World Shortest SEO Course:
This might be the shortest course, but you’ll learn the two most important factors in getting traffic and getting customers.
You’ll learn the fundamentals of why SEO is important and the areas to focus on first to achieve winning and successful results. SEO is a key part of your digital marketing strategy.
Learn the two most important factors in SEO.
Welcome to the world’s shortest SEO course with Damian Scattergood.
Damian manages the SEO team here at STAR. While this is a short course you will learn two of the most important factors about SEO so let’s start by looking at what SEO actually is.
SEO or “search engine optimization” is the process of getting your website seen online by customers who will buy from you.
Sounds simple but let’s look at that in a little more detail. That sentence can be broken down into two very distinct and important parts and these are the two lessons to learn from this training course.
Getting seen it’s the first part of SEO and getting customers to click and buy from you is the second part of SEO.
So how do you get seen?
Looking at getting seen the number one objective is for everybody is to get listed on Google so you’re seen and you’re ranked, you’ll hear people talking about this “I want to be number one on Google” I want to be on the first page, I want to get listed and all of this is the SEO process. How you get seen and get visible on Google is a technical process and it’s a system you have to go through.
Now one part of SEO which is also important is that you’re competing with others so this is a very long process. You can’t just come to a company like ourselves or an SEO company and say SEO my site and then the next week you get ranked on Google. Anybody who tells you that, you should walk away from because SEO is an ongoing process. Google indexes the web about every 90 days or so. It can be a bit faster sometimes but in theory that’s the indexing timing it uses.
When you do something on your website and you change content or you modify the page to improve the SEO it will take about 90 days for that change to be impacted on Google. So you have to be aware that it takes time. You may sometimes do work but it takes a long time to see the benefits of that work.
It’s a long game you play. To be ranked in Google you need to focus on your quality rather than your quantity. You hear people saying you know oh I’m ranking for 150 keywords or 5,000 keywords and you can do a lot of this type of work but fundamentally it’s down to if you have your five or six keywords or you know even ten keywords and you’re doing well and those that’s a good start. Do a little bit of keyword research to limit the amount of work you need to do.
So focus on getting good quality keywords and good quality links right. This will get you on the path to showing up in the search results.
Keyword Game
Don’t play the keyword game of trying to rank for everything under the sun because it’s too competitive. The other part about this is to remember you need to decide yourself where you want to actually be seen. Google is not the only game in town. Google at the moment has about 87 percent of the world’s traffic but there are other systems that are available like Bing, Baidu if you’re going into China, Yahoo, Duck Duck Go for people who prefer a little bit more privacy and other search engines. You need to decide if you want to optimize for them or even if you want to advertise on them as well and so that’s something to think about in your mix.
Delivering SEO results is done by a couple of different things. First of all you’ve got to write good content and so your website has to be engaging and it has to be written in a way that’s technically good for SEO and if you want to learn more about that you can just search on the web for “how to write for SEO” and there are plenty of tools and systems that will teach you how to write good content and SEO type of content as well and some of it’s down to what words you use and when you use them.
You can also hire an agency like ourselves or a specific SEO agency and they will do the job for you and they to be able to do that they need to be able to sign into your sit and edit your content and then be able to tailor it for the engine and the results that you want.
They key thing is that you should decide what you want from the site before you engage with an SEO company.
SEO Tools: There are tools you can do this yourself there are plenty of tools out there that you can use to learn about SEO. You can use SEMrush SEOprofiler or Ahrefs.
Some good websites to follow are “search engine land” this one so I follow myself and this is is quite good and Moz is another one.
Certainly you should follow Google’s @searchliaison on Twitter. This is Google’s official account where they tell you all the changes and things they implement on the Google search engine.
SEO is not a black-and-white process. Google has many hundreds of factors that they use to rank sites and so it’s not always as simple as you may think.
The number one learning on the first part on getting seen right is that it’s a technical process so you need someone who’s technically minded to be able to do your SEO and that can deal with the complexities of the website and deal with some of these tools and deal with Google itself. So that’s that key part of lesson number one.
It’s a technical process and it takes time.
So how do you know when you’re successful?
If your SEO company is successful and you’re a good at SEO you will show up in the SERPs what’s called the search engine results page so in these you’ll see a title at the top so where I’ve searched for the word “translation services” and here are the pages that have that Google has shown for that term right. So this is effectively how you know you’re doing a good job, so, but this is only part one this is getting seen.
So people will see these but will they click on them?
So let’s look at the next piece.When people see a SERP, a SERP actually has two key parts, the first part is the title tag and you’ve seen here translation services for documents and websites and the second part then is the page description and it’s “ready to go global looking for professional translation services etc” right!.
Now those meta tags are pulled from your website page so they are actually the two most important tags on your website so a lot of SEO people don’t drill into this but they should.
This is the number one thing you need to know about website SEO.
Your title tag and the description need to be really, really good because this is what Google is pulling. Google indexes your page and it pulls these two tags and that’s how it generates the SERP results
That’s how it displays the SERP results you know we’re not talking about getting ranked here we’re just talking about that’s what Google displays to a real person. You’ll see the Title text so this has to be about 55 to 60 and the description has to be better 155 to 160.
Make use of every single character you have. You see in this example we have three dots that means our text is a little bit longer than Google liked so it just clipped it on us so we need to decide have we done the best thing here or can we improve that text. So spending some time on your SERPs is really, really important because if the SERP is good people will click on it and clicking on it means that they are interested customers or valuable customers coming to your site and the number one thing to remember here is that you need to write for people so this is not about SEO or technical words our technical stuff or keyword stuffing. The user experience is important. Would you click on this link?
Make sure that the keywords are there but that the text is written in a way that real people will read and say yes I’m interested in this and I’ll click on it and have a look at that site.
There are tools out there that will help you like Yoast for example that if you’re using WordPress and Yoast has a lot of good stuff on their website even if you’re not a Yoast customer you’ll learn a lot about how to write good SERPS on their site.
And finally you can actually, believe it you can check your own SERPS to see what Google says. There’s a SITE: keyword so in the Google URL bar if you type the word SITE: and URL of a webpage that you want to have a look at Google will show you what it has indexed for that particular page and this is very, very important so that you can check how each of your pages on your website is displayed. You can actually search for your generic web site by
site:http://www.star-ts.com
for example with our address and that will show me most of the pages but you have to scroll through the pages. It’s better for SEO that you just look at an individual page and see if the page matches the SERP so when I click on services languages and translation services that’s what I expect to see on the page as well.
So you should be following through and analyzing your site like this. So in summary that’s a very short course there are two key things you need to know. One is the technical part.
So the technical SEO process is something you need to go through and there are lots of presentations around that and we’ll be doing one shortly ourselves and that takes time and the second part then is the human part that you need to write text that’s clickable, that’s attractive to real people. Somebody actually has to read your text and it has to be of interest to people so getting seen is one part and getting people to click is the other part and that gives success and success basically is once you’ve got the visibility and you have the traffic then you’re on your way to getting more customers and having successful website and a successful SEO strategy.
So I’ve been Damian Scattergood I manage the SEO process with STAR and if you’d like to know more please feel free to give us a call.
Tools discussed in this presentation are:
Great sites to read…
Twitter account to follow:
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Connect with Damian Scattergood directly on LinkedIn
