1. GENERAL ASSEMBLY I A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEO
A Practical
Introduction
to SEO
John Doherty
Lead/SEO Consultant, Distilled NYC
2. GENERAL ASSEMBLY I A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEO 2
What is SEO?
Definition
SEO is the process of getting traffic from the “free,”
“organic,” “editorial” or “natural” listings on search engines. All
major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have
such results, where web pages and other content such as videos
or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search
engine considers most relevant to users. Payment isn’t involved,
as it is with paid search ads. source
8. Optimized 8
Titles and
Headings
These are the strongest on-page indicators to
the crawlers what your content is about.
9. Keyword 9
Research
To get traffic from the search engines, you
need to create content around the keywords
you want to rank for.
http://www.johnfdoherty.com/minimum-
viable-keyword-research/
http://bit.ly/QU6dtu
10. User 10
Targeted
Content
These are the pages that meet your target
audience’s needs. They will usually be your
most linked-to pages.
http://bit.ly/nODcB5
11. User 11
Generated
Content
Depending your niche and site goals, allowing
users to create content on your site, with
editorial control, is a great way to get content
scaleably
12. 12
ONE WORD OF
CAUTION WITH Depending your niche and site goals, allowing
users to create content on your site, with
UGC editorial control, is a great way to get content
scaleably
Provide some education to your users, or require them to adhere to certain length and
quality requirements. Build SEO best practices into your system
13. 13
CONTENT
STRATEGY, not
Depending your niche and site goals, allowing
SEO CONTENT
users to create content on your site, with
editorial control, is a great way to get content
scaleably
A blog is not a content strategy. And we’re past the days of “unique content for SEO”.
You need unique content on your site, but it needs to be content that is not only unique
but also useful for users.
14. 14
On-Site
Content
Depending your niche and site goals, allowing
Strategy is
users to create content on your site, with
editorial control, is a great way to get content
scaleably
ongoing and
integrated
15. The Dropbox method 15
is very specific and
hard to replicate.
From an organic
perspective, it’s not To get users
good practice.
from organic,
Depending your niche and site goals, allowing
you need to
users to create content on your site, with
editorial control, is a great way to get content
scaleably
give them
content
16. Build pages friendly to 16
rankings AND conversions
Depending your niche and site goals, allowing
users to create content on your site, with
editorial control, is a great way to get content
scaleably
17. Don’t forget about the 17
other verticals of search
too.
Depending your niche and site goals, allowing
users to create content on your site, with
editorial control, is a great way to get content
scaleably
18. GENERAL ASSEMBLY I A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEO 18
Don’t Forget
“Why”
Especially as a startup, you’re unknown. You need people to connect
with your brand, so tell them “why” they should care. Who works there?
What are you trying to do? Why?
“Sell benefits, not features”
19. 19
Depending your niche and site goals, allowing
users to create content on your site, with
Show Your editorial control, is a great way to get content
scaleably
Personality
People want to connect with your story and be part of something bigger. Show who you
are and why what you are doing it cool. Tell a story.
20. GENERAL ASSEMBLY I A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEO 20
2) Accessibility
Without a clear site structure, search crawlers cannot access and
therefore cannot rank your site and content.
21. 21
If they
can’t crawl
it, users
won’t come.
The search engine crawlers are your fifth user.
Not only do you need to think about how
human users use your site, you also need to
think how search crawlers access it.
23. Google 23
crawls links.
Links drive SEO and the Internet. This is
mostly how Google discovers new content
(though social has a role in that now). If you
want your content to be discovered and
ranked, put your most important content as
high in your site structure as possible.
24. 24
Site Image Credit:
https://seogadget.co.uk/
Structure
Most important pages go near the top of your site’s hierarchy. These are passed the most
internal link equity from the most well-linked-to pages. Think about categories and site
taxonomy when it comes to linking.
25. 25
Internal
Linking
Always think about ways to link to the other pages on your site. Top navigations make the
most sense, as well as linking to parallel pages in categories. Link with targeted anchor text,
but make it natural for users. Think “Hotels in Paris” not “Paris Hotels Best”.
26. 26
No fancy
JavaScript
or AJAX
Google has gotten better about crawling Javascript and AJAX onsite, but best practices still
dictate that if you want the content indexed, you need to display it with HTML and CSS.
HTML5 is fine as well. Otherwise, you risk not getting credit with the search engines.
27. 27
No fancy
Or otherwise this might happen. And you do
JavaScript
not want this to happen.
28. 28
Categories
Categories
Categories
Category pages have a better chance of ranking for competitive terms than individual product
or article pages. Link back to these from articles, link to them from the homepage and other
categories. Good post - http://kaiserthesage.com/large-scale-link-building/
31. 36
31
GENERAL ASSEMBLY I A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEO
A Few
Technical Best
Practices
32. 32
Short
URLs are
better for
rankings
Shorter URLs have been shown to correlate better to rankings than long URLs.
Google/search engines stop crawling at a certain point to save on computing costs.
Therefore, try to keep URLs under 80 characters.
Post - http://www.johnfdoherty.com/lessons-from-google-about-url-lengths/
33. Short, 33
easy to
remember
domain
I tend to favor branding over domains with keywords in them, especially domains with
hyphens and keywords. If you build a brand, you’re more likely to win online because of
brand loyalty.
A good post by Rand Fishkin - http://moz.com/rand/domain-bias-why-branding-search-
marketing-cannot-be-separated/
34. 34
Optimized
Title Tags
Title tags are still the #1 correlated onpage metric to search rankings. If you want to rank
for a term, you need to have it in your title tag. Stuffing keywords into title tags no longer
helps though. Titles must be relevant to the user otherwise Google will change them in the
search results to return a better result to users.
35. 35
Analytics
To truly be able to optimize your site well, you need to track where users are coming from
and through which keywords. Therefore, at least have Google Analytics and Google
Webmaster Tools set up.
Intro: http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/index.html
36. 36
Redirects
If and when you rearrange your site, use proper 301 (permanent), not 302 (temporary)
redirects. 302 redirects do not pass link equity, whereas 301s will preserve up to 90% of
your link equity and help you preserve your rankings.
38. GENERAL ASSEMBLY I A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEO 38
3) Outreach
Without outreach for press and links, your site will not rank. Links drive
the ranking algorithm.
40. Recent algo changes 40
have changed
linkbuilding
A real example (WPMU) from @rosshudgens
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update
41. So we must be 41
careful about what
links we get.
42. GENERAL ASSEMBLY I A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO SEO 37
42
Let’s do it right.
44. 44
Guest
Content
• Ask friends if you can write
on their site
• Engage online
45. Here’s an Analytics Custom Report for you
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=OClPZwEVQ- 45
aOBYBhDq21Sw
Guest
Content • Track the following:
• Links
• Referral Traffic
• Conversions
46. 46
Find
Influencers
Every niche or vertical has influencers. You should
know who they are, or find them using Topsy or
FollowerWonk. Seek to connect with them (online
and offline).
