In this list, I will be typically be talking SEO as it relates to Google because Google will likely account for the vast majority of your inbound search traffic. Additionally, if you rank highly on Google, you will probably do well on other search engines anyway. Just like in football if you could play in the Major league you would most likely kill it in the minor league I would begin by explaining why SEO is important talk a little bit about what SEO is about and talk about how those concepts relate to the world wide web. Then talk about some of the things you could do to optimize your site from top to bottom of a typical webpage.
Why it’s important
- When you want to hide something on google put it on the second page. #SEO @searchdecoder
- Winner takes almost everything
- More than 80 percent of shoppers research big purchases online first
- Opertunity for business
- 88% Of Consumers Trust Online Reviews As Much As Personal Recommendations
- 72% Of Consumers Say That Positive Reviews Make Them Trust A Local Business More
- 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.
- 70% of the links search users click on are organic
- 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results
- Search is the #1 driver of traffic to content sites, beating social media by more than 300%
Understanding SEO
Search Engine Optimization SEO is the ongoing stratagy of generationing content and making pages more accessable for people to find on the web. SEO as a libarian
Page structure
It imports for you to write well-structured code, addresses with in an
tag articles with in tags so that search engine spiders could have a better understanding of what content on the page represent.
What should be in your header
Title
Page tiles have a huge impact on SEO ranking and should be different for every page on your site. Title tags—technically called title elements—define the title of a document. Title tags are often used on search engine results pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given page and are important both for SEO and social sharing.
The title element of a web page is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a page’s content. This element is critical to both user experience and search engine optimization. It creates value in three specific areas: relevancy, browsing, and in the search engine results pages.
Example Title
Optimal Format
Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
Optimal Length for Search Engines Google typically displays the first 50-60 characters
Meta Description
The meta description is a HTML attributes that provide concise explanations of the contents of web pages. Meta descriptions are commonly used on search engine result pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given page.
Meta description tags, while not important to search engine rankings, are extremely important in gaining user click-through from SERPs. These short paragraphs are a webmaster’s opportunity to advertise content to searchers and to let them know exactly whether the given page contains the information they’re looking for.
The meta description should employ the keywords intelligently, but also create a compelling description that a searcher will want to click. Direct relevance to the page and uniqueness between each page’s meta description is key.
Optimal Length for Search Engines
Roughly 155 Characters
Author
Google also allows you to place your name next to specific website you have created on the web. By adding the small snippet of code below to the header of your page and adding the link to the site to the “Contributors” section on your Google+ profile.
In a similar manner as a search algorithm may recommend a book by an established author so too Google’s search algorithm would recommend web pages/site/applications higher if they were witter by an establish author. Check out this website for more detailed infomation on how to implement the rel author tag to your page.
PRO TIP: Referencing the author of the web page as a Google Plus user is a good way to have establish a firm authority.
Improve speed
Okay this is a big one Google algorithm for ranking websites at it core is trying to sever up the website to search that both most closely meets your search query and provides you with the best possible users experience. That’s the short reason why slow sites rank low on Google.
Here are some tools you can use to test site speed and list of a few things you could do to improve profomance.
- Use css instead of images anywhere you can
- Take addvantace of SVGs
- Compless images
- Use CDNs
- Use less CSS and JS scripts
- Minify css and js files
- Use SVGs were posible
- Use font icons where possible
- Create image sprite
Micro Data
Search giants Google, Bing and Yahoo announced last summer a rare collaboration to support the use of microdata tagging to generate more relevant and more detailed search results. This offers business owners and other website publishers another opportunity to improve their search engine optimization (SEO) by making a few changes to their websites.
Ask Google to Craw your site
Because Google periodically crawls website based on the frequency of updates to that site eg. new sites and/or blogs that post regularly frequently have new content to be indexed. As a result of this Google spider usually finds new content every we it visits particular pages/sites. If that is not the case and content is not frequently updated you may want to ask Google to crawl your site after you make a large number of content changes or you have updated your SEO strategy. To do this click on the following link.
– Google Web Master tools
Naming files and images
Search engings are getting smarter and smarter but they are still not smart enough to craw images on your site for that you will have to give it some help. For that reason when it comes to SEO, it’s important to chose image and file names carefully, use keywords to help your webpage rank on search engines. Creating descriptive, keyword-rich file names is absolutely crucial for image optimization.
– More Info
Social Media
Twitter (Adding a Twitter card to your website)
Card Types
- Summary Card: Default Card, including a title, description, thumbnail, and Twitter account attribution.
- Summary Card with Large Image: Similar to a Summary Card, but with a prominently featured image.
- Photo Card: A Card with a photo only.
- Gallery Card: A Card highlighting a collection of four photos.
- App Card: A Card to detail a mobile app with direct download.
- Player Card: A Card to provide video/audio/media.
- Product Card: A Card optimized for product information.
Twitter Cards Sample Code
Facebook
The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. For instance, this is used on Facebook to allow any web page to have the same functionality as any other object on Facebook.
Facebook Open Graph protocol
SEO MOZ Social media meta data templates
Pinterest
Product
Article
Recipe
Pinterest recipe rich pin documentation
Movie
Pinterest movie rich pin documentation
–Rich Pins Overview
Google Plus
Shiny Trinket
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Shiny trinkets are shiny.
Google Plus Snippets
Anchor tags
Back links used to discriber your sites the more discriptice the better SEO is for you. Descriptive links, title, alt.
em Tags
Header tags
h1 - Should be one page page
h2 - Subheader
h3
Keywords and keywords optimisation
Web page keywords should not be stuffed that is equivalant to spamming
Developing a good content strategy
Semantic HTML
Easy to read for both the programmer and the web crawler
Mobile Friendly
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
Accounts to follow on twitter
If you could think of anymore tips and tricks or interesting links or things online related to SEO please leave a link or add a comment below. This list was created based on accounts I follow on twitter and recommendations from friedns all off these accounts had at least one tweet about SEO on the first page of there twitter feed at the time of this post.
https://twitter.com/DenzilDoyle/lists/seo
Medium
5 Publications to follow on medium that talk about SEO
Mobile SEO
Choose a mobile configuration | Search Central | Google Developers – Mobile Friendly Test
Robot.txt
Adding Robot.txt file to block search engines fomr indexing site there are a few reason you may want to do this one of the most popular ones is disallowing Google from indexing staging sites and code below to an robot.txt file to do this.
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Allow:
Example
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /404.html
Optimize Images
Converting images to base 64 to increase speed compression reduces the size of your image but your image should never go beyond 1920 x 1028 which is typically the standard screen size today
http://webcodertools.com/imagetobase64converter/Create
Create site map
SEO TOOLS
SEO Resources