| Kyle:
All right. Hub Spot, I do a lot of things. There's a lot of different
of ways to connect with me. So just so you know, I always love this
side because I'm an, I'm an over achiever. Everything that I'm going to
talk about, there's content, there's blog post, I already written about
it, so do not feel like you have to take notes, uhm, write down, that
down. Remember it in your head, that's all you need to know. Uhm, the
slides is going to go up in the blog afterwards, ah, let's have some
fun. So that's kind of a smorgasbord. I do a lot of random stuff. I try to do too much sometimes I don't get enough sleep. Uhm, so, but what I really like to do is I love to solve problems and SEO kind of is this problem, right? It's like how do you optimize your website? How do you get found? And, you know, I just use this analogy for, for analytics and I think it goes right in here with SEO too because SEO is about driving traffic in your sites that you can measure. But once again if a tree falls in a forest then no one is around to hear, it doesn't make a sound. Right? Right? So if, if no one can find your website, forget about measuring it, you're still not getting found. You're like a tree in the middle of a forest and not in the middle of a city. |
|
| 01:04 | So for SEO it's like if people can't find it, it
doesn't matter. And you know, you'd really think about that. You might
have this great and very important page in your website, but it's a
little bit buried. Uhm, but it's what you want people to get to but
they can't find it. Does that page even matter? Does it, does it matter
if you have it or not? You know, really think about that as we kind of
go through this. So what SEO is not, and, and you know, I think somebody was saying the same one day that if you do a Google search for SEO, there's all this spammy stuff. Like who, all of you are all web people, how often do you get something, once a week, it says would you like to drive more traffic to your website? Uhm, we all get those right? It's so annoying. Those people think they're geniuses and they're not. They think that SEO is nickel and pixie dust and it's just not. You know, it's not that complicated. It's really easier just some core fundamental things, uhm, and what I'm about to go through here is going to get you 80% away because the last 20% is like you don't really need it. |
| 02:01 | This is great. It's peace talking tomorrow. I
always love plugging this book because this book's all about usability
and accessibility but that is SEO. If you do SEO right, if you make a
user friendly website, you've done SEO because these three guys right
here, the three blind mice if you were, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft
being, search engines are your dumbest, blindest users, right? You
know, that if you've got to make your website so that they're able to
see what's going on, so they're able to read it, uhm, that's when you
win the game. That's all you really need to know about this. So by the numbers, on average about 30% of traffic is delivered by search engines. This especially seems to be like a pretty good middle ground for higher education ah, as that kind of asked the question earlier this morning in SEO presentation. It seems like that was about right. Some people are higher or lower, uhm, about 82%, 89, 85% of that traffic's delivered by Google. Google is still the big bowl in the block in different circuits, it's different ones, uhm, but it's 80% we'll say. |
| 03:03 | So that it, on a large college website with a
million visits per month, that's 300,000 people visiting your website
just because of search engines. It's kind of a big deal right? That's a
lot of traffic. So what if we could take that 30% and what if we could
turn that 30,000 into like 350,000, 400,000? Like you all of a sudden
returned a pretty good ROI to your boss. So let's talk about how to do
that. So search engine optimization right? This is, this is probably outdated at this point but 3000 searches per second. There are 3000 searches per second just in the Google. Uhm, how do you win at that? You know, publish more content, optimize your content, promote it. Uhm, you know, are you optimized to get all of this traffic? It's a good question. And it all starts with the keywords. It is, the core foundation is the keyword. And now, now here the couple of quotes that I think, I don't know if I've made this up or I read this somewhere, "It's not about what you want or what you call it. It's about what people are actually looking for." |
| 04:0$7 | Uhm, you know, we all love our institution. We
think we're the best school around but if that's not what someone's
looking for it doesn't matter. You know, use this analogy all the time,
you know. It's, you got to find that problem that you're solving
because no one cares about your products or your school except for you,
right? You know, people have a problem, people have a need. A
prospective student is looking for, I need an institution in maybe an
area or maybe that's, you know, really credible or I care about biology
or what it is. So that's the kind of way you need to be thinking about the keywords that you're targeting. What makes your school special? And why does someone would want to care about it more than something else? So there's this concept called the long tail. Ah, anybody familiar with the long tail? Anybody know what the? I see, I got to throw away swag around here. So I got some free stuff to throw around. Uhm, so this is, this is SEOmoz. SEOmoz is kind of like the, the, guru of SEO. Ah, Ramfish is just a genius. He was ah, up in Boston last week. He never says anything that's not like perfect. |
| 05:08 | Uhm, and, and the concept here is this, you
know, if you know anything about the long tail that these top hundred
keywords makes up, you know, a small percentage of search traffic. That
it's kind of this whole 70-30 concept. That the long tail is 70% of
search traffic and it's the reality is that there's a lot higher
competition up here for these main words they have lower conversion
rates. This long tail lower competition but a higher conversion rates.
And that's what we really want to focus on here. So with the long tail, let's say we're a college, right? It's not the keyword we care about, right? Maybe we care about a college in Ohio. That's a lot better keyword, right? Now let's get a little bit more specific, a college in Cincinnati, Ohio. We're getting closer here biology college in Cincinnati, Ohio. How about best biology college in Cincinnati, Ohio. That's more what someone's going to be look, will be looking for if there are 18-year-old high school senior in Cincinnati. And they're thinking where do I want to go to school. |
| 06:12 | So that's what you really had to be thinking
about that there's no way you want to, what you're going to win this
keyword. You don't even care if you win that keyword. What you care
about is what's important to you and what makes your institution
special. Ah, and that's how you want to make sure you're talking about,
you know, branding right? We all talk about branding. That's all
SEO is. It's just long tail keyword targeting and making sure you're
being very descriptive, you know, as you talk about pages. So, you know, where do these keywords go right well before we get to that? Just to kind of distinguishes different search engines, I just Google's a big bowl in the block but to kind of wrap your mind around uhm, some best practices kind of say that Yahoo is more for, for navigation. You know, not to stereotype but a lot of the data points that ah, Yahoo seems to be, used a lot more by lower income families. That's not necessarily a bad thing, you know, depending on your audience. You know, if it's, if, if you're maybe a community college that might be the audience you're targeting. |
| 07:07 | If you got a lot of state tuition maybe that's
kind of the audience you're targeting. So think about that. Maybe you
do want to have a presence on Yahoo. Being is kind of, actually being
in Yahoo we're kind of merged now. They're using the same back in.
People use Bing for a lot more of the transitional, transactional
stuff. It's kind of cool going to Bing and typing in ah, a search for
school or a game or something like that because they kind of bring it
back for you. Uhm, you try to do something like, like buy a trip.
Bing's pretty good at that. Google is kind of the, the commercial
investigation it's kind of the catch all. And then Ask is, is some
people still use Ask for informational stuff. So going back to this keyword, how do we do keyword researches? A lot of different ways you can find keywords. So in this example, if you ever use Google, you know they got these nice little suggestions they give you? Go type in top college and they'll give you all these breakdowns. So you can kind of do this to, to do a little keyword research. All right, you know remember we just said it's not about what we think about, it's what people are looking for. So this is kind of what people are looking for. So, so target it that way, break it down that way. |
| 08:06 | Uhm, Google is a good place to start. Ask does
the same thing, Bing does it too. So you can use kind of all of those
big boys to help you kind of start doing some of these keyword research
to see what people are looking for. Uhm, of course Yahoo does it too.
So it's a great place to say, all right what are people looking for in
these search engines? What are these keywords that I need to be
targeting around my website. Ah, ad words, keyword tool this is
Google's kind of, you know, PPC, I'll got to ask this, how many of the
people in here are using PPC? I mean doing like Google ad words
campaign? A few people. I still think that's one of the most
underutilized things in higher ed, uhm, because there's just, there's
just, there's a real value in that. But you can kind of come in here and say that I want to look for something like MBA program and I can get kind of a segment of what people are looking for, uhm, they kind of target the right kind of keywords, uhm, looking at stuff like competition around those keywords. |
| 09:02 | And, and I'd even say kind of a good role with
them is for any of these keywords you're trying to target, add, add a
geospecific term to it and it's all of a sudden going to be a lot
easier to win on it. You know, if you're a school in Cincinnati, uhm,
say you're in Cincinnati. Google Insights, another kind of interesting
tool where you can get some data. You know when you're trying to
think of what is the exact way I want to say something? Ah this is
just, you know, pulled up for some, for fraternity greek, like sorority
and fraternities. This kind of say which one's actually more popular
than another to help you kind of target the right kind of keyword, ah,
great little tool there. And of course, the source right? I mean it almost seems too easy but if I've got something like diploma or what are other variations of that and maybe would be a good word to use? And then once you kind of start doing all these brainstorming, ah, the big concept is you want to kind of come down to. What are these ten keywords that I care about? You know what are those ten majors that your school's really known for. And then you had all these long tail words to it. And then you, you come up with hundreds of keywords. |
| 10:06 | Uhm, couple other kind of powerful keyword
tools, word tracker's got a, a good one they've got a free tool and
they've also got a paid on. Not plug in Hub Spot but we've got a
keyword tool too. You know, if you want to start targeting some of
these bigger terms and kind of tracking them over time. Uhm, so it's
all about the keywords. So what do you do with the keywords? How do
you, how do you think about it? And, and this is kind of a breakdown from SEO experts and, you know, what are the important things that matter to us? You know, I think it's even a little bit higher than this. Uhm, and what it's saying is 65% of SEO, I'd even go as far as maybe 70, 75% is all about reference and authority. And what that means is great, you doing the right kind of things to have the right kind of keywords on your site but it's your authority that matters. It's the, the people that are linking to you. It's the, votes of confidence you're getting around the web. So kind of keep that in mind and we'll come back to that in a second. |
| 11:02 | But you've also got these things on page SEO and
kind of help people use the site. And literally because of that, you
know we really do breakup SEO into two parts. You got on page SEO and
off page SEO. Two things, you have a lot of control over on page, off
page is a lot more complicated but that's where everything really is.
So on page SEO, you know, here's the pixie dust again that there's
these five kind of elements that matter from an on page SEO standpoint
that you want to make sure you're doing right and really it is less
than that because some of these are more important than others. The page title, by far and away the most important thing. This is what shows up here at the very top of your browser. You know, it's also what shows up in Google search results. Uhm, it describes that page. If every single page on your website does not have a unique page title, that's the first thing you've got to fix because every single page in your website's unique. We just talked about all of these thousands or hundreds or however many keywords you want to have, you got a different page for every single one of them. |
| 12:07 | You know, be sure to include keywords in that
page. And kind of remember you've got only so many characters, there
are 70 characters or less. You can put more than 70 characters in a
page title, ah, but the search engines chop it off when they share
results so that's kind of the max there. The URL. The URL describes the
page, you know, you want to include keywords in here too. And a kind of
a dynamic URL is hard to understand. I'm a, I'm a big Braze fan and the
loss yesterday was devastating but if you look at these kind of URL,
these two URLs here, uhm, you probably have a pretty good idea what
that first page is about, don't you? This second one is something that's kind of randomly generated by CMS but I have no idea what that means and, and literally remember Google is your dumbest, blindest user. They look at the keywords in this. If you send a link to someone in an email, they can be a lot more like they could click on it they know what it's, what it means. Google's the same way. |
| 13:00 | Make sure that your page titles have clear and
distinct URLs. Uhm, if any, all that are out there that kind of use the
CMS and puts out junk like this, the two things you want to look for is
either something like URL aliasing or, what's the other one? URL
rewriter for your CMS. One of those two is what you're going to want
to, it's a plug in or something that you can get to help write clean
URLs, uhm, big, big good stuff for SEO. You're quiet, gosh. All right headers, ah, so this is kind of the next big thing and, you know headers anybody that needs sort of HTML knows H1s, H2s, H3s, not as important as those first two elements but it does matter too because this kind of helps Google know what is the important stuff on the page. Once again, it describes the page. So the concept that we're kind of drilling away here is every single page on your site has a certain set of, a certain keyword that its going after. One long tail keyword and you want to include that one long tail keyword in all of these places. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward. |
| 14:02 | Uhm, but really the way to think of it, you
know, headers, if, if, if you're not familiar with that and if you're
more of a marketer and not a, a back in junkie, it's just like a word
document. You know, your, your H1 is like the main header on a page. H2
is kind of your subheaders on a page and H3 is kind of go over a little
bit further down. And it's very, very important to break up content on
the web this way because remember Google's dumb and blind, uhm, you got
to tell them what's more important on a page. And it's also important to remember that people on the web are lazy, they don't like to read a lot of stuff. They like stuff broken down, something like, "Oh, I don't care about this. Oh, I care about this. I'm going to read this paragraph." So breakup your content that way. Meta description keyword. So meta descriptions, ah, these last two elements are kind of meta elements, uhm, back way, way back in the day, ah, meta keywords used to be a lot more important, they're not important now. No major search engine looks at meta keywords. That doesn't mean you shouldn't still use them. |
| 15:03 | And what I kind of recommend is, is you say a
limit of tan, when said every single page is about one idea, one corset
of long, one long tail keyword take that as your meta key and be done
with it. Don't feel like you got to rack your brain for all these meta
keywords because if you remember back in the day, spammers basically
abuse this, this ah, meta keyword so bad that search engines ignored
it. But that doesn't mean to say that if one day Google could all of a
sudden set it aside, hey guess what? These things are relevant again.
I'm going to start looking at them. So if you just completely neglect them, you might be shooting yourself on the foot at some later date but just keep it simple, you know, one or two meta keywords in each of them. Meta keyword is this long tail so a keyword could be four words together. So always keep that in mind when I'm talking about keywords. It's not necessarily always one word. Meta descriptions $are a little bit more important. But they're not necessarily important for the optimization, they're more important for the click through on search engines and I'll talk about that in a second. |
| 16:06 | All right, so we've talked about all the on page
stuff and who, I mean everybody's heard this right? Contents king,
contents king. Uhm, but it go on the way back if, if 65% of SEO is
about off page SEO, then links must be the queen, right? So this is
where the other side of the equation really starts to narrow. This is
off page SEO. It's all those people that are linking to you. If you
were to think of, of the way the search engines work as, as, as an
election and whoever has the most links or votes is a lot of times
whose services are up to the top. You don't always have control over who links to you. You can't necessarily influence that. The only way you can really influence that is like producing great content people want to link to. Site authority, this is something nobody in here has to worry about because everybody knows that, that college websites .edu domains are like the cream of the crop in Google. They're trusted websites, you're not going to have spam on them. You're not going to let those people that want to link trade with you. You're not going to put links to them. Your very trusted and incredible sites in the mind of the search engines. And then kind of anchored to it is a third party which we'll look in a second. |
| 17:19 | So people always ask how do I generate inbound links? I say don't worry about it. You know, if you're creating
great valuable content, uhm, people will link to it. I always love the
analogy field of dreams, you know, if you build it it will come. If you
write, if you have great content on your website, content is many
things which we'll look in a second here. People will want to link to
it, people will want to share it and you'll win now. And, and that's
kind of the important thing to, to know about that. So publish content we're sharing, publish awesome stuff. You don't want to publish stuff that's boring and non-interesting, you all know that. But there's a lot of things that you can kind of do that make interesting content right? This is a Wofford's video player where interesting content, videos are content. If you've got interesting video that people can kind of come and consume, people are going to want to link to this. People are going to want to share it. Guess what? That looks good in search engine eyes. |
| 18:10 | The other one is kind of a, a sounds like. So
some of you will probably think that I don't have time, I don't have
budget to do video. This is a really, really cool tool that if you've
got pictures, who doesn't have pictures? And the you can lay it over a
soundtrack. I think sounds likes is 50 bucks for a license and they are
basically put together like a video that's basically pictures with
audio in the back end. Really, really cool tool. You can instantly make
videos you can dump all over YouTube. Great way to produce content.
Really, really cheap and reuse the pictures you have. Of course YouTube is kind of the big bowl in the block. One thing that kind of say about YouTube, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world now. Meaning more people go and type in stuff to look for in YouTube than they do Yahoo or Bing or anybody else. But people don't talk about it because well, YouTube's owned by Google. Uhm, and a lot of times YouTube result show up in Google results. But video content is, is very much there in the same kind of keyword stuff applies here. |
| 19:10 | Yes? Speaker 2: [19:11 Unintelligible] Kyle: So good question. So the question was, if you have a link from YouTube back to your site, does it pass a search engine authority? Speaker 2: Inbound. Kyle: I get it, right. An inbound link. So the, the one thing that goes into this and I don't know if YouTube does it or not there's a, there's a tag, uhm, they can, you can put on the links called a no follow link. And what this tag does is it basically tells ah, search engines do not follow this link. Do not give this link, ah, link use. I don't know if YouTube has those things set up. I don't think they do. I know like Twitter, any link that's in a Twitter stream is all no follow meaning it doesn't pass search authority but for something like that, if it's, if it's valuable content that people are consuming, part of the win is in clicking the link anyway right? So like, yeah, you want to think about it from search authority but the goal is the same. You know, whether I show up at the top of searchers and order people clicking on the link they come to my site. So I definitely recommend you do it either way. |
| 20:13 | Uhm, so the next here is kind of audio,uhm,
everybody understands for those who does this really well. Another form
of content, another way to get stuff out there. People enjoyed it. They
got me mic-ed up in there they're recording this for a podcast. Now hey,
it's content. Student blogs, this is kind of a, I think this one edgy
web last year. A really, really cool blog. If you've got really, really
interesting stuff, this is the college out of London. Let your students
build content for you. Let them write content for you. And if they're
using the right kind of keywords, you're raking for stuff you didn't
even think about. An example of, from a couple of years ago, we had one of our student bloggers who was blogging over the summer and, and wrote a post about five things that you should bring to ah, school for incoming freshmen. Well, I was looking at the, the Google Analytics account, I was like why we're getting all this traffic from, from things to bring to school. Uhm, well guess what they're, people out there are looking for that. |
| 21:06 | So you can get traffic in ah, the most
interesting ways. Let these guys, you know, help support that cause.
You know give them an idea about some of the keywords maybe you care
about so they can kind of work them into their, their post titles and
things. Interactive campus map, you know, another good thing more, more
uhm, you know, content. It's a great thing. People love linking to
these things. You know a place that you can kind of share that content
and get more buzz out there. Social news, this is kind of a, a little hidden trick that, you know, having some sort of like a, a bookmark, like I share this widget on all of your content that you produce like this. Anybody could click on that bookmark and then share that to their Twitter followers, I just said that it doesn't pass SEO credit but it's driving traffic too. We all know how important social media is now. You know making it as easy as possible for people to share that content is just another way to drive traffic and to drive those inbound links because who knows somebody might actually pick up one of these things and blog about it on their site and that's an inbound link too. |
| 22:07 | So produce that content that's really worth
sharing and make sure that you make it really, really easy for people
to share that content. RSS and kind of calendars. RSS is great. I can't even tell you how wonderful RSS is. The hidden gym about RSS for SEO is that every time you write something that gets put on an RSS feed, that feed is, it goes gets pinged by search engines or it goes out and pushes that count hit. So basically if you want to know how you get indexed by Google five minutes after posting something, have an RSS feed attached to it. Post something then go copy and paste the title of that article, that press release, that news release whatever it is and put it in Google, guarantee, if you have the set up right you're going to see yourself ranking forward immediately. Really, really cool easy way, You should always attach feeds to stuff and, you know, more feeds the better. |
| 23:00 |
This also goes kind of this whole usability
concept right? That your audience likes to consume content in different
ways so maybe someone cares more about men's basketball than they do
about Le Cross. Break that up for them. And then of course the
calendar, this is ah, these guys just redid this but ah, actually this
is the new one but, you know, notice how for, for a calendar event they
actually give you the ability to Tweet it, share it on Facebook. You
know all of these waste dumped into a Google calendar, a Yahoo
calendar, make that content really easy to consume and just, you give
kicks out there in the web. So, you know, kind of get these social
media elements into because that does actually help with SEO. Make it
easy to share. So I've said earlier like, college websites don't have to worry about site authority, right? Like if you looked at ah, the who is record on your, your domain, I guarantee probably most everybody in here, your site's at least 15 years old. Uhm, that's a big win if not older than that. I mean the dinosaurs of the web are college websites. You've been around forever. I don't mean dinosaurs because you're dead, I mean dinosaurs because you're old. |
| 24:04 | Google loves the trusted old domain. You've got
that built and authority. They give you special treatment because of
that and that's why you don't have to necessarily go out and solicit a
bunch of links because you already had the man that respect. So
that if you can just get these keywords in you page titles, in
your header elements, in your URLs, you're going to see your search
traffic just started going up. It's, it's kind of that simple. You
already have all the trust and authority. But a couple of other things you can do is this anchor text counts. And I always love this example. If you're going to Google and type in click here, look what shows up number one. Tell me how that makes any sense. [Laughter] Tell me how that makes any sense. What does Adobe Reader have to do with click here at all? Uhm, you probably heard of the, anybody ever heard of these kind of Google bums where if a while back you typed in miserable failure, uhm, it was a link to President Bush's page of whitehouse.gov and, and the way that works is I was talking about these votes of confidence right? And a big part of these votes of confidence is the link. So that people all over the web say to download, click here, to download Adobe Reader. That's the link. That's the anchor text. That greatly influences the authority that Google's passes. These are the keywords that's associated with that page. |
| 25:20 | So note to self, if you're linking that
stuff all throughout your site, do not say click here or learn more
make that link more descriptive. People will know if it's blue and
underlined, it's a link at this point. You're just shooting yourself in
the foot and you're competing with Adobe Reader. And that kind of goes
directly into this next part that ah, you know, one of those buildings,
and this isn't once again, it's not about what we call it, it's about
what people look for, right? A great example, this is a resident's hall right? It's a, it's a, but you tell me one 18-year-old high school senior that says, "Mom, I can't wait to go living in a resident's hall next year." No they're called the campus dorm. That's where they want to go. |
| 26:03 | So once again kind of going back to the Google
tool here. you can kind of do a search for something like resident's
hall. 49,000 but not do something like campus dorm here. It's twice the
search volume. That's what people are looking for. It's not what you
call it. So make sure you use it kind of those kind of keywords when
you're building your pages at. It's not about us it's about what people
are looking for. Uhm, so we even went, we specifically target the page campus dorm instead of college dorm because they're all right a little hanging fruit not a lot of competition around it. Let's see if we can build a page and rank for it. So this is it. Actually they redesigned the Wofford website since then but this is, this is the campus dorm page we've built. Remember all those things I just told you all about on page SEO? There's the, there's the header. Now look at that, bam! Bam! It's like campus dorm in the page title, campus dorm in the URL. Here's in the header. We even mentioned it throughout the page. And over here on the right hand side, this is kind of navigation for all pages in this section of the website. |
| 27:02 | Every single page in this section of the website
links to this page with the anchor text of campus dorm. Like I just
talked about link authority, uhm, and you don't necessarily have
control over people linking to you but every single one of you has
absolute complete control about your internal links don't you? That
matters too. If you can be linking to your own pages across your site
using the keywords you care about, your college websites, your
university websites, you've got all the SEO authority you need, you're
going to start ranking for stuff. Yes? Speaker 3: What if we don't? I learned something called a weekend engineering program, which everyone is calling a part-time media program. Nobody's looking for a weekend program part time. But enables our program is a weekend program so I can't... Kyle: And you can't write any content referring to it as... Speaker 3: It can be in effect. This is one of our part time program but [27:53 Unintelligible]. Kyle: But even if you don't build the page and call it resident's hall but you're linking to it throughout your site with the anchor text campus dorm, you still win this. Speaker 3: [28:04 Unintelligible] |
| 28:06 | Kyle:
Uhm, I'm not going to comment on that. [Laughter] That's why I went to private world. But everybody kind of gets this concept here right? I'm just teaching. I can't help you do it if you can't do it. God. [Laughter] All right. So there we go. So, and I don't know if this is still the case because this is, this is screen shots like two years ago but we've built the page, campus dorm linked to it internally, bam, campus dorm Google search right there in number four. The portal version of dorms right there in number two. Like, I didn't do anything magical. I didn't go about and solicit a bunch of links across the web, I just built a page following best practices. You know, think about that. And you think about the called action here, you know I mentioned it earlier. This is the page title. This is that meta description. |
| 29:05 | That's what shows in the search engines. That's
your called action. In the search result that's all you get to make
someone want to click on this page versus any others. That's why it's
so important to make every single page title and description compelling
and unique so that it's about that page. So people would want to click
on you and not the result above or below you. Uhm, that's your called
action search results. A couple other things here kind of a navigation. Obviously they help with usability. Site linking is we just saw really, really bad. Site maps, uhm, site maps.xml it's more of a technical thing. Zach talked about it this morning. Really, really great thing for search engine, kind of set those up through Google web master tools. And in the footer, oh, I guess also a site map, we'll also tell them what the site map on your page. It's a good idea to have an actual human site map page on your site. Go look at sites like CNN. They've got a link somewhere in the footer that links to a site map page. So you can get kind of an idea about where everything is. |
| 30:07 | That's good for searching just like
it's good for humans. Because at search engine, you can see all of
these different links on that page that takes them to different
locations. And utilize your footer. You know, if you've got certain
pages that are kind of important to you, ah, that you're really wanting
to build credibility around, uhm, it's a numbers game once again. So if
I've got lots of pages linking to something like a fast facts page that
I've got in my footer, that's a lot of links pointing to it. That's the
numbers game that I'm winning with Google. Ha, I'm going to back and talk a little bit more analytics, I thought I got done with this earlier today but come back and rehash a couple of these from earlier. Ah, internal site search set this up in Google analytics. You set it up on whatever search engine you're using because you know, this shows you where you're failing people. You know, that if I can see that the number one thing that people are looking6 for through my internal site search is bookstore, I probably would have made that a lot easier to find. I'm not doing a good job in people searching for that. |
| 31:04 | Guess what? This is also a great keyword
research. This is what people are looking for. So if you see something
like campus dorm or college dorm that shows up in here way above
residents hall, you're using data at the table. I'm trying. Uhm, visits
by keywords once again, you kind of drill into this. Ah, interesting
here of course the top nine all I have to do with Wofford number ten is
Betsy Cox novels. She's ah, she's a professor at Wofford, she's a
novelist. Imagine that she writes a lot of books, randomly shows up
here. So knowing that, do we have a good page built around that for her
to collect some of that traffic. People out there are looking forward, uhm, make sure you've got a page for it. You know, let people tell you what they're looking for where you've got little hanging fruit and how can you make those pages stand up better to move up the search results on. Because this could, uhm, you know at number nine. But doing some of the optimization I just talked about maybe we moved that up to one or two in the search results, we're getting a lot more traffic from it. |
| 32:04 | Yeah? Speaker 4: [32:04 Unintelligible]. Kyle: It's a good question. So the question is, does that really help your college just getting more traffic on stuff? Uhm, indirectly, all brand recognition is good, right? You don't necessarily know who is looking for what. You don't know if it's, if it's someone looking for her to come speaking at another event. If it is, big brand recognition there. Is there, is there, it's hard to try up, to tie it back to a direct event that you can directly, you know, talk about but, but if you can find enough of those low hanging fruit one of them is going to pay big. And from a usability standpoint, it's kind of in your best interest. Another thing here, this is the, ah, another chart that shows up in Google Analytics for page titles. We'd just talked about how important page titles is. You can kind of see every single page that shows up in this report and it goes way, way down pages and pages of them. |
| 33:05 | You want to make sure that every single one has
a unique page title and that's the easy way to go through your whole
site right there in Google Analytics. And guess what? If you're going
to focus on which pages that make right, you probably want to start to
the most visited pages right? Those are the important pages. So this is
a great kind of checklist to work your way down as you're optimizing
the whole site. It might not, if you've got a million pages on your website that you're a big, gigantic university and you're responsible for some large percentage of those, there's no way in your lifetime you can go optimize every single one of those pages. But if you can start with let's say the top hundred and say knock out 50 a month, uhm, you're really start moving the needle big. It's definitely a low hanging fruit that you can unpack. So referral sites here. We just talked about how important these inbound links are right? And if we can kind of see what sites are linking to us, hey, we're already getting traffic from these guys, I wonder if they give us another link. So it can be kind of a low hanging way to find, all right we want to get some more, we want to get some more links. We want to move up the search engines somewhat. Who's linking to us now? And what they do will only give us some more links. |
| 34:10 | Maybe you have relationship with some of those.
Ah, go upstate here is the local newspaper in South Carolina. They
would love dealing to us. And we just kind of give them some other ways
to, uhm, tear your fancies like the, the, the forms that talks about
the football team. It's easy to get a link from those guys and they
actually draw a traffic too because people click on it. 404 pages, yeah? Speaker 5: [34:32 Unintelligible]. Kyle: Ah, that, that's actually an internal IP butt yeah my filter is not perfect. 404 pages once again, ah, 404 pages of what you're failing right? It's when you go to a page and it's like boom, this page does not exist. We all talked about the importance of inbound links. If people are clicking on on, a link to come to your page and that page doesn't exist, guess what? You're losing that credibility for that page in Google. |
| 35:00 | So you can do things like set up
301 redirects so there are some ways trying to find certain pages, we
can direct into that right places to better use your experience and it
passes that credibility to the search engines. So an example for this
were like, ah, the one, the one I used earlier is for Wofford they had,
uhm, the mathematics department was wofford.com
wofford.edu/mathematics. But they were actually links going to
wofford.edu/math. Go ahead and set up 301 redirects for
that. It's a better user experience, They're going to always feel that
they're going the right place and Google's going to appreciate that. Another big one's admission versus admissions right? Everybody has to have one or the other. I guarantee you there's somebody out there linking to the other one. Go ahead and set that up. So yeah, almost always use 301 redirects because they pass search authority. And kind of another form of 301 is this whole URL canonicalization. I'm calling University of Georgia out here. |
| 36:02 | I ticked on this like a month ago they still got
it wrong. This is the exact same page. One has no www and the other one
has www. Guess what this does. This makes every single page on their
website and I guarantee these guys probably had a million pages on
duplicate content. And why is that important? Because well Google
doesn't know which one to give more authority to. So they're splitting
every single page on their site's authority two ways. Make sure that you have canonicalization as you set up the right way. There's a whole, there's a blog post in Google to tell you how to do that. It's pretty easy, it's one of those five-minute things of low hanging fruit and get it right, uhm, you could save yourself a ton, ton of credibility. And by the way www or non-www, one it's not better than the other it's all about branding. Choose which one you prefer. Splash screens. You got a spl-- this is kind of like 90s anyway. If, if someone tries to convince you the value of the flash screen, it's not there. It's annoying, it's a bad user experience right? It's just annoying. |
| 37:05 | Guess what? Because of that bad
user experience, it's bad on search engines too. They're crediting the
wrong page and they're crediting then there'll be crediting the other
line. Same for flash, Google has a very hard time reading flash. There
are some ways that you can do to write in some back end stuff, to kind
of that in there but for the most part, flash should add, it
should not dominate. Especially with stuff like HTML5 coming along.
It's probably time to start thinking about how you're going to put that
over because mobile access get the HTML5. So a couple of SEO kind of tools you kind of take home prepping your tool belt. So the links browser, this is one of my favorite and this is .eduguru homepage like I said Google's dumb and blind. This is what it looks like to Google. That's the text browser because basically what links is and here's a link to it bitly links, It's a great, it's ah, the website where you can go stick in any URL and see what it looks like to Google. Get an idea what it looks like with the search engines because what a lot of people have is they'll have this big old section of links that maybe your sublinks, because her style she's not exactly set up the right way. |
| 38:10 |
So you want to make sure that it's
really easy to read. You don't have a bunch of extra junk in there,
keep it clean. Ah, SEO mods mentioned these guys earlier, they got a
billion free tools, great stuff. SEO toolbar, this is the Firefox plug
in that helps you do a lot of interesting stuff. Most of the stuff is
probably overkill for higher education people except for this kind of
page x-ray. Remember when I was talking about header elements here and they kind of have great stuff H1 elements are. That x-ray with this Firefox plug in is really cool and help you do that. Uhm, Hub Spot has this great free website, great at report if you want a, created over a million websites can give you simple hang through SEO tips. Uhm, kind of the goal is create, optimize, link, kind of that simple. You know you keep your content creators producing great content and make sure they understand these on page elements to optimize it and then the links will come. |
| 39:04 |
So a couple of things I just kind of threw it here in
the end. Google Instant, a lot of people were asking what is this
mean for search? And the truth is, it doesn't really change
anything for the way that we build content, the way we optimize it.
What does change is there is no such thing as somebody going to the
third page of Google looking for something anymore. If you're not
number one, or you're not above the fold, because what do they do? They
threw all of this ads all over the place and you've got three results
maybe that show up. If you're not one of those three results, people are not going to find you because they're not going to scroll. They're just going to redefine their, their search. So the only thing SEO does, it doesn't change what you should do, it just changes the importance of SEO because those top results are that much more, are like much more critical. And then finally like you know, how fast is your website? And, and I like to think about this one to business standpoint. That if I'm Google, right? And, and I index billions of pages and I crawl all of this stuff and I'm consuming all this content, I'm spending a lot of money on energy. This is costing me a lot. |
| 40:10 |
And if I'm looking at website A
and B, and A is a lot faster, the pages load a lot quicker, there's
less stuff on them and website B is slow, it's on a slow server, which
one do you think I'm going to give more credit to? You know strictly
from a business standpoint and Google does that now. So make sure your
website's fast and it's going to help out a lot. If you've got, if you
have images on your website that aren't optimized and you know, you,
everybody knows, I know, we all have users that try to upload something
directly from their camera, that's killing your SEO credibility. It's
killing you. Optimize that stuff for the web. Great, great tool for this, this website optimization dotcom. They've got this web page analyzer, there's the link kind of didn't come through. Uhm, really, really cool tool. You can analyze any page, they'll bring you back. You know how big is your CSS? How big is your JAVA script? How big are the pages of the images? How long does it take to load all these different connections? Great, great tool to see how fast you are, uhm, because speed does matter. |
| 41:11 |
Final thoughts here, SEO is not
a sprint, it's a marathon. Like guests, they're definitely some low
hanging fruit we can take away here but this is an ongoing thing. You
know, teaching your content writers, and some of you are content
writers had a leverage to some of these things and get them in the
right place. You've got to continue to do it over and over again. You know, every page in here we're thinking about the title. Does it have those keywords in it? How we're using it? Does it say, you know, best college in Cincinnati instead of just college? Uhm, best college. Help people find your buried treasure. That's what this is all about, right? Everyone of you are special. You have a special school that does something special and something great. Continue to tell that story, just make as easy as possible for people to find that story. That's what the value is. |
| 42:03 |
Some additional reading, SEO, do
you want one blog that read about SEO? Of course there's .eduguru but
seomoz.org/blog great, great. Search Engines in Optimization an Hour a
Day, book I highly recommend. A couple of other sites here and I'm
spent. [Laughter] [Applause] Speaker 6: You mentioned the, you know the new, what your website called [42:40 Unintelligible]? Kyle: Yup, yup. Speaker 6: Or if searches of the clients five differences... Kyle: Sure. Speaker 6: So we might be able to get around 500 pages for just for enough... |
| 43:07 |
Kyle:
Right. Right. So the question is, if, if you've got a page, you call it
one thing your external people call it another, uhm, ah, d you build
multiple pages. How do you build multiple pages? How do you build
multiple pages? Can you? Uhm, I think bigger picture here is, it is a
numbers game right? The more pages you have, the more you kind of win.
And there are ways you can do that with stuff like blogs, press
releases, you can target some of those long tail. But also with the
inbound links, right? So maybe I do have a page it's residents halls,
we use that example again but I'm linking to it well things like campus
dorms. That page ranks for both of them because all the on page elements target it one way but all over the off page elements are targeting it in another way. So you could still have pages that kind of do that, uhm, but I think the bigger strategy is you know, it's a numbers game. You know, don't, don't overthink those kind of things. You're better off creating more valuable content. You know telling those stories. Yes? |
| 44:04 |
Speaker
7: You can through to the [44:06 Unintelligible]? Kyle: Yup. Speaker 7: Kind of stuff by making [44:14 Unintelligible]? Kyle: It's called URL canonicalization. Come find me afterwards and I'll, and I'll give you a link to the blog post you want and you'll be good to go. I mean give it to your web guy or you or whoever. Yeah, Jerry. Jerry: Yeah, I'm just ah, [44:30 Unintelligible]. Kyle: What do you think? Of course I'm going to have this up on the blog. Come one. [Laughter] Of course it's going to be up there. Jerry: Yeah. Absolutely. Kyle: I saw a question over here. Speaker 8: Well I would just got to mention also and I was also curious, have searched for Georgia on Google or see if it is getting split like that? Because there's also within the Google webmaster code. Even if you don't have a set up to you know, redirect one to the other... Kyle: Right. Speaker 8: ... you can now fix Google, you know it's more difficult for Yahoo Vega but you can at least tell Google to prefer one over the other. |
| 45:06 |
Kyle:
Right. Right. So the question was with the Georgia website. You can go
set it up in Google to tell it that it's one or the other, uhm, you
know with or without the www's. And I'd, I'd still say that like, it's
still five minutes to go and get it done anyway. And Google is like one
of the search engines. There are still so many micro search engines
that are not as advanced as Google. Google's pretty smart now. But I still think there's still some extra credibility by going and getting it set up the right way. Uhm, yes. Speaker 9: I just want to comment on that are [45:48 Unintelligible]. Kyle: It's a good, good tip. |
| 46:07 |
Jerry:
Nice. [Applause] Speaker 10: We got one. Kyle: Give it away. Give it to somebody else. Go fight her if you want one and you're afraid to ask a question. Yes? Speaker 11: You mentioned ah, this presentation in this one of our easy program modification. Kyle: Yes. Speaker 11: Uhm, I'm just curious to know if something you're going to do. Uhm, you got to [46:33 Unintelligible]. Kyle: So, so the question is about PPC and disappointment by the keywords you've targeted. And I guess my, my response would be go longer tail. Target, because, you know, you don't want to just target top MBA programs in this example. You might target top MBA programs in Ohio. Uhm, that's going to be a lot less competitive term. It's got to be a lot more specific and you're going to do a lot better on it because it's, it's more relevant to what people are looking for. |
| 47:13 |
The other thing I would say
about PPC that a lot of people do wrong is that you're, you're buying
traffic, right? You are paying money for people to come to your sites
I've talked to many businesses who buy PPC and send that traffic at
your homepage. No. You're paying for these people. You're giving us
specific offer. PPC works best if you're driving some sort of
convergent page. So in the, in the MBA example I should be driving them to some landing page. It's like download five tips about why our MBA program is better than the other one. Or something that's kind of mid funnel. You might even go as far as like, apply to our MBA program but if you're getting traffic with PPC, they're probably not that far down but just think about it you're paying for this so make sure that you've got some sort of conversion tied directly to it. And if you're seeing that success, oh, another tip turn off the ad network if you're not, uhm, they've got they got a checkbox in there turn of the ad net. |
| 48:04 |
That what shows up in blogs that
add Adsense Speaker 12: Content network. Kyle: The content network, yeah. Yeah. That's waste of money. But target longer keywords and go to exact match instead of relative matching and do some stuff like that to really decrease that spent. Speaker 13: Hey thank you very much, Kyle. [Applause] Kyle: Thank you. I've got three left to people who want to come up and grab them. Speaker 14: Let's see the URL from over there. Kyle: The two you want that you want to grab are... Speaker 15: Pretty impressive. [48:38 Unintelligible]. Kyle: It's literally just .eduguru.com and it's /SEO because that SEO has got literally 30-40 blog posts on every single one of these subjects. Speaker 16: Awesome. Awesome. Kyle: And you can read the whole detailed article of what I've said and what I didn't say. Speaker 16: Awesome. Kyle: Thank you. Cool. Speaker 17: Kyle, that was awesome. Kyle: Thanks. Hey. Speaker 18: Website? About the, called the... website? Kyle: Go to .eduguru.com/seo. Here let me write this word that you want. |
| 49:06 |
Speaker
18: I was trying to write it out. Kyle: .com/seo. and you want to look for an article about canonicalization. Speaker 18: Is that a word though? Kyle: Yeah. It's some long, long ridiculous. Speaker 18: So this is where your, I was going to ask you if you had it out on the net somewhere. Kyle: I haven't gotten it updated but there's an older version of this presentation there, I'll be updating it. Speaker 18: Oh, you will be updating? Kyle: Yup. Speaker 18: OK. Good. Speaker 19: You have your other one from this, this? Kyle: I do. I do. Ah, instead of seo. it's /webanalytics. I'm sure I'll be blogging about both of them over the main page too. Speaker 19: Oh, good. Thank you very much Kyle. Kyle: Thank you. Speaker 20: Hey. Kyle: Hey. Speaker 20: That was really good. Kyle: Thanks. Speaker 20: Uhm, so the question I had is, when I put together keywords and I started to feel like getting cold sweats about like apostrophes and commas and you know, I mean just enough terms because we're trying to get on to universities and college and stuff like that. Get to worry about every instance of every key, every key stroke that people make or what's your recommendation? |
| 50:11 |
Kyle:
Yeah, I would say you know, that, I'm going to turn this off first. |