Creo-Whitepapers-SEO

S.E.O. Achieving efficient search results & increased website user traffic

A CREO Guide to Improving your Business / v01. Contents “We are a full service brand About this Whitepaper 4

Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird... 6 agency, providing innovative Keywords 8 design solutions and effective Page Title Tag 10 marketing strategy.” Meta Description 12

Heading Tags 14 We help businesses connect with their customers online – providing a range of industry leading services from Organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) Management, Social Media Images 15 and Brand Management. Page Content 15 We thrive on building long lasting client relationships and delivering true Domain Names and URLs 16 value for money. We’re passionate about what we do - and that shows in our work. Creo will help you build your brand online and achieve a ROI Site Speed 17 that can be clearly measured against your bottom line.

Rich Search Results 18

Mobilegeddon 20

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) 21

Glossary of Terms 22 Brand. Digital. Strategy.

A company’s brand identity Digital is the execution and Strategy is increasing the is how that business wants to maintenance of your brand digital reach of your brand, be perceived by consumers. on all your digital channels. products and services.

Copyright 2017 Creo Interactive Ltd Share this guide: 2 Optimisation techniques can be About this whitepaper broken down into on page and off page techniques: The main purpose of a search engine On page optimization techniques is to provide the searcher with the On page optimization includes those techniques that can be done on the pages most relevant information relating of a website. On page optimization relates to those things that are within your control — i.e. the content of your website. On page optimization techniques help the search engine crawlers read the website content. A readable site helps to show to their search query. quality and will result in higher ranked web pages.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) involves designing, writing, and coding a website Off page optimization techniques in a way that helps to improve the volume and quality of traffic to your website from people using search engines. These “free,” “organic,” or “natural” rankings on Off page optimization includes those techniques that can be done outside your the various search engines can be influenced, but not controlled, by effective SEO website to increase traffic to your website. The various free off page optimization techniques. techniques (also known as free traffic sources) that you can use to drive traffic to your website and increase its ranking level in major search engines include link swaps, blogging, social networks, white papers, infographics and forum postings.

Google decide the authority and rele- Google also sees links to your site as a ‘vote’ for your site. If a well-respected site links to your site, then this is a recommendation for your site and you would be vance of the web pages they rank by placed favourably in Search Engines. calculating a score based on “over 200 So we’ve created this guide for you and packed it signals for ranking” within their ever full of hints, tips and relevant links to help you with changing algorithm. your on page SEO efforts in 2017.

Although Google keeps these 200 factors a secret they are open about a number of best practices that they recommend to ensure your site can be crawled and understood. This will give you a better chance of ranking for your desired terms.

Hummingbird came out in 2013 and was a complete overhaul of the entire Google algorithm. The goal of the Hummingbird Google has multiple named algorithm is for Google to better understand a user’s query. There is speculation that these changes were necessary in parts of the algorithm that order for Google’s voice search to be more effective. Hummingbird has had other named updates, such as Payday influence search rankings. designed to fight spam, Pigeon designed to improve local results, Top Heavy designed to demote ad-heavy pages, Google Panda is part of the algorithm that is specific to the quality of content, Mobile Friendly -Mobilegeddon designed to reward mobile- Penguin is specific to the quality of links, and Hummingbird is Google’s part of the friendly pages and Pirate designed to fight copyright algorithm for handling conversational search queries accurately. infringement.

Google Panda Google RankBrain

RankBrain came out in 2015 and is an algorithm learning Google Panda was introduced in 2011, it takes the quality of artificial intelligence system. It helps Google to process a site’s content into account when ranking sites in the search search results and provide more relevant search results for results. For sites that have lower quality content, they would users. Behind content & links, RankBrain is considered the likely find themselves negatively impacted by Panda. As a third most important signal in determining ranking on Google result, this causes higher quality content to surface higher in search. the search results, meaning higher quality content is often rewarded with higher rankings, while low-quality content drops.

Google Penguin Google Pigeon Mobilegeddon The Penguin update was brought out in 2012 and its goal was to reduce the trust that Google has in sites that have cheated by creating unnatural backlinks in order to gain an advantage in the Google results. While the primary focus of Penguin is on unnatural links, there can be other factors that can affect a site in the eyes of Penguin as well. Links, though, are known to be by far the most important thing to look at.

Copyright 2017 Creo Interactive Ltd Share this guide: 7 Leverage synonyms and closely related terms. If your page contains synonyms of your targeted keyword, Google will Keywords understand that your page is actually about the subject title and you will benefit from a higher page rank.

Co-occurring words are words that are frequently found together in the In a post-Hummingbird world, same document. To find these run a search on Google and analyse the top three results in a keyword cloud tool. Scan through the results and some people say keyword look for words (not the core term) that are similar between each of the analyzed pages. research is not important - Synonyms are words that can be used interchangeably. You can use google to help you find synonyms for your keywords. Perform a search in don’t listen to them! Google and they will list synonyms as suggestions at the bottom of the first page of the results. Hummingbird doesn’t negate the need for keywords, it just recognises the intent of your search query more clearly and may re-word it on the way to the index servers so Identify money-making keyword phrases that your question can be best answered. Some pages on your site should prioritize money-making keyword phrases (those that lead to a sale, as identified by examining your metrics) and Knowing what keywords your target audience will use to find the products or services make sure you position them within your page so that search engines and that you offer is the most critical consideration in search engine optimization. your audience can easily identify them.

Identify Long Tail Keyword Phrases Points to consider when undertaking keyword Long tail keywords are keywords with three or more words in them. They are very targeted and usually don’t have huge search volumes but they research: can convert at a better CPA.

The following pages discuss a very specific run- Find Your Core Keywords down the HTML elements and structures that are Put yourself in the shoes of your prospects and start by brainstorming all the keyword phrases they might use, both single words and up to four or five recognized by search engines. You’ll want to put keyword phrases (called long tail keywords). your keyword phrases in these places to ensure Adapt your keyword strategy for conversational queries. the SEO power of each of your pages! The first challenge Google has to deal with today is the growing number of conversational phrases people use to search the Web. Consider adding other words the beginning or end. Common ones searchers use are “how to”, “how to do”, “how do I”, “how can I”, or “where can I find”.

The Page Title Tag (or more Keyword Placement: Your most important words (keywords) need to be first in your title tag, with your least important words being last in the title accurately the HTML Title tag (most to least). Element) is still the most Keyword Separation: Use pipes | to separate important (keyword) phrases (no commas, underscores, dashes or any other punctuation unless the important on-page SEO factor to keyword is written that way). Wording: Keep your important phrases short and simple. Leave out words address on any web page. that would make it read like a sentence. (e.g., and, if, but, then, etc.)

Title tags are part of the meta tags that appear at the top of your HTML inside the Company Name: If your company name is not part of the important area. Think of title tags like the title of the chapter of a book. It tells people (keyword) phrases, put it at the end of the title tag - separated from your and search engines what your page is about. keywords with a | character; if it is part of your important words, put it as the first words in the title tag. Title tags are also part of what makes people decide whether to visit your site when it shows up in the search results. The title tag should contain important keywords to Don’t Duplicate Title Tags: They must be written differently for every page. help the search engine determine what the page is about. DON’T MASS REPLICATE YOUR TITLE TAGS!

Make It Relevant: Title tags must be written to be descriptive of the content The coding for a Title tag looks as follows: on the page. (e.g. the About Page would be: “About Creo“)

Length: Title tags should be a maximum of 70 characters long, including Web Design Cardiff, Branding, Marketing | Creo spaces. Use Numbers and brackets: Consider using numbers in your URLs to boost click through rate. e.g. “10 tips to boost website traffic [SEO workshop]”

The meta description is a ~160 Keywords: do make sure your most important keywords for the webpage character snippet, a tag in HTML, show up in the meta description. Often search engines will highlight in bold where it finds the searchers query in your snippet. that summarizes a page’s content. Write legible, readable copy: this is essential. Keyword stuffing your meta description is bad and it doesn’t help the searcher as they’ll assume Optimizing the meta description is your result leads to a spammy website. Make sure your description reads a very important aspect of on-page like a normal, human-written sentence. Treat the meta description as if it’s an advert for your web-page: SEO. make it as compelling and as relevant as possible. The description MUST match the content on the page, but you should also make it as appealing as possible. The Meta description tag may no longer hold the value it once did, but it is still a highly important Meta tag. Search engines will show the meta description in search results Length: a meta description should be no longer than 135 – 160 characters when the searched for phrase is contained in the description. A meta description long (although Google has recently been testing longer snippets). Any can therefore influence the decision of the searcher as to whether they want to click longer and search engines will chop the end off, so make sure any through on your content from search results. important keywords are nearer the front.

The coding for a Meta description tag looks as follows: Do not duplicate meta descriptions: As with title tags, the meta descriptions must be written differently for every page. Google may penalise you for mass duplicating your meta descriptions. add elements to the snippets to increase their appeal. For instance: star ratings, customer ratings, product information, calorie counts etc.

Heading tags, as the name implies, Years ago people used to include key terms targeted on that page (within the Alt Tag) but this isn’t what the tag is for. The tag is to help provide textual information are tags that are used for the that describes the image. If you are using images that truly relate to the content of the page you should be able to include key terms naturally without trying to creations of headings The most crowbar them in. important tag is the

heading Content tag, and will usually be the title of a post. Content is a key component of the Google Panda algorithm. Your aim should be to create fresh and unique content, writing
Heading tags have a top-down hierarchy from

to

. Each page should use for your audience and with create engaging copy. heading tags. This helps create a well-structured on-page layout. Current thinking in the post Panda world is that the keyword density for your post has to be between 0.5 and 2.5%. Write naturally and don’t add There are two ways heading tags can structure your content. In classic HTML, there unnecessary keywords. would be one H1 heading tag on each page, maybe a couple of H2 heading tags etc. and these would all combine to form an outline of the entire document. Include your targeted keywords as close to the beginning of your content You should try to include the main key term for that page in the H1 header; however, as possible (i.e. within the first 100 words). do not have a heading tag that is simply the targeted term unless it’s natural to do so. You are writing for your audience, not search engines. You can use H2s, H3s, etc. Working with variations and synonyms will not only help keep your copy as many times as is needed. on topic but also naturally allow you to target further / long tail terms.
The coding for a Heading (1) tag looks as follows: Does your page content have 2000 words?
Include 2-3 external and internal links in your content.

Headings and why you should use them

Include multimedia in your page content

Google has indicated site speed Keywords in URLs: still a good thing Keywords in the URL help indicate to those who see your URL on social media, in an email, or as they hover on a link to click that they’re getting what they (and as a result, page speed) is one want and expect of the signals used by its algorithm Keep your URLS short The URL length is not an official ranking factor for Google, but if the search to rank pages. engine has to choose between two URLs, the shorter URL will usually be preferred in the search results. Research has shown that Google might be specifically measuring time to first byte as when it considers page speed. In addition, a slow page speed means that Whenever possible, use a single domain & subdomain search engines can crawl fewer pages using their allocated crawl budget, and this If possible avoid using a sibdomain eg blogs.creo.co.uk. Ideally all your could negatively affect your indexation. content should be on the one domain. Page speed is also important to user experience. Pages with a longer load time The more readable your URL is by human beings, the better tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page. Longer load Avoid using space characters in URLS and filename as they are replaced with times have also been shown to negatively affect conversions. %20 which detracts from the readability of your urls. Tips on improving site speed Avoid multiple URLs serving the same content If you have two URLs that serve very similar content, consider canonicalizing them, using either a 301 redirect (if there’s no real reason to maintain the duplicate) or a rel=canonical (if you want to maintain slightly different Purchase premium hosting in order to improve server response time versions for some visitors, e.g. a printer-friendly page). Use a content distribution network Consider a keyword based domainname over a brand based one Back Optimize images in 2012 brought our its “Exact Match Domain Update.“ which reduced the benefit of this - it is still provides a ranking factor e.g. http://www. Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML cardiffchiropractor.com Enable compression use an SSl certificate to gain a slight ranking boost Use google’s PageSpeed tools to find additional tips on improving your site speed. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Copyright 2017 Creo Interactive Ltd Share this guide: 17 Rich Search Results Structured data allows search engines to not only crawl your site, but to truly understand it! Rich search results are everywhere. Years ago, search engines presented search results without much Structured data is added directly adornment. Today, the search to a page’s HTML markup. Search results look very different. engines use structured data to generate rich snippets. We see extra information beneath the links, plus a couple of big blocks of rich content, depending on what you look for. The additional lines beneath results are Schema.org (often called Schema) is a specific vocabulary of tags (or microdata) called rich snippets, and they are meant to directly inform users. that you can add to your HTML to improve the way your page is represented in SERPs.

Dipslaying Rich Snippets does not Schema.org is the result of collaboration between Google, Bing, Yandex, directly result in better rankings. It does, and Yahoo! to help you provide the information their search engines need to understand your content and provide the best search results possible at this time. however, make you more visible in the There are different types of rich snippets. Here are the most prominent examples:

search results. Products

Reviews and ratings

Businesses and organizations Rich snippets are part of rich results; the catch-all term search engines use to describe parts of the search results that have a highlighted presentation. Recipes

Featured snippets are the boxes Google shows at the top of the page to Events answer a query directly. Courses To get rich results, you need to add structured data to your site.

Mobilegeddon is a name given by The mobile web is constantly webmasters and web-developers to evolving and Google is always Google’s algorithm update of April experimenting with new ways 21, 2015. to speed up content delivery and The main effect of this update is to boost the ranking of mobile-friendly pages on performance across all devices. mobile search results.

The new Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project from Google is aiming to do just To check if your site is mobile-friendly, you can examine individual pages with the that by allowing websites to build light-weight web pages using their open source Mobile-Friendly Test: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ framework, built on AMP HTML.

In May 2016 Google announced a further update to the algorithm, further enhancing Creating an AMP pages for parts of your site isn’t just a plug-and-play affair. You the importance of having a mobile friendly website. need to rewrite the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS styles to match the AMP design principles. The project has its own lightweight framework – AMP HTML – using just this makes web pages load faster. The counterpoint to this is that there are fewer The mobilegeddon update does not affect options available so your web pages may work as well as they do suing full html and javascript. searches made from a desktop computer

AMP-optimized news stories now appear at the top of Google’s mobile search results!

Copyright 2017 Creo Interactive Ltd Share this guide: 21 HTML (Hyper-Text Mark-up Language): A programming language used Glossary of Terms to create sites and pages on the web. This is the primary language of websites.

Link building: The process of gaining links to other websites that link to your website. 301 Redirect: Method of letting web browsers and search engines know that a web page or site has been permanently moved to a new page or Link popularity: The number and quality of links that point to your website site. (i.e. back links). The number, quality and credibility of these links can influence your page rank. Algorithm: A mathematical formula providing a set of instructions for completing a task. Crawler-based search engines use a set of instructions Link swap: An exchange where site owners agree to mutually link to each to index and rank websites. other’s sites.

Anchor text: Words used in the link text. It is best to stay away from words Malware: Malicious software that can destroy a computer. Common like [Read More], [See More], and use a more keyword-rich phrase pointing examples of malware include viruses, Trojans, worms and spyware. to where the link is directed — e.g. “Discover Niagara’s Hotel Package Deals today”. Meta tags: Keywords, description and content describing your website that is contained in the section of HTML coding and is not visible on your Back links: Links from external sites that connect to your website. They are website. also referred to as inbound links. Outbound links: Links from your website to other websites. Blogs: A blog (short for weblog) is an online journal. Most blogs have an open format that allows any Internet user to post entries (comments, Reciprocal links: Exchange of links between websites. questions) to other bloggers. Blog discussions are usually organized according to certain themes or topics. Referrers: Sites that suggest your site through links coming from their website, blog, email, directory, tool, etc. Bounces/Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that visit Search Engine Results Page (SERP): The pages that result from a search one page on your website then exit the site before visiting another page. engine query run by a user. You can run a search using certain keywords to assess where your web pages are ranking. Crawlers (also called spiders, robots, or bots): A program which searches or browses the Web in a logical, automated manner. Search engines use Social media optimization (SMO): Using social media activity to attract crawlers to find up-to-date information. visitors to websites by using methods such as adding social media features (e.g. RSS feeds, sharing buttons) to the website content and doing Google PageRank: A rough indication of the popularity and importance of promotional activities like blogging, participating in discussion groups and sites that point to your page. A higher PageRank indicates a more popular updating social networking profiles. page.

Thank you very much for reading this whitepaper. I do hope that you have taken some tips from it that you can put into practice.

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Creo-Whitepapers-SEO

heading Content tag, and will usually be the title of a post. Content is a key component of the Google Panda algorithm. Your aim should be to create fresh and unique content, writing Heading tags have a top-down hierarchy from

to

Headings and why you should use them

heading Content tag, and will usually be the title of a post. Content is a key component of the Google Panda algorithm. Your aim should be to create fresh and unique content, writing
Heading tags have a top-down hierarchy from