John Nosal, keynote speaker, presented “SEO for the Everyday Joe” at #DFWRocks2014. A few of the highlights of his presentation are listed below.
How to Feed the Google Monster
The big challenge is – how do we create content that Google is going to like.
How Do We Feed The Google Monster?
Content, content, content.
It depends on how much content your audience needs. Do they just need to know what is the latest thing that is happening with the company, or do people need to have their questions constantly answered?
- It has to be FRESH
- It has to be clear and focused
- It has to play by the rules
For example, John has a client who writes some really good content, but this client also goes off on subjects that are not related to the main topic of the website.
You hear lots of buzzwords thrown around (backlinks, blackhat, etc.), but it boils down to getting down to the basics.
Creating food the Google monster loves.
Optimizing a Website
Four Areas of Focus
- Page Titles
- Metadata
- Headlines
- Images
Page Titles
This is the name of the page. This is what comes up when a page shows up in the search engines and you want the page title to show what the page is all about.
Example of a good title: Angela’s Bridal Purses and Evening Bags
Example of a bad title: Home Page
Metadata
- Title
- Head Tag
- Description
Headlines
John almost laughs when people tell others that for $699/month they can get a business on page 1 of Google by their business name. Unless someone is SEARCHING by your business name, those are not the keywords they are going to be actively using to find something.
Images
- File Names
- Alt Tags
It is best to have an image name that relates to what the page is about. Alt tags are great add-in keywords for people. DO NOT LEAVE SPACES IN YOUR FILE NAMES. The results can be something other than what you are wanting.
The power of Pinterest lies in the fact that you can put in so much info in the descriptions that are linked to the words on the page.
The things I just mentioned above are the things that Google uses to figure out the relevance of the content of your page. When looking at SEO it doesn’t matter if you are doing PPC and backlinking – if the content on your home page is not rock solid, and on target, you are going to be missing out on getting people to engage with your site.
Resources
SEOQuake.com – You can use this to look at any keyword and find out what its relevance is. You can also pull up a keyword report. You can also find out how many times a keyword is used on a page. This helps John look at a client’s web presence and the presence of three competitors.
Google Analytics – If you are not using this tool, you are missing out on a wealth of information. One of the most important things that Google Analytics can show you is bounce rate. The higher your bounce rate, the lower the effectiveness of your website. Another bit of information on this page is where the traffic comes from. Mobile is getting big, and you can learn how well your site does with mobile devices.
Google & Bing Webmaster Tools – Using these tools helps you to increase your relevance when it comes to the search engines. Right now Bing is only 18% of the market, but that can greatly help you if you are the only one capturing that traffic. With both, you can validate your website, and go from there.
A search query is a helpful tool as well. For this example, John is using dfwrockssocialmedia.com in Google Webmaster Tools. The graph shows that 200+ people are clicking on the link to go to the main website. As you scroll down the Google Webmaster Tools page you can see the impressions and clicks of different keywords associated with your website. In the example used, dfwrockssocialmedia.com is showing up for the website’s name but is also getting 2,000 impressions for social media day. The time frame for this example is May 31st to June 30th (30 days). You can also look at 90 days as well.
Question from the audience: What is the difference between impressions and queries?
Answer: Google Adwords – if you find two words that are similar to each other for a keyword, but there aren’t many searches for it, then Google DOES NOT consider them related.
Question from the audience: What would be considered a decent bounce rate?
Answer: John tries to keep his clients’ websites under a 30% bounce rate (Lissa Duty’s website had a single digit bounce rate).
Question: Are there any Joomla plugins to help check bounce rates?
Answer: There aren’t many good plugins for Joomla to check SEO.
Question: Can Google Analytics be used to track a webpage’s history?
Answer: Yes, you can go back rather far on your pages. You can really drill down to the main statistics with Google Analytics.
Visit John’s Facebook Page to learn more about him.
