Explore the process of SEO,

including how to read a

SEO Learning results page and see how

rankings affect businesses
large and small
Leveraging the power of
search to accomplish
your business goals
 Search is the gateway to just about everything we
do online. If we're hungry, we turn to a search
engine to find the best restaurants and read
reviews. If we're in the market for a product or
service, we research it and even buy it on the web.

Importance
of Search And with the explosion of devices like
smartphones, tablets, and home assistants, we're
no longer limited by where we can search. So
people are searching all day every day. But the real
question is will they find you in the search
results? That's what this course is all about.
 SEO Case Study
https://www.careerguide.com/
Increased Organic Traffic
by 588% for an
Educational Website:
SEO Case Study
 Career Guide is one of the largest student
guidance portals. It provides updates and
preparation material of school studies,
entrance exams, college admissions,
government jobs, talent search exams,
Olympiads.
About the
Career Guide
Career Guide website provides National,
state and college level entrance exams and
admissions updates, helps with preparation
and query solving.
 As a popular student portal, the website was already
pulling in organic traffic, but in December 2017, with the
2018 admission season (March ‘18 to June ‘18) ahead of
them, the client approached me to better their previous
years’ traffic numbers and overall website performance.

The Challenge
Given that the client had already done a pretty good job
of driving traffic the previous admission season in 2017,
it was going to be tough to beat the numbers especially
with the competition having strengthened as well.
 Not ones to shy away from a tough challenge, we started
working in January 2018.
• The website is a massive portal with 6,876 pages. Since we had
very little lead time before the start of the admission and
exam season, we had to be planned and methodical in our
approach. We quickly researched the admission and exams
calendar and search trends to identify which keywords and
The Solution landing pages to focus on in which month.
• Given that this was a guidance portal with rich content, most
(Approach) visitors came looking for information. As most of the traffic
was from mobile, we knew immediately that we needed to
implement AMP pages to boost organic traffic from mobile
even further.
• We also realized that we could extract more traffic from
keywords by implementing schema that would appear as rich
snippets in search results thereby improving CTRs.
 • Keyword Research and Landing Pages – exhaustive
research to identify exam and results announcements
dates to identify which keywords to work on in which
month. Based on keywords identified, we mapped
target landing pages to be optimized on a month to
month basis.
First 2 Months • Site-wide On-page SEO changes –
Focus was On- 1. Header and Footer Optimization to include links
to most popular Exams and topics. Added drop
Page down menu to the header to improve
navigation.
Optimization: 2. Improved internal linking to drive link juice to
relevant landing pages and boost Page Authority.
3. Fixed large number of dead URLs that were going
404 [not found] but were still linked to from the
content.
 From March to June’18, our focus was on optimizing keywords and
landing pages that were going to be popular in that given month. Most
of the effort was around content optimization and link building
• Content Optimization for Rich Snippets – we optimized content
[exam, syllabus, results pages etc.] with proper schema so it would
appear in search results and boost CTRs.
Next 4 • Content Optimization for Quick Answer Box – we optimized content
months Focus in structured data format, so many queries would start appearing in
quick answer box.

was Content • Content Syndication - we created content on the basis of the

upcoming exams which includes articles, blogs, press releases, guest
Optimization: posting, etc. these were syndicated across the web for brand
awareness and backlinks.
• We undertook a massive link building campaign which included
activities like list creation, pdf sharing, Quora submissions, company
profile creation and web 2.0 pages creation, microblogging, content
curation, social sharing, community sharing, video posting and RSS
feed submission.
The Results

We saw a
whopping Increase of
588% in organic search
traffic from Jan’18 to
June’18. This was an
awesome jump by any
standards.
 • The company was thrilled with the performance as they saw a
44% increase in organic sessions for the 6-month period from
Jan’18-Jun’18. Significantly more than they had expected.
• Month on Month Growth in Organic Traffic

Monthly
Traffic
 We laid great emphasis on the content in this campaign as we saw a clear
opportunity in improving Click Through Rates (CTRs) by updating Schema /
Rich Snippets for various sections of content on the website.

We updated content for accuracy and completeness and used Schema for
following content types:

Why we got Exam Pages [exam date, type, duration etc.]

successful Syllabus Pages [number of questions for various subjects etc.]

Results Pages [date of exam, date of declaration of results, date from

when and where score card can be downloaded etc.]

Registration / Application Forms [ Fees for early and late registration, fees
for rescheduling and retaking exams]

The content updation and schema implementation was a great hit as we

saw significant jump in CTRs from January 18 to July 18.
Overview of SEO
What is Search Engine
Optimization?
Plain and simple, Search Engine Optimization is the
process of making improvements on and off your website
in order to gain more exposure in search engine
results. And more exposure in search engine results will
ultimately lead to more visitors finding you for the right
reasons.

What is search engine

optimization (SEO)?
What is search engine optimization (SEO)?

At the heart of it all, search

engines are just trying to
find and understand all the
content out there on the
internet, and then quickly
deliver relevant and
authoritative results based
on any phrase the user
might be searching for
Relevancy of the Website
First, let's talk about relevance. When a
user searches for something like Noida
hotels, search engines want to show a
list of results that are relevant to the noida hotels
topic of Noida hotels. Search engines will
analyse all of the webpages they have
ever visited, and pick out the pages that
they believe are the most relevant to
Noida hotels.
They determine this by evaluating lots of
different factors, including how your
content is written and implemented in
code, as well as how other
websites around the internet are linking
to you.
Authority of the Website

The other very common way that

search engines determine the
authority of a webpage or a domain is
by evaluating what other websites link
to you, and this can be measured
through not only links out there that
are pointing to your website, but also,
and this is especially important if
you're a local business or selling a
product, reviews and what people are
saying about you on the internet, a
category collectively referred to as
sentiment.
Reading search engine result pages (SERP’s)
Before we dive into working on getting your website to
show up in the search results, it's important to
understand what those search results actually look
like. Although there are a lot of search engines around
the world, and they all have some distinct
differences, there are some common
characteristics that their search engine results pages,
or SERPs, may have.
One thing that we're probably going to find are some
paid listings. Paid listings are very different than the
traditional organic or natural listings that we'll be
focusing on for our SEO efforts. These paid listings are
actually advertisements, and programs like Google Ads
or Microsoft's Bing Ads, allow advertisers to bid on and
place these ads in the search results page.
 A typical Search
Engine Page

A typical search engine results

page will have 10 organic
results that link out to
different web
pages, sometimes referred to
as the 10 blue links. Each
result might look a little
different, but they'll all have at
least a headline, a description,
and a visible URL.
 Different Search
Results

In some search results, you

might see a visual carousel of
results. Others may include
enhanced results, like Google's
Knowledge Graph. These results
are generated from a variety of
sources, like Wikipedia and
review sites, as well as
information that you can
provide search engines from the
code of your pages using
schema.
Setting SEO Expectations
 Search engine optimization is a process that requires a
lot of work, a lot of time, and a lot of
patience. Throughout this course we'll dive in to
more about how to do SEO, but before that it's
important to set some expectations.

Be Patient
SEO is a bit different than other marketing
strategies and understanding these differences will
help us to stay on course for running and measuring a
successful SEO campaign. Patience is a virtue and that
couldn’t be more true than with SEO. Approach SEO as
a long term process that builds long term value.
 It takes time to develop and
execute on your strategy.
Research your keywords and
understand their intent. Create
valuable, useful
content. Attract relevant links
and authority signals and
resolve any technical issues
with your site. It's a never
ending process.
There's always work to be
done. SEO is not a one time
project. It's a process that
you'll continue doing for the
long haul.
Not a one Time Project
Search Engine Algorithm is always changing

Another thing to expect with SEO is change within the search engines and the search results
pages. It's important to realize and accept that these things are outside your control. Search
engines are always trying to improve their product to help deliver results that people want
and they're always trying new things.

Sometimes these changes are algorithmic. Other changes are more about features or
different ways of presenting different kinds of content to users in the search results pages.
 Search engines have the ultimate goal of
generating results that people will find useful and
helpful. If you build your authority and create
Goal of Search quality content that's useful and interesting to
people and if you do it in a way that's friendly to
Engines the computerized audience as well, the long term
and consistent goal of the search engines is to
reward that.
How SEO affects your
Business?
Everything we do online starts with Search

1 2
The good news is that Search Engines can help More and more content appears on the
you reach a tremendously large audience, web every second of every day. And your
attract more targeted visitors, and measure the customers need search engines to help make
impact of your efforts in terms of a return on sense of it all. People search to find answers to
your investment. their questions, to buy products, to find a place
to eat, to book travel, to get news. Just about
everything we do online starts with a search.
Search Intent
We call the motivation behind a given search
intent. And it's not just done around the family
PC anymore. The explosion of connected mobile
devices and voice assistants means that we have
access to search just about anywhere in the
world with just a few key strokes or voice
commands.
What people search for and the words they
choose when making their query says a lot about
their intent, or what actions they want to take at
a specific moment in time. And this has
traditionally been the Holy Grail of marketing
research.
 But more than that, one of the biggest benefits of
search engine optimization is the ability to actually
measure your results. You can use your website
analytics data to find out exactly how successful
you are in acquiring search engine users. And you
Biggest can see if those users' actions are in line with your
Benefit – business goals.

Measure your
You can evaluate the effectiveness of your
results content in attracting and advancing the
user through your sales file. And you can measure
what they do and what they don't do on your
website and beyond.
Keywords Strategy – The Foundation of SEO
 Before you can optimize your
website, you need to know what
you're optimizing for. Finding the right
keywords to focus your SEO efforts
on, can be challenging, but
fortunately there's a lot of data out
there, and a structured approach that
we can use for our keyword research.
Keywords are what searchers type into
a search engine, search engines like
Google and Bing will go out and fetch
the most relevant results for your
search query based on everything they
know about you and all the content on
the entire internet.
But it's important to remember that
search engines, have a hard time
Why you need a keyword – understanding what a user is
after, unless it's really spelled out.

Research Plan?
 • Formal keyword research is
the foundational piece in
SEO, that will help you
understand what people are
typing in the search engines.
• The intent of those
keywords, as the search
engines understand it, how
frequently they do it, how
relevant those terms are to
your business
objectives, and how
competitive those terms will
be to try to rank for.

Keyword Research
 Let's take an example, say you
sell cars, you might think that
the keyword car is something
that you want to rank for. But
after you've done a little
keyword research, you'll
probably find that it won't
make your list.
Why, well even though that
word gets typed into search
engines with a very high
frequency, think about its
relevance, how many
reasons could somebody type
the word car into a search
Example engine.
 They might be looking for toys, a
place for repairs, a car wash, car
parts, a rental car, any one of
hundreds of things that have
nothing to do with actually buying a
car. And think of all those people out
there that are also trying to rank for
the word car in the search engines.
This is an extremely competitive
term, a phrase like buy new blue
Toyota Camry might not get typed in
as much, but if that's what you're
selling, it's extremely relevant and
much less competitive. Keywords
like this will very likely end up
on your list of keywords to optimize
for.
What people type?
How to Research for
Keywords?
 The most important part of keyword research is to forget about
you and your business and put yourself in the shoes of your
potential customers.

Brainstorming The process typically begins with brainstorming and

answering some key questions.

This stage is important from an organizational

perspective because it will force you to look at different areas
of your business. Start with answering a basic question, what
products and services do you offer? Be as comprehensive as
possible and list out as many keywords and phrases as you can.
 Once you have a solid seed list of keywords, you'll need
to expand on it.

Keyword Two favorite keyword expansion tools in the SEO

industry are Google Trends and AnswerThePublic. Both

Expansion offers suggestions around new target phrases based on

your chosen keyword and both help you
understand exactly how people are searching for things

Tools on the live web.

Once you've got that list of potential keywords, the next

thing you'll need to do is take a look at search volume
metrics to see what kind of demand there is for those
phrases.
 • And while individually, there's not a lot of
search volume on each term, they each
do have some search volume. For
example, if I were selling iPhone cases, I
may start looking into the keyword
iPhone cases, a term that gets typed into
search engines a lot.
• It's extremely competitive and it's
probably going to be very difficult to rank
for. But I might also take a look at a more
long-tail keyword like protective blue
iPhone cases, it's going to be extremely
relevant, less competitive, and easier to
rank for, at the expense of raw search
volume.
• But here's the important part, you might
be able to find hundreds or thousands of
these long-tail keywords that together
have the potential to get you more
traffic than ranking for iPhone cases
would have from the start.

Long Tail Keywords

 Finally, you'll want to add some meaning and organization around the
keywords that you've collected. You can do this by identifying themes or
topics to group your keywords around, a process known as keyword
categorization.
Back to the example with the blue iPhone case, we may want to create a
group that will just be about blue iPhone cases that includes all the
different models of the phone.
Alternatively, we could categorize these, not by phone model but instead by
color. There's no right or wrong way to do this.
Keyword
Categorization
Keyword Research Tools
Moz Keyword Explorer

Now that we understand the basics around how

we conduct keyword research, let's dive into the
tools that will help us find more keywords and
collect all the data we'll need. There are quite a
few good tools out there, but for this video, we'll
use the Moz Keyword Explorer tool.
Not only does this tool provide a good measure on
search volume, it also suggests related keywords as
well as provides an idea of what types of sites and
content are currently holding the top positions.
You'll need to sign up for an account, and decide
between the free and paid versions, and, once you
navigate to the Keyword Explorer, you'll see a
screen like this.
Let’s go to the tool and explore the Keyword
Explorer Feature now…
 Google Trends

• Another great tool to get even more

information about a keyword is Google
Trends. This lets you type in different
keywords and see all kinds of information
about how that keyword is being typed into
Google searches over time.
• At the top of the page, you can filter this
data by geography and time period,
category, and even the type of search. Let's
stick Digital Marketing Course in here and
see what we can learn. Here, we see a
graph of how this term has been searched
for over the past five years. While there's
been a few spikes here and there, there
seems to be a upward trend across.
Importance of Keyword Research Tools

Using keyword research tools, like the Moz Keyword Explorer and Google
Trends allows us to discover new keywords and understand just what
people are typing into search engines.

This exploration and data collection is the backbone of our keyword

research process and can provide us with wonderful insights and
ideas around which keywords we'll focus on as part of our SEO strategy.
Understanding Keyword
Attributes
3 Key Attributes

There's a lot of data available to us about

the keywords people are typing into search
engines. And it's important to be able to
evaluate the different attributes of a
keyword before we decide whether or not
to target one with our SEO strategy.
There are three key things you'll need to
consider when choosing your keywords.
Relevance, search volume, and competition.
Relevance
• Let's start with relevance. The first thing you need to do when
you're deciding whether a keyword is relevant to your business is
ask yourself one simple question. Does the keyword you found
accurately reflect the nature of the products and services that you
offer? If so, you've nailed it.
• Remember, the number one objective of a search engine is to find
and deliver the most relevant content to its users for a given
search term. The best way to understand your customers'
search behavior is to put yourself in their shoes and really try to
get at their intent.
• If you were in the market to buy a car, how would you use a search
engine? You probably wouldn't type the word car in and click
search. Instead, you'd use something very specific to what you're
looking for. Like, used late model Toyota Camry.
Search Volume
• While used late model Toyota Camry might
be extremely relevant to your business and
likely to lead to an eventual sale, it's also not
typed into a search engine all that often.
• Search volume is the number of searches
being done for a particular keyword. And if
you use a tool like the Moz Keyword
Explorer, WordStream, Ahrefs Keywords
Explorer or SEMRush Keyword Magic, it's
represented as the potential monthly search
volume.
 Now let's have a look at competition. Keyword
competition, or keyword difficulty, as it's often
called, is just a measure of how difficult it's
going to be for us to rank a keyword in front of
our competition on a search engine results
page.

Competition
Looking at how actively and aggressively search
advertisers are bidding on a keyword can be a
good proxy for just how difficult a keyword is
going to be on the organic side. And if you have
an active Google Ads account, the Google
keyword planner has a competition column, as
well as bid information, that can help.
Understanding Keyword
Distribution
 Keyword distribution is the process of assigning keywords to specific pages on your
website. This is an important step in the content creation process and results in the content
on the page being aligned and relevant to the keyword you're targeting on that
page. Remember, you can't have an optimized page unless you know what keyword you're
optimizing it for.
Once you've identified all your target keywords through that keyword research process
working in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, or another spreadsheet program allows you to

Align Page create this mapping of keywords to the pages in your site structure in an organized way, and
it has the added benefit of keeping a record of which pages are targeting which keywords to
refer back to in the future.

Content
with Target
Keywords
Steps to Populate the Spreadsheet
The first step is to populate this spreadsheet with your existing webpages including the title tags,
meta-descriptions and h1's or first headers from the page. Be sure to include every page of your
site including your Home page, your About page your Location page, Contact page, and other
general kinds of content.

Remember, search engines want to see unique information for each and every page and listing them
all out here is a good way to quickly spot and correct duplications.

The second step is to take a look at the keywords from your keyword list and find the
most appropriate pages of your site for each of the keywords.
Ongoing Keyword
Evaluation
Keyword Evaluation

Ongoing keyword evaluation is critical to the long-term success of your SEO efforts. And it's
really the last step of the keyword research cycle. With all of the great keyword data that we
can look at, the one data point that we can't find out about in advance is how they'll actually
perform for us.

Once we start ranking for the keywords that we've targeted, and we start to get traffic coming
to our pages as a result of those rankings, we'll need to see of those keywords are actually
driving conversion actions and helping us achieve business objectives.
Using Google
Search
Console

By staying abreast of changes, with fresh research and focusing on how your
target keywords contribute to your website's organic traffic and business
objectives, you'll be developing a better understanding of your visitors, their
search patterns, and how you can serve them better, both today and for years
to come.
SEO Optimization: On-Page Optimization
Optimizing the Textual
Elements
 The main goal of a search engine is
to guide people to content that is
relevant to the keyword or phrase
that they search for. We can fine
tune the relevance of a page for a
certain topic through the process of
on page optimization. The
ItsECampus Website is focussed on
providing Digital Marketing Training
in Noida. And let's imagine that
through our keyword research we
decided that we wanted to optimize
this page for the phrase Digital
Marketing Training in Noida. Let's
walk through how we might
optimize the different elements on
this page for that particular search
term.
Goal of a Search Engine

1st Step - URL of the Website
The first element we're going to
optimize is the URL. The URL is the
location of the page we're looking at
and you can find it up in the address
bar. You can think of it almost like a
file on your computer, and much like
the path to any file on your
computer, we can follow some
simple guidelines that allow us to
create a good URL that can be
found and understood quickly.
The URL length should be as concise
as reasonably possible. While at the
same time, contain some usable
information about the page
itself. You might find that your
website structure uses a system of
sub folders and this can be good in
that it helps with the site structure.
 The next element we'll look at is the
meta title tag and here, we're going
to dive into the source code of this
page.
The meta title tag is also the title
that's used for the page's search
engine results listing. Not only are
we trying to optimize a title so that
search engine identify the theme of
our page, we're also trying too
entice users to click on it when they
see it in the search results.
But don't make the title too long or
detract too much from your target
keyword phrase as it will need to be
readable. Too long and it will get cut
off by the search engines. Tools like
the Moz Title-Tag Preview Tool can
help you visualize and test how your
2nd Step – Meta Title Tag title will look on a search engine
results page.
 • Another meta tag we can configure
is the meta description. Although
optimizing this tag won't likely do
much to improve your search
engine rankings and is largely
ignored by the major search
engines it can improve your search
engine result's click-through rate.
• And that's a metric that
informs how search algorithms
evolve. You'll want to pay attention
to it, because this tag can often be
used as the text that shows up
under the title of a listing in the
search results, and optimizing it
properly can both improve your
click-through rate in the present and
positively impact your rankings over
time.

3rd Step – Meta Description

 This is typically the mark up
used for the main visible
headline of your page and
search engines know this. The
purpose of using it is to give
the reader a clear idea of what
the content below is
about, much like a newspaper
headline does.

4th Step – H1 – Header Tag

 Now at this point, if you were a
search engine, you've seen a
URL, a title and a headline that
are all talking explicitly about
Digital Marketing Course, and
you're starting to get a pretty
good idea of what this page is all
about. And now we have the
content itself.
The most important thing about
your content is that it needs to
be optimized for people first and
search engine second. Make
sure that you're content is
written so that it communicates
5th Step – Content / Body to your target audience in a way
that's really engaging.
Text
 • One last element to optimize on this page are the
images.
• Let's take a look at this first image. As human beings,
we can look at this and quickly figure out that those
are some footprints next to the words Digital
Marketing Course. But when a search engine looks at
it, all it sees is a bunch of dots and different
colors. While machine learning and artificial
intelligence are tackling this problem, search engines
aren't yet relying on a machine's ability to read
words that appear in an image, or see the image like
a person does. So search engines rely on a few other
signals to understand just what those images are.
• Let's take a look at the code behind this
image. Inside this image tag, you can see a few
attributes. The first one is the source file name, or
the URL of that image. This tells the browser where
to go find the image so it can be loaded. The alt text
is reserved for a description of the image for those
people or browsers that can't see the image
itself. Both of these elements can be optimized to
accurately describe what the image is about and also
help support the keyword phrase we're trying to
optimize for.

6th Step – ALT Image

Finally - On-Page
Optimization
While there are many more items on a page that can
be optimized, focusing on your URL, title, description,
headers, body text and images will take care of a very
big chunk of your on page optimization.
Of course, doing this from the very beginning is the
ideal situation. But take a look at the existing pages of
your site after you've done your keyword research and
mapped your pages to your target phrases. You might
be surprised at just how much optimization there is to
do.
Optimizing non-text
components of a
webpage
 Search engines are generally very good at
analyzing and understanding the text
content on web pages. But search engines
have a more difficult time with other
forms of content like images, videos, and
audio clips.
Optimizing content like
images, videos, and One simple best practice is to use the
audio clips. text surrounding the non-text elements to
describe what it's all about.
So while the search engine will look at the
image filename and the alt text, it will
also look at the text nearby.
 • Aside from using the text that's near the
non-text elements, there's also some
code we can use to help the search
engines out.
• What's known as structured data allows
us to markup our code with some very
relevant, very specific metadata, specific
to a certain type of content. It's useful to
note that there are different ways of
marking up your structured data, but for
this example, we'll format the
schema.org markup using JSON-LD, which
search engines tend to favor. These are
some of the properties that you can
define for an image object. And if we
scroll down, you can see examples of the
difference between your standard image
tag, and one that's been enhanced with
schema.org markup.
• Note that there are markup
specifications for audio and video clips as
well.
Editing Schema.Org
 Take a look through
schema.org, and you can see
all of the different
properties and elements that
you can define for non-text
data. Making sure to provide
as much information as you
can to the search engines
can only help your overall
search engine visibility.

Editing Schema.org
 When you're adding markup to
your site, be sure to test it
using search engine tools like
Google's Structured Data
Testing Tool. Using a mix of
content types in your pages
can be a great way to engage
with your visitors and help
them down the conversion
path.
And just because a piece of
content doesn't use
words, doesn't mean we can't
help a search engine
understand just what it's all
Test Schema.Org about.
Analyzing Content
Quality
 We've covered how we can optimize
a page for a target keyword phrase
using the URL, title, headers and
overall content of that page. But
determining just how well a page
has been optimized can often be
difficult to gauge. And we may want
to isolate more opportunities for
improvement.
To help us do this we're going to use
the SEM Rush Site Audit. It's
important to note that if you're
going to get serious about SEO, you'll
probably want to invest in some
tools. And while for these examples
we're using a Moz Pro account you'll

Tools to Analyze Page find lots of excellent tools like

SEMrush, Ahrefs and more.

Content
 The factors analyzed are grouped by level of
importance. And we can switch between factors
that are hurting and helping the overall
score. For each issue we can see why these
things are problems, suggestions around how to
address these issues, and even some
commentary and links to more information.
Reviewing the elements that we've done
well can be helpful in making sure that we carry
these best practices over to other pages as we
optimize. And again, there's lots of great
information here to help us understand more
about each element that was analyzed. If you're
looking for a way to quickly generate a fairly
comprehensive evaluation of the pages of your
site along with a list of recommended
actions, this is the type of tool you'll want to
use.
And following these recommendations to clean
up the on-page factors of your webpages, is
what will end up showing the search
engines what keywords your content has been

Analysing the Site Pages optimized for.

Exploring the benefits of
user-generated content
 Importance of UGC

An important strategy for growing search

engine visibility is to continually generate
new, unique, and quality content. But,
there's only 24 hours in a day, and it can be
pretty difficult to do that with your own
resources. Fortunately, you can leverage
the interest and knowledge of your website
visitors to create new content for you, and
this is better known as user-generated
content.
User-generated content is content that
normal website visitors create for your
website, and given the right
circumstances, user-generated content can
be a very scalable and cost effective means
of content creation.
Benefits of Social Media
And don't forget to take advantage of user-generated content through social media outlets. A big
reason for the explosive growth of these social media services in recent years is that people have a
natural tendency to share interesting content with other people, and these services make it easy to
do that.

Remember, sharing content, whether you've created it or your users have, provides even greater
opportunity for people and search engines to find and see your content as authoritative.

Last, you'll want to make sure that you have some kind of approval process in place if you're going to
let visitors write or post whatever they want.
Combat Undesirable
Content
Unfortunately, the world is full of automated bots, and
angry people that can and will take full advantage of the
ability to post inappropriate things on other people's
websites.
You can have a blacklist of words and phrases that flag a
post as needing approval, or you can set all posts to
require approval.
You'll also want to consider if you'll be allowing any code,
HTML markup, or links in your user-generated
content, which can pose some additional issues.
And no matter how you structure your user-generated
community, you'll want to read, watch, or listen to what's
going up on your pages.
 Optimizing for
personalized search
Personalized Search - Location

Search engines take into account things like the device you are using, the location the device
is connecting from, and even your previous search history. Let's take a look at how location
influences the search results that you might get. Search engines can use location
information from an IP address, GPS, or other signals to understand where you physically are.

So a search for 'pizza place' done from New Delhi will give some very different results than
that same search done in Mumbai. But searchers can also indicate a location by adding it to
the search query.
Personalized Search - Device
Personalization is also done at the device level and you'll probably notice
that search engine results with the same query can be different across
mobile and desktop.

Knowing that many mobile searchers are on the go, search engines often
adjust the mobile results to cater to maps, paid results, knowledge graph
results, and even the ordering of mobile rankings.

Keep in mind that search engines test interactions with these results
often, refining those results to provide you with the relevant
information and then evolving your personalized experience.
Personalized Search - Behaviour
Last, your search history can be used to populate future results. The websites that
you visited in the past, as well as your personal search settings, and length account
activity, will influence the way that search engines provide information in the future.

There are a few ways that they do this. And it's important to know that this can
effect both paid and organic results.

On the paid side, clicking on a search result can activate targeting criteria that
advertisers can use to show you related ads regardless if they're related to that initial
website.
Personalised Search – Voice Search
As search engines continue to evolve with voice inputs and adapt to increasingly
complex queries, their ability to solve human problems like where I might like to eat
or the best place for me to purchase something are tailored more and more to the
individual conducting those queries.

Personalization means that the future of search is about catering results to the
individual. And as we develop and refine our SEO strategies, knowing that the search
experience will provide more personally relevant ads and organic results will help us
stay ahead of the curve and leverage this personalization ourselves.
Content Optimization: Technical SEO
Interpreting the
code behind
webpages
 The end goal of a search
engine, when it's crawling a page, is
to try to determine what a web page
looks like to regular people. But the
search engine can't see a page like
we do. Instead, it sees the code that
web servers send back to our
browsers, and to help illustrate
this, let's take a look at the
ItsECampus home page.
To us humans, we see a rich and
colorful web page with lots of
content on it. Pictures, text, menus,
and videos, and all kinds of colors
and styles. It's visually appealing,
and we know how to absorb all of
this information and navigate
through it.
How a Web Page Looks?
 But to a search engine crawler, the same
page looks like this instead. This may not
look like the same page to the untrained
eye, but it is. All of this markup and code is
really just a bunch of instructions web
browsers can follow in order to render a
great-looking web page onto our screens.
And the important part is that this is
what search engines look at when trying to
understand what your page is about, and
how it should be ranked.
Web pages are ultimately created with
HTML code: scripts and other markup, which
helps browsers figure out where to find and
download all the files needed to produce
this pretty page, where everything is visibly
placed on the page, how things are laid out,
which fonts, colors,and sizes to use, what
side menus will look like,where links will

How Search Engines Look at point to, and where content elementsare
going to be placed.

Pages?
 • If you take a close look, you can see that
there's lots of stuff in the HTML that may
not end up on the screen. And these items
provide us with extra opportunities to help
search engines understand our content
better. HTML, or hypertext markup
language, is also responsible for
referencing and loading styles sheets, which
are extra instructions that help define the
visible attributes of a page: font coloring,
content sizing, line spacing, background
images, page conventions, all kinds of rules
for the visual representation of a page can
be found here.
• And HTML is not the only language that
browsers can understand. These days, web
pages are made more interactive through
the use of things like traditional JavaScript,
JQuery, Angular, AJAX, HTML5 elements, and
more. These advanced frameworks and
languages make possible things like
animation, slideshows, dynamic menus, and
lots more. You can also find code that
produces different types of non-text

Website HTML
content.
Error Free Web Pages

As you can probably guess, making

sure that your website's code is
clean, efficient, and free of any
coding errors, will help ensure that
your pages are displaying properly
to your users, but also save the
search engine some confusion. The
cleaner your code, the easier it will
be for you to make adjustments to
improve your on-page optimization,
and the more search engines will
trust that your pages will be a good
experience for your users.
 Understanding how
search engines index
content
 It's important to understand how search engines
discover new content on the web. As well as how
they interpret the locations of these pages. One
How Search way that search engines identify new content is by
following links. Much like you and I will click
through links to go from one page to the next.
Engines find
new content? Search engines do the exact same thing to find an
indexed content. Only they click on every link they
can find. If you want to make sure that search
engines pick up on your new content, one of the
easiest and most important things that you can
do is make sure that you have links pointing to it.
 One great way to do this is to create an HTML
sitemap. Link to the footer of every page of your
website that mirrors the exact structure of your
site with links to all of your important content.

SiteMap
Another way for search engines to discover new
content, is from an XML sitemap. XML stands for
extensible markup language. And it's a different
type of meta language that like HTML is used to
share data on the web. Unlike the HTML
sitemap, which is a list of links on a webpage.
 Sitemap.org

An XML sitemap is a listing of your site's

content in a special format that search
engines can easily read through. You or
your webmaster can learn more about the
specific syntax and how to create XML
sitemaps by visiting sitemaps.org.
Once you've generated your HTML and XML
sitemaps, you can submit them directly to
the search engines and this gives you one
more way to let them know when you add
or change things on your site. Another
important thing to recognize is that while
search engines will always try to crawl your
links for as much additional content as they
can find, you may not always want this.
 There can be times when you might
have pages on your site that you
don't want search engines to find.
Think of test pages or members only
areas of your site that you don't
want showing up on search engine
results pages. To control how search
engines crawl through your
website, you can set rules in what's
called a robots.txt file.
This is a file that you or your
webmaster can create in the main
root folder of your site. And when
search engines see it, they'll read it
and follow those rules that you've
set. Robots.txt blocks can help
control bandwidth stream and make
your site more crawlable.
Robots.txt
 With a robots.txt file, you can
set rules that are specific to
different browsers and search
engine crawlers. And you can
specify which areas of your
website they can and can't
see.
This can get a bit
technical. And you can learn
more about creating robots.txt
rules by visiting robotstxt.org.
Again, once search engines
discover your content, they'll
index it by URL.
Robotstxt.org
 URLs are the locations of webpages on the
internet. It's important that each page on your site has
a single, unique URL, so that search engines can
differentiate that page from all the others. And the
structure of this URL can also help them understand
the structure of your entire website.
There are lots of ways that search engines can find
your pages. And while you can't control how the
crawlers actually do their job. By creating links for
them to follow, unique and structured URLs, sitemaps
for them to read, meta tags to inform them and
robots.txt files to guide them.

Unique Structured URL

Working with Canonical
URLs and Redirects
 - As search engines try to find and index all the pages they find on the
internet, they rely on unique URLs as pointers to each piece of
content. Well there should be a single unique URL for every page on the
internet.
- Often our webpages can introduce slightly varied URLs for the same
piece of content, resulting in duplicate URLs in the search engine's
index. A common reason for this is the use of URL parameters. These are
extra bits of data that are appended to the end of URLs, and they can be
used to do a lot of different things.
URL
Parameters
 Sometimes they can actually control what content shows up
on the page. And in those cases, the different URLs actually
are different pages. Other times though, they have
nothing to do with the content.

They could be used to store session IDs or tracking

parameters, and while the URL may be different, the
content is unaffected.
Duplicate
URL’s The problem is search engines can only make guesses about
which URL parameters are important for content and which
aren't. And sometimes those guesses are wrong.

If search engines see two URLs with the same content on

them, and index and then rank them both, then you'll end
up competing with yourself.
 Canonical Meta Tag

And this can lead to reduced visibility in

search as the search engines start to prefer
pages from competing sites that are less
confusing. One way to resolve this issue on
your site is to use the rel canonical meta tag.
This tag is something that you add to your
page that acts as an instruction for search
engines, telling them that no matter what
URL might be showing up in the address bar
for this content, make sure to index this URL as
the primary URL for this content.
Another way to clear up any confusion about
how your site uses URL parameters for
content is to tell the search engines directly
through Google Search Console and Bing
Webmaster Tools.
 Search Console

Here's an example in Search

Console where we've gone to
the crawl URL parameters
area to define certain URL
parameters that should be
ignored.
 • Another reason that duplicate content
may exist is because content may have
been moved from one location to
another on your website. The old
location and the new location could
potentially be in the search engine's
index at the same time. And to avoid this
situation, whenever you move
content it's important to implement
redirect rules.
• There are a few redirect types that you or
your webmaster can use. But let's take a
look at two in particular. The first is
known as a 302, or temporary
redirect. This should only be used for
short-term content moves, like when you
want to show an alternate page while
your site is down for maintenance. It tells
a search engine that the page it's looking
for isn't there now, but it will be back
very shortly. So please don't do anything
to your index.

Temporary Redirects
 • For long-term or permanent content
moves, which search engines are
really concerned with, you'll want to
use a 301, or a permanent redirect.
• These tell search engines that
although they may have indexed a
previous URL for that content, that
old URL is no good anymore. The
search engine should take
everything it knew about that old
URL, and apply it to the new
one where that content now lives.
• One thing to be mindful of is how
you use these two redirect types. If
you leave temporary 302 redirects
up for too long, search engines may
eventually start to treat them as
permanent redirects.

Permanent Redirects
Using Google Search
Console
Verifying your website

he first step is to go to google.com/webmasters and

sign in to your account. This requires a Google
account and if you don't already have one, you can
head over to google.com/accounts to create one. Once
you're logged in, you'll need to submit the exact version
and protocol of the live site for the domain you want to
manage.
And in this case, we'll continue using our example site,
ItsECampus.in. Remember there's a difference
between the https and http protocols. And to make
sure we're working with the right one, we've matched it
to the http version. When you first sign up, in order to
protect your account and your website, Google will
need to verify that you actually own this domain and
that you're authorized to see some critical details
around this website. So there are a few verification
methods that you can choose from.
 The options that you or your
webmaster have include uploading a
specific HTML file to your site, or
adding a specific meta tag to your
source code, or making a small change
to your site's DNS record.
Another helpful option is the Google
analytics or tag manager access
method, which you can use if you're
using these services and have
administrative access to the account.
Once you've verified a website, you'll
see a listing for it in your main
dashboard with any important
messages. Clicking into this website
will bring up a dashboard and menu of
all the different areas of the search
console.
Options to Verify
Navigating through
Search Console
While you can click on any of these to dive right it to certain
reports and areas of Search Console, let's go ahead and walk
through some of the most important items using the menu at left
as our guide. First, you'll want to notice the site messages
area. This is where warnings, alerts, or information that pertains to
your site will surface. And it's important to check in here from time
to time.
Next in the search appearance menu, the first item is a place that
can give you an overview of the structured data that Google is
aware of on your pages, like that microdata we've looked at with
schema.org.
Let’s go to the Search Control to take a look at few of the options
that we can see for our website
Long-Term Content Planning
Overview of Long-Term
Content Strategy
 Content Strategy

• With many businesses turning to online

as a medium to market their products
and services, it's more important than
ever that business owners understand
why having a content strategy will help
propel them forward and achieve
success with their search objectives.
• A content strategy is the planning,
creation, and management of usable
content. Before you begin writing
content and posting it or syndicating it
across the web, you need to have a
plan. This starts by understanding who
your target audience is, and what their
needs are.
Planning for the Content
Think about content as bait, and your audience are the fish. If you use the
wrong kind of bait, or, if you throw the right bait in a pond where there
aren't any fish, that's no good. You won't catch what you're looking for.

But understanding who your audience is, where they hang out and
converse online, and what they're talking about, will help you to both find
your targets and learn what's important to them.

When you couple this with keyword research, you'll have a strong
understanding of the themes and kinds of topics you'll want to produce
content for.
 Content creation involves
writing usable, relevant, and
targeted content. The quantity
of the content is not as
important as developing
quality pieces, so that
customers can always refer
back to and share with others.
For SEO purposes, remember
that it's the content that
attracts audiences and
links. And relevant, high-
quality pages, are then
rewarded further with
authority in the eyes of the
Creating the Content search engines.
 • Once your content has been created, it needs to be managed and
maintained properly as well. A sound content management system lets
team members write, edit, post, and maintain content quickly and
efficiently, helping with workflows and encouraging a more collaborative
environment that each member of the team can be a part of.
• Going through the cycles of planning, creating, and managing usable
content will have you well on your way to a sustainable and successful
content strategy.
Measuring
the Content
Effectiveness
Define your audience,
topics, angle, and style
Importance of Defining Your Audience
Defining and understanding your target audience is the
first step to writing content for them, and knowing who
you're writing for, what you'll be writing about, and how
you should be writing will ultimately make the content
development process clear and simple.

Search engines as well as users value rich,

quality, and relevant content, so it's
important that you keep this in mind before you
start typing away on your ideas.
 • The first step is to define your target
audience. Attracting just anyone to your website isn't so
hard, it's attracting the right kind of people and offering
the right topics in the right tone and style that's a
First Step – challenge.

Define your • A good way to start is to simply ask the question, who
are the people that we want visiting our site and what
Target roles would they play in an organization? From here, we
can go through the exercise of understanding how
Audience they're using online channels and where we might be
able to message or engage them.
 • A great tool to start off with is the Google Consumer
Barometer reports. This series of insights from
Google can help provide information into how your
end consumer uses different technologies today.
• There are several useful tools within the reports,
namely the Graph Builder, Trended Data, Audience
Stories, and Curated Insights.
• As an example, using Curated Insights for the
U.S., you can learn how various demographics
access and use the internet, and how the online
experience informs buying decisions.
• Reviewing Audience Stories, you can dive deeper
into how a subset of internet users interacts with and
consumes online content.
• Drilling into millennials, for example, we can see that
some 90% of 16 to 34-year-olds go online daily, and
75% of those access the web via smartphone at least
as often as they do by computer, or that one in 10
millennials learn of new products online.

Tools to Define your Target

Audience
Trended Data and
Graph Builders
Trended Data will give you high-level demographic statistics by
country or globally and allow you to further drill down by
gender and age group.
Finally, Graph Builders lets you build demographics-based
graphs from a series of topics, categories, and subcategories to
get deep insights into the behaviors of specific groups. Once
we know what kind of content our target audience is
consuming and how they behave when they consume that
content, and once we've learned more about who they are,
we'll need to dive in and look at our topics.
 Ultimately, users are entering keywords into search
engines, and keywords remain the core and foundation of
SEO. So, when it comes to choosing topics, we'll want to tie
them to the keywords we've chosen in our research based
Second Step – on relevance, search volume, and competition.
You'll also want to look at tools like Google Trends to
Define Your monitor industry trends and understand what's popular
among your target audience and what's being searched for
Topic and discussed. Matching your topics to what's popular and
being searched for will maximize the size of the potential
audience you're catering to.
 Next, you can employ the concept of filling in the
gaps. Odds are good that someone else already wrote
something about your topic, and the last thing the internet
needs is more pages talking about the same old
Third Step – Fill thing. Instead, figure out what's missing out there and fill
in these holes.
in the Gaps Monitor what your competitors are writing about, but
more importantly, monitor what they're not writing
about. These are great opportunities for you to offer
unique perspectives and even more value.
 • Once we've identified who we're writing for and what
we're writing about, the last thing we need to do is
define our content angles.
• This is really nothing more than your approach to writing
content, and it should be consistent and appropriate to
the audience you're speaking to. Are you writing
Fourth Step – technical articles for rocket scientists to read or light
hearted commentaries on the state of the
Define your entertainment industry? There are very different tones
for each. And above all, remember that while we're
Content Angle doing all this to support business objectives, and
ultimately, some kind of a sale, no one wants to read a
blatant sales pitch. We need to offer up something of
real value, content that's compelling and useful to the
reader.
Summary of your Content Strategy
Understanding Different
Types of Content
Understanding Different Types of Content

You might think that

content is just text on a
page,but these days, that's
not the case. Content can
take many forms, including
slideshow presentations,
images, infographics, video,
audio, augmented and
virtual reality, and much,
much more.
Different Types of Content

First, lots and lots of content out

there is in textual format. These
are the words we read on pages,
blog posts, articles, product
descriptions, stories and
more, and we've seen the
importance of this text and how
we choose it and how it relates
to the keywords that we want to
target with our SEO strategy.
Different Types of Content

But don't forget about other file formats. PDF files,

Word documents, and even presentation slides are
all forms of content we interact with day in and
day out, and they can all be published on the
web. While you can usually bring the content from
document formats into an HTML format for the
web, many people don't think about their
presentations.
If you have a slide deck that you recently
presented, why not host it on the web and share
it with your audience after the session? More and
more speakers and companies are making a
habit of uploading their slides to slide hosting
services, like SlideShare, before they even give
their talk.
Different Types of Content

Using images can be a great way to tell

a story visually or to help readers
envision exactly what the text on a
page is describing, and images are
quickly evolving as their own kind of
content all across the web.
Think of the popularity of sites like
Pinterest and services like Instagram
that are completely driven by groups
of images arranged by and commented
on by people all over the world.
Different Types of Content

• Another popular piece of content that has

popped up is the infographic. Infographics
represent a concept or a large set of data
visually, and they can help people absorb and
distill a lot of information in a meaningful
way that can quickly be understood.
• Infographics are typically just image files, and
they're often found on pages with plenty of
context around them, so they can certainly be
indexed and searched on in search
engines. And well-designed and constructed
infographics on popular topics have the added
benefit of getting shared around and
referenced from other sources.
Different Types of Content
• Believe it or not, not too many years ago, you
would've been crazy to put video up on your
webpages because it would've meant your
users needed to have a high-speed
connection and have some fancy plug-in
installed in their browser.
• But these days, video is everywhere. And not
only do most of us have high-speed data
connections for our computers, we have them
for our phones and tablets, too. Video
production has never been more
economical, and telling a story with sight and
sound can help you get a message across that
text and images simply can't convey. And
remember that video content can be
optimized for search engines.
Getting ideas for content
 First, think of your website in
terms of some very broad
themes, and then think of the
different ways that you might
be able to present those
themes as content. Content
can be classified in many
ways, and thinking about the
style you can write in
may shake some ideas loose
and start you down a
path. Here are a few broad
types that you can refer back
to when you need that spark.
First – Build Content
Themes
 • The second thing you can do as a source
of inspiration is scan your competitors to
see if you're missing something or if
there's a hole out there that you can
fill. Do a quick search on some of your
keywords and click on some of your
competitors.
• You can spend time on their sites and
take a look at their blogs or the FAQ
sections. What kinds of things are they
writing about? Are there categories that
you can offer a new unique insight
into? Are there hot topics that you can
expand on, or burning questions that you
can answer? Or look to a tool like Answer
the Public, or the plug in tool Keywords
Everywhere to get additional insights into
what people want to know about a given
topic or query.

Second – Scan Your

Competition
 • Third, the people you work with each and
every daycan be a hidden sources of
fantastic content. Customers are often
happy to leave reviews or provide
feedback if you ask them to, and there
are lots of ways that you can ask. Calling
up or having a face to face
conversation with your best customers
can lead to a case study or a testimonial
that you can put up on your site that
shows real customers having good
experiences. For a search engine, that
can represent both good content and
authority.
• You might ask a customer to do a
thorough review of one of your products
or services for posting on your
website, or run a contest where
customers write about their experiences
for a chance to win a sweepstakes, or a

Third – Leverage Customers prize of some kind.

and Partners
Working with an
editorial calendar
An Editorial Calendar

An editorial calendar is perhaps one of

the most important parts of your
content strategy and without proper
planning, you'll find it difficult to
establish consistency or structure in
the content that you're posting to your
site. An editorial calendar simply
maps out your content development
process, assigning writers and dates to
the topics of pages, posts, or any other
content that will be going up on your
site.
Example – Editorial Calendar
Things to Look Into…

01 02 03
Make sure your Make sure they are Assign a content
keywords are part pointing to the owner who can
of the overall right links of your keep the track of
content website pages the content
development
Promote your content
with Social Media
Measuring Content
Performance
 Measuring the performance of your
content is essential to determining the
success of your SEO efforts and to helping
guide your content strategy. By looking at
how your content performs, you'll be able to
understand what your visitors want and
provide more of it to them in the future.
When you evaluate your content's
performance, it's important to ask these
questions: What pieces of content are our
visitors looking at? What's our most popular
content? Are our visitors engaged with our
content? Are they sharing our content with
others? And is our content generating
quality business results?
If you haven't already, you can install a web
analytics tool like Adobe Analytics or Google
Analytics to collect the data you'll need to
help you get the answers to these questions.

Ask these Questions

Gauging Visitor Engagement
 Did the visitors who came to our site as a result of a particular piece
of content end up buying something?
• Calling us?
• Submitting a lead form?
• Downloading a white paper?
• Did they sign up for a product demonstration?
Measure your • Or did they follow us on a social network?

content • Or share our content with others?

• Did they sign up for our newsletter?
performance Each and every one of these goals has a real business value. And by
understanding what content drives these conversion actions, we can
answer the biggest question of all. What did we get back for our
investment in SEO? Whichever tools you use monitoring and
measuring the performance of your content will help you understand
the value you're creating and help you plan for and continually
improve the content you'll be focusing on next.
Link-Building Strategies
Understanding the
importance of links
 One of the most important aspects of SEO
is links. This is traditionally been the
backbone of how search engines work. As
search engines scour the internet and
crawl all the pages in the world, they find
links pointing to other pages.
You know that clickable text that you
Importance of Links see everywhere that takes you to some
other page? You can think of each one of
those links as a vote, and not every vote is
the same.
Remember that some sites are
considered more authoritative and
trustworthy than others.
 The number of links you have pointing to
you, the ratio of links to linking domains, and
the quality of those links. Generally speaking
you'll improve your search engine visibility by
increasing your link popularity.
The more quality links you have pointing
back to your website from other websites, the
Authority with Links more authoritative your site will be to search
engines. If no other website was linking to
yours, it would be very difficult for search
engines to trust your site enough to return
it in the search results.
A search engine would much rather show
results from sites that have earned links and
authority.
Building internal links
Navigational Links
Internal linking helps search engines understand the structure of your website, the topics and
themes of your content, and even the relative importance of each page on your site. We can break
down internal linking into two different types, navigation links and contextual links.

Navigation links are typically links found on the top, side or bottom or you web pages, or often
within breadcrumb trails. You can think of them as part of the framework of your site. Navigation
links are present on every page of the site and they're used to help guide users as they click around
your site and find what they're looking for.

Search engines will analyze your navigation links to determine a hierarchy of pages that drill down
from your home page. And they'll be able to see how your content is organized and how flat or deep
your site structure is.
Contextual Links
01
Outside the navigational framework of your
website you'll have contextual links. These are
links within the content of a specific page that
point to another page on your site. And just
like external links these can be very
helpful when the content of one page makes
reference to the content of another page.
02
Contextual links help users by cross
referencing other relevant information, but
they help search engines too. Search engines
can look at the anchor text of an internal link
to help it understand the content of the page
the link points to.
Plan the Structure for your website

When you're building your website make sure to give some thought
and planning to the navigational elements that you plan to use across
all the pages, and the anchor text that you'll use in navigational links.

And when you're writing content make sure you're taking advantage
of linking to other pages on your own site with contextual links that
also use appropriate and descriptive anchor text.
Building External Links
 Building quality links to your website will
improve its overall popularity in the eyes
of the search engines, and improve your
search engine visibility. But you're
probably thinking what most people are
Quality Links thinking at this point, how do I get links
pointing back to my site when I don't have
control over other websites out
there? The good news is that links come
in different forms and can be generated
from different tactics.
Web Directories

First there are some easy ones. A very common way of generating links is to submit your website or
business to different web directories.

But keep in mind that you're going to want to be extremely selective about the directories you
submit to. What you don't want to do is click on one of those ads that says they'll submit your
website to four billion search engines and directories for $1.99. There are lots of spammy directories
out there, and very few are actually trustworthy.

A good litmus test is whether or not the directory conducts some form of editorial process that
reviews each link and only accepts relevant and trusted websites, themselves. If a directory is willing
to publish any link without any review, it's probably not a reliable directory.
Local Directories

A good place to start is in the local business

directories, where you can submit your
information to the different search engines
directly, and maintain and control your local
profile. If you have industry-specific
directories and listing services that are
trusted and unique to your market, those
are good places to go next.
Another way of building links is to entice
other websites to link to your content. And
the key factor here is that you need to have
quality content that people are willing to
link to.
Outreach for Linking Content

In a search engine's perfect world, someone reads a piece of content and says "wow, that
content is so fantastic "that I have to link to it." And sometimes great content attracts links
naturally, as a result of people discovering it and sharing it around.

But there are other times when you may have to do a little outreach to get people to discover
your content in the first place. Leveraging your social connections to share the fact that you've
posted new content can get the word out. And don't stop there, try to find other
websites that you feel have that same audience as you.
Build new, Quality links

And don't put yourself on listings or directories that exist solely to get you more links. As with most things, common
sense should keep you out of trouble. The web is constantly changing and evolving.

And the search engines are too. While a lot has changed within search engines over the years, the importance of links
has remained intact.

And that's because quality and insightful content will always attract readers willing to share your content. As long as your
link-building tactics keep those key elements in mind, you'll always have an opportunity to build new, quality links.
Finding Link Building
Opportunities
Searching for Backlinking Keywords

One simple way to find new opportunities is to analyze the backlinks of other sides ranking for a target keyword
phrase. The logic here is pretty straight forward. If a webpage is ranking well for the keywords you are targeting,
then they must have some good backlinks. By examining their links, we might find some that we like to go after as
well to help our own rankings.

Let's take an example and say we want to find new link opportunities for the phrase Digital Marketing Course.
The first thing to do is head over to Google and do a search for that term. The top organic results here are ranking
high in part because of their on-page optimization, but another strong reason they rank so well is because they
have a lot of good links pointing to those pages. What we want to do is analyze who is linking to those
pages, determine how they got those links, and create a link outreach strategy to emulate those efforts.
 Tools for BackLinking

A tool we can use for backlink research is the

Backlink Analytics, another tool that's part of
the SEMRush Suite.
Let's pick one of those top-ranking URLs from
the previous search and enter it in using the
exact page option. You'll see lots of
information about this page, but the backlink
section is what we're concerned with for this
exercise.
Backlinks list out all the pages linking to the
one we're examining. You can play with the
various filters to narrow down this list
according to different criteria, but for now
we're going to focus on active links only, and
we're going to sort by linking domains to see
the referring by domain.
Measuring SEO Effectiveness
Measuring SEO
Performance
 One of the biggest challenges that you
might find is in figuring out whether your
SEO campaigns are succeeding or not.
SEO measurement not only involves the
analysis of basic metrics like traffic
resulting from organic search engines, but
Importance of it also requires a holistic approach to
measuring business outcomes and making
Measuring SEO adjustments based on data.
If you've never paid attention to
measuring SEO before, there are some
basic things you'll need to have checked
off your list. Before you can do anything,
you have to make sure that you have an
analytic solution installed.
Measuring SEO Performance

Once you're collecting the data, you'll need

to define your business objectives and the
key performance indicators, or KPIs, that
you'll use to measure them.
For example, you might want people to
submit a contact form on your website. In
that case, you can configure your analytic
solution to track that as a conversion
action. And you might look at KPIs like the
number of conversions that occur over a
particular time period or the conversion rate
for specific marketing channels.
SEO Specific KPI’s
Analysing Keywords
 Keywords are the backbone of search engine
optimization. And when we're measuring our SEO
efforts, analyzing the different keywords that are
bringing people to our websites is an excellent place
to start. Again, there are many enterprise level
Analysing analytics tools that you can use on your website that
can help you accomplish your task.
Keywords
with Google But for this video, we're going to use Google
Analytics. The first thing to notice in this tool, or any
Analytics other, is that there are some reports specifically
dealing with organic keywords. In the case of Google
Analytics, we're going to take an extra step of
actually linking our Google analytics and Google
Search Console accounts.
 Google Analytics –
Search Console

Once linked, if we go to the search console

queries report from the Acquisition
menu, you'll see the different keywords
that have driven traffic to your site from
Google in the given period, with
information around average
positions, impressions, and clicks. One thing
you might look for are keywords that have
high impressions but low click through
rates.
This means that while you're showing up in
the search results, nobody's clicking on
your listing. This could indicate that you've
got problems with your title or maybe your
description, and it's probably worthwhile
take a closer look.
 Google Analytics -
Channels

To find some insights around what's happening

after the click, we can head over to the all
traffic channels report. Drill down to the
organic search traffic, and you'll notice that the
default primary dimension, keyword, has the
bulk of the data in a bucket called, not
provided.
Unfortunately, Google doesn't provide much in
the way of organic keyword data to web
analytics tools. But you can change your
primary dimension to source, and get a sneeze
of which search engines are making up what
percentage of your traffic. Adding a secondary
dimension of landing page can give you some
clues into your most successful content on
each of these search engines.
Analyzing Links
 Over time, if you're consistently putting out good quality
content, promoting it, and working through link outreach
opportunities, other websites will start linking to you. And
being able to clearly see what's happening to your linked
Tools to track portfolio, can tell you how you're doing in your quest to
show the search engines just how trustworthy and
Links authoritative your pages are.
There are a few really good tools out there for analyzing
backlink metrics, like Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, Raven,
SEMrush, and others.
 Checking your
Website Links

It's also important to note, that you can use

these tools to analyze links for any website,
not just your own. And as we saw earlier in
this course, looking at your competitors
backlinks can be a great way to discover
new link opportunities.
But when your analyzing your own
backlinks, you'll want to take a good look at
some metrics that can tell us how our link
building efforts are going. Using Backlinks,
you can produce a report on domain and
page metrics for any URL, and you'll also
see a list of the pages that link to that
website.
SEO for E-Commerce
Understanding SEO and
ecommerce
 These days, lots of people use search engines for
shopping. Whether they're in the early stages of research
or they're ready to buy something right now, whatever
stage of the buying process they're in, if you sell a product
that they're searching for, you're going to want to be
Searching for found.
And there a few different things to consider that are
Products specific to e-commerce websites that can help a search
engine match your pages to the intent of people's search
queries. First and foremost, remember that
everything that applies to normal content, also applies to
e-commerce pages.
 The common best practices around website linking
structures, external links, and on page optimization are all
very important. But in an era where search engines want
to explicitly identify content at the most granular level of
detail that they can, we want to make sure that search
Highlight your engines are very clear that your e-commerce content is
exactly that.
Content Beyond the typical HTML code that's found on your web
pages, you can use very specific metadata to help identify
your content as e-commerce content and describe the
products that you're offering.
Working with schema for
ecommerce
Schema.org
E-commerce sites are different from most normal websites because
they have very specific content about very specific products. To help
search engines identify these specific bits of content, we're going to
once again take advantage of shema.org markup. Schema.org contains
many schemas that can help identify different kinds of content, and
that includes e-commerce content.
Your e-commerce site will have product pages, and these pages should
be using the schema for products found at schema.org/product. In your
code, you can specify a product name, description, product image, and
even a brand manufacturer or model information.
Offers and Reviews
Another element that you can associate with your products are
offers. Offers have a whole list of properties that you can
populate; things like how much you're selling the product
for, the availability of that product, what condition that product
is in, or even what date that price is valid until.
And to take further advantage of user-generated content, you
can apply microdata to the reviews that you're collecting on
your products. Schema.org/review provides the syntax around
properties like the title of the review, who wrote it, when it was
published; and, of course, the content of the review itself.
Advantage of Schema.org

Taking full advantage of the schema.org And investigating the always-expanding

microdata for your e-commerce-specific support for the various schema markups
data is a great way to make sure that that are out there might help you add
search engines know exactly how to more relevant content that you wouldn't
interpret your content. have otherwise thought of.
 The technical
components of E-
Commerce
Things to Watch out for
E-commerce websites are unique in that they're
constantly changing because of product inventory
that's coming and going. These websites tend to
be very large, as well, which can increase the
chances of unanticipated technical issues popping
up.
If you're running an e-commerce site, then there
are some specific things to watch out for and
some things to put on your to-do list.
First, if you're out of stock of a product, the
product changes slightly, or you're not selling it at
the moment, but you expect to at some point in
the future, make sure to leave the page intact,
but, of course, update that page with the
appropriate messaging.
Redirecting the Pages
You don't want to have to start from scratch, especially if
you're already getting good traction with the search
engines.
But if a product no longer exists in any form, make sure
that product URL 301 redirects to a new and relevant
product or to an upper-level listing page of similar
products in order to transfer existing link equity to
topically similar pages.
If there's nothing you can reasonably redirect the page
to, ensure that it returns a "page not found“ with a status
code of 404.
 Dynamically Create
XML Sitemaps

With content that's always changing, we

also want to make sure that the search
engines have a way to discover your new
content right away. Make sure your e-
commerce platform generates an XML
sitemap of all of your website URLs.
Most e-commerce platforms can
dynamically create these XML sitemaps as
your site changes from the same database
that drives the website itself. And many of
them can submit your sitemap URLs to the
search engine webmaster tools as well.
Making sure this process is in place ensures
that search engines will always discover
your new content right away.
Rel Canonical Tag

And don't forget to place that rel canonical tag on each of your
pages. This will make sure that search engines are indexing only unique
URLs for each of your category, subcategory, and product pages.

And it will ensure that you don't run into any duplicate content
issues. Again, many e-commerce platforms will do this for you or offer it
as a feature that you can enable and configure.
Pagination Links
• Last, a common presentation style on e-commerce
sites includes paginated content. For example, you
might have 30 products in a particular category, but
they're only displayed 10 per page.
• To a search engine, this might look like three totally
different sets of content and it can be confusing to
search engine crawlers as they traverse your website.
• Fortunately, you can use the rel next or rel previous
attributes on your pagination links to tells search
engines not to treat the linked page as a unique
page, but instead, as just an extension of the current
page.
• Keeping in mind the extra technical components of an
e-commerce website will help search engines to clearly
index your content and understand the products you
offer, setting you up for a better chance of being
returned when users come searching.
 Exploring E-Commerce
information architecture
Website Structure
Just like any other kind of website, search engines need to understand how your ecommerce content
is organized. With a well organized structure, your content pages, ecommerce specific pages, and
even the products themselves will be clearly recognizable and identifiable to the search engines as
they crawl the pages of your site.

Remember that internal linking is crucial for helping search engines understand the structure of your
website. When you walk into a store in the offline world, it's organized into different sections to help
visitors head in the right direction before they actually start looking for specific products on the
shelves.

Websites should be built with the same concept in mind, using your linking to set up that structure.
Website Structure
• At the highest level of your hierarchy, you can
identify the different categories of products that you
sell. And within those category pages, you can link
to the next level of subcategories or products. By
doing this, search engines will be able to understand
what it is you sell and what product categories your
products fall under.
• And this allows them to return the best, most
relevant pages of your site to searchers. If someone
is searching for shoes, for example, a search engine
can return your general shoes category page.
• When they start searching for a certain type of
shoe, you may want them to end up on your
subcategory page for that particular type of
shoe. And if they're talking in brands and model
numbers, well you want the appropriate product
pages being returned.
Product Linking
When we get to the actual product
pages themselves, there are a few
things to remember. First, each
and every product should have its
own unique page and on each of
those pages you'll need to include
content around the product.
That means including things like
the product name, properly tagged
images, product descriptions,
product colors, sizes and other
options, prices, whether or not it's
in stock, and a host of other
attributes that we typically
associate with ecommerce pages.
Producing ecommerce
content
 Content for e-Commerce sites serves a number of different
purposes. First, it needs to be attractive to the search engines so that
people will find your pages.

Produce
But once you've got people on your pages the content needs to be
Effective effective, not only in encouraging people to buy your products, but also
in getting them so excited that they'll want to share your content with
Product other people through links in social media, which also helps you from
an SEO perspective.

Content
It's one thing to simply describe a product, but people are a little more
complex than that. Going back to Marketing 101, we don't sell products
and services.
 We sell solutions to people's problems. So make sure to
describe more than just the product. Explain how the
product is actually used and take opportunities
through photos, videos, animations, or even step by step
Focus on diagrams to show your customers how this thing
works and how it will solve the problem that they're
Solutions to having.
This is something your competition may not be doing a
Problems great job of and it will give you an angle on some very
unique content that will stand out to both search
engines and your website visitors.
 Providing Reviews

You also need to remember that your

visitors are aware that if they buy
something from you, you stand to
benefit. It's like when you go into the
electronics store and the sales person,
who's on commission, recommends the
most expensive camera. You know that's
because they'll make the most money if you
buy that one.
But on the web, we have the option of
reading through reviews from people just
like us who are at that same crossroads and
ended up making a decision to purchase
this product. Now they're going to tell us
what they think about that decision and
they're not getting any commission.
Include Product Recommendation Feature

As consumers, we tend to trust these reviews and displaying product reviews, or service
testimonials, is a great way to help people understand the value of your products through
other people's experiences. And last, don't forget to include additional product
recommendations.

If your e-Commerce software has this built in make sure you're leveraging it or, if that doesn't
work for you, take a look at the many product recommendation engines on the market. As
people browse certain products you can recommend other, similar products that people tend
to buy that also have great reviews or that match other criteria.
Leveraging link building
and Social Media for
E-Commerce
Create Good Quality Content

Building links and getting people to your eCommerce content

can be challenging. But with a little creativity, you can find some
very valuable opportunities that will help out the search
engines as well as your visitors. First and foremost, make sure
that you're taking the time to create really good content.
Anything you can do to help show how a product will solve the
problems of a consumer is going to be a good thing. And it
becomes a lot more shareable than just another product name
and description page. Over and above videos and diagrams and
things like that, there are a few ways to spruce up your product
pages even more.
 Get more innovative

With a little work, some out-of-the-box

thinking, and a good programmer, you can
come up with interactive features that can
help the customer really understand your
product.
Think of those clothing websites that allow you
to put together an entire wardrobe through a
drag-and-drop interface. Or home decor stores
that let you lay out and generate your dream
kitchen or living room.
And with augmented and virtual
reality entering the mainstream, the sky is the
limit from a creative perspective. Whatever
you're selling, these kinds of useful
features are the kinds of things that people
blog about, link to, and share with their social
networks.
Invest in high quality images
Another thing to remember is that investing in high-quality images of
the products you're selling is something that will pay off in the long
run.
Blogs and image-based social networks are filled with users willing to
share quality, beautiful, and interesting images associated with your
products.
So take time to produce and promote professional, high-quality, unique
images, and you'll be in a good position to garner even more links back
to your content.
Create deals, offers and
contests
And at the end of the day, don't forget about your customers. Free
stuff, giveaways, discounts, and special offers are the kinds of
things that get shared around the internet, and can spread like
wildfire. You might feature a section on your site that shows your
current deals and coupons.
Or, you might run a contest or a sweepstakes, or even have a crazy
deal of the day page that offers up a loss leader, but gets people
talking about you, your site, and your products.
You might break even, or even lose a bit on your promotion, but
think of it as investing in all the links, blogger attention, and social
media buzz that will find you new customers, and that search
engines love.
Involve your
customers
Last, don't forget to let users generate some content for
you. Whether it's product reviews that you ask for in
follow up emails after a purchase, testimonials or social
media integrations, making it easy for your users to share
their experiences leads to lots of potential links,
sharing, and user-generated content that can help a future
customer make the decision to buy from you instead of
your competitor.
While adding the standard social media sharing and liking
buttons to your product pages is a must, you might also
think about providing "Save to my wish list" or "Share with
a friend" functionality that can spread the word and keep
people coming back.
 In short, don't be another boring eCommerce
website with boring product pages. There are
plenty of those out there already. Instead, go that
extra mile to produce truly useful and engaging
content that excites your users and has the
potential to gain links and social media shares.
Don’t be
Boring
Get creative. Take time to think about your
audience and what can really be useful to
them. And then take the time to create the right
effective content that meets those needs.
Leveraging Local SEO
Understanding Local SEO
Local Search
If you're a brick and mortar business, or if you have a local
presence, then it's important to know that your potential
customers are using search engines to look for local products and
services. And search engines are getting pretty good at giving users
exactly what they want, with some very specific local types of search
results.
Let's say you're in Noida, with a tooth ache that needs some immediate
attention. These days the first thing you're likely to do, is head to a
search engine and start typing, dentist Noida, and you're more likely to
do it on Google than anywhere else.
 Local Search

In Google search results, you'll see a list of

businesses in the Noida area, matching
your search. You'll see some special listings
with location markers and a map. And with
a click or a tap, you'll end up in a listing
format showing a larger map of the
area, with local results showcasing hours of
operation, reviews, contact information,
driving directions, questions and answers,
and more.
The bottom line is that if you're a dentist in
Boston and you don't have this kind of local
listing on the search engines, your phone
isn't very likely to be ringing.
 So how do you position yourself to
have your business featured in these
special local search results, when
users type in search queries with a
local intent, or while they're
physically nearby. Well you'll want to
focus on local search engine
listings, citations and some
optimizations you can make to your
pages.
First off, you're going to need to
have a Google My Business
listing. And the first step is to head
over to google.com/business and
walk through the process of setting
up and verifying your business
listing as soon as possible.
Google Business
Optimize
your
website
Next, your website itself is a critical piece of your
local marketing strategy. You'll want to make sure
that you have separate pages on your website for
each service or category of products you offer. And
you'll want to make sure that your business's name,
address, and phone number are clearly identified on
those pages.
Of course remember your content strategy and
make sure you have relevant key words in your
copy, to ensure optimal search performance. And of
course you'll want to be leveraging local Schema by
ensuring that you've added the appropriate local
markup to your pages.
Using Google
MyBusiness
Factors Influencing Local
Search
- In short, Google My Business is a place where businesses can get
themselves a robust and feature-rich online listing for free. When
you create a business listing on Google My Business, you'll have
the opportunity to provide information about your business,
photos, and more. Users will be able to leave reviews for you.
- And as an administrator, you'll also get to see statistics about
your visitors and the searches that they've done to bring them to
your page. But all this is only going to be seen if your visitors can
find the page. And there are essentially three factors that
influence rankings on local search results, relevance, proximity,
and prominence.
Understanding Three Factors

Relevance is all about how well your business listing matches a user's search query. In most cases, the more complete and
accurate a business listing is, the easier it is for Google to properly understand your business and return its listing in local
search results.

The second factor is proximity. Local searches are by definition bound to a geographic location, and Google uses what it
knows about where a searcher is physically located, including mobile location services, or location terms in the search
query.

It then attempts to return the most relevant result based on listings in that specific area. Finally, the prominence of the
listing has an effect on how well it will rank. Prominence is a measure of how well known your business is across the
web, and much like regular content pages, it looks for evidence around the web that others are talking about you. Things
like links, citations, reviews, articles, blogs, social activity, directory listings, and any other mentions about your business
are all considered.
Demo of Google MyBusiness
Managing Citations
What are Citations?
Having accurate information on the web is extremely important. If your
information is incorrect, it can hurt the chances that people will find you, and
that's not good for you or the customer you could have served.

People turn to search engines for recommendations on where to go, and

that means that physical locations and contact information are extremely
important.

The more a search engine can trust your location information, the more
confident it can be in returning your pages to the local searcher.

And citations are a key to local success. A citation is any mention of your
business name, address, and phone number on the web.
Importance of Citations

The quantity, quality and consistency of the citations

that search engines find around the web, for your
business, are an important factor in how well you rank
in local search.
And having tools to manage your existing citations,
and help you find opportunities for new ones, can
make a big difference in your overall, local search
strategy.
If local SEO is going to be important to you, you may
want to explore some of the additional features in a
paid Moz Local account will get you. And you'll
probably want to check out additional tools, like
Whitespark's local citation finder, or BrightLocal. Both
offer a suite of tools to help you build and keep track
of citations, as well as optimized for local SEO.
Getting Reviews
-Online reviews can be a major asset for
businesses, and this is especially true for local
search. Recent studies have shown that for a
majority of consumers, positive customer
reviews make them more likely to use a local
business and that they trust these reviews as
much as personal recommendations.
If you're not getting reviews online, you're missing There are basically three ways a user can provide a
out on a huge opportunity. Reviews not only help review for your business: offline, email, or online.
you to build an online reputation. They can also
bring more customers to your front door. A review
is just a short write-up or rating provided by a
customer based on their experience with a
particular business.
 Many businesses communicate with their
customers every day through phone calls,
physical mail, or in-store
interactions. Every one of these offline
touchpoints is an opportunity to ask
customers what they thought of their
Offline Reviews experience, and you can use negative
feedback to help you improve your
business and turn the positive
feedback into testimonials that can be
used on your website or in promotional
materials.
 If you're still not collecting email addresses on your
website for visitors that want to subscribe to your
newsletter or find out more about you, you're missing out
on a great opportunity.

Creating, maintaining, and growing a list of your

Email Reviews customers and those who are actively interested in

becoming your customers gives you an extremely useful
and valuable asset.

You can use this list not only to inform and market to a
very qualified audience, you can also send out
invitations to customer satisfaction surveys or automate a
post-purchase email that asks for or even provides an
incentive to leave a review of the product or service that
the customer has just purchased.
 The third way that you can get reviews is online. That
might mean your own website, but these days, it's
more and more likely that users are going to be using
other websites to review you, your products, and your
services.

Your own website is, of course, where you have the

Online most control over your content, and you should
consider creating a section dedicated to testimonials
Reviews or sharing the experiences of past customers.

This is an opportunity to host user-generated

content on your sites that search engines will love.
 Entice your happy customers to write
reviews on major listing sites like Google
My Business, Yahoo and Bing Local, Yelp,
Citysearch, Homestars, and more. And
remember that there are a host of
industry-specific review sites that might
make sense for you, like TripAdvisor for
Get reviews the travel sector or Angie's List for
contractors and home services.

to build
customers Regardless of how you get them and share
them around the Web, reviews are great
opportunities to build content and
references to your pages that will not only
help people find you in the search engines
but also help convert them into your next
customers.
Mobile SEO
Understanding Mobile
SEO
 How Mobile has
become part of our
lives?

Everywhere you look these days it's evident

that mobile devices have become a part of our
day to day lives. In our workplace, at home,
and everywhere in between we're
continuously connected through our phones,
tablets, watches, virtual assistants, fitness gear,
security systems, and even our thermostats
and smart home devices.
As searches from mobile devices continue to
grow, it's crucial that we take the mobile
experience into account when we're talking
about search engine optimization. But before
we worry about how we're going to get found
by search engines, it's important that we talk
about how user behavior on mobile devices is
unique.
Mobile Search Behaviour

If you're a searcher on a mobile device and you're on the go, you're likely more
apt to be looking for things like locations, store hours, and phone numbers. You'll
require information fast. You want it to be reliable. And it needs to be accessible.

The last thing you want when you're looking for directions is to have to drill
down through layers and layers of menu items to find an address or a phone number
that you can tap.
Importance of Mobile
Search
With the rise of the virtual assistants and voice search
capabilities, you'll want to take into account how this might
impact key words being searched on without any typing at all.
Once you have a good feel for how your users will be using
your content on a mobile device we'll take a look at some of
the technical and platform options you have for creating and
optimizing the mobile experience, both for your users as well
as for the search engines.
Developing mobile friendly content and matching it to the
mobile user's search intent can not only help you attract and
retain more customers or achieve your business goals, but it
will also help you with your mobile search engine visibility for
years to come.
Configuring Mobile SEO
Mobile Web Configurations

From a technical standpoint there are really

three types configurations to consider for
It's also important to know that we're only
serving your mobile web content. And which
talking about mobile web right now. And not
configuration your business chooses will
the apps that are downloaded and run as
depend on both what your organization can
applications on a mobile device.
support and what you're trying to accomplish
on a mobile device.
1st Option - Responsive Web Design

The first option is to use responsive web design. This is very common these days and it allows you to basically
build one site serving the same content from the same URL no matter what device the user is on.

Responsive designs accomplish this by using CSS media queries to indicate how the content should be rendered on
the different screen sizes it detects, automatically adapting things like fonts and images to the most appropriate
layouts. Google has expressed their preference for this approach. And responsive design has the advantage of only
needing to maintain one code base as you create new content and optimize existing content. On the downside you
may find that you actually do want to alter the mobile experience to match mobile intentions and these same
advantages can quickly turn into limitations.
2nd Option – Adaptive Design

The second option is to dynamically detect and serve content based on the user agent that's sent through the
browser. The web server will identify users on mobile devices and return the appropriate content. This is known as
adaptive design. Adaptive and responsive are often used as if they are interchangeable, but they're actually two very
different types of mobile friendly programming. Each with different technical challenges and considerations. So it's
important to know the difference.

While the adaptive option can give you quite a bit of flexibility in how you choose to treat mobile visitors, from a search
perspective, you run the risk of search engine crawlers seeing different content as they examine your pages. And you'll
also likely be on the hook for maintaining more complex code.
3rd Option – Maintain Separate Mobile Site
A third option is to maintain a completely separate site that will serve mobile content on a separate
URL. Traditionally these have been located on subdomains like m.yourdomain.com and the server
would be responsible for detecting a mobile device and redirecting the user to that dedicated
mobile site.

You might also recognize these by that little link at the bottom that says something like view desktop
site that will offer the user the chance to go back to the regular site. Of course you'll have the
ultimate level of flexibility to customize the mobile experience and cater to the mobile users
intentions with this option, but you'll also need the resources to now maintain yet another website.

The other thing to consider is that because this is a totally separate website, a search engine will
typically treat it as such unless it's properly tagged with mobile alternates and canonical tags.
Google Indexing

Under Google's mobile-first indexing, the mobile version of the site is what will be used in indexation
for returning both mobile and desktop search results. What this means is that if your mobile site has
less pages, if each page displays fewer links or has paired down content or if your mobile site is really
a smaller version of your more robust desktop page, all those desktop pages may fall out of search.

Similarly if your adaptive or responsive site removes content or navigational elements as they change
to accommodate mobile users, this could also cause issues with how the content is indexed and
search results end up being served for your site.
Importance of Mobile
Site

It's now more important than ever to insure

that your mobile site, no matter how it's
structured, is as robust, informative, and
usable as your desktop version. Each
configuration has their pros and cons. As
well as their limits and uses. What it really
comes down to is how much you want to
cater to mobile intent and what your
business can realistically support.
Whatever you decide, providing a mobile
visitor with an optimized site will in
turn provide you with the competitive
edge and the knowledge that your
efforts are increasing your visibility across
an ever expanding set of new devices and
channels.
Optimizing SEO for
Mobile
Provide the best mobile user experience
As smart phone adoption and use has
continued to grow, search engines have
adapted by updating their
algorithms and placing more emphasis
on how efficiently a site responds to a
mobile user's needs. In 2018 Google
launched its mobile-first index, meaning
it now indexes and then ranks
sites based on how they present on a
mobile device.
While all the things we've talked about in
the earlier videos / course still apply
from a search engine optimization
perspective, this means that your site
also needs to provide the best mobile
user experience and the fastest
performance possible.
Improve your Mobile Experience
Let's take a step back and think about the mobile search visitor and
how we can make their mobile experience a positive one. We can
start by making sure that the mobile platform they land on loads
very quickly.
This means using smaller image files, minified code, caching, and
all kinds of other tricks that make sure users aren't spending
time and bandwidth waiting for the content they want to
view. There are a number of optimization tactics that you can
employ to ensure your site is optimized for performance.
 Tools for Better
Mobile Experience

Google has a great tool called pagespeed

insights that can help you identify speed
issues and point out opportunities to
improve the user's mobile experience. For
example, if we use this tool on the LinkedIn
site, we can see that it's loading fast and
has a mobile optimization score of 69 out of
100.
If we scroll down, we can see some of the
opportunities for improvement as well as
guidance around how to address any
issues. Another important tool to use is the
Chrome developer tool called
Lighthouse which offers much more in
depth analysis of the high level data in
pagespeed insights.
 Mobile Site Layout

You should be looking for opportunities like

increasing the size of your fonts to make
text readable on a smaller
device, increasing the size of links and tap
targets to make them easier for fingers to
find, and avoiding technologies like
Flash that don't work on certain mobile
devices. Don't forget to update your
forms for mobile users.
Use large, clearly labeled fields that are
easy to navigate on a smaller screen and
use mobile specific inputs like tappable
calendars and selectors rather than forcing
people to type on a small keyboard.
Improve the Input Experience
If you're expecting numeric inputs for things
like phone numbers or zip codes, default to a
numbers only keypad instead of the full set of
inputs. Pre-fill whatever you can and check for
errors as the user moves from field to
field. Anything you can do to take the pain
away from filling out a form on a tiny
device will go a long way.
At the end of the day, the mobile user wants
fast and reliable access to the information
they're seeking and a positive user
experience. The search engines are going to
continually refine their algorithms to reward
both of these aspects as mobile usage
continues to expan
Developing Mobile
Content
Adapt Best Practices
As we've seen time and time again throughout this course, in the end,
content is king, and as we look to improve our mobile experiences we'll
want to ensure that we're providing usable, valuable, and relevant
content to our audience of mobile users.
First, you want to apply the same best practices for your content
optimization on your mobile platform that you would on the
desktop. These include optimizing your titles and meta descriptions.
Using headlines to break up and structure your content. Leveraging your
internal linking processes, and even adjusting the layout of content on the
pages as you'll want your most important content near the top.
As you develop content for your mobile visitors, you'll want to think about
the keyword queries that mobile users will be using to surface your product
or service and tailoring your mobile content to respond to those queries.
 Not so long ago when you wanted to find a companies
contact details, you'd pick up the local telephone
book. But now, the phone book has been replaced by
web searches, and many of those from mobile
devices.

Optimizing
Location and Knowing this, you of course want to make all of the
location and contact details of your company very easy
Contact on to find you might even consider optimizing your
contact page for keywords that include things
like: Address, or Phone, or even the name of the city
Mobile you're doing business in.

And don't forget that smartphones have some very

interesting features when it comes to contact details.
Using the tel: prefix in your anchor tags, lets
smartphones know that clicking on this number should
bring up the phones dialer. Properly formatted
addresses can launch the phones map applications
with a single tap.
Optimize with a user intent

That means that you'll want to put things like

Offering up voice guided directions to get your
your hours of operations front and centre. As
potential customers in your door. And don't
this is going to be very relevant information for
forget that mobile users are often looking for
that users intent. For many businesses
your contact information because they have
understanding what content will drive a
an immediate need.
mobile user to action will be intuitive.

Specialty services like Dentists, offering 24

A pizzeria will likely want to insure that their
hour emergency services, or a hair salon that
menu is readily available. That their phone
offers walk in appointments, will want to
number and address are prominent. Or even
showcase these offerings, as this is exactly the
that their online ordering system is easy to get
type of content that users on the go will be
through on a smaller screen.
looking for.
Use Web Analytics to Understand

Focus on the content that will resonate with the mobile audience. A great way to discover and develop
more content, that your audience is interested in, is to use your web analytics tool.

Any of the major analytics platforms these days, will let you segment your reports by mobile and non
mobile users. And taking a look at the pages that mobile users are looking at, the site elements they're
interacting with, and the paths they take to converting on your goals, can be a great place to start.

With the right content available, at the right time, to address the unique needs of the mobile user, you'll
be able to provide a positive experience, for both your visitors and the search engines that send them
your way.
Thank You