Sami Vanni gave a presentation about Search Engine Optimization basics, tools and strategies on July 5th 2018 at WordPress St Petersburg

1. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
SAMI VANNI
www.samivanni.com
Sami Vanni Design

2. MY BACKGROUND
▸ From Helsinki, Finland
▸ Competed in golf for about 13 years
▸ Moved to the US in 2012
▸ University of New Orleans - graduate
▸ Wordpress experience: 1 year

3. WE WILL COVER
▸ Philosophy of SEO and definitions
▸ What you need to do for a proper SEO setup
▸ The useful tools for the process
▸ Success strategy

4. WHY IS SEO IMPORTANT?
▸ Buyers will come to you
▸ You will get organic traffic (non-paid)
▸ Once you have momentum, you can get a lot
of traffic

5. THE CHALLENGE WITH SEO
▸ Everyone is competing for the rankings
▸ It takes time and consistent effort
▸ 6 months to start seeing improvement
▸ With consistency and good strategy you can
win

6. DEFINITIONS
▸ Search Engines = what most people use to
navigate through the internet (Google)
▸ Search Engine Optimization = Optimizing
your website to be found through the search
engines (by the right people)

7. PHILOSOPHY OF SEO
▸ Google is a business that wants money
▸ The more users (searchers) they have the
more money they make
▸ They get users by offering the most
RELEVANT and the HIGHEST QUALITY
search results to the users

8. OUR 2 GOALS IN SEO
▸ Convincing Google that our content is
1. The most RELEVANT for our target
audience (to rank in the first place)
2. The HIGHEST QUALITY of all the other
relevant search results (to rank as high as
possible)

9. OFF PAGE OPTIMIZATION
All optimization that happens OUTSIDE your
website
‣ Back links (links from other sites to yours)
‣ Social media marketing
‣ Mostly affects the QUALITY factor (how
high quality our site is)

10. ON PAGE OPTIMIZATION
Optimization that happens ON the website
▸ Important for both the RELEVANCE factor
and the QUALITY factor

11. SETTING UP YOUR SITE FOR SEO
‣ Download and configure Yoast SEO plugin
‣ Create a Google Search Console account and verify your
website with it (using Yoast SEO plugin)
‣ Link your Sitemap to the Search Console (using Yoast SEO
plugin)
‣ Make sure your Permalinks (URL structure) is set to POST
NAME
‣ Create a Google Analytics account and link your site to it
(with Monster Insights plugin)

12. GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE
‣ An SEO tool that Google provides to you for free
‣ Notifies you if there are any problems on your
site that hurt your rankings
‣ Google trusts your site more if your site is
verified with the Search Console
‣ You can make sure that your website gets
indexed

13. VERIFYING YOUR SITE WITH SEARCH CONSOLE

14. VERIFYING YOUR SITE WITH SEARCH CONSOLE

15. VERIFYING YOUR SITE WITH SEARCH CONSOLE

16. VERIFYING YOUR SITE WITH SEARCH CONSOLE

17. VERIFYING YOUR SITE WITH SEARCH CONSOLE

18. SITE MAP
▸ A “map” that shows search engines how your
website content is structured
▸ Helps Google to index all your pages
▸ Google wants you to have it
▸ You get it with Yoast SEO
▸ You should connect it to the Search Console

19. LINKING SITE MAP TO SEARCH CONSOLE

20. LINKING SITE MAP TO SEARCH CONSOLE

21. LINKING SITE MAP TO SEARCH CONSOLE

22. URL STRUCTURE

23. KEYWORDS
▸ Helps the RELEVANCY factor
▸ So only the right people will find our website

24. (SERPS) SEARCH ENGINE RESULTS PAGES

25. (SERPS) SEARCH ENGINE RESULTS PAGES

26. EDITING SERPS (WITH YOAST SEO)

27. KEYWORDS
▸ Title tags
▸ Meta Descriptions
▸ h1, h2, h3
▸ URL
▸ Paragraphs

28. KEYWORD STRATEGY
▸ Most common keywords are very competitive
▸ Use many long tail keywords (keywords that include many words)
EMAPLES
—> How to make a website
—> The best Italian restaurant in St.Pete
‣ Write articles that go very deep into a certain topic
‣ The more content, the more opportunities to use keywords
‣ Use keywords naturally!

29. KEYWORD RESEARCH
▸ Google keyword planner
▸ Uber Suggest (free)
▸ SpyFu
▸ SEM-Rush

30. CORNERSTONE CONTENT
Your most important piece of content

31. INTERNAL LINKING STRUCTURE
▸ Link to your other pages within your content
in a way that makes sense.
—> Encourages site visitors to read more,
which sends good user signals to Google
—> Helps Google bots crawl and index all
pages

32. FACTORS THAT CAN HURT YOUR RANKINGS
▸ Duplicate content
▸ Slow loading speed
▸ Site not mobile friendly
▸ Site not user friendly
▸ Thin content (too little text on pages)

33. MONITORING RESULTS
▸ Manually search your keyword on Google
and see how you rank
▸ Google Analytics (free)
▸ Ahfers (paid tool)
▸ SEM-rush (paid tool)

34. GOOGLE ANALYTICS STRATEGY
▸ You can find out which keywords you already
get traffic from, and then double down on
those keywords on your content.

35. GOOGLE LOCAL PACK
▸ If you are a local business with a business
address
▸ Create a Google MyBusiness (GMB) account

36. GOOGLE LOCAL PACK

37. GOOGLE MY BUSINESS (GMB)
▸ Create a Google MyBusiness account at
www.google.com/business
▸ For the Google Local Pack (map results)

38. GOOGLE MY BUSINESS OPTIMIZATION
1. Fill all the info that Google asks for
2. NAP information = (name, address, phone
number) should be consistent throughout the
web
3. Reviews are important. You can provide a link to
your customers to the review page
4. Add images with the location (street address) as
the file name. And GEO-tag images.

39. RESOURCES
‣ MOZ - 2017 Local Search Ranking Factors
https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors
—> Great resource to see what ranking factors
currently have the most weight