Website SEO What you can do on your website to improve SEO | Laurence Svekis | Skillshare

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Website SEO What you can do on your website to improve SEO

teacher avatar Laurence Svekis, Web technology Instructor

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

18 Lessons (1h 12m)
    • 1. Promo

    • 2. 16 Webpage Title tags

    • 3. 17 Webpage description tags

    • 4. 18 Hyperlinks Linking

    • 5. 19 Webpage URLs SEO

    • 6. 20 Image SEO

    • 7. 21 website videos for SEO

    • 8. 22 HTML heading tags

    • 9. 23 Status Codes 404 errors

    • 10. 24 Page Canonicalization

    • 11. 26 Website navigation strategy

    • 12. 27 Sitemaps

    • 13. 28 SEO content strategy

    • 14. 29 Rich snippets

    • 15. 30 Metatags

    • 16. 32 MOBILE ready websites

    • 17. 33 Factors for better SEO

    • 18. 34 SEO tips more ideas

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Laurence Svekis

Web technology Instructor


Web Design and Web Development Course Author - Teaching over 700,000 students Globally both in person and online.   

Google Developers Expert - GSuite

Providing Web development courses and digital marketing strategy courses since 2002.


"I have a passion for anything digital technology related, enjoy programming and the challenge of developing successful digital experiences. As an experienced developer, I created my first computer applications in 1990,... See full profile

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1. Promo: we all know that better ranking equals more traffic equals more sales on line s seal. The practice of search engine optimization has changed a lot and will continue to evolve, develop a mindset in order to evolve alongside their several Constance, when it comes to good ranking, learn common sense practices for better understanding of what to consider when it comes to s CEO website planning from instructor who's been online since 1999 and has created hundreds of websites driving hundreds of millions of views by regularly keeping pace with best practices. This course will outline what to do better optimize your websites. This course will illustrate what can be done to improve your chances of ranking well within search results. There are over 250 tips discussed throughout this course which will help you think smarter about s seal and better help you optimize your website. It's not about learning a magic trick to get to the top. It's vote thinking and using common sense to create better performing websites. If you are looking for secret magic formula, this course is not for you. It takes hard work and persistence. But success online is in reach for anyone who wants to achieve it. We've comprised a list of the top s CEO tips and we're going to be discussing them. Wrote this course everything that you should consider when you want to improve your search engine rain. This is a list of tips that have been kept and regularly updated when new guidelines and strategies are released. This course is not about memorizing all these techniques. It's about learning to think about what works in s seal. Our approach to S E O is a natural common sense approach finding that fine line when it comes to what is important for your individual website, understand? The principle of discussed in this course will help you better navigate the complex and sometimes opposing strategies when it comes to seal. 2. 16 Webpage Title tags: this lesson is a very important one because in this lesson, we're gonna talk about page title and page. Title is actually one of the most important S CEO factors, so I've got a whole bunch of tips here for page titles. Eso using your most important keywords. Keep it accurate and concise in regards to your page. Content title should be descriptive and readable. Try to do 50 to 70 characters as it will get cut off on smaller screens. And you don't want that for readability. Sake again, most important words should be first within the title. Unique wording for each page. Make sure that it's focused on the content of the website. You can also this is where also you can out in branding. If your branding to your website, you cannot dot branding in and also again remember to communicate the topic of the Web page content. So when it comes to HTML, adding a title is really easy and straightforward. So here I've got an example website and here I've gotten HTML code, so right here at the top within the head section of the website, so disregarding what's contained within the body, we've got our title tags and all. It is an opening title closing title. The content between here, This is what the title tag and this is, what the title tag that's going to be displayed within the Web page and that the search engine is gonna look at. So when I go out to my Web page, we can see that the title also shows up for users here within the tabs. So if they've got a bunch of tabs open here, you'll see the title of the Web page. And other than that, the users aren't going to really see the tiles. But these are important because, as you can see, most Web users will have multiple tops open. And then this is how they're going to distinguish what content they're actually looking at . Eso. You can also see it within the source there. So title is right there within the source as well. This is the same source as that HTML that we're looking at within our Web editor, and I'm just gonna show this once again tips about titles eso because it is one of the most important factors keeping the character length. This is important, although this won't harm your S CEO as much of its really long. But don't try to overstuff it. Don't try to stuff in keywords. Make sure that it's accurate and concise in regards to your page content. And when you are using your keywords, try to keep them up front. So I know this is quite a lot to ask for, but because this is such important aspect, you should put some time into title tags, always making sure that they are s CEO friendly. 3. 17 Webpage description tags: within this lesson, I want to talk about the description tag. So if you notice within the last lesson, we talked about title tags and description was right underneath there. But there is a difference between description tags. We see that it's written out as a meta tag so it doesn't have its own separate element tag as Title does, where we indicate that it's a title eso were using meta and the name of the Meta. The attribute within the meta tag is description, and then that content. Here's where we enter in that descriptive wording. So previously description tags were important with search indexing, so they would take a look at those description tags. They would also look at keyword tags, the same thing as meta renamed keywords, and they would look at all of these tags in order to help determine what the content was about. And then, unfortunately, a lot of people started spamming these filling up the descriptive wording with not content relevant information s so they had to stop the practice of looking at the description tag as being relevant for the content that's contained within the site. So it doesn't look at the content that's within the description tag much anymore. But it is still an important tag it. I'm gonna explain to you within this lesson why it's important even today. S o. The way that Google uses them is that it can also use them as snippets when you're searched hurt when your search page comes up with in search, we're going to see that description there. So there's sometimes they'll create their own description, and sometimes they'll use the description tag. So then again, this is up to Google's description discretion, how they're using that. Another thing to keep in mind, try to keep it up to about 160 characters. Don't overdo it, And the reason again is because you're targeting descriptions that Google might be using as snippets within search results. And another tip. When you are writing those description tags, make sure that there's attention grabbing information like take action type content. So when people do they do come up with in search results, they might be more inclined to click through them. And that's the last tip that it can be used to increase your click through rate within search results. So I'm just going to go back into our search page and we'll see here that sometimes whatever content is contained within here is actually gonna be the content within the description tag. So I had to update my search here so that I could find example off where those descriptive tags air being used. So we see here again, using those keywords we see that gets bold ID when I type in test. And we see that the description here for test your Internet connection band with two locations around the world with interactive broadband test s so we can see that this is the description that Google has chosen to use for this website. And when we go to the source code and we open that up and I know there's quite a lot of stuff in here, but we see that exact same description here in the meta description tax, and they've even got some meta named keywords as well. So this this key words there mainly obsolete now, But you will find websites that do still contain them s Oh, this is interesting. That description is being taken and that they've kept those keywords in there as well and as you can see that this isn't actually harming their results. They're doing really well within search. When I type in test and another thing to keep in mind And when I we look out over here, we say that gets some attention grabbing information for that content s Oh, that makes sense when the user is presented with the keyword and if it's bold ID. So maybe that when they quickly glance over and something jumps out here eso here we've got , uh So if we were looking for part of the world's largest private educational testing and measurement organization, So if we were looking for a new organization something to do with testing, this might well jump out more than the first result and the thing the way that the search engines work, the more these get clicked, you'll find that they actually started moving up within rankings, so it's always a good idea to get people and as well you're going to start driving more traffic as well. Eso There's lots of benefit to taking the time to write out just your meta description tags and the way that you do that, just type go into your code. So within the head section of your HTML. So it's Metta. Name is description and then content. And whatever content is contained within that content attribute is going to become the descript ing meta description tag for your Web page. 4. 18 Hyperlinks Linking: We have briefly talked about links earlier on within this course and how important it is to have links so that the search engine bots can come through, crawl your website and find additional pages on your website. So they're doing that through links. And when it comes to links, they're also looking at some other factors within the link. So this is just a typical hyperlink here, and this would be linking out to example dot com. And then here we have that keyword that's linking out to that page over here. We've got this r e l equals no follow. So this is an indicator for search engines that this is This is a link that you don't want to pass any link juice to S O. This is the reason why a Web master would use no follow eso typically for paid and entrusted sites at in the no follow. So in regards to the way that no follow works, there is some indication that no follow sometimes can work against you as well. So if you're no following a whole bunch of links, it might not make sense to Google why that's happening, so they'll be doing account of that and then that plays into the algorithm. So there's a lot of things always to consider when you're doing s CEO, you don't want to over s CEO, and you don't want to make it look that you're attempting to manipulate search engine results because then that's gonna be harmful and as well, when it comes to links, you don't be linking out to too many things. Eso if you've got a whole bunch of links, if you got hundreds and hundreds of links on the Web page, that's just not gonna look good either. Ah, it's so interlinking within your website s. Oh, that's good to ah to a certain degree. Keeping those links between the content of your website and allowing users to flow through your website with that interlinking is good, but if you're doing it strictly for s e o purposes, you always stuffing keywords. And that's not so good. So there always has to be a good balance between how much S E. O. You're applying? Ah, and then lastly, here also try to use keywords within this within the content area of the hyperlink. But you want to avoid what's called keyword cannibalization. Eso I just show you Look over into our example Here, our web page example Eso I've got some examples here of some links. So these air inter page links if they're linking to pages that are available within our website Also, if I want to link on image, I can do that as well so I can link around the image. I'm just gonna link it over to and then close off that link. So any content between that hyperlink actually becomes that hyperlink. So our image now because it's nested between those that hyperlink element, it's gonna be our link to index dot html. So we go out onto our web page and our example where you can see that this is linked now to the Web page. This is linked to the Web page as well. And when you type in keyword cannibalization, here's a really good definition of it s o making sure that you're not over doing the ASIO. So make sure that you're not doing too much targeting of that same keyword and then going into back link watch which we looked at earlier, we can see that this anchor text here s so this is an indication of what text is actually linking out and within our back lings. And when you are getting back links, you should have a variety of anchor text. It shouldn't always be that same anchor text linking to you because again, this isn't gonna look natural. If you've got ah, whole bunch of or a whole bunch of the same anchor text see here, we've got an image linking to it and so on. So we've got some variation here, and a lot of it just says bootstraps. So this is actually linking to get bootstrap dot com. So that's why we see a lot of boots drop there. 5. 19 Webpage URLs SEO: this lesson. I want to talk about you, R l So everything to do with your URL. So these are some typical you URLs here. So this is the file paths, categories, anything that's representing the web page. Make sure that you try to create a simple directory structure, so something that makes sense. So the reason that I say this is bad is because it's long it doesn't really see and it's not easily readable by users. So over here, we've got example dot com and then we can see that they do have a category dogs, and this just makes sense and also keep in mind. So we've got some tips here, so keep in mind that you girls are displayed within search results. So we see that when we go down here, we actually have those you URLs So having nice, attractive Buehrle's I can actually attract more visitors and all of these girls, they make sense. So we've got key keyword cannibalization effects, ex CEO, how to how to fix so use keywords within your you Earls and the reason I see that because we've got this bolding happening again within search results. So always think about how it gets presented, how your search term gets presented within search results, and this will help guide you to grating better. S E O pages on your websites as well create descriptive categories and file names. So don't just have a bunch of characters here that don't make any sense. Do something like category portfolio, my websites and so on. So this will help keep your website more organized. It will also lead to better crawling results from search engines because it just makes sense. So this makes sense from a user's point of you coming in that they see all of these different results, and they're able to be able to read it. Another thing that I keep in mind that there are going to be real people and coming to that website if it's easier to remember. And the way that Google works is that they want the website content to be friendly to users , not to search engine bots so easy to remember. Websites, you, RL's and categories are gonna be a lot friendlier, and s CEO performed better within s hell. So the friendlier the U. R L. Is the benefits are that users are more likely to remember them and as well, sometimes users might get intimidated. So if you've got this long, you are l. And somebody has to post that. And maybe they share just that. You, Earl, this is a lot more intimidating. And if you've got both of these, you URLs that someone presented to you, then which one would you rather click if you're looking to something about dogs? Eso also use common sense and logic. Use hyphens two separate words and rewrites to rewrite unfriendly you RL's so over here we've got all the hyphens are separating the words and we can see that it comes out nice, neat, easy to read fashion when we talk about unfriendly you URLs So I've got my wordpress over here. It's got settings here in Perma links. So this is always a really good example off what's friendly and what's not friendly. So by default, it goes into plain And when Aiken, refresh this and go back and click that portfolio again, we're going to see that I actually need to refresh the page so that I get that new link. So we're going to see that these are not as friendly. So what is this Being cat equals three. It doesn't make a lot of sense for the user coming in. And that's why Post Name and we're including the Post Information makes a lot more sense when we're coming to those pages. We're looking at those eso going again. Cat three doesn't make a lot of sense when I go back here and refresh the page and I can click Portfolio Now, from a user point of view, someone coming and reading it, this is gonna make sense again. So keep those in mind. I've got a few more tips about you or else as well. Eso again, the shorter the better. Eso just again from a point of view of a user coming in. Whatever makes more sense, the easier it is to read, and you can see that within the search results as well. So if you had something that was shorter, you're probably more likely to click through it instead of having long ones that you can actually see what the end of it is and where, what it's meaning, What what's contained Within those words, I try to use keyword variations. We see that here. They've got some variations how to solve keyword cannibalization. So this is a variation off of keyword cannibalization on. They've added in this this action action here that people might search how to solve keyword cannibalization, also making them readable by humans. Eyes another really good idea. And we can see that when we go back to our wordpress install, Install that here, we've got a category. So whatever mean category it is. And then our portfolio so just makes sense. Place content in the same domain. Some domain, when possible, avoid multiple domains. So keep all of that content within that same domain. Avoid having multiple domains and multiple you URLs that people have to click through. So make sure that your navigation is simplified and just makes sense. Also, the distance of the pages from the root directory isn't a factor. And also whether pages get crawled or not. Because logically, you would look at this and you would say, OK, well, this page is not as important as a page that might be just within category, and then, of course, category wouldn't be as important as our main page. So this is a way that we can actually add some waiting to our web pages and indicate how much and how important they are within the structure of our website and especially true when you've got a lot of pages on your site. This is something that makes a difference. Ah, and then lastly, I did want to talk about page Nation s O when we DuPage nation is sometimes hard to avoid thes kind of PG equals three and there is a solution to that. Ah, and that's including the ar e l next Arial previous within the head section so that within the link, we can better understand that this link is linking to a previous page. This link is linking to a next page. And when the search engines come and index that then they'll be better able to understand it Eso page nation pagination again. This is a better example of it here that we see that we've got all of these links going through and we know that the's are gonna be actually Paige needed eso They're gonna make sense that sometimes they might not contain that, uh, the structure of the links as we would need them. And this is where we would include those page page values as people move through the different pages 6. 20 Image SEO: in this lesson. I want to talk about images and how to apply text keywords to images. And the way that we do that we already had looked at this earlier is that we've got an image here and we include on all tag. So this is an example of a all tag. There's some more information about all attributes here. Wikipedia. It's essentially all tags provide text descriptions to images. So normally a search engine bought would come to the website. It wouldn't be able to tell what's contained within the image. It would be able to look at this source. It would be able to get some information on the contents of it. But again, this thes. Oftentimes you'll find that people aren't naming images well, and maybe these paths air really long. So it's not really a useful way to be able to judge the content oven image. And of course, they don't want to miss, say, if there's a really good image, so they want to make sure that you're including Ault. Text all tags within your images, so it's again, really you see to do. It's an attribute within that image element to have got image source to the image and a lt equals. And then we just copied it out here. So my first real post s Oh, this would be should be more descriptive off what's contained within the image because this is a WordPress image. So it should say something like my my wordpress logo or something like that. Ah, use keywords if possible. Uh, so if our keyword was WordPress, this would be a really good use of it. And also keep in mind that besides regular search, Google also has, and I just removed that eight. Google also has image search, and you'll find sometimes that images as well come up. So we've got all of the different images that come up for keyword when we do our search. And sometimes Google will take cues from all tags in order to determine what keywords they're gonna put within that image search. So you have an added bonus of showing up high with an image search and a possibility of people actually clicking through and visiting your website, gaining traffic for the all tax that are you are using for your images. And of course, it's not just the all tags that are gonna be used when they're judging the website content . They're gonna also look at what's surrounding the page and what's surrounding the image. 7. 21 website videos for SEO: much like images. Videos are hard for search engine bots to understand what the content is. Eso you should always try to provide a transcript of the video. The same goes for audio. Try to include some wording to be indexed by search engines. Eso with YouTube videos There's always an added bonus when you're creating YouTube videos that you're placing on your website. Eso. This can actually rank within YouTube search as well as it can show up within regular search results as well. So this can actually drive additional traffic to your website. And also, a good thing about using videos within your Web pages is the ability to keep people on webs on your site longer. And the longer people are on your website than along the higher your time on site is the more favorable your search engine rankings and the algorithm will look at your time on site as a factor in measuring the users experience on the website, so as opposed to just going to a website and dropping off. So over here I'm looking at YouTube dashboard, and as we can see here within YouTube, they actually do transcribe the video content. So you can actually use the transcribe video content within YouTube if you wanted to as well. There's a number off at speech to text add ons, especially within chrome. There's quite a few that are really easy to use that you can have access to, and in that way you can actually transcribe your video and audio content. So just play it into those speech to text plug ins and pull out your usable transcript of your video and your audio and with video files. There's one other thing Teoh make note of. Make sure that the streaming is of good quality. You don't want to have issues with videos coming in on your site, and it's slowing down your Web page, load time and so on. So just make sure that the videos are properly formatted. Their place within your sight and the quality and the delivery of the videos is reasonable 8. 22 HTML heading tags: in this lesson. I want to talk about heading elements in HTML, so headings are indicated by H one closing H one content in between is the top heading, and headings do have a structure. So there's headings. Each one are the most important and h six are the least important, and headings could be used to highlight content on your page. They can be used to structure and represent titles for content sections. You should only have one each one tag per page, and each one tag should be on the main page. So take a look at some different heading tags here that we have in our WordPress site. So this is just a default WordPress site and WordPress does headings really well, eso When we look at this heading over here, we look at the source code and it's it's nested within in each one type eso that we see that this is deemed to be important content and we also see that it's actually re using that title information within that H one tag and we look at the other elements down here. So these are smaller and see would go down to H two and then I don't believe there's any h threes, but this one should be in H two as well. So the way that the structure of the page is that the each one is the most important. And then we've got a Siris of H twos that are also valuable heading information for the sections within the Web pages. I'm just going over to S e o review tools dot com and they have a tool here that can help us search heading. So we're gonna do a quick check of get bootstrap dot coms, headings and how that structured. So we're just doing a check of that. So there's no h one heading Zehr found. So take a look at that and see within the source code. We see that this is in fact, in h one heading, So not sure what happened there, but we see that we always have the same type of structure. When we do have that, each one s we've got h one down here, which then we've got two each two, so this is counted as within the title area. So that's why they've got the each one up there as well. But typically you'd only have one h one per page. And then as you move down, you move it into hte to so overview H one and then we go to H two. And this would be an H two s o all of these subcategory subsections. All these main broken down sections are gonna be hte twos. So this one is in each one as well. So, typically, you wouldn't have this type of structure. You'd only be using one h one per page. But again, eso there are some variations that you can do and doesn't always hurt your search engine rankings. And always keep in mind that you don't want to over a seal eso over here. I've got my index dot html page. So I've got my each one up here and then all the other headings are h twos. Eso I've got eight threes because this is ah, subheading of the main heading and working all the way down 9. 23 Status Codes 404 errors: in this lesson. I want to talk about status coats. So there's a number of status codes that get returned depending on what happens with the website. So a 200 code it means that it's OK that's returned successfully for a four is not found. So you might see these typically, um and ah, 500 is a server error. So usually with your back end server. If it's having some issues rendering the code, you might see something like the 500 error and errors can be harmful to your site s seal. Eso We've got the ability to look in Web master tools for crawl errors and within the crawlers. We're gonna be able to see all of these errors if we're missing some pages and we should always fix thes as soon as possible, avoid broken links because again, this could throw off when your websites being crawled and it could expose your website to errors. So make sure that you tuck it all of those broken links and make sure that you don't have broken links within your Web page content. So a really good tool to scan through and find out if you've got any broken links. And if you've got any no response errors and so on. If you got essentially got errors there, if you've got some redirects or blocked you RL's is screaming frog s CEO, Spider Tool. It's free to download S. So it's definitely worth checking out screaming frog dot c o dot UK and run this tool on your website Teoh check to see if you've got any 400 errors, 500 errors and so on. So another thing when it comes to errors and air handling is the 404 error. So having an actual custom for a four page whenever the webpage isn't found is a great way to improve the users experience as well as help, uh, with alleviate if you having some missing pages until they can be fixed. So if I go into wordpress and if I just type in a bunch of characters here, we see that we don't actually get this 400 error. We don't We don't get this page that's not being returned, so I'm not sure if they're gonna have a redirect, but eso we see that they do have a default page file not found eso. We've got some information here and it's always a good idea to include these types of pages as well as some links, to go back to the website or search through the website to find the content that they're looking for. And this is why I say the word press always handles us really well because this page doesn't actually exist, but it still keeps us within that frame of the website is going to get rid of that on and we see that they present us with a search box and this is in order to help the user actually find what they're looking for so that they can actually search the site, so that's a well handled for four error. 10. 24 Page Canonicalization: so conical ization happens when you've got to arm or versions of the Web page and they appear on different girls. So sometimes this can happen and we'll check out WordPress because there is quite a lot of content duplication. We've got ability to, uh, to redirect those three a wonder redirects. So do those main de domain redirects to a different version of the URL. Sometimes you're gonna have redirects to similar Urals, depending on what country the person's coming in. Not and this is the way to avoid getting penalized for duplicate content. Eso essentially, if we've got link h rough and then we're linking to the rial page r e l con conical, it means that the copy of this blood page, the rial web page, is located over here, So avoid duplicate content. Use con conical your l use r e l and linked to the element. If you can't redirect it three a week one redirect from non preferred you or else to the dominant girl. So we go into wordpress and it's gonna go back to the main page and we'll just open up the source. Here s so this will give us a better idea of where. So we've got these alternatives here and we can see here within their source. They've actually linked out Teoh, actually the same page. But this is just indicating and it's probably just a precaution to make sure that we do indicate that this is going to be the main page that should be looked at for the content of that's being presented here. So in case we're duplicating the content would make sure that we do have that that listed here up here within the meta information that had information of the website. 11. 26 Website navigation strategy: we had talked to both importance of navigation when it comes to the search engine spiders coming to your website and being able to navigate through there and get additional content . So also keeping in mind when you are setting up your navigation. That navigation helps determine how important content it is. So, depending on where it's placed, how many links you've got going to it, how easy it is to reach what level it's on that will state Teoh, the search engine, bought how important that content is within your website. Navigation is essentially linking, and having a good strategy will help guide visitors to content within the website as well. So, always pre plan where you want your users to end up how you want your users to interact with your website, so it should be easy to navigate through your website. Navigation should always be looked at. Starting from the home page, used breadcrumbs for complex, larger websites create a natural flowing hierarchy. Use mostly text for navigation, so you want try to avoid images for a navigation. You wanna have navigation bars, list out important links and as well throughout your website. Now they help guide users through to link through two important content on your website. So just like over here, we've got our navigation bar. So usually this is very prevalent stays at the top and users air coming into websites. They're expecting these navigation bars. So this is why usually you're gonna find them at the top or they're gonna be somewhere where it's easy to see where the navigation and we can see that within this website, these air the three main Web pages. So there's the home page there's about and there's the content or contact, and usually the entry page for websites is gonna be the home page. So when you're determining your navigation strategy, work from the home page and work out from there. 12. 27 Sitemaps: in this lesson. I want to talk about it. Site maps and why site maps are important to your website and to the crawlers come into your websites of both website visitors and crawlers. So essentially they help the crawl the spider to crawl through and find Web content. But it also could be used to help visitors defined content. And we can create site maps for crawlers over here at XML Dash site maps dot com eso just pop over to that Web page. And so this is the Web page, and always to do here, we have to indicate are starting your URL are change frequency. So this is one of the factors that we can help indicate how often were changing what pages we can also indicate than when the Web page was last modified. And we can also indicate certain priority on Web pages. And this again, all of this information is used in order to help the search engine better understand what you find is important in your website and what and how you want your website indexed. So they're gonna use this information ah, and pass it into their algorithm to help better understand content in your website, so make sure that so with this free service, you can do up to 500 pages and they get indexed. So essentially a site map is gonna look like this is gonna be an XML version. We've got the u. R. L. So the path where it's located, the last modified frequency and priority that we can list on the page itself. So also within the website, it's always a good idea tohave a site map for users as well. So if you don't have search or if you have a very simple website, you'll find that sometimes there are site maps for users to come and see all the Web pages listed. And then they can easily navigate through to the Web page that they're looking to, uh, Teoh to use when you're using WordPress. There's a lot of plug ins for site maps, so you could just go into plug ins, and I don't believe I have anything here, but we do have the ability to add site map generators. There's also ones that can get submitted into Google. So I do something like site maps. We're going to see a whole bunch of plug ins for site maps, and some of them will automatically submit those site maps. Teoh your Google Webmaster tools. So if you are using WordPress thes air, really good tools, add ons to utilize to really bring your S e o site maps and have them created generated through your Web WordPress site. 13. 28 SEO content strategy: in this lesson. I want to talk about content now. Content is really the key to what the Internet is all about. Users will come to the Internet and they're looking for content. They'll use search engines. Teoh search for that content. They'll use browsers to see that content. Uh, and the World Wide Web. The Internet networks. And they'll use their computers. Teoh output that content from the browser s. So this is the path that everything flows and we see that at the top here. We've got content at the bottom here, we've got computers. And then besides, the computers were going to actually have the users of those computers that are digesting that content. So content is really the key to everything on the Internet. And also content is what's important when you're crying to create websites, you've got to think of what content you're gonna be creating. Think of how often you're gonna be caught creating content and think of what content your visitors would be expecting on your website. Keep content updated so that search engines are coming back free frequently, and the more content you've got, the more good content you have, The better your website will do so content. I should always be unique within the website and even across the Internet. It's not. It's not a good idea to copy something from a website and paste it on your own website. That's not going to do well within search engines. And we can see that when we take something like a phrase here from Wikipedia, we go over to a website like copy check dot cc and we do a check on it and it will immediately pull up where this content is and how many websites air using it and I something like this. We can obviously tell that it's originated on Wikipedia here. So we've got several different sources that are using that content and Google you employees that same type of technology where it crossed cheques your content with other Web pages, and it will quickly determine if that content is being used elsewhere. So a number of ways of getting content on your website eso One of the common things are blog's, and this is really good for content generation. It gives you a reason to be on and creating brand new content, so blog's typically tend to do really well. And if you're using WordPress, then I'm sure you know what blog's are all about. Eso WordPress is designed as originally designed as a blogging platform, and it's expanded since then. Eso going back to different amounts of wording that you should use eso you should always, um, you should always try to have at least 800 characters of unique content orm or, if possible. So obviously, the more content the better to try to write unique articles. But don't overdo. It makes sure that the content is relevant and its readable by users and as well, adding new content update content as often as possible. And usually when we're dealing with content, it's a good idea to come up with a content strategy so that you can schedule time on a regular basis to be adding and updating content to your websites. Eso When it comes to keywords and using keywords within content, you should look to use them 2 to 4 times again, depending on how much content you have, make sure that they're not occupying more than 2 to 8% of the content. Eso these air just rough figures as long as it's natural, and the flow of the content makes sense when you're reading it that it doesn't look like you've stocked a bunch of keywords. You should be okay for Heward. Use within your content. So along with the those tips, text should always be visible to both users and search crawlers. So don't hide text. Make sure that whatever text your writing is visible to users and search crawlers, you don't want to differentiate that, because if that gets picked up, then that's gonna look suspicious to the search crawlers. Also using bold, you can use bold 1 to 2 times to give extra weight toe wording. I also the number of content updates that you're doing frequency of updates and how much you're updating and one other thing. Make sure that you're using proper grammar and spelling, so it's gonna be important when it comes to how the search engines are gonna be interpreting the content on your website and remember that content is always king s. So it's one of the most important factors and in fact it is what the Internet is based on because search wants to return the most relevant content to people coming in to search for content and as well your website should be delivering that content that the search engine is expecting to be delivered within that page. Do concentrate on content and regular updates of content, and again we can go back here. We can get some cues on what's important so the frequency that it's been changed. So it's always a good idea to update new content and also with the priority of that content as well. So we see that within the XML site naps that these air all relevant factors and as well it should be relevant within your content strategy as well. 14. 29 Rich snippets: so rich snippets you should use when you can within your website. So if it makes sense to use it on your website, you can use them. There's a tool over here that Google provides that contest your structure, Data testing tool. Andi also just give you an example of someone type in something like company readings. We see that we've got these readings that are showing up. So this is what we're referring to when we're talking about rich snippets and this is information that's contained there that the search engine actually outputs on within the search results. And as you can see there, it really does highlight those search results, and it can bring additional clicks into your website. So the structured data testing tool works like this where we can enter in a you Earl and we can see if that is valid. We've also got just different ways that we can take a look at that structure data, and we see that this is what that output data is from that structure data. And there's a few other examples here, So something like a movie critique who's who's got some additional information there, and we've got our ratings and reviews. So a lot of times this type of stuff will show up within search. And if your website merits adding something like this into it, then it's definitely worthwhile, adding and taking a look at rich snippets. 15. 30 Metatags: in earlier lessons, we had looked at meta tags and importance of Met attacks. So title tags, of course, very important to have within your meta tags and then also descriptions and why we needed them. So there's also additional Met attacks that you can add in into your website, and you could add them in as needed to help browsers and search engines better understand the content of your Web page. So I'm just gonna go open up s CEO site, check up dot com, and they actually have a meta tag checking tool. So what it's doing is it's checking your title tag. It's checking your meta description to make sure that they are existing. Eso I just did get bootstrap there and we see that everything is 100%. The title tag and Met attack are active within the website. So when I go to something like WordPress here, we see that we've got a whole ton of additional Met attacks. So we've got the title there, and we've got all of these meta properties. So the all of these meta properties Ogea These are first social media, all of these meta properties and these air getting read by social media. So if you were to share this on Facebook, we would take this. Ogu are l would take the title. We take the description and this would be what would be contained within that share Content automatically. We've also got Twitter card Twitter title. So these air by default Ah, in the WordPress Yost plug in s so we can see that also here we've got meta character set eso This helps the browser understand what characters were out putting. We've got Vieux port eso This again helps with rendering out the content eso that it's scaled and looks proper. We've got some additional link information here styling information and all of this is contained within the head section of your HTML. We've also got some generator information here s o use this meta information as needed. Eso if you want to include your company information or met in for may any other meta information that's all available up here within that head section of your website. So depending again what you wanted to add in or you could keep it really simple and just do like what I've done up here where I've got my utf title description and link 16. 32 MOBILE ready websites: so everybody these days has a mobile device, and browsing on mobile devices is up significantly year over year. And this is one of those things that Google brought in recently, where they actually penalized websites that aren't mobile friendly, and the way they get penalized is that if you search on a desktop, all of the results are going to show up. But if you do that exact same search on your mobile device, you're gonna find that sites that aren't mobile friendly aren't going to show up as high within those search results if they show up at all. And this is something that Google's implemented and now, with more and more traffic coming from search for mobile devices, this is one thing that you need to consider when you're designing a website to go mobile first, so make it responsive. Go mobile first, and luckily there's a framework here. There's a few different frameworks, actually that help you create mobile ready responsive websites. So this is where we have been looking at bootstrap. Get boots drop dot com over a few lessons now, and this is what boots drop is. It allows you to quickly develop mobile ready responsive websites and the thinking for designing and bootstrap is mobile, ready or mobile first projects on the web. So make sure that your CSS is able to control the way that the content gets presented. And that's exactly what Bootstrap does. It's got a lot of CSS within their CSS styling. All you do is connect to the appropriate class. And this provides that responsiveness to the design. Make sure that you're ready for small screens, and I'm just gonna open up my console here. So in chrome, you've got the ability to toe open up your web, Dev Consul. And from here, you can actually toggle different devices so we can see what a website is gonna look like on any number of different devices. And as we can see, bootstrap is mobile ready. So this is it's ready for any size, screen, any size device. It automatically adjusts and re size. Is that content? So if we had a ipad mini, we had a regular size iPad. This is how the content would look like. So this is available within chrome within the deaf tools. And if you're on a Windows machine, you can press control shift I or right click and just do inspect. You can also access it here from your settings available in all chrome browsers. Eso There are also a few tools that you can check to see if a website is mobile already. So once it's online on the Internet, you can go to the mobile friendly test from Google. And the good thing about this test is that it's actually going to give you suggestions if it finds issues with anything within the website s. Oh, this is gonna be really good, ineffective. And luckily, Bootstrap is mobile friendly. Ella can also try it within being being does the same thing where it does this analysis of that content and we can see that within being were returning that this site is mobile friendly as well. And then it also gives you in a screenshot here where we can see that output there. And one of the advantages of WordPress is that it's already mobile ready. So this is a good thing about WordPress sites that in general there already gonna be mobile ready, and we're going to see that once we re size it, it'll stock properly and look proper on a mobile device 17. 33 Factors for better SEO: when you're thinking of SC Oh, there's a few points to take in mind as well, so always remember that there's gonna be multiple points of view. What's good for S e O What's not good? So this is always constantly being debated and, of course, that Google and other search engines will never really let you know what they actually used to calculate rank. So the Google algorithm is apparently over two million lines of code and constantly growing and expanding, and they're also constantly updating and tweaking that algorithm. So it's a constantly changing, and the best way in the best practice when it comes to S e O, is to just do things that are common sense. Don't try to cheat and just do things that make sense from a user point of view that this is actually content. And this is a website that provides some value to the user. And it's gonna be something that the user wants to see when they type in a particular set of keywords, and this is really the best way and simplest way to look at it and think about it whenever you want to answer any SQL questions think about it that way. Is this something that the user would appreciate and want to see when they are presented with this website? So there's no easy way to the top. It's always gonna take hard work and persistence, having a good content strategy, having a good strategy overall, linking strategy Web page strategy and creating good Web pages. User friendly. What pages is essential. You can also make sure that your website code adheres to the W three c validation. And when we go to W three c site weaken, type in an address and we can do a check just to make sure that all of the HTML code is valid. Html code and we see that there are some warnings here so you could go through this and that your website and just make sure that you're not getting too many errors and too many issues within the structure of your HTML code. Also when, especially if you're doing affiliate links, try to avoid having too many affiliate links. Try to avoid having really long you RL's as well. Try to keep them short and simple sleight, references and sources. This is always a great way to go, especially when you've got a website and if you're using content from another website, it's always good to reference back to the website. So something like Wikipedia will see that we've always got all of those references here, and it's linking back to the source of the content. Also, remember the age of your site and keep everything user friendly. So look at and consider how other websites air doing it. One of the ah good site to look through is Yahoo designed pattern Library. This will give you a better idea of what users would be expecting and how to actually develop more user friendly content. So you've got things like Accordions and what a user would typically expect within accordion and some information about the best way to present this type of design within your website and what users are expecting. So even things like adding in breadcrumbs and navigation all add to the user experience as well as they're going to do well for your website. Uh, when it comes to search engines as well, because whatever is good for users is also good for search engines. So here we've got some common page grids here, so it's worthwhile taking a look through and seeing the best way to present your content to users. Also think about different links, and more valuable links are coming from Edie, you and Gove sites. I also look at getting links from competitors, So this is another really big thing that you can look at and get additional value from links. So in addition to all of these, look at things like how you're breaking up content. Use bulleted lists, numbered lists, page age as well. Also, some other factors make sure that you do have a contact us page. So this is important because it indicates to Google that you're connecting to people as well as your contact us page. If you've got some location information, this will help with Google Search when you're looking for a particular company, so just going over here. So these air common adding a contact US place page, make sure that you don't have too many links going outside of your site. Try to keep your visitors within your sight. Think site structure. When you're developing your website, make sure that you have a fair number of pages also considered freshness of content server up time is important as well as server location. So where you're actually hosting your Web pages? This all comes into play when you're considering improving your sights, performance and having factors that can improve your websites ranking. So all of these may or may not be actual determining factors. Some of them might work into other factors that are determining factors. So there's a lot of things to consider. And there's a lot of accuse that take place in order to understand S CEO and how S CEO plays into actual search ranking. Eso also make sure that you set up analytics so you can check your bounce rates to make sure that people aren't bouncing off of your site because this is one of those prime indicators when someone was comes to a website, and if they leave really quickly, then that's considered a bounce rate. And you want to try to avoid that as much as possible because you don't want people leaving your website because that sends a cue to Google that well, maybe there's not any value on this website of people are leaving really quickly. Make sure you include privacy pages, terms on a, uh, T O s terms of service eso all of these Play into your authority and trust factor of your website. See if you can get direct traffic. Repeat traffic. So if people are keep constantly coming back to your website, there is value in that The sources of your traffic, those are important as well. So if you're getting sources from major websites are all coming back to your website, Uh, this is important, and then the time on the page is a good indicator of the quality of the content. So in the next lesson, we're gonna finish off with even more tips about S CEO and more things to consider when you are trying to rank your website. 18. 34 SEO tips more ideas: so their final thoughts from the all of the content that we've covered throughout this course. So I've got a few additional tips as well. So one of the things to think about is to think like Google would think. Determine your website if it's a good quality site. Is this something that Google would want to present to their search engine users as content in regards to that particular search topic? Also think about the way that Google would not want to miss major news stories or information or Web pages about a hot topic so they don't want to miss all of these things. They're going to be actively pursuing this type of content, and major news stories would be something that's coming out. There'd be a lot of clicks. There'd be a lot of buzz about it, even hot topics. So all of these things give off cues that Google looks for in order to provide better results for their search engine users. They don't want to miss anything, and ultimately they want to provide the best results for that search entry. Also, think about geo targeting. This helps determine your area and especially within being being is looking at this as well . So locate where your company is located. Geo Targeting. If you've got a restaurant or some type of local business, make sure you to focus on this geo targeting and focus on showing up well within search. Local search results use Google Plus, because this is gonna be This is a Google product. This is Google's social network. And although they do say that using Google Plus isn't gonna affect your search engine ranking, it's a Google product. So we'd have to assume that there is some kind of connection between their build your brand stronger. Your brand is online, the more relevant you're gonna be For that brand. ESO makes sure you're building a brand. Avoid over doing a seal, so avoid also too many pop ups. Distractions. You don't want to have a very distractive website. When you're placing ads in your website, make sure there aren't too many ads above the fold. Keep them below the fold. Avoid auto generated content. Avoid low quality links links from, say, my piece servers and avoid selling links. So these are all really important determining factors when it comes to how your website will do within search engine rankings and here we've got a definition of what search and Internet marketing strategy is. So it's the process of effecting the visibility of website or Web page in the search engines unpaid results. So we had looked at where the unpaid results are as opposed to the paid results, and this is essentially what an Internet marketer does and AES CEOs strategy is to optimize the website to better perform within search engines, and the other side of it is creating search engine friendly content. And then the other side is to remove barriers to indexing. And you can optimize your website by editing the content on also looking at where you're linking and whose linking into you understand what your preferred a target audience is and deliver content for that audience. So the basic principle make Web pages primarily for users, not for search. Don't deceive your users. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is if you feel comfortable explaining what you've done to the website that competes with you or to a Google employee than then you should be fine with what you're doing. Another useful test is to ask, Does this helped my users? Would I do this if what? I like this. If search engines provided this content for me as well, and also think about if you're gonna be doing some actions for S e O. Would you do this if search engines didn't exist? So sometimes it's good to kind of look at it as if search engines completely didn't exist. Would you be doing what you're doing within your website? Preventing and removing user generated spam on your site so often times If you have a WordPress site, you might be getting a lot of comments. Eso Sometimes you can turn those comments off, so we always have that ability to leave those comments. So try to cut down on that user generated spam. Onley have quality content you don't want have a whole bunch of useless information because it's not going to serve any purpose on your website. Think about what makes your website unique and valuable and engaging to your users, and this is all about the content that you're delivering to those users. Make your website standout on and make it ah place for users to want to go toe. Want to visit us to enjoy visiting and the more your users will enjoy interacting with your content that better. Your website will do. Also monitor your website for hacking, remove any hacked content or any malicious code or anything that can cause issue within your website.