2016 Google SEO Guide by Ryan Delanuez

(2016 & 2017) GOOGLE SEO GUIDE Search Engine Optimization Guide What You Need To Know About SEO Today

SEO Essentials Although search engine optimization (SEO) practices have evolved over the years, SEO is still— and likely will always be — an essential Internet marketing strategy. www.InVisionWorks.com

Contents 1.0/ ___ What’s New in SEO ?

2.0/ ___ Conducting a Website Audit 3.0/ ___ Keyword Research 4.0/ ___ On-Site Optimization 5.0/ ___ Off-Site Optimization 6.0/ ___ Webmaster Tools 2

7.0/ ___ SEO Metrics to Monitor 9.0/ ___ Final Thoughts

© 2016 Ryan Delanuez, All Rights Reserved ISBN: 978-1497415027

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8.0/ ___ Official Recommendations From Google and Bing

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What’s New in SEO? Latest Google Algorithm Updates So far since the beginning of 2014, Google has made regular updates to its algorithm under the names Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, Pigeon and Payday Loans. Here’s a quick summary of the differences between each update: •

Google Panda First released in 2011, this update counters SEO techniques that devalue the quality of search results and penalizes websites that are full of low-quality content. The latest major update to Panda occurred on May 19th.

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Google Penguin First Released in 2012, this update primarily penalizes webmasters who have violated Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by employing “spammy” link building strategies. The last major Penguin update was in October 2013. If you are building links in 2014 you need to spend the time to understand the Penguin update.

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Google Hummingbird Debuting in 2013, this update continues to work on understanding search users’ queries and intent instead of just focusing on exact keywords.

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Google Pigeon On July 24th of 2014 Google launched its Pigeon update which had a huge effect on how Google ranks and displays local listings

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Google Mobile Friendly Update On April 21, 2015, Google will release a significant new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that’s designed to give a boost to mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results.

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Click here to see all the latest updates for 2016 & 2017

It’s important to keep up to date on how the search engines are safeguarding their user experience in order to give you foresight into what types of activities that will provide lasting results for your site.

To learn more and stay up to date with all of the latest algorithm updates we highly suggest visiting moz.com/google-algorithm-change.

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Structured Data Markup

While Google doesn’t necessarily use structured data markup for ranking purposes, it can help your website appear more prominently in search results, thus helping you receive more visits from organic search. Commonly used types of structured data markup include breadcrumbs, events, music, organizations, people, products, recipes, reviews, software applications, and video. Here, you can see rich snippets for review markup in action:

Learn more about the various types and how to implement them here. You can also use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to implement structured data on your webpages and test the rich snippet output based on your code using the Structured Data Testing Tool. The latter can also help you check if you have implemented Google Authorship correctly.

Mobile Optimization

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Mobile optimization has always been important for user experience, but it is becoming more important to search optimization as well. Google expects mobile search queries to overtake those on a desktop this year, and to cater to this trend, Google plans to warn mobile users when a site will not work on their device. For now, this is aimed at websites using Flash, but additional warnings may apply to websites that have a poor user experience on mobile devices in general.

If you want to ensure your website is mobile-friendly, consider responsive design. Because users will use one URL regardless of the device they are using to browse your website, the benefit of responsive design is reduced management costs of maintaining multiple websites as well as reduced errors from trying to keep two sites in sync. This leaves less room for errors when Google crawls your website and also provides optimum user experience without redirects. In early 2015 Google will most diffidently update its algorithm to favor “mobile friendly sites”. To check if your web site is mobile friendly Click Here Now that you know a bit about what’s going on in the SEO world, let’s move on to how you can properly optimize your website.

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Conducting a Website Audit

The first place to start with search optimization is a website audit. While website audits can become extremely complex, they don’t always have to be. For the purposes of this guide, a website audit should allow you to identify the top pages on your website and evaluate how well they are optimized for search. You’ll want to start by identifying the top pages on your website. These are the pages that are most important for your business.

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For smaller websites, it could be your homepage plus key pages such as the ones about your company, your products, and your services.

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For larger websites, it could be your homepage, key pages, and hundreds or even thousands of product pages.

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For publishers, it could be your homepage, key pages, and content pages (blog posts, video collections, etc.).

There are several ways you can grab the URL of your top pages. You can start with your website’s navigation bar, as you have likely added your most important pages to it. You can use your Web analytics tool to identify your top pages based on traffic or conversions. If you use WordPress, you can use an XML site map generator plug-in to create a site map that you can copy URLs from, or you can use XML-Sitemaps.com for any website to build a document with your page’s URLs in it (free for up to 500 pages). Once you’ve got your top pages’ URLs, you’ll want to put them into a spreadsheet. You can then create additional columns for the following.

This is the type of page (homepage, product, about, landing, blog post, article, press release, support document,FAQ, etc.).

 Keyword #1, #2, and #3 You will use these three columns to annotate the keyword the page focuses on as well as two additional keywords it is currently optimized for or should be optimized for.  Image Is there an image on the page that is keyword-optimized? Use “yes” if there is an optimized image, “yes” in red if there is an image but it is not optimized, and use “no”

 SEO Title Enter the SEO title for the page. Use red text for SEO titles missing a keyword.  Meta Description Enter the meta description for the page.

Use red text for meta descriptions missing a keyword.

 URL Structure Is there a keyword in the URL?

 Schema Note structured data markup type for the page, or note in red what type of structured data markup should be added to the page (such as authorship for blog posts).

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Keyword Research Keyword research is the next step after your website audit. It will help you determine what keywords are best for each of the top pages on your website.

Commercial vs. Informational Intent Keywords should be placed into two categories: commercial intent or informational intent.

Commercial-intent keywords are those searched by someone who is looking to make a purchase. Informational-intent keywords are those searched by someone who is looking for just that — information.

The difference between commercial intent and informational intent would be link building service versus link building. Someone searching for link building service is likely looking to compare products and make a purchase. Someone searching for link building is likely looking for more information about link building.

In this case, if you sold a link building service, you would want that to be the keyword you use on your homepage/product page. You would then want to use link building in your blog content to get those interested in link building to your website so you could introduce them to your service.

If you’re not sure if a particular keyword has more commercial intent or informational intent, you can use Google to help you out. Just search for the keyword and look at the first page of results. If most of the results are products or services, then it is a keyword with commercial intent. If most are articles, then it is a keyword with informational intent.

Search Volume vs. Competition

Customer-Friendly Keywords Also keep in mind your customers and the keywords they use. If you listen to them when they call your business or submit contact/lead forms, you’ll likely get a good sampling of keywords to choose

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This is where long-tail keywords come into play. Until your website builds enough authority in search, you are better off targeting Los Angeles dui lawyer versus lawyer or Los Angeles lawyer. The bonus with long-tail keywords is you are always optimizing for the one with the most search volume and most competition while also optimizing for the long-tail keyword that will be easier rank with as your authority grows.

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As you use tools like Google AdWords Keyword Planner to determine what keywords are best for your website’s top pages, keep in mind the balance between search volume and competition in addition to intent. Keywords with the highest search volume likely have the most competition. These also tend to be the keywords that are one or two words.

from. You can learn a lot about the keywords customers use at different stages in the buying process.

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People comparing portfolios may contact you because they want to see examples of educational website designs.

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People comparing costs may contact you because they want to learn more about your web design rates.

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People comparing service offerings may contact you because they want to learn more about your web design services.

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People ready to hire may contact you because they need a web designer.

In addition to listening to your customers, step into their shoes by thinking about the things you search for when you are comparing products or services versus when you are ready to buy products or services. The keywords you come up with may take you beyond the pages you already have so that you can create landing pages and content optimized for people at different stages of the buying process.

Putting Them Together Once you’ve found the best keywords for the top pages of your website, prioritize them using the Keyword #1, #2, and #3 columns in your website audit. Now, you’re ready to move on to on-site optimization.

“Targeting the wrong keywords is one of the most costly and common mistakes novices make when first dabbling into SEO.”

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- Ryan Delanuez, President CEO, InVisionWorks.

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On-Site Optimization The following are the main ways to optimize each page on your website for search.

URL Structure If you are creating a new website, make sure you are able to put your page’s main keyword in the URL. You want to have yourdomain.com/keyword-phrase as opposed to yourdomain.com/p=?123.

If your website is established, remember that changing your URL structure or changing the keywords in the URL will affect every website that already links to that page. This is when you will need to add a 301 redirect from the original URL to the new URL to allow those who click on or type in the original URL to go to the current URL. It also tells search engines your page has permanently moved to the new URL structure.

SEO Title Tag In the past, you have always been able to rely on the fact that if you had an SEO title tag that was less than a specific number of characters in length, it would be fully shown in search results. But as Dr. Peter Meyers points out on The Moz Blog, that is no longer the case. Instead, titles are getting cut off based on the actual width of the characters. To illustrate, 20 l’s are shorter than 20 w’s:

20 L’s

llllllllllllllllllll

wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

20 W’s

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This is why Moz created a title tag preview tool — so you can see whether your SEO title tags will make the cut.

The best practice in this case is to make sure your primary keywords are included before the cutoff, or that your title is short enough not to be cut off at all. This is especially important since Google bolds the search queries people enter, making the title tag stand out more in results.

Meta Description Although meta descriptions no longer play a role in rankings on Google, they are still important when it comes to encouraging people to click on your page in search results. Consider the meta description the 160 characters you can use to increase the click-through rate of each of your pages and write it accordingly, including your primary keywords.

Page Content Optimization The content on every page should support the keyword(s) that it is optimized for. There’s no rule on how many times you mention your primary keywords. Effectively, if you are creating content that supports the keyword, the keyword will be included in the content naturally.

Structrued Data Markup Content optimization should also include structured data markup when relevant. If your page’s content is a blog post or article, it should have authorship markup. If your page’s content is a product, it should have product markup (as well as a product feed). Refer to this guide on the types of structured data markup to see if your page has one that fits the content.

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For content to be considered high-quality by Google standards, it needs to be written and/or reviewed by experts. What defines an expert varies — someone who provides medical advice about an illness should be a medical professional, but someone who lives with an illness and talks about his or her experience could also be considered an expert, even though he or she is not a medical professional.

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High Quality Content In order for content to help boost your rankings in search, you have to strive toward publishing high-quality content. This is especially true for websites that allow users to make purchases, manage their finances, or get advice related to finances, health, and law. Google holds these types of pages to the highest standards, as it wants to remove pages with low-quality content that might negatively affect users’ happiness, health, or wealth.

Image Optimization Don’t overlook the value that images hold for SEO. There are three opportunities for adding SEO value to images: the file name, alt tag, and caption. Optimizing these enables the image to contribute to the page’s optimization as well as boost its position in image search results.

Before you upload an image to your website, make sure you rename the file so it includes the keywords you are targeting. Instead of image001.png, it should be web-analytics-conversions-report.png. Then, when you place the image on your page, use the alt tag and the caption beneath the picture to further optimize it for the targeted keyword phrase. Additional text above and below the image will further optimize it for specific keywords.

Internal Links Internal links help Google’s crawlers discover new content as well as associate it with specific keywords. Therefore, make it a habit to naturally link to your website’s pages from within your website’s content. This can be in the main navigation bar, within the content with keyword anchor text, and in your website’s site map.

Page Load Time While page load speed is not fully confirmed as a ranking factor, it is a factor in user experience. Since Google wants users to have a good experience with any page they discover in search results, it pays to make sure your website’s pages load as quickly as possible.

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Tools like the Pingdom Website Speed Test will allow you to see how quickly your website is loading beyond your desk. It also identifies the problem areas that are slowing down your website so you can fix them. It gets as specific as showing the load time for each element on your page, including embedded scripts, images, and media.

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Off-Site Optimization The optimization you do for your website off-site is also important in order to gain better rankings and higher authority in search. There are two ways to accomplish off-site search optimization.

Link Building Link building is the process of getting third parties to validate your authority by linking to content on your site. Because this search signal is so valuable, it has been prone to abuse by less than scrupulous marketers. Because Google is so focused on penalizing websites that participate in unnatural link building practices (link exchanges, link buying, over-optimized keyword anchor text, etc.), the best approach to link building is to do it through link attraction. Essentially, you want to create content that makes people want to link to you. This content could be blog posts, guides, quality infographics, free tools, and so forth.

Creating and claiming social profiles ( Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. )

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Creating and claiming local business listings ( Yelp, Merchant Circle, Urbanspoon, etc. )

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Guest blogging on authoritative publications in your industry

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Getting mentions in the media by becoming an authoritative source

As you place your brand name on various properties and publications throughout the Web, you will increase the likelihood that when someone types in your brand name, he or she will find something you created or contributed to. Almost all of these opportunities will allow you to link back to your website, so when someone discovers them, he or she can click through to learn more about your business.

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Webmaster Tools Google and Bing both offer their own webmaster tools. These are essential for website owners and marketers. Not only are they free, but they can also help you keep on top of your website’s health in the respective search engines.

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Brand Building Brand building is another way to gain great links back to your website while dominating search results for your brand name. Brand building will be a key factor to achieving high search results in 2015. Brand building includes but is not limited to:

Google Webmaster Tools, for example, offers a variety of features that allow you to evaluate your website’s on-site search optimization, view your website’s top search queries and pages, see the latest external links to your website, get alerted to things that impact your website such as malware, see crawl errors that cause user experience issues, and much more. Bing Webmaster Tools offers similar features that relate to your website’s presence in its search engine.

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If your rankings in Google and Bing search matter, be sure to sign up for both of these webmaster tool sets today and start seeing what each has to offer in the way of search engine optimization data and advice.

IF YOUR RANKINGS IN GOOGLE AND BING MATTER, you need to sign up for webmaster tools.

As you continue to optimize your website for search, you will likely want to know if your efforts are yielding results. The best way to do this is to measure some (or all) of the following metrics.

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Organic Search Traffic An increase in organic search traffic over time will tell you that your SEO efforts are helping drive more visitors to your website. (Similarly, a decrease in organic search traffic will tell you whether you have been affected by a Google algorithm update in a negative way, which is why you should always pay attention.)

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Organic Search Traffic Conversions If you have set up conversion goals in your Web analytics tool, you will be able to determine if your SEO efforts are driving customers to your website as opposed to just any visitors.

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Keyword Rankings If you have optimized your content properly, you should notice an increase in your keyword rankings. Standalone tools that can help you track your keyword rankings over time are available from Authority Labs and Whoosh Traffic.

Most SEO tools (Moz, CognitiveSEO, RavenTools, BrightLocal etc.) also include built-in ranking trackers.

Domain and Page Authority Moz offers a free toolbar for Chrome and Firefox that you how well Moz believes a domain/subdomain or webpage will perform in search

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can use to monitor your domain and page authority. These are scores that indicate results for relevant queries.

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Backlinks and Referring Domains Majestic SEO offers a free plug-in for Chrome and

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Firefox that allows you to quickly see your number of backlinks and referring domains pointing to your website.

Official Recommendations

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Google Webmaster Guidelines This is Google’s official documentation of the best practices to help Google find, crawl, and index your site. It covers all of the things you should do in relation to design and content as well as includes technical and quality guidelines. You’ll also find all of the things you should avoid when it comes to SEO, including automatically generated content, link schemes, cloaking, hidden text, scraped content, and much more.

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Google Webmaster Central Blog This is Google’s official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google Index.

You can also follow Google Webmasters on Google+ for social updates.

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Google Webmaster Videos This is Google’s official YouTube channel, most known for hosting the Q&A sessions with Matt Cutts. It also has office-hour hangouts to answer your questions about crawling, indexing, mobile, internationalization, duplicate content, site maps, Webmaster Tools, duplicate content, and anything to do with optimizing your website for search.

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Bing Webmaster Guidelines Similar to Google, Bing has its own Webmaster Guidelines to help you gain visibility for your content. It covers content, links, social media, indexation, and technical 14

guidelines. You’ll also find the on-site optimization elements on which Bing places the most importance.

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Bing Webmaster Blog

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This is Bing’s official news on topics affecting webmasters who want to optimize their websites for Bing search.

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Final Thoughts When you’re busy running your business, optimizing your website might not seem like a priority.

However, by taking the time to implement a few simple SEO tactics, you can boost your search engine rankings and increase your revenue stream. Try setting aside a few minutes each day or a block of time each week to update your website using the hints in this e-book. Before you start, use the analytics tools listed above to see how your website performs now. Then, after you’ve finished, wait a month or so and check your stats again. Your efforts should make a noticeable difference.

Also, remember that SEO is only one component of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy.

Analytics, social media, and strategic advertising can also increase online market share. Once you’ve optimized your website, you should move on to the next phase of your digital strategy. As your digital marketing efforts begin to make a difference, make sure to have enough resources to handle heavier customer traffic.

P. (800) 407-4116 E. Ryan@invisionworks.com www.InVisionWorks.com

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