Ask me Anything - Search Engine Optimization Expert

africanos23

africanos23

africanos23

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I know most people here are probably programmers or beginners in web design etc. Something very important when designing websites should be implementing SEO (search engine optimization) best practices. Be this on and/or off page.

It's good to have a "nice" looking website but with no actual visitors your hard work will never get noticed.

I created this ongoing SEO thread to help novices and have discussions with advanced users alike to get more out of there websites and also discuss general SEO questions or opinions.

I have knowledge in quite a few industries (media, software, services, ecommerce) hopefully I can also help you out.

Ask me anything SEO related :)
 
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Cool stuff - deffinitely an area I need to do more research on.

In your opinion, what would your "top 3 rules" be?

And if you're a beginner at web design, what you be your top 3 "easy to do" recommendations?
 
amigafan2003 said:
Cool stuff - deffinitely an area I need to do more research on.

In your opinion, what would your "top 3 rules" be?

And if you're a beginner at web design, what you be your top 3 "easy to do" recommendations?
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It's kind of hard to pinpoint only 3 things for SEO but here are a few things that might be beneficial for a newbie:

a) Using a mainstream community supported platform (no wonder I always use Wordpress). You can find just about anything from plugins to code tweaks. This should make your life a lot easier or you're going to need an inhouse/paid developer for each small detail.

b) Get the site structure right from the start. Categorization etc Don't go to wide from the start as you will have a harder time ranking. Be the best in your small little niche and then leverage that to grow in to more competitive-relevant niches.

c) Creating valuable content (linkable assets) and reaching out to prospect influencers.

Easy to do :

a) Read this on page checklist guide, this should cover everything about technical aspects https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015
b) Hook up webmastertools to give you an idea on how google "feels" about your site.
c) Look at what "big" competitors are doing and why (reverse engineer). See where they're promoting their content,where they are getting links from and how you can become better at whatever your market/niche is.

I can get into a lot of detail about every single aspect (generic question I guess thats why) but this should suffice for now. If you have any specific questions please ask.
 
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b) Get the site structure right from the start. Categorization etc Don't go to wide from the start as you will have a harder time ranking. Be the best in your small little niche and then leverage that to grow in to more competitive-relevant niches.
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In regard to this point, if you are having a major site overhaul and there is no way that the structure will stay the same is there any way to minimise the effects on these sorts of changes.
 
roccles said:
In regard to this point, if you are having a major site overhaul and there is no way that the structure will stay the same is there any way to minimise the effects on these sorts of changes.
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You will need to log the old urls and 301 redirect to the relevant pages/categories/posts.

a) check which pages are receiving the most traffic from Google analytics (these usually have more links) note the top 50-100 etc performers down.(this is just incase you miss anything)

b) use screaming frog to grab all urls and use excel to log old link to new link and then redirect 1 by 1.

I've completely redesigned old sites from one platform to another with zero loss in traffic. If it's a very big site, the structures are usually similar and an htaccess 301 redirect rule can be used.

Google will catch up eventually but you don't want to lose link power that is getting your site up there in the top results.
 
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Page titles, key words and descriptions are often the most basic form of optimisation, but I have found getting these right can have the biggest impact with very little work. What is the first thing you look to change when asked to help someone improve their rankings?
 
MoDe said:
Page titles, key words and descriptions are often the most basic form of optimisation, but I have found getting these right can have the biggest impact with very little work. What is the first thing you look to change when asked to help someone improve their rankings?
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Each market is different (example ecommerce website vs publication) but have similar characteristics in terms of the three mentioned on-page optimisation "tricks"

Page Titles :
For blog posts - informational articles
I use a Headline analyzer - http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/ (Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer)
anything above 40 is very very good in terms of getting social media traction and/or getting better CTR (click through rates in organic search)

Which one would you click through to if you found these on page 1 ?

Title 1
Make Windows Load Faster
Title 2
9 Ways To Make Windows Load 50% Faster

For product pages I try to add the UVP (unique value proposition).

For the current ecommerce website I part-own I am testing

Ships FREE : XXX Product

Descriptions :

Blog Posts - This should include the main keyword/keywords in a small intro

Product Pages - UVP (unique value proposition)
Discover our "XXX product" with free shipping returns etc etc etc

This is relatively easy to change on big batches of similar pages like product pages if your using Wordpress for example and Yoast SEO. There's template variables you can use for automation (%%title%% %%date%% etc etc).

The keyword is usually the product model and manufacturer here

Keywords:

a) Use google adwords keyword planner

solid state drive - 60500 searches a month
ssd - 550000 searches a month

drill down accordingly from here

- type your keyword into google and see what pops up (sometimes the actual word is not present but something else)

- you can also understand the user intent (if wikipedia and informational sites are coming up thats probably what your article should be like, if its a list make yours similar etc etc)


b) If you know your market well enough you know it's specific technical jargon (this should really help)


SSD will NOT be your page title something like

Best SSD drives for 2016 would, and if it's big (1000 words+) and you add specific market jargon in the post itself you will also rank for similar and relevant keywords you didn't target.
 
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englishpremier said:
How important is https to SERPS. Sure I read somewhere that all things being equal google will rank a secure site more highly. Curious as to your experiences with this?
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This isn't just a search engine thing, it's also useful for customer assurance and trust in your website. People like to see SSL these days, it's been drummed into their brains for years.
 
englishpremier said:
How important is https to SERPS. Sure I read somewhere that all things being equal google will rank a secure site more highly. Curious as to your experiences with this?
Click to expand...

Zero to none as I have both sites with http and https. A case study shows that 25% of all ranked websites on their tracked keywords have HTTPs.

In the past few weeks Google seems to be indexing all HTTPS urls by default. (as mentioned on some SEO blogs)

If you don't need to have a secure site (example only publish content and run adsense) there's no need.

rexehuk said:
This isn't just a search engine thing, it's also useful for customer assurance and trust in your website. People like to see SSL these days, it's been drummed into their brains for years.
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True especially when purchasing something. If a site hasn't got SSL on checkout there's no chance I would enter my VISA details.
 
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Thanks for the reply.
I mean link not updating content.
So for example a plumber wants a website that offers his services etc so basic pages would be home about services contact_us ( which would all be content thats set once and forgot about) - How would that work?

Then scenario 2 they add a portfolio page which they add work that they have done but only very occasionally
 
hargi said:
Thanks for the reply.
I mean link not updating content.
So for example a plumber wants a website that offers his services etc so basic pages would be home about services contact_us ( which would all be content thats set once and forgot about) - How would that work?

Then scenario 2 they add a portfolio page which they add work that they have done but only very occasionally
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You will be looking more into local SEO for something like a plumber

here is something to have a glance at :

https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-local-seo-audit
 
i run a cleaning company and we have a nice decent website getting better every week with little tweaks, extra pages we feel the customer may want to read, blog etc. i know that in reality even with myself unless i used a company, i'd never feel the need to share someone's site like mine. It'd have to be something like say i had a builder and they created a beautiful bathroom, i may share this on fb and maybe link to who did it.

in the past i used to hear about how you should submit articles to article websites, make comments on blogs and link to your website, but these tips seem to have died off now and always felt spammy and unnatural any way.

if a customer does share a link it'll most likely be through facebook, and more likely to our facebook page, so not really doing much from seo.

what ways could we create links to our site? 1 way is we hope to create interesting articles that would one day be shared, but how do we go about letting people know these articles even exists? should we let local news businesses know of a great article we just did comparing xy and z, or perhaps good deals? I feel the only way to get links is to either pay or do what feels like spam
 
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Would you approach a new website/domain differently to one that has been online for sometime? Even if you were developing (or a new website had been developed) onto the existing domain?

If there are differences, what would they be?
 
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