http://bit.ly/unbeatableseotips

5. Building A Strong Foundation
Read the manual
Google Webmaster Guidelines
• Design & Content
obvious site hierarchy
text links
information rich
• Technical
use robots.txt to block crawlers
don’t track crawlers
don’t allow ads to affect SEO
• Quality
make pages primarily for users, don’t deceive them
Avoid tricks, auto-generated content, link schemes, cloaking, sneaky redirects, hidden text or links,
doorway pages, scraped content, irrelevant keywords, malicious behaviour
Google SEO Starter Guide
https://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en&ref_topic=2370419

6. Building A Strong Foundation
What do the search engines think?
Google Webmaster Tools, http://www.google.com/webmasters/
Fast and easy to verify your site, https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35179?hl=en
Tonnes of useful tools and invaluable insight

7. Building A Strong Foundation
Controlling the bots
Use robots.txt to control what URLs search engines are allowed to crawl with a website.
If search engines can’t crawl it, they can’t index it & therefore it can’t rank.
Use Google Webmaster Tools Crawl->Blocked URLs report to quickly check how many URLs are blocked.

8. Building A Strong Foundation
XML Sitemaps
Back in 2006 Google, Microsoft & Yahoo! jointly announced a XML sitemap protocol.
XML sitemaps are a way for a website to tell search engines what content they’d like crawled and indexed.
Be aware, it is a hint or suggestion not a directive that they must obey.
Popular content management systems can generate them out of the box, some require plugins or they can also be
created using a website crawler such as Xenu Link Sleuth.
Notify search engines about them via their webmaster console or via robots.txt files.
Submit several smaller XML sitemaps for different sections of your site to help understand indexing problems.
XML Sitemaps, http://www.sitemaps.org/

9. Building A Strong Foundation
URL Canonicalisation
To a search engine, every variation in a URL is a different unique URL:
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http://domain.com/books
http://www.domain.com/books
https://www.domain.com/books
http://www.domain.com/books/
http://www.domain.com/Books
http://www.domain.com/books/?sort=price-asc
Tools to help address these issues:
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HTTP 301 permanent redirects
rel=“canonical” tag, https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

10. Building A Strong Foundation
rel=“canonical” tag
Ecommerce websites typically have lots of products, which typically means tools such as filtering or sorting to help
users. Faceted navigation and helpful user tools can be tricky for search engines. Maximise high priority page
equity by directing rel=“canonical” tags from URL variations into their respective base URLs.
/books/?sort=name
/books/?sort=price
/books/
/books/?sort=rating
rel=“canonical” tag, https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

11. Building A Strong Foundation
Pagination
Ecommerce websites tend to have a lot of products, which then requires pagination.
Pagination, https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744

12. Keyword Research
Understand your customers
Keyword research allows you to understand
how your customers actually search for your
products/services.
Leverage keyword research to make better
information architecture decisions, improve
internal navigation, align product categorisation
to customer expectations.
It will uncover topics , sub-topics, related topics
and importantly unrelated topics, many of
which will go untapped without investing in
keyword research.

13. Keyword Research
Tools, tools & more tools
Good keyword research is about going as broad and deep as you have the stomach for.
Leveraging multiple keyword research tools and different sources of data provides the best diversity. Remember, you
can always ignore a keyword but if you don’t know it exists, you could be missing out on a pot of gold.
Google Analytics, http://www.google.com/analytics/
Google Webmaster Tools, http://www.google.com/webmasters/
Google AdWords Keyword Planner, http://adwords.google.com/keywordplanner
Bing Webmaster Keyword Research, http://www.bing.com/toolbox/keywords
Ubersuggest, http://ubersuggest.org/
Soovle, http://soovle.com/
Keyword Snatcher, http://keywordsnatcher.com/
HQ Suggest, http://www.hqsuggest.com/
SEM Rush, http://www.semrush.com/
WordStream, http://www.wordstream.com/

14. Website Performance
Website load time performance matters
April 2010, Google announced desktop load time performance was now a ranking factor
June 2013, Google announced mobile load time performance was soon to be a ranking factor
In addition to being on your search engine optimisation best practice road map, it is great for users.
Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL, Amazon, Shopzilla and many more have case studies about the benefits.
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Phil Dixon, from Shopzilla, had the most takeaway statistics about the impact of performance on the
bottom line. A year-long performance redesign resulted in a 5 second speed up (from ~7 seconds to ~2
seconds). This resulted in a 25% increase in page views, a 7-12% increase in revenue, and a 50%
reduction in hardware. This last point shows the win-win of performance improvements, increasing
revenue while driving down operating costs.

15. Website Performance
Best practice front end optimisation
Measure how well your site adheres to best practice guidelines using:
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http://www.webpagetest.org
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https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
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http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
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http://gtmetrix.com
Best practice performance improvement items:
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Enabled compression
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Merge CSS files to reduce HTTP requests
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Merge JavaScript files to reduce HTTP requests
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Combine images into CSS sprites where ever possible to reduce HTTP requests
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Configure HTTP caching so browsers don’t needlessly re-request the same assets over and over
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Use a Content Distribution Network (CDN) to bring resources closer to the user
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…

16. Website Performance
It’s hard work, how about a tool?
Google are focused on speed, they’ve built and open sourced a tool named PageSpeed to make it simpler.
PageSpeed has been implemented for popular web servers:
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Apache
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Nginx
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Microsoft IIS
If your hosting provider doesn’t support PageSpeed, Google provide it as a service as well
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service/overview
Australian based startup Squixa and US based Cloudflare provide a similar service and support
Great for complex implementations
http://www.squixa.com/
https://www.cloudflare.com/

17. Website Performance
SPDY (pronounced speedy)
SPDY is a networking protocol developed primarily by
Google, is moving toward standardisation and looks as
though it will be included in the HTTP 2.0 protocol.
It runs over HTTPS, supports HTTP header compression,
out of order responses, multiplexed requests, server-side
push and a raft of other optimisations.
Google tested the performance improvement of 77
web pages across 31 popular sites using a Samsung
Galaxy Nexus smartphone and found a 23%
improvement in mean load times across the sites.
Already has support in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 and is available today
for the Apache web server, https://developers.google.com/speed/spdy/

18. Great Content
Underwhelming
What sort of characteristics to underwhelming, lack lustre pages have:
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Little to no content
Duplicate content/product descriptions from manufacturer
1 or very few photos
Small or low quality photos
No zoom feature on photos
No 360 degree panorama photos
No video
No virtual tours
No reputable third party reinforcements from noteworthy businesses/people
No customer reviews
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19. Great Content
Outpace your competition
Remember, search engines rank content – preferably high quality content.
Review the type and quality of content your key competitors are producing, now work out how to do it better!
Critically review what content you’re currently producing, do you have gaps over your competitors – if so fill them.
Market leaders like Amazon have drawn a line through many of the underwhelming points, great content,
endorsements, customer reviews, recognition programs for top community members, lots of photos, zoom
functionality, 360 degree panorama, video to accompany the photos with real people providing product
descriptions, interviews with book authors, it just keeps going.
Could you be asking your customers for action shots of their purchase (ie: customers wearing jean X, cut Y, size Z),
how about 15 second video captured on an iPhone of your customers kids loving their latest toy.
Think long and hard about the things that make you purchase online & why – can you achieve similar?

20. Rich Snippets
Rich what, speak English.

21. Rich Snippets
Why use rich snippets?
Search engine optimisation is about getting more traffic, you can do that by:
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increasing your rankings
improving the quality of your <title> tag
improve the quality of <meta> descriptions
stand out visually using rich snippets
Rich snippets don’t improve your ranking but they sure make
your site stand out in the search results! Cyrus Shepard
improved the CTR of his sites content by 35% by testing
his author photo, http://moz.com/blog/google-author-photos

22. Rich Snippets
Eye Tracking
US based eye tracking company LookTracker perform eye tracking on lots of interfaces, Toshiba, Dell, NetFlix,
Disney, Walmart, ESPN, Target and many more, http://www.looktracker.com

23. Rich Snippets
Structured mark up comes in various forms
Google, Microsoft & Yahoo! all support schema.org to varying degrees.
Google currently augments their search results with the following structured mark up:
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reviews
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recipes
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events
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music
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video,
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people
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products
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businesses/organisations
Google Webmaster Structured Data Testing Tool, http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
Rich Snippets, https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/99170?hl=en

24. Link Building
Links, the equity of the internet
Google Penguin was released in April 2012, it detects low quality,
irrelevant links and over-optimised anchor text.
Risky scalable link building tactics from low quality, irrelevant websites:
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bulk directory submission
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forum signature spam
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comment spam
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article marketing
Similarly, unnatural volumes of highly commercial anchor text such as:
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car insurance
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sydney hotels
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cheap credit cards
once a go-to tactic now for easily rankings, puts an entire website at risk when taken too far.

25. Link Building
Link building ideas
Building links can seem difficult at first, however once you’ve had some success – it’ll begin to flow.
Link Building Strategies, http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

26. Link Building
Link research tools
Link research tools allow you to dig into the link profile of any website, your own or a competitor. Pull your
competitors link building strategies apart, use it against them to dominate the search results.
Google Webmasters, http://www.google.com/webmasters/
Bing Webmasters, http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster
Yandex Webmasters, http://webmaster.yandex.com/
Majestic SEO, http://www.majesticseo.com/
Open Site Explorer, http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
Ahrefs, https://ahrefs.com/
Link Research Tools, http://www.linkresearchtools.com/
Citation Labs Broken Link Builder, http://brokenlinkbuilding.com/
Citation Labs Link Prospector, http://linkprospector.citationlabs.com/
Outdated Content Finder, http://www.greenlaneseo.com/outdated-content-finder/
Review your own link profile for risky, remember Google Penguin.

27. Mobile
Mobile is here to stay, it’s time to pay attention
July 2013, Google CEO Larry Page stated that over 1.5 million Android devices are being activated per day globally.
Australia has the sixth highest smartphone penetration in
the world at ~65%.
90%+ use mobile internet daily.
With the except of Norway (48%), between 50%-70% of
the smartphone users within the top 10 counties use their
smartphone daily within their favourite search engine.
Google Mobile Planet has amazing information about,
http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/mobileplanet/

28. Mobile
Options for delivering a great mobile web experience
Three common approaches that are used regularly around the internet:
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Responsive Web Design (recommended by Google & Bing)
Responsive web design serves all devices (desktop/tablet/smartphone) on the same set of URLs, with each
URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the
device.
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Dynamic Serving
Sites that dynamically serve all devices on the same set of URLs, but each URL serves different HTML (and
CSS) depending on whether the user agent is a desktop or a mobile device.
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Mobile Specific Website
Sites that have separate mobile and desktop URLs.

29. Mobile
Finer Details
Allow Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile to crawl both desktop and mobile content.
Responsive Web Design:
Google recommend using a CSS media query such as the below to adapt the site design for a smartphone:
@media only screen and (max-width: 640px) {...}
Dynamic Serving:
CMS should serve a HTTP Vary response header by user-agent
Mobile Specific Website:
CMS should serve a HTTP Vary response header by user-agent on the conditional redirects
Implement desktop/mobile rel=“alternate” annotations, can be implemented in HTML or XML Sitemaps
Smartphone guidelines, https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

30. Social
Participate where your users participate
facebook has over 1.15 billion Monthly Active Users
Google+ has 540 million MAUs, over 300 million
MAU are within the stream and more than 1.5
billion photos being uploaded per week.
Twitter recently passed 218 million MAUs
Over 50% of facebook and Twitter usage is
via mobile
Social media doesn’t directly correlate to
search engine rankings, however it represents
a great awareness building tool which can
be leveraged to achieve outcomes that do
directly help search engine rankings.

31. Social
Google Personalised Search
Australian Bureau of Statistics data reveals there were 12.4 million internet subscribers at June 2013
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/8153.0/
In February, an estimated 14% of visitors to www.mantra.com.au were logged into their Google Account
http://www.convergentmedia.co/google-account-numbers-doubled-under-12-months/
Content liked or shared by your Google+ social connections is elevated in the search results. Where your website
might not stand a chance of ranking due to a highly competitive niche, suddenly your followers friends can
potentially see your content!
Integrate Google+ and Google+ sharing into your online purchasing process. After customers have purchased
something, ask them to tell their friends about the product via the payment confirmation page but share the
product URL or product category URL – trying to increase the reach of those high value URLs throughout your
customers social network.

32. Social
Putting your best foot forward
Everyone is familiar with sharing content into a social network, whether it
facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest or elsewhere.
Did you know that the biggest social networks provide opportunities to
customise that sharing experience?
Facebook Open Graph
Twitter Cards (photo, gallery, player, product, ..)
Google+ Interactive Posts (buy, reserve, apply, confirm, ..)
Pinterest Rich Pins (product, recipe, movie, article)
Surprise your users with customised sharing experiences, delight their followers
with a the best possible representation of your content, maximise the likelihood of
your content being re-shared because it is relevant and visually engaging.

33. Social
Twitter Cards
Twitter supports a number of different card formats:
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Summary Card (default)
Summary Card with Large Image
Photo Card
Gallery Card
App Card
App Installs and Deep-Linking
Player Card
Product Card
Twitter Cards documentation, https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards
Twitter Card validator, https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/validation/validator

34. Social
Enhance your customer data
People fill out a lot of information in their social profiles over time, many of which are happy to share it publicly.
What if you could mine your customers public social information, now you can!
FullContact provide an API, it allows you to enrich your existing customer information with public information your
customers have shared in their various social accounts, http://www.fullcontact.com
Use this information to:
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put together link building campaigns
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increase social followers
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find influencers that can increase the reach of your content

35. Thank You
Get In Contact:
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alistair.lattimore@gmail.com
http://au.linkedin.com/in/alistairlattimore
http://google.com/+AlistairLattimore
http://twitter.com/alattimore
Support my mo, http://mobro.co/alistairlattimore
Download this slide deck, http://bit.ly/unbeatableseotips