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SEARCH ENGINE

OPTIMIZATION
FROM SEO TO SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Search Engine Optimization – The A to Z guide to good


SEO

__________

By Antonie Geerts
(Search Engine Optimization – The A to Z guide to good SEO)

Copyright © 2011 by (Antonie Geerts - Antoniegeerts.com)

All rights reserved. This book is free to share and will hopefully help
you make the right decisions for your website

ISBN (IT-IS-FREE)

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D EDICATION

This book is dedicated to my father

“Thanks for motivating me to write this book”

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T ABLE OF C ONTENTS
Dedication ..................................................................................................3
Foreword ....................................................................................................6
Preface .......................................................................................................7
Introduction ...............................................................................................8
What is Seditio SEO? (And what not) ........................................... 10
Who should read this book? ......................................................... 12
About the author .......................................................................... 13
Be prepared..............................................................................................14
What is my market? ...................................................................... 15
Becoming an Authority ................................................................. 20
Find your niche ............................................................................. 23
Taking action ............................................................................................27
Collecting & Registering................................................................ 28
Tracking, adjusting and comparing............................................... 42
Google Analytics.......................................................................................42
The Dashboard .............................................................................. 43
Breaking down the numbers ........................................................ 44
Which Traffic sources reaches your site ....................................... 45
Google Webmaster Tools.........................................................................47
Reviewing & Resubmitting .......................................................................50

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Advanced SEO ..........................................................................................52
Social Networking ......................................................................... 54
The Story of Johnny and Jimmy: Johnny’s revenge ...................... 55
Social Media.................................................................................. 59
Social Media Optimization ............................................................ 61
Keyword analytics & trending anticipation..............................................62
Integrating tools .......................................................................................68
SEO for Word Press ....................................................................... 69
Connect to Facebook using Wordbook ........................................ 70
SEO for Twitter.............................................................................. 72
Website optimization tools .......................................................... 73

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F OREWORD
When I first started writing this book I had the intention of selling it
online or getting it published in Ireland. How naïve I was in thinking
that having the right information and the right ideas would turn this
book into a best seller. You need a dedicated editor, funds for the
art work and graphics and of course contacts in the business.

A few years have passed since me writing this book and I found
myself very successful in the Search Engine optimization market and
especially the emergence of the new Social Media websites without
selling a single copy. It that time I also realized that selling a book
for profit about social media and networking isn’t the right thing to
do. Everything I learned or needed to know throughout the years
came from free resources (and the odd torrent site).

So I decided to return the favor, with this collection of SEO insights


that still apply today.

Read it, share it and if you like it send me an email.

Kindest Regards,

Antonie Geerts

Email: info@antoniegeerts.com

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P REFACE
When I started turning my hobby of computing in to my career and
eventually business I did so with certain naivety, as I roamed the
web for solutions to problems I noticed that many solutions were
given that actually did not work even though you would pay hard
cash for them.
SEO optimization is one of those “solutions” that just don’t work in
a “quick fix” kind of way and when I noticed a large amount of my
new clients have taken part of those schemes and there search
rankings plummeted down the drain of the everlasting internet I
found it on myself to write a book that would explain what is really
going on with search ranking and search engine optimization. Giving
away the secrets that actually aren’t secrets at all. Just logic that
would make it possible for everyone and every website to start
ranking high in the search results!

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What is Authority? How to write Niche Content?

Can’t be found on Google or Yahoo?

A lot of visitors but no online sales?

The answers and explanations are in this book

Everything you need to start your online business the


right way!

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I NTRODUCTION

What is Seditio SEO

Who should read this book?

About Antonie Geerts

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W HAT IS S EDITIO SEO? (A ND WHAT NOT )

So, you finally made it on the web! You got your site up and
running; ready to take on the internet market by storm, selling your
brand new products or services to the masses online.

You invested thousands of Euros in internet marketing so your Web


Designer can create an amazing looking website with the ease and
functionality that even a 3 year old can use it. You hired a Systems
Administrator to host and support the large number of clustered
servers to insure 24/7 uptime plus amazing functionality and you
dedicated a large part of your company’s resources into creating
some great engaging web content and sales descriptions of your
product line and services.
So what happened after being in operation for 6 months, you
haven’t noticed a single sale from your website and it feels you
made a big mistake going online with your business. The upkeep of
the servers your newly hired designers and system administrators
are draining your resources and you are getting close of going under
in this recession prone financial climate.

Does this sound vaguely familiar? Or is this one of the scenario’s


that is stopping you from taking the big step online? In either case
this book can help you get at least one thing right (and possibly a
few more as well) and that is good and honest Search Engine
Optimization.

Seditio SEO is a guide book about getting your website and


company back on the right track for online success. It is all about
making sure you are doing the right things in online marketing and
search engine optimization to drive customers to your website and
keeping them there without having to pay monthly fees in search

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engine optimization services so you can keep on getting traffic and
with no difficult technical terms or long winding processes.

Seditio SEO is easy, all information is provided in the simplest


format and this book provides loads of great examples and real life
case studies to use in your own campaigns.

Seditio SEO provides you steps and checklists that will make search
engine optimization & internet marketing, again, “easy”!

Seditio SEO is not


 A fast way to online ranking success
 A guarantee page 1 rank 1 formula (since they don’t exists)
 A quick fix scheme

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W HO SHOULD READ THIS BOOK ?

The first drafts of this book I showed to some of my computer


illiterate friends and family because I wanted to make sure that
even they could get something out of it but in actually this book is
designed for small and medium sized businesses that cannot seem
to get their website in the top rankings (on Google and any other
popular search engines) or companies who don’t receive the sales
and traffic they really deserve.
It is also a definite guide for startup companies to get in the online
market the right way without having to invest valuable Euros they
could spend somewhere else. Virtually anyone who is interested in
search engine optimization and internet marketing would benefit
from this material and it has helped me and many of my clients to
succeed in a long lasting and stable search engine optimization
strategy.

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A BOUT THE AUTHOR

Antonie Geerts has been writing blogs and tutorials since his early
years. He wrote technical columns for various technical websites
and forums under one of his many pseudonyms and even a 400
page novel.

While doing all this writing he was at the same time building his
career and expertise in IT and Internet Marketing starting out as a
System Administrator for a large enterprise in the Netherlands.
Eventually he grew in to internet marketing and social network
marketing business. He has setup SEO branches for various IT
companies and gave many presentations on behalf of internet
companies in both Ireland and The Netherlands.

He is now a full time IT and Internet Marketing consultant working


with some of the major players in internet marketing and search
engine optimization.

All the examples in this book are based on his experience and real
life scenarios he had to deal with. Even though the names and
services have changed in these scenarios to protect the clients, the
application and implementations haven’t.

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B E PREPARED

What is my Marketing

Becoming an authority

Finding your niche

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W HAT IS MY MARKET ?

Market research is one of the key ingredients of any successful


business. Even if your product is great and it virtually sells itself,
90% of it had to do with good marketing. There will come a point in
time that it stops selling, this is either because the market you have
aimed for already has your product or a better alternative of your
product has arrived.

The book “Who moved my cheese” by Spencer Johnson, for


example, tries to hammer down the point that things will change in
your market whether you like it or not!

The beauty of the web is you can anticipate change much easier
than on the streets. Think of search engines like digital shopping
malls: if you can get a nice ground floor space near the entry of the
Google Shopping mall, then the visitors of the mall see your shop
first when they come through the door and the chances of them
going inside your shop to do their business is much greater (unlike
the shops on the end of the mall who are rarely visited).

The search engines will create a unique shopping mall every time
you search for something using a keyword. No dedicated “shops”
are put in the mall because it “builds” new ones every time you
search for something on the web.

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An example mall with search results for cola

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In the above illustration I have created the virtual shopping mall
based on a search query, the keyword for the search was “Cola” and
the first 4 hits on page one were as follows:

1#Pepsi Cola
2#Coke Cola
3#Bob’s Cola
4#Coco Cola

Now if you would search for the keyword “colas” the result would
be completely different and the mall would like changed as well.

1#Coca Cola
2#Pepsi Cola
3#Animal zoo

The layout of our virtual mall has been changed completely due to
the addition of a single letter in our keyword. This in term means a
completely new “virtual mall” was created using the new search
phrase (colas versus cola). Now take the above example and apply it
to a small company producing organic cola somewhere in Ireland.
In theory, this company would want to compete with the big
players like Coca Cola and Pepsi when searching for the keyword
“cola”. But in order to do this, it will need to become an authority
on the subject of “cola” itself.

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So if we look at our small organic cola company in Ireland, we can
see that their market keyword is Cola and they are aiming to
compete with the giants Coca Cola and Pepsi. But because those
giants are already an authority on the keyword “Cola” for many
decades with many websites referring and linking to their site and
having long standing brand names, it would be an almost impossible
task for the small Irish firm to compete with them head on.

They decide to hire an Internet Marketing professional for help who


tells them that in order to succeed they need to become an
Authority on the subject and keyword of Cola. But what is an
authority they asked?

Google started with the phrase “authority websites” many years


back and this has been spilled all over their search engine algorithm
throughout the web nowadays. In short an authority website is a
site that already has the power and the brand awareness of the
surfing public. So within this example the Coca Cola Company would
be the authority website because many smaller website would
mention Coca Cola or link to their website. Those inbound links
(links that go from any website into the Coca Cola website) raise the
level of the “authority” one website has. The more inbound links
you have the higher your authority and the better your search
ranking.

But wait! How about if I register a 100 cheap websites and all of
them point to my personal website, would I not get 100 inbound
links and thus increasing my Authority? That used to be a great idea
when Google and other search engines didn’t really consider the
content of those 100 websites, but that was in the past. Now these
types of schemes will have a very negative effect on your rankings
because the search engines can determine what actually a real
website is and what just a “portal” site is.

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So how does the likes of Google and Yahoo determine what kind of
website is linking to my personal business website? When I
attended a SEO seminar by Google a couple of Months ago I asked
the same question to Matt Cutts who replied in short that there are
over 200 factors that determine a websites validity and search
ranking. These factors will have to be included in your personal
website but also in the websites that are linking to yours for it to
create a “real” impact. Here is a small list of just a few elements
that are important to both your site and those that are linking to
you.

1. Domain Age (Is the website older than a year and registered for
multiple years?)
2. Server location (Does the company who sells products in Ireland
have a server in Ireland? And are the websites linking to the company site
also in Ireland )
3. Content (How real is the content, does it contain many keywords
in a sentence but they are not really readable sentences)
4. Accessibility ( Does everything have a description and the ability
of more information)
5. Contact ( Can I contact the owner of this website or is he hiding in
the dark)
6. Speed ( Does it take long for me to load pages )
7. Structure (Are the pages making sense for example: our-products-
vacuum-cleaners-and-hovers Vs. index.php?Prod=21?ID=2 )
8. Layout (Can I find what I am looking for under 3 clicks or less
9. History (Have I always played by the SEO rules or did I tried to do
some naughty stuff in the past for example using “Black hat” SEO
techniques.

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B ECOMING AN A UTHORITY

If you look in the dictionary for the word “Authority” you might find
this:

au·thor·i·ty ( -thôr -t , -th r -, ô-thôr -, ô-th r -)


n. pl. au·thor·i·ties

1.
a. The power to enforce laws, exact obedience, command, determine, or judge.
b. One that is invested with this power, especially a government or body of
government officials
2. Power assigned to another
3. A public agency or corporation with administrative powers in a specified field
4.
a. An accepted source of expert information or advice
b. A quotation or citation from such a source
5. Justification; grounds
6. A conclusive statement or decision that may be taken as a guide or precedent.
7. Power to influence or persuade resulting from knowledge or experience
8. Confidence derived from experience or practice

An authority in the eyes of a search engine depends on a large


number of factors. Some are more important than others. The
description in 4a of the dictionary comes closest to what search
engines mean with the word.

4.
a. An accepted source of expert information or advice

So how would the likes of Google or Yahoo asses which source is


that of an expert and which one isn’t? The below example will give
you a better understanding of the context.

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The Story of Timmy’s balloon Blog

Timmy has a hobby of creating balloon animals for many years now.
He has been making them for parties on kids birthdays until one day
when he decided to go online with his hobby. He created a simple
blog that allowed him to upload his pictures and write instructions
on how to create the basic balloon animals. All the information
about how to create balloon animals and what other fun stuff you
can do with these inflatable creatures was written on his blog.

Now the page has been around for years and grew to become a
great resource for fellow balloon animal creators. The traffic and
visitor numbers where rising steadily when all of a sudden Timmy
noticed a huge increase of visitors in one of his blog posts called the
Giraffe Animal, the comments on the topic were posted and
everyone seemed to love his “art”.
When opening his analytics & statistics page, he noticed that
instead of being found via the search engines, most of his newly
found visitors came from Referring Web Sites, which had posted
links to his blog about the Giraffe Animal blog he created. This
linking sparked a chain reaction and this resulted in a huge surge of
visitors and traffic for about a month.
The result of this search and the amount of links from referring
websites also resulted in Timmy’s blog getting a lot more search
engine traffic because according to the search engines he became
an “Authority” on balloon animals which other websites would refer
to.

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Now let’s look back at our Irish cola company. They know the
authorities in the field of “cola” are the giants Coca Cola and Pepsi
Cola. So how can they compete with that!? As we’ve seen with
Timmy’s balloon animals, you cannot become an authority
overnight but it takes good content that other websites want to
mention and link to before you are seen as an authority on the
subject.
So what triggered Timmy’s balloon animals to get to this status
without virtually doing anything? This is what he did right without
even knowing it.

He had a blog
He was posting and updating it for a long period of time
He has found a niche topic

The niche topic that he found was the instructions on creating


balloon animals which was not very well populated on the web.
Unlike that of Coca Cola which found its niche at the end of the 19 th
century. So how can we provide the Organic Cola Company their
niche? Let’s look at it deeper in our next chapter.

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F IND YOUR NICHE

Finding your niche is really what it is all about these days on the
internet. When the web was in its infancy and even some years
after that, it was reasonably simple to get your website high up in
the ranking even though this would be short lived for most
websites. The initial concept for search engines to generate a
ranking was simple: the more relevant keywords on a website
would result in it winning the race to the top ranks of any search
engine.

The problem with this was that you could repeat a keyword for over
a thousand times on a single page. This would make that site
become the number 1 page on Google when searching for the
keyword since the early search engines were only counting the
number of occurrences of the keyword on each page.

This “trick” resulted in a large number of ‘dirty’ hits when searching


the web since many internet scammers would add as many
keywords as possible scattered around their websites and as a
result they would get ranked high up in the search listings pushing
all the sites with genuine content down the ranks. So Google and
others decided on changing their search algorithm drastically, which
would make it fairer for all parties but it would also make it a lot
more difficult to get your keyword ranking to a higher level.

In the previous chapter, the concept of authority was the


dominating factor in all efforts for search engine optimization. But
the domain age, domain keywords, and location of the server that is
hosting your website, will have an impact on the results and will be
part of a planned and good search engine optimization strategy.

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Factor Explanation
Domain Age The amount of time a domain
exists (for example
Symbolics.com) is from 15 Mar
1985. The rule of thumb is: the
older the better
Domain Keyword When selling bikes it would be
more beneficial to have the name
“bike” in your domain for
example bikesforsale.com
Hosting Location Search engines will look at what
the location of your physical
hardware is and adjusts the
rankings accordingly. So if you are
selling your products in Germany,
but your hosting location is in the
US, that would have a negative
impact on your ranking.

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So how can niche content make an impact on your results? The trick
is to become an authority, remember? And it is a lot easier to
become an authority on niche content than becoming one on
popular and well know content. Just take a look at our Irish cola
company and how they could apply niche to their product. They sell
Organic Cola in Ireland; this already gives them the following niche
searches.

Organic Cola
Irish Cola
Organic beverages
Irish beverages

These are just 4 variations of keywords that can be connected to


their product and we could find more niche and different types of
niche and trending keywords, which we will discuss in later
chapters.

Now, searching for the above keywords gives a whole different


result than just the keyword ‘cola’ and our virtual “shopping-mall” is
now filled with a different range of websites, companies and blogs.
Even though the search results are 400.000 websites versus the 15
million websites the keyword “cola” produces, it will still be a lot
easier to get up in the rankings now and the market is still big
enough!

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T AKING ACTION

Collecting & Registering

Implementing your niche content

Tracking, adjusting and comparing

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C OLLECTING & R EGISTERING

Any good website will have started somewhere in time with an idea
and a vision. The first websites were very limited, not because they
lacked the ideas and vision, but because the technology to produce
that vision was not yet available. They had to do with what was
given and they did try their best even though it might not have
looked as pretty.

Lego.com in 1996

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Nowadays, the internet is growing thousands of new great looking
websites and this growth gives, not only a good idea and inspiration
for your own website, it also allows us to peek into the source code
of most websites to see what is going on and what they are doing
right that works for them.

Domain Url Page Title Keywords Page Rank


www.sowansorganic.ie SOWAN’SORGANI none / 1#
C BREAD MIX

www.absolutelyorganic.ie Bread - Absolutely organic,organic shop.asp?cat 2#


Organic Food food,organic =8
Delivery, Ireland shop,organic
groceries,delive
ry,shop,absolut
ely
organic,ireland,i
rish

www.goodfoodireland.ie Bakery Ireland | bakery ireland, Member239/ 3#


Sowan’s Organic sowan’s organic Sowan's-
Bread | Cork | bread mix, Organic-
Ireland | Good cakes, buns, Bread-Mix-
Food Ireland organic bread, Laois.html
cork, laois,

www.bordbia.ie Site removed Site removed Site removed 4#

ncobfp.blogspot.com North Carolina / 5#


Organic Bread
Flour Project

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When you start your SEO planning you would want to first find out
what works by taking a look at the competition of your “keywords”.
A simple Excel sheet will often do the trick like the example above

The search result ranking of the keyword “Organic Bread” in the


local Irish Google (google.ie) gave us the following top 5 and what a
surprise we have in store for these ones.

As you can tell the Number 1 in the ranking list does not have any
keywords setup and has only the keywords in its page title and part
of it in its domain name so how come it is number 1?

If we make another table to calculate the overall strength of the


domains in a SEO perspective we can find out why this is

Domain URL Keyword Keyword Domain Inbound Google Total


in domain in title age links Page Points
Rank

www.sowansorganic.ie 3000 2000 300 126 400 5826

www.absolutelyorganic.ie 3000 1000 800 67 400 5267

www.goodfoodireland.ie 0 2000 300 2,286 500 5086

The numbers in the above tables are points given based on the
certain factors that search engines like to see in the websites they
index. This research will also give you an idea of what you need to
implement in to your own website.

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Also the niche factor is great because even though they have a good
domain name and a good number of inbound links the number 4 in
the ranking is already unavailable and will most likely be removed
from the list within a couple of days. Another thing that you notice
is the huge difference between nr #3 and the rest when it comes to
inbound links. Goodfoodireland.ie for example has almost 20 times
as many links as the number #1 so why is it not number 1 or 2 in the
list? Well here comes authority back in the game again. As
discussed in the previous chapter’s authority is something that
search engines find extremely important when it comes to their
ranking system. The more sites that link to your content the better
BUT that will only work if those sites which are linking to your
content are related in one way or another. To emphasize this a bit
better let me give you an example by telling the story of Johnny and
Jimmy.

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The Story of Johnny and Jimmy: The race to the top

Johnny is a well-established whiskey manufacturer who just started


recently in getting his product and website online. He did
everything right according to his web designer and marketing
advisor to become highly ranked in Google in no time. The only
thing left for Johnny was to get inbound links which he got around
by hiring a company in Indian that could provide thousands of
inbound links for only 500 dollar.

At the same time Jimmy who was also is whiskey manufacturer


decided to go online with his product and website but sadly enough
he did not have the budget and expertise to make his site SEO
friendly so he missed some of the basics in doing a good SEO site.
However he did find out about the importance of inbound links and
decided to get in touch with his friends in the pub scene where he
normally delivers his product to get them to place a link to his
website. He also got in touch with whiskey tasting groups and
joined whiskey brewing competitions with his product to get some
more recognition.

A couple of months went by and when both Johnny and Jimmy


started searching for Whiskey they noticed something strange.
Johnny who invested thousands of dollars in his website and who
had over 4000 inbound links pointing to his website was online
ranked 19th when searching for the word Whiskey. Jimmy however
who had virtually no budget was ranked 4th and he only had 34
inbound links pointing to his website. What happened?

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Authority happened.

Because Jimmy was getting inbound links from websites that are
related to his product the value of or authority was great than that
of Johnny who was getting inbound links for thousands of holding
pages and a lot of other none related websites. Some of inbound
links websites were even blacklisted by certain search engines. Not
only did this investment of “getting” inbound link not work it even
backfired giving Johnny’s website a negative ranking due to
relations with blacklisted websites.

Now if we want to apply the optimal strategy for the new Irish
Organic bread company we could use the following strategy.

Domain name registration

As we seen in our research the domain names that contained one


or more of the keywords received a whopping 3000 points and
guess what at the time of checking organicbread.ie was still
available.

Website Title

Having the right word in the right place is another 1000 points per
keyword. So let’s make our title like this: Organic Bread in Ireland –
You can find only the best here

Keyword tags and description

We will finish the initial SEO of the page by adding relevant meta
keywords and descriptions to the website. I have chosen the words:

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Organic bread, organic, organic Ireland, bread, organic foods,
healthy food, organic food Ireland

And for my description:

Organic breads from Ireland, we deliver you the greatest tasting


organic foods and breads right here on this website.

So now we have our domain name and we have the optimal Title,
keyword and description for our website. Now the only thing left is
good content and of course building authority with inbound links
and finally submitting our website to the various search engines and
directories.

But before we will do any of this we want to have a clear and


content rich website which can be difficult sometimes if you’re not
a writer or salesman but with a bit of practice anyone can do it.

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Many people have a tendency to write but find that after a
paragraph or two the writing just stops. They are able to construct
what they feel is all the useful information in just a couple of
sentences and don’t know what to add more to the information. For
books this concept would not really work because most great
novels would be a few pages long and book sales would plummet
due to the lack of depth in the stories. Websites however can
contain just that. Small paragraphs of useful information about a
product and a service, it is often rare that you see websites full of
stories with a lot of detail in the single page. This type of detail
often comes in the form of multiple pages and links on which the
user has the click first before the detail is displayed. Detail on
demand so to speak.

Now when you start creating your website and filling it up with
content you want to make sure that this content is related with the
domain, keyword and title information you put up as the base of
your website. This is because search engines will not just look at
these 3 main items but it will also process all other texts on the
website. So we need to make sure the content contains a set of
rules to highlight the importance of the text within the website.
Header tags for example which html code is used like this

<h1> Text </h1> will display a text bolder and bigger than the rest
of the page

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So when the search engines find a <h1> or <h2> they will know that
the text contained within the header tag is an important piece of
information. Thus it is important that you would use the previously
specified keywords in a header as well.

If you apply this information to our example company which sells


organic bread we would use header tags like this

<h1>Organic bread </h1>

Most companies will often have images as well to accompany their


text as well and these images can be optimized using a so called
alternative text or alt tag. The below example contains the following
line

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<img src="organic-bread.gif" ALT="Organic Bread"><br>

As you can see when hovering over the image the “explanation” of
the image appears and search engines pick this information up. Not
only will it get you scoring higher it will also allow your images to be
found on image searches.

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Now we have done our header text and alternative image text but
we have not really discussed the “real” content which contains the
rest of the information we want to disclose to our website visitors.
There are various options you can go for but the more tags you
push around your text to more difficult it becomes to make a good
looking website.
Organic agriculture is a carefully designed system of food
production which operates internationally to written
standards. It aims to grow the best food possible by
understanding and working with natural processes. Good
health – of the soil, plants, animals and people – is the
objective.
A balance there for is the best way. The next example text is done in
two ways, one is over optimized and one is under optimized.

“Organic Breads” and “Organic” agriculture in “Ireland” is a


carefully designed system of “Organic food” production which
operates internationally to written standards. It aims to grow
the “best food” possible by understanding and working with
natural processes. “Good health” – of the soil, plants, animals
and people – is the objective.
Over Optimized text

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As you can see from the two paragraphs there is a difference in text
and also the over optimized text contains a lot of quotes and bold
text. However as of now this strategy does work better than the not
optimized text it will also look a bit silly when reading it. Find a
balance would be the better solution like the below example.

“Organic Breads” and organic agriculture in Ireland is a carefully


designed system of “Organic food” production which operates
internationally to written standards. It aims to grow the best
food possible by understanding and working with natural
processes. “Good health” – of the soil, plants, animals and
people – is the objective.

Balanced optimized text

To balance between the two texts has been found in the above
example. Even though it still contains the keywords in bold and with
quotes it looks a lot less crowded. It is always advisable to use the
keywords in the text as well even though it’s described in your page
and header also.

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Now we have our optimized page ready but most likely you will not
sell just a single product or have a single website. The average
website will contain a few other pages that can be in relation to the
buying of the product or service, location and contact information
and maybe a further product description. Those pages too will need
to be optimized using the above recommendations. It is also very
important to make the page names as descriptive as possible. So
that every link that is created will already tell you about the content
of the page.

For example these could be the links of our organic shop:

http://www.organicbread.ie/about-organic-bread.html
http://www.organicbread.ie/about-organic-soup.html
http://www.organicbread.ie/about-organic-cake.html
http://www.organicbread.ie/buy-organic-bread.html
http://www.organicbread.ie/buy-organic-soup.html
http://www.organicbread.ie/buy-organic-cake.html
http://www.organicbread.ie/contact-organic-bread.ie.html
http://www.organicbread.ie/where-to-find-us.html

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After you are fully satisfied with the design it is recommend to
“grade” it using various tools like: www.websitegrader.com
This web site will scan through your pages and gives information on
what things you mind have missed when creating your site. This
could be duplicate title tags or missing descriptions but it will also
provide you an indication of your Google ranking and how many
inbound links you might have received.

Another plus is you can add in the domain names of your


competitors and see how they are ranking compared to yours.

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T RACKING , ADJUSTING AND COMPARING

When doing any project offline or online you want to be able to see
the results of the project when it is ongoing. You will be sure that
what you are doing is achieving the desired result and address
issues when they arise before it becomes a costly experience. When
creating a new website or launching a new product online you want
to check the status frequently and various great tools are available
for doing so.

G OOGLE A NALYTICS
Google Analytics for example is a free tool from Google that will
track the amount of visitors you had on your website, where they
came from and how they arrived to your website. This information
is useful because you can see the effect of your SEO. The more
people that come in via search engines the better your SEO has
been. You will also see to what page within your website they are
arriving, it might be that they come to a certain subpage because
this has been ranked higher in the search engines. With this
information you would be able to update this subpage with a bit
more relevant sales information.

You can register your analytics account by visiting the below url:

http://www.google.com/analytics/

After you register you will receive a special code that you will need

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to paste in every page you want to “track”. After 24hours your
account should be fully activated and you can start analyzing your
traffic.

T HE D ASHBOARD

On the Google Analytics Dashboard you can find a large number of


relevant factors for your business here is a breakdown of what they
mean.
15.053 Visits This indicates the total number of real visitors on
the website.
24.86 % Bounce The bounce rate is the user that visits the website
Rate for a very short period of time it is important to
keep this number as low as possible
147301 Pageviews Pageviews indicates the number of times the
website has been “seen” on the web for example in
a search result but not been “clicked”
03:14 Avg Time Average Time on site indicates how long a user
stays on your website
9.79 Pages/visits Almost 10 pages are looked at by each user on an
average visit
84.49% New Visits New visits indicate that the user hasn’t been on the
site before. A high number is good in this sense

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B REAKING DOWN THE NUM BERS
In order for a “real” statistic to form we will need to calculate out a
few factors, the following factors are important in this calculation.
1. The total amount of Visits
2. The total amount of The Bounce Rate
3. An one month “period”

With these factors in place we can calculate the real number of


visitors in a month and per day by deducting the bounce rate of the
total number.
Total amount of real visitors in a month
Rv=Tv – (Tv * Br)
Rv=(15053 – (15053 * 0.2486)
Rv=15053 – 3742
Real visitors = 11311 per month
This reflects that the website gets 11311 Visitors a month or an
average of 365 Visitors a day.

Now we have the average number of visitors per month and the
average number of visitors per day

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W HICH T RAFFIC SOURCES REACHES YOUR SITE
It is also important to find out how users are able to find your
website; this can be either by Search Engines, Referring sites or
through direct access (by typing in the website address in to the
browser. The breakdown for the month period 1st May to 1st June
is like this:

As the above image shows almost 60 % of all traffic comes through


referring websites will another 28 % arrives through search engines.
We can break down these statistics a bit further to determine from
which page they arrive.

As you can see the Shops and Restaurants page on the website is
the main traffic bringer while the links on the main pages are on the
second spot.
Another element of traffic sources is that of the search engines we
can do a break down on these as well to see which keywords users
are looking for to reach your website.

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Google is the number one way that users find your website with
almost 4000 visits while the runner up Yahoo just has a little under
a 100 visits in the month period.

When clicking on any of the Sources it will provide you with an


overview of which keywords brought users to your website. If for
example a large number of your visitors arrive through the search
engine via a particular blog post it would give you an indication that
the topic is “niche” and people are interested in more information
and you could add a call to action on this page to motivate the
visitors to see more of the website or your products.

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G OOGLE W EBMASTER T OOLS
This book is almost starting to sound like a Google Product
promotion manual but this is only because at the moment of
writing these are the best tools around and they are free. Another
great tool from Google is called Webmaster tools which is freely
available via the following url
https://www.google.com/webmasters/

The web application is designed to adjust certain settings that


influence the way the search engine is crawling through your
website and it reports on errors that it finds within the website.
You register your domain name and you are asked to upload a page
or add a piece of code on one of the pages of your site. After this
verification it will take 24 hours for Google to index your website
and report its findings. Another requirement is that your website
has a xml site map ready. This sitemap is nothing more than I little
index list of all the pages you have on your website and it can be
easily created using the following website: http://www.xml-
sitemaps.com/

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Your webmaster tools dashboard will look like this one:

As you can see its main view is split in 4 segments: Top search
queries, Links to your site, Crawl Errors and Keywords

Top search queries

The top search queries segments will display which are the most
popular search terms that attracted visitors to your website. This
also gives an indication on how your keyword SEO has been. You
can see which words worked and which didn’t.

Crawl Errors

Google’s robots visit each web page they index and crawl through
the content to see what they content is and how relevant the
keywords are in relation to the text inside of the pages. It will also
check out which links work and which are broken. If something is

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not right it will report on it and you will see an error appearing in
the Crawl Errors segment.

Links to your page

Authority is back! Already discussed multiple times in this book was


the topic of Authority and within Webmaster tools you will have
your own segment to see how many inbound links you have and to
which pages they are linked from. The more the better and this also
indicates which websites are linking to you and on which
“keywords” or which page or blog post they are linking too.

Keywords

The amount of times you use a certain word in your blog or website
gives an indication on how important you really think this word is.
So if you are a web design company but in every page or post you
mention something about a Monkey than Google sees that as your
most important “search word” and the chances are great that the
keyword Monkey will be higher ranked than Web Design because its
more often used. This also gives you a clear hint if you are using the
important keywords enough or not.

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R EVIEWING & R ESUBMITTING
After you have done your research on the webmaster and analytics
tools you want to use those results and implement fixes to adjust it.
If you noticed a lot of broken links reported by Google or you have
seen that certain irrelevant keywords are more important than
others than you will have to changes this. Also riding on the
popularity of certain pages within your website and blog and writing
new follow up content about it is recommended after a review.

When done with this you will have to regenerate your sitemap and
resubmit it again and also you might have to ask the search engine
to reconsider your website to be submitted. Just make sure you
fixed all the bugs before resubmitting it because if it is not fixed it
will take longer for you to resubmit a website the 3rd time.

Here is a summary of the 5 steps you should take:

Step 1: Which pages are more popular via Google Analytics and
Webmaster tool and try to write follow up content on those pages
Step 2: Which pages have a high bounce rate and adjust them to be
more interested
Step 3: Fix all the errors that are reported by Webmaster tools
Step 4: Make sure that your most important keywords are in almost
all the content
Step 5: Re-generate your sitemap and Resubmit your website or
blog to the search engines and the various blog directories (Blog
Pingers)

If you have followed the instructions in the previous chapters you


should have a great optimized website, and you will notice the

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difference in your site visits in a couple of days or weeks (Depending
on how fast the search engines visit your page again). The next
chapters in the book will discuss more advanced SEO techniques
and we will also discuss the benefits of Social Networking and Social
Media Optimization and how it affects not just your website ranking
but also your online image.

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A DVANCED SEO

Social Networking

Social Media

Keyword-analytics &
Trending anticipation

Integrating tools

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S OCIAL N ETWORKING

At the moment of writing this I can predict that 75% of you reading
this are already part of the social network and maybe it is through
websites like: Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hyves, Hi5, and LinkedIn. I
can also predict that maybe only 10 % will have their company
profile setup on these social sites and maybe only 2% will have it
done correctly.

The main reason for companies not to embrace this new trend is
mostly due to the fact that they are not sure how beneficial it will
be and how to generate business out of it. This chapter will discuss
the dos and don’ts and we will use the same businesses discussed in
the previous chapters for our case studies.

First let’s talk numbers

350 million active Facebook users

Facebook is the third most popular video site

Free advertising to friends and friends of friends

Largest Social Networking site on both PC and Mobile devices

Integration with Blogger, Twitter, and many more other web tools

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T HE S TORY OF J OHNNY AND J IMMY : J OHNNY ’ S
REVENGE
As we have seen in previous chapters both Johnny and Jimmy are
whiskey manufactures that went their separate ways. Johnny had
his budget and marketing team but made some crucial mistakes
which cause Jimmy who had a lot less budget to overtake in the
race for the Google top 10. Months have passed on Johnny decided
to take the marketing for his whiskey in his own hands. Reading up
on the latest news and finding out more social networking pushed
him to get involved with Facebook. He started by creating a simple
Fan Page on Facebook and invited all his friends from his personal
profile to become fans. After a couple of week his page had more
“friends” than his personal profile and it started growing rapidly, a
developer friend approached him and asked if he was interested in
a Facebook application. Although he wasn’t really sure to go and
create application; he did trust his friend and it only costs a few
hundred to develop so he gave him the go ahead.

A week later the application was born and the concept was very
simple. You could give your friend on Facebook a virtual Johnny’s
brand whiskey glass, jug or bottle. This would create a simple post
on the friend’s page with an image of the item and an option to
“pass” on a drink. The tool was free, simple and fast and it became
hype. Facebook friends were passing virtual drinks to each other
and Johnnies fan page become a huge success growing
exponentially. Not only was his brand being pushed around the
internet, also the interest in the “real” thing grew and before he
knew it he was getting orders from around the world. This triggered
many different responses and his brand was being blogged about
from all corners of the globe and started trending as a popular drink
in clubs and bars.

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Which resulted in not only a huge increase in sales but also because
the term become so popular on the web it created a large number
of inbound links that caused Johnnies website to overtake that of
Jimmy.

The story was an example of how powerful social networking really


is, it can make or break businesses and with the help of thousands
of Facebook users it can create a tipping point that will have a
positive impact on both your brand and your website.

Below are the steps to setup up a basic Facebook marketing


campaign for your company, because of the diversity of each
business this will be a basic guide line.

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The 8 steps of Social Networking success

Step 1: Create a fan page and company page on your social


networking site(s). So you can add it for example to Facebook,
MySpace, Hi5, LinkedIn etc. If you have the time don’t limit yourself
to just Facebook. The more bait the bigger the chance of a big fish

Step 2: Fill these fan and company pages with interesting content,
pictures and videos. Try to find out something which is fun and
what other members would like to share for greater exposure and
with Step 3 in place it will be a lot less work then you think.

Step 3: Integrate and connect all your social media tools like
Twitter, Blogging services and News updates in to your Social
Network Profile(s) and on to your website for more exposure with a
lot less work.

Step 4: Invite all your friends to your fan page or company profile
and start adding friends of friends to your page as well. You will get
comments either positive or negative but at least you will get
another view of your site and product from the social community.

Step 5: Go Viral by either make a nice little application for Facebook


or MySpace; create a fun video or start giving away stuff for free.
Going Viral is one of the hardest things to do but it will be definitely
create huge exposure if you’re doing it right.

Step 6: Don’t be a salesman; Social networking sites can be seen as


virtual café’s or bars. People are there to enjoy each other, have
discussions and watch & share videos. If you would sit in a bar
having a nice drink and some guy would come in with a big sign
shouting “Special discount on Earmuffs” you most likely will get
annoyed and try to kick him out of the bar.

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Step 7: Listen and participate, you want to find out what people are
saying about your brand and company. Submit to websites like
Google Alert or Twitter alert and follow what is being said on your
fan pages.

Step 8: Be patient. Some can take weeks some can take years to
start boosting but just because you took the step of being part of
the social network you will have gotten yourself an edge over the
competition.

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S OCIAL M EDIA

Videos, Images, websites, blogs anything on the web that is being


shared in a social concept can be called Social Media. Many confuse
social networking & social media as being the same and although
the two types are bound together in a great relationship (Facebook
is the 3rd video site for example) they are still two different areas
which need different types of optimizing. Another difference
between SM and SN is that within the social media website there is
a sort of democracy where media content can be voted up or down
vs. that of social networking sites.

A few of the most popular social media websites are YouTube,


Vimeo, DIGG, reddit.com and Daily Motion. But there are thousands
of different ones on the web they host social media. In this chapter
I will discuss the optimization for 2 of the bigger ones; YouTube and
DIGG.

Let’s first discuss YouTube by giving a bit of history of the company

YouTube is a video sharing website on which users can upload and


share videos. Three former PayPal employees created YouTube in
February 2005. In November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by
Google Inc. for $1.65 billion, and is now operated as a subsidiary of
Google. The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses
Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-
generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music
videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short
original videos. Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded
by individuals, although media corporations including CBS, the BBC,
UMG and other organizations offer some of their material via the
site, as part of the YouTube partnership program.

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So it’s a company started in Feb 2005 and it managed to be bought
for 1.65 Billion dollar 1 and a half year later. This gives an indication
on how the company managed to boom their product and because
it became so popular Google bought the company with the
knowledge that the public wanted to upload their own video’s and
share. Social Media was born. Since Google became owner die
integrated the YouTube site with their own Ad-Word system which
allowed popular amateur video makers to gain revenue from the
freely available and uploaded video by displaying ads on top of the
video frame. Mainstream television channels and music producers
are doing the same by also freely uploading their content.

Another Social Media website is Digg.com, the big difference


between YouTube and Digg is the various forms of Media and the
way the front pages are created. On Digg you can provide links to
media and these don’t always have to be Video’s. News stories,
pictures, websites, videos, games anything that you can find on the
web can be submitted to Digg. Then the Digg community (all the
other users registered to Digg) can vote if your post is interesting or
not. The more interesting the better and this can result in a huge
increase over a short period of time.

Now we discussed to social media websites, one which is purely


focused on sharing streaming media by allowing uploads and one
which focus is on “how great it is” and allows it to be voted up and
down. A full list of these Social Media websites can be found in the
last chapter.

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S OCIAL M EDIA O PTIMIZATION

Doing Optimization the right way takes some time although there
are some tools available that will speed up this process but let’s first
run down the steps.

Content (Come up with a great Title and Description for your


content)
Register on as many social media websites you can find the time for
Submit your content by uploading on the various video sites and
then submit the links to all the social directories (digg.com ,
reddit.org etc.)
Embed a link to vote the content up on your Facebook page by
using the “share” function in Digg
Embed the video in your Blog and use relevant keywords
Cross sharing by responding to popular videos with your own video
(see screenshot)
As you can see they are only 5 steps but step 2 and 3 are the ones
taking the most work initially. Next time you want to add a new
piece of media you will not have to do step 2 of course! In our next
chapter I will discuss keywords studies that you can use in
submitting your media as well. !

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K EYWORD ANALYTICS & TRENDING
ANTICIPATION

The following chapter is what I call the Voodoo of SEO, not many
companies do this or have heard of it because it is so new but this
method will really provide you with an advantage. Google the
company I have discussed many of times in this book has started to
record what people were searching for in early 2004 and now 6
years later this information up to 24 hours is freely available on the
following website.

http://www.google.com/insights/search

First thing to give you a bit of a feel on how it works you can select
your target region and then just press “Search” which will give you
the most common search terms over the past 6 years but also the
most trending and upcoming search words.

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As you can see since 2004 “YouTube, Facebook, Bebo” have been
the top rising searches *(which means that they made the biggest
climb in search numbers)
“Facebook, BBC, YouTube” were they Top searches as well
(meaning highest amount of times it was search)

Now you have a feel of what is data this can provide so let’s look a
little deeper in a search term by comparing them. So Add multiple
search terms as in the example below

As you can see we compared the top 3 rising searches and


Facebook is the clear winner with a huge climb. But with YouTube
you can see what the forecast is for this search term in the future,
based on previous data the insight search predicts or anticipates
what the search term will do in the future.

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As you can also see the search term for “Bebo” has been declining
for the last 2 years so you can predict that this will decline even
further in the coming years.

Magic!

So how can this tool be used for SEO? There are many things you
can do with this but I will discuss 2 of the main ones that will have a
positive impact on your SEO.

Content

Most people I know have problems writing good and relevant


content to attract visitors to their website and brand. This is often
because they don’t know what to write, this so called writers block
can be easily solved by writing about things that people want to
know about. The Insight search filter allows you to select a Country
but also a Category and a timeframe. So in the following to
examples I will use these filters to come up with rising content ideas
and keywords.

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Example 1: Meat producer.

The filter has been set for the last 30 days in the UK using the
category “Food & Drink”, and just a search. Based on this you can
see that “Hairy Bikers” and “Haggis” are the rising searches (Biggest
climb) in the last 30 days and “Tesco” and “recipes” are the Top
searches(Most used).
Now already based on this information I could write a nice blog post
for our meat producer:

Hairy Bikers Famous Haggis using “My brand name Meat”

This recipe is an alternative version of the Hairy Bikers Haggis


Recipe.
You need … and “My brand name Meat” which you can find in any
Tesco or buy using Tesco Direct.

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So based on what was popular I could write this blog which would
be good content and attract much more visitors that if I did not
investigate they relevant keywords.

Example 2: Jimmies Whiskey shop.

This time the filter was set to the last 30 days in the U.K but with
the search term Whiskey. Now the results are specific to Whiskey
and what the top related terms are and what are the rising searches
are. In this case “Whisky sauce” seems to be really kicking off. And
did you notice that “Whisky” is spelled wrong? This information
gives you a niche because not many companies would spell Whiskey
without the E. So this blog post could be as follows:

Whisky Sauce: Jimmies Brand Famous Whiskey sauce for Haggis.

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Some call it Whiskey sauce, some call it Whisky Sauce but however
you call this tasty sauce it will really taste great with Haggis, You can
use Jimmies brand of Malt whisky and create…..

Again we created content based on what people are searching in


the last 30 days and use the spelling “mistakes” to create our niche.

Have I convinced you yet about the power of insight search? This
great tool really will help you create good and relevant content and
you will notice the difference in your traffic. This research can be
applied on anything you do, from websites, blogs but also for social
media and networking pages and content. Anything you want to
create should be pre-analyzed firsts to get the maximum benefit of
all your hard work.

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I NTEGRATING TOOLS
Now we are coming to a close and I bet it must have been a ride of
too much information from time to time, it might seem that so
much work is not worth it and you may even want to give up but
NO. Trust me the work you put in optimizing your website will be
rewarded. And in order to make the large amount of work to go a
bit smoother we can start using tools and sites that will allow
integration of content over the various platform go a lot easier.
These tools make cross fertilizing of content possible and you often
end up only having to update 1 or 2 areas in your site profile and
the tools will do the rest.

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SEO FOR W ORD P RESS

All in One SEO Pack


You can find this tool at the following url:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
This plugin for wordpress will add a new field in every new blog post
where you can add relevant keyword and title information and with
the advanced keyword research (previous chapter) you can really
optimize each blog post to gain the maximum exposure.
Setting Permalinks
Permalinks is a way of making your blogs easier readable the same
way we discussed it for websites in earlier chapters. You can find a
complete instruction on how this works at the following url:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_Permalinks_SubPanel
The basic setup can be found in the word press admin area: Settings
> Permalinks >
Here I would recommend the following custom structure:
/%postname%/

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C ONNECT TO F ACEBOOK USING W ORDBOOK
Word Book

This Facebook application allows you to post on your face book


profile or fan page any new blogs you have made automatically.
Simply go to the following url :
http://apps.facebook.com/wordbook/
There you can “add” this application to your page and provide the
details of your own blog website.
Get the Max out of RSS with Feed burner

Yet another Google owned tool that allows you to optimize your
blog further and enables your RSS feeds to be optimized and linked
to 3rd party websites. You can register your blog here:
http://feedburner.google.com

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Ping-Pong – Blog Pingers

Have a short title and description ready and start “pinging” your
blog to various blog directories using Blog Pingers. There are various
types available but the 3 listed below are the most common:
http://autopinger.com/
http://pingomatic.com/
http://bpinger.com/
After submitting your information these services will tell the various
blog directories that there is new content available for them to link
to.

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SEO FOR T WITTER

Ears to the ground with: Tweet Beep


A great and useful tool for twitter is Tweet Beep, this web
application will monitor twitter for you and whenever your brand,
name, company or anything you want to be made aware of is being
tweeted you will find out. It is a very useful tool to be on top of
trends and opinion about your company or that of your competition
http://tweetbeep.com/

Facebook status updates via Twitter


This Face book application will integrate your twitter and whenever
you do a tweet it will update this on the Facebook profile or page
you have selected. Just go to the following link and add the
application to your profile:
www.facebook.com/twitter/

Tweet your companies event


Twittercal is a service that connects your Twitter account to your
Google Calendar and lets you add events easily, directly from your
Twitter account.
Schedule your tweets
Having the ability to schedule tweets is very handy to keep your
twitter alive and kicking without having to comment a lot of time
while being busy.
http://www.tweetlater.com/

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W EBSITE OPTIMIZATION TOOLS

Graders
The website grader tool scans your website and tells you what is
missing or wrong in your pages. It gives you a good indication of
things you might have missed and because it’s free and quick it’s
definitely worth doing tests on it.
http://websitegrader.com/
http://www.seoautomatic.com/ (needs registration)

Firefox plugins
When it comes to browsers Firefox is the most versatile for
developers, it has a range of tools that can really spice up your
browsing but it also helps in detecting what can be wrong with
pages.
Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development
tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and
monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
http://getfirebug.com

Seoquake allows user to obtain and investigate many important


SEO parameters of the internet project under study on the fly.
http://seoquake.com/

SearchStatus is a toolbar extension for Firefox and SeaMonkey that


allows you to see how any and every website in the world is
performing
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