Google Search Optimization Course

"Crawl" reports

"Crawl" reports let you monitor whether Google can visit your web pages. This is important because if Google can't access your web pages, your content can't be included in Google's search results.

keyword stuffing

Don't add extra keywords or variations of keywords to your pages. Repeating them unnecessarily is called "keyword stuffing" and is against search engines' guidelines.

Next, consider related topics.

EX: are vegetarian diets popular? Do requests for gazpacho recipes come up? This will help make your keywords more specific and a better match to what your customers are looking for.

When expanding a business internationally, which of the following is most important to provide on your website?

Ensuring that international audiences can see your products in their local currency with the correct delivery options is key to providing good customer service.

Text ads

Every time someone searches advertisers compete for the opportunity to display ads. It happens in milliseconds and the searcher won't see the details, only the winners: the ads that appear on the page. Paid search ad results are targeted at people who are already looking for a particular kind of product or service

But even if you don't add multiple languages, there are other considerations for customers in different countries and markets. (Localization)

Start by thinking about what information would be useful to them. Do you need to provide product prices in different currencies? Do they use a different system of measurement—metric versus imperial? For example, would customers weigh your avocados in kilos or pounds? Did you include local addresses and phone numbers so they can contact you? Do you need to list your business hours in different time zones? These are all small things you can do to make sure your website remains useful to potential customers in different countries. They are also signals to help search engines understand your content is relevant to international markets.

What is an Alt Tag?

"alternative text", Known as an "Alt tag," it describes the image, which is useful for people using web browsers that don't display images, or for people with visual impairments who use software to listen to the content of web pages.

Why shouldn't you mix languages on the same page?

when half your content is in French and the other half is in English, search engines can't decide what language your content is in. It's better to use different pages for different languages.

How can you measure engagement?

you can measure engagement by tracking what content your visitors read and interact with, such as leaving comments, or how many visitors become your fans on social media networks.

Which of the following would be an ideal goal for an SEO plan?

Increasing how many relevant people visit your website

Your two best chances to control what other sites are saying about you are... (ie. offsite optimization)

1. Back links 2. Social Media

The three basic tasks of search engines

1. Crawling 2. indexing 3. Ranking

Ways Search Console helps

1. Search Analytics Reports 2. Links to your site reports 3. Mobile Usability Report 4."Crawl" reports 5. "Google Index" reports. you can use the reports to figure out how to improve your presence on Google. Using the reports, you can make changes to help Google better understand your web pages and as a result make your website perform better. Google Search Console can help Seth to figure out if the keywords he's using on his website are helping it appear in the search results for the kinds of searches his customers are making. It can also show him whether appearing in these results is translating into visits to his website from potential customers. Google Search Console can recommend better page titles, but it can't recommend more effective content for Seth to use, or show him the type of people who usually search for businesses like his.

SEO PLAN

1. keyword research 2. consider related topics 3. gaps in your seo performance 4. backlinks 5.Finally, adjust your plan when something isn't working. Is there a web page that's not getting much organic traffic? It may need a refresher. Are you attracting visitors to your site but not making sales? Perhaps you need stronger calls to action. Once you've identified good keywords, take a look at how you're doing in search results for those words. How many of these words and phrases bring up your website on a search engine? Are there specific topics that don't bring much traffic to your site? Let's recap. Start with keyword research to understand what your customers are looking for, then use that info to assess your successes and failures. Brainstorm solutions to improve your weak spots, and prioritize them. And never be afraid to redo your SEO plan based on changes in your world and the world of search engines. First, Eric should do some keyword research and consider related topics. That way he'll know what people are searching for. Next, he should see where he appears in the search results for those keywords. If there are gaps where keywords aren't bringing traffic to his site, Eric should plan ways to fix these gaps and improve SEO performance. the work of SEO is never done, because trends come and go, users can change their behavior, and search engines evolve over time. Your job is to consider how changes will impact your site and what you need to do to continue to attract unpaid (organic) traffic.

SEO guidelines for websites that offer content in multiple languages

1. make sure that each page in a different language has its own unique web page 2. Do not mix languages on the same page 3. Avoid using automated services to translate your conten

what are organic results?

AKA unpaid results When someone searches for something using a search engine, the results page they see contains a list of organic, or unpaid results. Organic results typically appear in the center of the page, and are the results the search engine decides are the best match for the search query, or words, that were typed in. Think of it this way. The search engines' primary goal is to help people find what they are looking for. If you can help the search engine decide that your website is what people are searching for, you're in good shape.

Ways to use mobile to get local customers

1. make sure your site looks good on mobile devices and includes contact information 2.take advantage of some things that only mobile devices tend to have: - many people allow websites and mobile apps to use a GPS function that can detect where they are and direct them to where they want to go -Or, if the bike shop has an app that people install on their smartphones, it could use that GPS functionality to send messages—like sales alerts—when potential customers are within a certain distance of the shop -the app, it could allow customers to schedule appointments for repairs, find answers to common questions or even order accessories. The app could also send reminders of cool events taking place at the shop, like a monthly group ride or free tune-up clinic. -Another common way GPS-enabled devices work with mobile is in local advertising. Paid advertising programs help you target the right customer, at the right time, and now, in the right place. 3. local advertising opportunities can be found in other places too, not just major search engines. Local advertising through social networks, directories, review sites and more can be a really cost-effective way to reach local customers.

How to show search engines know where local is for you

1. make sure your website includes information like your business name, your business address or your service area, if you meet with customers at their location, your phone number and your working hours. 2. Content: It could include descriptions, photos and videos of local bicycle races or popular biking trails in your area. It might include how-to articles about choosing the correct bike frame size with an offer for local customers to visit the shop for help. As you add more local information to your website, and search engines recognize its relevance to local searchers, the chances of appearing in the local results may increase, too. Add location details to your website, Continually add quality content that's relevant to your audience and highlights the location of your business, Check your business listings on search engine and local business directories, and Ensure your site is mobile-friendly and easy for both search engines and visitors to understand.

elements on your page that can tell the search engine about it

1. meta tags/description 2. title 3. headings 4. page copy No matter where search engines look, they'll see consistent and clear information about what's on the page. And that might help improve your search engine rankings.

which parts of a web page help search engines see

1. the title of the page in the code. 2. webpage text 3. webpage images Use descriptive, unique titles for each page on your site. Write for your customers, but remember to include important words and phrases that can help search engines understand what your pages are all about. And don't forget to name image files with descriptive words and include alternative text.

Here are 4 quick tips on how to stay up-to-date on search.

1: Learn how search engines work. Many have blogs that offer updates on new features, algorithm changes and suggestions on how to better optimize your website. 2: Keep an eye on changes and monitor how they affect your website. For instance, you might read that the major search engines made a change that improves users' experience on mobile search results. If your website isn't optimized for mobile devices you'd probably want to update your website to be more mobile-friendly. 3: Find inspiration from other websites. Do they offer free shipping? Are they active on social networks? Do they regularly update their website with photos? Adopt the practices that will work for your own business. 4: Talk to your customers. They have the best insights on what content your site is missing, features that are needed, or products they are looking for. Even the way your customers describe your products can be a form of keyword research—they likely use those same terms to search.

A good meta description is:

A good meta description is usually two short sentences. It should also reinforce the title by using the keyword or phrase again. A good meta description is two short sentences that just summarise the page. EX: A good description would be: "Blake's Produce delivers organic fresh fruit & veg to your home, as often as you need it. Order your customizable box online.

A good title would be:

A good title shows the company name and highlights what the page would be about, like 'Blake's Produce: Fresh Fruit and Vegetables'.

A search engine's most important job is to...

A search engine's most important job is to show people the results they are looking for, and this extends to the ads. The ads you see complement the search results page, with the ultimate goal of helping a searcher find what they're looking for.

When it comes to search ads, what could dictate how an ad will perform against a competitor?

Bid value, together with quality score, is one of the components that will dictate your ad's position in the search results page. By increasing your bid on specific keywords you're more likely to outrank your competitor's ads.

how search engines understand what's on a web page

But when a search engine looks at the same page, in addition to seeing what you see on your screen, it also sees the code behind it, called HTML. Specific parts of this code help the search engine understand what the web page is all about.

Three Business Goals

Conversions: Turning website visitors into paying customers. Engagement: Persuading people to interact with the content on your site. Acquisition: Getting new customers.

Beyond language and localization, you can help search engines understand the country (or countries!) you are targeting.

For instance, if your website has a country code top level domain name—ccTLD for short—it's a strong indication that your site targets a specific country. An example of a U.K. site with a ccTLD would be www.avocadofarm.co.uk. For Germany, that site might be www.avocadofarm.de. Search engines may use a number of factors including where your website is hosted, its IP address, and information on your web pages. You can still help your site and its content be more visible to international prospects by using country targeting tools such as those found in Google Search Console.

What is an important factor in the paid search auction system?

How relevant your ads are

Choosing Keywords

Ideally, you'll match your website content to what people are actually looking for. If you don't, there could be a disconnect: visitors to your site could be looking for one thing while you are talking about another. There are three things you should consider when choosing the keywords for your SEO plan. 1. Frequency 2. Competition 3. Relevance Through all your SEO efforts, remember the golden rule: Your site's content should be made for your human visitors, not for search engines.

Competition

If you have a large, established website, you may be able to appear on the search engine results for high-volume, highly competitive keywords, like fruit and veg. But new sites have big opportunities too: if you're just getting started, look for keywords that have a bit less competition. Only a small number of keywords have very high search volume. But there's a large number that have low search volume. This is what's called the "long tail" of SEO.

What are language annotations

If you've taken the time to translate content, some search engines allow you to add language annotations to your web pages. These annotations help search engines serve the right content to the right person based on his or her country or language. To help search engines discover this alternate content, in this case you'd be able to add an annotation to each English and German page. These tags will mark your pages so search engines can serve up the right version of your content to viewers in their respective countries.

International SEO

If your potential customers are in different countries or speak multiple languages, there are many aspects to consider. We'll go over the most important ones: 1. language 2. localization 3. country targeting.

Using Social Media

It promotes your site—and your business—because it helps people discover your content and encourages them to interact with you.

What should be the first step of a structured SEO plan?

Keyword research. This will enable the website to rank for relevant search terms. To help deliver the best possible search results to the user, search engines look at how popular a site is and then build a domain authority based upon relevant links to and from that site. This demonstrates the site's trust and popularity.

Why is being a first result not guaranteed success?

Let's say your farm website is the first result when someone searches "vegetable gardens." You're getting a lot of visitors to your site—but not an increase in sales. Maybe that's because people searching for "vegetable gardens" want to plant a garden, not buy your fruits and veg. The lesson? Don't waste effort on keywords that aren't relevant to what you do.

Fill in the blank: Short strings of specific keywords with low search volume are called ___________.

Long-tail keywords Increasing relevant traffic to your website would make an ideal goal for a SEO plan. The more relevant the users are that visit your site, the more chances you have to convert them into potential customers.

What is SEO?

Making improvements to your website to help it appear in the organic results is called search engine optimization, or SEO. Good SEO involves helping a search engine find and understand your site.

What is CMS?

Many websites can be edited using tools that handle all the HTML coding for you - that's called a content management system, or CMS.

how does good website content affects the organic search results?

So how can you improve your website's chances of appearing in the unpaid results? It all comes down to quality. So what do search engines like? Good, relevant content.

Local advertising

On search engines, you can bid to show your ad when people type in certain search terms, and all of the major search engines allow you to limit your ads showing to only people in certain locations and geographies. For example, if you were bidding on a keyword like "bicycle repair," you could set up your campaign to only bid if the person that typed it in was within, say, 10 miles of your bicycle shop. Esmeralda can target local customers in a number of different ways. She can set up her ad campaigns to only bid if the customer doing the search is within 10 miles of her shop. She can also set it to only bid during the hours that she's open. With local ads, Esmeralda can tailor her messages to people who are close to her shop. These are all ways that she can make her searches more specific to locals.

Which factor should you consider when optimizing your website for search engines?

Site popularity

Results pages will also display ...

Results pages will also display advertisements, or paid results, though they'll be separate and labeled as ads. Although organic results and ads appear on the same page, there's one big difference: there's no cost to appear in the organic results. Websites do not—and cannot—pay to appear here. So how can you improve your website's chances of appearing in the unpaid results?

What is SEM?

Search Engine Marketing

Why avoid automated translations?

Search engines don't value content generated from automated translation tools. Even worse, the page might be considered spam. Translation service may cost you a bit more upfront, but you'll likely have higher quality content that can drive better results for your business.

"Google Index" reports.

The "Google Index" reports show what information Google recorded about your site and tells you if your pages are accessible.

The best way to support off-site optimization

The best way to support off-site optimization is by creating good content that establishes your site as a quality resource, attracting visitors who then share it across social media.

How do you get links to your site?

The key is to think quality, not quantity. Links to your site are great, as long as they are legitimate links from good websites. So how can you get more of these good links? The best way is to create great content on your own site. Then, others may link to you because they think their audience should see your content. You can also encourage others to write about you, and share links to your website. In the SEO industry, this is called content marketing.

Relevance

The keywords you select should closely match what you actually offer. Make sure your chosen keywords match the intent of the people who are searching.

Long-tail Keywords

The long tail of SEO means longer keyword phrases that are very specific to whatever you're selling. These have a low search volume, which means there's less competition, so it's more likely to be relevant to a user's queries. For a small business, the long tail is often where you will find your SEO opportunities. It typically takes a website lots of time and focused efforts to appear in the results on searches for popular generic keywords. However, smaller websites may get good rankings for long tail keywords with less effort.

Frequency

The number of times a word is searched for. Obviously, you want to include the terms that people search for most often in relation to your products. Just keep in mind that it may be difficult to differentiate your business on highly searched-for terms.

So, how do search engines decide who wins the ad space?

The primary components are the bid and the quality. The bid is the maximum amount an advertiser is willing to pay for a click on an ad. If someone clicks the ad, the advertiser is charged an amount equal to—or sometimes less than—the bid. If an ad shows on the page but no one clicks, it doesn't cost the advertiser anything at all. Ideally, bids correspond to the value of the keywords to the business but the amount is up to each advertiser. Winning the auction doesn't always hinge on having the highest bid. Search engines reward ads and keywords with strong relevance to the search.

Spending money on search advertising influences how your website appears in ___________.

The search results page

Title and Meta Description

The title and meta description are important because they both are used by the search engine to generate the actual search result for the specific page. The title is used to generate the first line shown; the meta description is used to generate the few short sentences that follow. A title should be short and sweet; a description should match what the page is about. EX: For a page about fruits and vegetables, you'll want to make sure that the phrase "fruits and vegetables" is in both the title and meta description.

How does webpage text help the search engine

Think about who you want to visit your page, and what words they're using to describe your products and services. EX: Do they talk about fair trade coffee? Do they use the term cappuccino instead of macchiato? These are probably the terms they're also using to search. Try to speak the language of your customers when you write your content. Because this can help ensure they'll find your pages when they search.

Ranking

Third, search engines decide which content is most useful to the searchers. If lots of sites use the same content then it will be hard for any one of them to stand out in the search list. How search engines rank sites is their 'special sauce' - the details of exactly how this works is a closely guarded secret.

"Search Analytics" reports.

This can help you answer a few important questions like which searches bring people to your site. Or tell you when searchers click on your links. They can even let you know which other sites link to yours. Search Analytics" report shows lots of things, including the most common searches bringing people to your site. Ideally you'd see words and phrases relevant to your business. If you review the report and see unrelated or irrelevant words and phrases, it's a hint that the text on your website needs some attention. Another thing to look for is the number of clicks. You'll want to know how often your site appears but gets no clicks—that's a sign your content doesn't match what people are looking for.

Mobile Usability Report

This will point out pages on your site that don't work well on mobile phones, which you can then fix to improve your website performance when people search on mobile.

So what's good content?

To create good content, you have to understand who your potential customers are, what they are looking for, and how you can provide it.

Why is it important to make sure each webpage in a different language has its own webpage rather than having a translate button?

Web design technology makes it possible to have English language content on a web page—say www.example.com/avocado.html—but allow visitors to click a button to view the same page written in French. Sounds great, right? The problem is that humans can click that button, but search engines can't. A better approach is to separate each translated version on its own web page. In this example, it would be much better to place the French version on its own page, with a separate URL: www.example.com/avocat.html

Google Search Console

Well, it's a service that gives you feedback about how your website is doing in Google search results. It has two primary functions. 1. It monitors your performance in Google Search results. 2. And it also shows you how Google "sees" your site.

Identifying your SEO goals

What are you trying to achieve online? How do you define success?

How does the page title help make your site visible to search engines?

You can help the search engine index your page properly by making sure your page title accurately describes its content. That way it can show up in relevant searches

How can you measure acquisition?

You can measure acquisition and reach by tracking the number of times your business appears in search results—your "impressions"—and how often people click through to visit your site.

How can you measure conversions?

You can measure conversions by tracking the number of visitors who come to your website to buy something or tracking a smaller action that can lead to a sale, like signing up for your email newsletter.

headings and page copy

You should also consider what's on the page itself—what people who visit your site - not just search engines - actually see. There are two things you can optimize here to help search engines categorize your content correctly: headings and page copy

Keyword Research

Your first step should be keyword research—that means finding out what your potential customers are searching for. discovering what words or phrases people are looking for when they are searching for products and services related to your business. EX: Are they looking for organic produce? Weekly fresh vegetable deliveries?

Your search engine optimization, or SEO results are influenced by what?

Your search engine optimization, or SEO results are influenced by things you do on your site and things that happen off your site. The latter involves what other sites are saying about yours.

What is the index?

a gigantic list of all the webpages and content found by the bots.

Backlinks

a link from another website to your site. Think of links like votes—if you have a lot of links to your site, it means many different people on the web believe your site has good content. It's a vote of confidence. Search engines might see these links as a sign that you have a high-quality site, and are perhaps a good option to show searchers.

On-page optimization

changes you can make on your website's individual pages can quickly help search engines better understand your content.

Crawling

first search engines examine the content they learn about and have permission to see Search engines crawl the internet to discover content, like webpages, images, and videos via crawlers, spiders, or bots

Headings

headings are embedded in the HTML code of your page, but they're also visible to people. Often, they're displayed at the top of a page. EX: A great heading would be "fresh fruits and vegetables," which clearly tells a person what the page is about but works well for the search engines, too.

Links to your site report

hows websites that link to your site. Think of these as "referrals."

Page Copy

if you're writing a piece of content about fresh fruits and vegetables, you'll naturally want to use that phrase in the copy. Don't go overboard and repeat the phrase over and over because search engines may see that as spam. Remember that you're writing primarily for people, so be sure your message is clear.

If you review the SA report and see unrelated or irrelevant words and phrases...

it's a hint that the text on your website needs some attention.

When you set SEO goals you can...

measure, track and report on the results. You'll know which efforts are succeeding—and which aren't. And then you can adjust things to make it work better. Setting SEO goals gives you something to measure to help you better understand how your site is—or isn't—performing.

Indexing

second search engines categorize each piece of content they The search engine uses this index as a source of information displayed on the search result pages, but not everything the bot finds makes it onto the search engine's index. Search engines might find multiple copies of the exact same piece of content located on different websites. The search engine has to decide which version of the same content to keep in the index. Pages make it into "the index" only after the search engine has determined what they're about. That way, it can file them in exactly the right place amongst the other pages, and find them the next time a search relates to their content.

What do crawlers, spiders, or bots do?

the bots hop from page to page by following links to other pages The bots never stop, their sole purpose is to visit and revisit pages looking for new links and new content to include in the index

How do the search engines see images?

the code behind the image. So give your images descriptive names (like describe exactly what is in the picture)

What can help a search engine understand what your page is about?

the title tag