SEO is Not Magic - International Food Blogger Conference 2014 - Seattle Washington

Editor's Notes

1. Add image From Moz Product Strategist Been doing SEO for 10+ years I’m here to tell you you can do this (difference between a novice and an expert?) I have a lot of actionable content here. Here’s a link to the presentation.
2. We all know what it is
3. In a non-shocking development, I have concluded that people not only love food but, love to talk about, read about and share about FOOD That’s the demand-side, now let’s look at the supply-side
4. “I would rather spend $300 per month and just not have to worry about it”
5. End up hiring these guys
6. Who end up making promises they can’t keep
7. Your money ends up going here
8. Or worse, your site ends up going here. Jack’s story.
9. I am here today to tell you…It’s not that hard, you can do this. It just takes some hard work and patience.
10. Sure, Google is a black box. There is a lot that happens in this black box that decides to rank one web page over the other. No one knows exactly how they do it and they never will. As someone who publishes high quality content on the web you don’t need to know. You need ot follow a few best practices, create really good unique content and the rest will fall into place.
11. I am here today to tell you…It’s not that hard, you can do this. It just takes some hard work and patience.
12. And if you need something to make it go down easier, that’s fine too.
13. Redo John Wiley, Lead Designer for Google Search http://www.bloomberg.com/video/behind-google-s-obsession-with-perfecting-search-c6KcoGikT0m2KFqHuzYGoA.html Great opportunity, but no keyword data 
14. Driving search traffic isn’t about optimizing around 2 or 3 really big juicy, high volume keywords (like travel)… Nearly 70% of all searches are only search upon by less than 10 people. Don’t Sweat the BIG STUFF!
15. #1 is Audience. Audience is all about building relationships and targeting: empathize with your audience to understand what content they are looking for. Then build that content, measure, adjust, optimize and create more. <according … to 1.5 million people per day talking about wine…there is an audience…find your niche> Content = the currency of SEO 1) information that you produce (the higher the quality, the usefulness and uniqueness the better search returns) 2) onpage elements, META elements that are in your control to tell the search engines what your content is about
16. Matt Cutts – has been with Google from the beginning of time, and is the head of the Webspam team. His team is responsible for ensuring quality of results, and he has become the defacto liason between search marketers and Google. He is mostly feared and search marketers typically hang to his every word. So in my opinion when he gives advice on technical SEO, we should listen. (although sometimes I think he sends us scrambling in the wrong direction…on purpose) Wow! Ok, I’m on Wordpress my job is done here…well not necessarily, WP helps with the mechanics (site structure, sitemaps, avoiding duplicate content, etc), your job lies in determining what to write about (making sure there is a market), narrowing your keyword targeting and crafting headlines and titles. In otherwords, there’s still a lot of work to be done.
17. Plugin allows you to edit several on-page SEO elements – Title, Description, keywords, etc, and will give you some inline recommendations.
18. What is on-page SEO. Simply put: it is the optimization of elements that are on your page. The good news is that YOU are in control. While they don’t carry as much ranking weight as external signals, like links that point to your page, they are important for couple of reasons:1) Google can match the relevance of your page with the searches intent 2) improves click through rate within the SERP 3) provides Google with context around non-text based content: videos, images, etc. This simple diagram shows hierarchy of what is most important, let me show you a few examples.
19. Here is what it looks like in your code. What is wrong with this H1/Heading tag?
20. The difference between Search and News So, why is this important. CTR. This is your one chance to tell the user why they should click your link instead of your competitors.
21. Where does the Headline <h1> live on this page? Where does the Title </title> show on this page? Where does the META description show?
22. Be honest with yourself. Make data-informed decisions. The good news is that there are many free tools out there. The challenge is having the discipline to do the proper level of analysis on the data before making decisions.
23. Critical – This is how Google sees your site. If they have issues, they will tell you (most of the time); crawl errors, penalties, crawl budget (how much are they crawling)
24. Critical – Google Analytics. Very rich data, but only as powerful as you make it. Take some time to learn how to use it. Google provides free training videos at the Google Analytics academy https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/explorer
25. Nice to have, but not critical. Track your subscribers and clicks to your RSS feeds
26. Nice to have, but not critical. Provides you a way
27. Optional, is not free, but for those looking to actively pursue an SEO campaign on your own it could be a good tool
28. If you have 3 minutes to perform keyword research, you must do this Deciding what to write about or narrowing in on a topic Choosing one key phrase over another
29. Deciding what to write about or narrowing in on a topic Choosing one key phrase over another
30. Deciding what to write about or narrowing in on a topic Choosing one key phrase over another
31. Deciding what to write about or narrowing in on a topic Choosing one key phrase over another
32. Deciding what to write about or narrowing in on a topic Choosing one key phrase over another
33. Deciding what to write about or narrowing in on a topic Choosing one key phrase over another
34. Deciding what to write about or narrowing in on a topic Choosing one key phrase over another
35. Amazingly simple and amazingly powerful Have only a few minutes, just don’t hit enter
36. When considering a keyword target there are 3 critical factors to consider: 1) People care 2) You care, and it relates to the context to your site 3) You can compete
37. Let’s not forget to take another very important factor of deciding what keywords to use into account…competition
38. Now you just need to figure out your angle and build a relationship
39. In the meantime, WMT is the only place that you can even get a sniff of your keywords…another reason to have GWT. Only 90 days of data Can’t dig deeper on what the clicks did when they got to your site Only 15,000 keywords Does show trending and average ranking, which is nice and hard to get
40. Remember what Google results looked like 10 years ago? It was just simply 10 blue links. There are now over 25 different search verticals. Each with their own logic and algorithms for ranking and display. It’s not just about writing a good piece of content and hoping it ranks. Google now gives you the opportunity to optimize within your rankings, by providing you tools like structure data markup like I just showed you. Here another example of something you should be taking advantage of immediately.
41. Rich snippets – the extra text and information that you see around the search results. It helps Google understand what your content is about and provides them It’s easy to implement; and is just a new set of tags in your HTML code http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/05/getting-started-with-structured-data.html
42. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/05/getting-started-with-structured-data.html Here are some examples of what you markup
43. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/05/getting-started-with-structured-data.html Rich snippets – what are they, why are they important, now easy to implement.
44. If I told you you could spend 5-minutes and own this much more real estate, would you? It’s practically free land, you just have to stake your claim to it.
45. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/05/getting-started-with-structured-data.html Rich snippets – what are they, why are they important, now easy to implement. Mark-up helper
46. Most people get discouraged after a while
47. Those who stick with it can be rewarded
48. Those who stick with it can be rewarded
49. Finally, SEO is NOT magic, but sometimes it feels like this. Just continue to create awesome content that is relevant and STICK with it.