SEO 101 Flashcards
What is Mozlow’s Hierarchy of SEO Needs?
Going from top to bottom, from improve competitiveness to the bottom three which improve rankings, the following is Mozlow’s Hierarchy of SEO needs
- Snippet/ schema markup - to stand out in SERPs
- Title, URL & Description to draw high CTR in the rankings
- Share-worthy content - that earns links, citations, and amplification
- Great user experience - including a fast load speed, ease of use, and compelling UI on any device
- Keyword optimised - to attract searchers & engines
- Compelling content - that answers the searcher’s query
- Crawl accessibility - so engines can reach and index your content
What is SEO
Search Engine Optimisation - the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic to increase the exposure of your brand through non-paid also known as organic search engine results.
What are some examples of SERP features?
Things like those answer boxes or when you ask for the weather, a box with the current weather will come up immediately before links to weather sites will come up.
White hat vs. Black hat
White hat SEO refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that abide by search engine rule, its primary focus is to provide more value to people
Black Hat SEO refers to techniques and strategies that attempt to spam/fool search engines. While black hat can work, it puts websites at tremendous risk of being penalised and/or de-indexed (removed from search results) and has ethical implications.
What are the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
Basic Principles:
- Make pages primarily for users, not search engines
- Don’t deceive your users
- Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful task is to ask “does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist”
- Think about what makes your website unique, valuable or engaging
Things to Avoid:
- Automatically generated content
- Participating in link schemes
- Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)
- Cloaking - the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.
- Hidden text and links
- Doorway pages - pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website
What are the Bing Webmaster Guidelines?
- Provide clear, deep, engaging , and easy-to-find content on your site
- Keep page titles clear and relevant
- Links are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have grown organically
- Social influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run
- Page speed is important, along with positive, useful user experience
- Use alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand content
Things To Avoid:
Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well
- Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, this can lead to de-indexing
- Ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues
- Make your URLs descriptive, short, keyword rich where possible, and avoid non letter characters.
- Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.
- Duplicate content
- Keyword stuffing
- Cloaking - the practice of showing search engines different content than visitors
What you should and shouldn’t do when managing Google My Business listings
- Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business Index; You must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)
- Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features
Things to Avoid:
- Creation of Google my Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible
- Misrepresentation of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings for fake addresses
- Use of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses
- Abuse of the review portion of the Google My Business listing via fake positive reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors
- Costly, novice mistakes stemming from failure to read the fine details of Google’s guidelines
What is the fundamental job of an SEO?
Your job as an SEO is to quickly provide users with the content they desire in the format in which they desire it.
Try not to focus too much on beating Google’s algorithms as much as providing users with the answer to their user intent
What are some common examples of user intent?
Informational - Searching for information. Example: “What is the best type of laptop for photography”
Navigational - Searching for a specific website. Example: Apple
Transactional - Searching to buy something. Example: “good deals on MacBook Pros”
Looking at the SERPs to gain an understanding of the user journey
You can get a glimpse of user intent by Googling your desired keyword(s) and evaluating the current SERP. For example, if there’s a photo carousel, it’s very likely that people searching for that keyword search for photos.
- Think about what content your competitors who are ranking top in the search are providing that you are not. How can you provide 10X the value on your site?
What are your website’s goals?
Use this link for more info on website strategy and business goals: https://moz.com/blog/seo-value-for-clients
See common SEO KPIs below:
Sales Downloads Email Sign-Ups Contact Submission Forms Phone Calls
Goals for your Google My Business Listing
- Clicks To Call
- Clicks-To-Website
- Clicks-For-Driving-Directions
How can I learn more about setting smart goals for my clients SEO endeavours?
Use the Moz Whiteboard Friday talk here: https://moz.com/blog/smart-seo-goals
