Created for Rochester WordPress User Group SEO Workshop. A Background into SEO best practices including research, audience data link building and social media. Learn how to make SEO work for you and drive traffic to your website.

1. MAKE SEO WORK FOR YOU
Jeseph Meyers
http://qcm.so/RocWPseo

2. @jesephm
WHO IS
JESEPH
MEYERS?
• Studied Marketing at UB 2004-
’08
• Started doing freelance web
design in 2006
• Founded Queen City Media in
2011
• Loves digital marketing, Buffalo
and beer

3. keywords
SERPs
Google
alt tags
$$$$ competition
SO, WHAT IS SEO?
#1 rank
backlinks
payday loans and viagara
content
SEO is constantly changing. What used to be a race to rank in google
has shifted to a more holistic approach to optimization and marketing.

4. GOOGLE’S RANKING
FACTORS
There are countless ranking factors in Google’s algorithm. This algorithm is
ever changing and exhausting to keep up with. Our job is to create timeless
optimization.

5. “As a general rule of thumb. If a process can be
automated, it’s probably not a safe approach.”
–Johnny Appleseed
This is not to say that there isn’t room for automation in your workflow.
Use common sense; if it feels spammy… it’s probably spammy.

6. WHERE DO I BEGIN?
Before you do anything you need to set goals. These goals will drive the
research in any successful SEO campaign.

7. WHAT IS YOUR GOAL?
• Awareness/Exposure
• Lead Generation
• Sales!!
What are you really trying to accomplish? Vanity rankings aren’t
important so what do you intend to do with your traffic?

8. RESEARCH PHASE
• Do you know who your audience is?
• Do you know who your competitors are?
• What do you want to rank for?
The days of picking an industry keyword and spending all of your
resources to rank for that keyword are over. It’s time to dig deep and
learn about your business.

9. BECOME
YOUR
AUDIENCE
Follow your audience around the web, find forums and discussion groups
around your topic. What are they asking? What can you answer?

10. KEYWORD DISCOVERY

11. SOME FREE TOOLS
There are countless tools that can give you great insight into keywords,
key phrases and content topics to help formulate optimized content.

13. Google’s auto-suggest feature gives us insight into popular searches.
This is an excellent way to find long tail keywords.

14. Scroll to the bottom of search results to find related searches. This gives
great context into the way related searches are formed - content ideas?

16. Gather insights from Google Analytics to discover what is working and
identify elements of your website that can perform better. Find the wins!

17. AUDIENCE

18. Did you know that after enabled demographics tracking you can get real,
actionable insights about your audience? Respect dialect.

19. Not only will Google Analytics tell us who is visiting our website but we
can learn what they are interested in. We need to leverage that
information.

20. CATER TO AN AUDIENCE
• Lessons That Hollywood Can Teach Us
about SEO
• 10 of the Worst SEO Mentions on TV
• How the Hunger Games Dominated Google
SERPs
Once you have learned some of the nuances of your audience, you can
cater your content to their language

21. ACQUISITION

22. @jesephm
How much of our traffic is coming from organic search? Of the backlinks
that we have, how much is actually sending traffic?

23. (NOT PROVIDED)
The evil Google machine stole our keyword data. But not all of it, use
legacy data and hold on to the last referral data that remains.

24. BEHAVIOR

25. Enable site search to find out what users are searching for once they find
your site. Use this information in your content strategy

26. PUT ‘EM IN A
SPREADSHEET FOR LATER

27. ON-SITE SEO
• Technical site health
• Content strategy
• Internal site links
Our goal when creating a new page or editing existing content is to show
up, attract and engage. Every step is focused on the wants/needs of our
visitors.

28. Use Portent’s SERP Preview tool to help optimize Title Tag, Meta
Description and URL for SERP visibility. http://www.portent.com/serp-preview-
tool

29. Mobile is here, and it’s growing. Don’t think about it as optimizing for
devices, think about optimizing for the fastest growing user base on the
web

30. Page speed is important for providing a good user experience and
Google wants to rank sites that provide a good user experience.

31. @jesephm
WORDPRES
S SEO BY
YOAST
Your new best friend.

32. LINK BUILDING
Link building is one of the most abused subsets of SEO strategy. With
that being said, natural link building is still one of the most important
factors.

33. Don’t waste time looking for miracle strategies. Link building is about
building strong, relevant relationships over time

34. LINK BUILDING - PART 1
1. Keep a list of savvy SEO websites and cast
studies
2. Target websites that review products
3. Find organizations and provide a discount
4. Focus on relevance

35. BACK LINKS - PART 2
5. Forums (I’m not suggesting spam)
6. User driven content (reddit, Digg, etc.)
7. Resource pages
8. Press Mentions - HARO

36. GUEST
POSTING
IS ALIVE
AND WELL
Guest posting isn’t dead. Bad guest posting is dead. Remember,
strategies are built with long term success in mind.

37. GOOD CONTENT!!!!

38. SOCIAL MEDIA
A RANKING FACTOR?

39. “So because we're sampling an
imperfect web, we have to
worry a lot about identity [and]
identity is already hard.”
- Matt Cutts
Simply put, it’s too hard to give provide direct ranking influence from
social signals. It’s a system that has too much data and is easily gamed.

40. “Social sows the seeds of solid
SEO”
I had to steal this slide from my friend Brett Snyder, it’s the perfect quote
to represent the relationship between social and SEO.

41. USE SOCIAL TO DRIVE
SEO
Looking for opportunities to guest blog? Or some amateur press
coverage, use highly targeted Facebook ads to reach your audience

42. FIND YOUR AUDIENCE
Use a site like knowem.com to find niche social networks and online
communities. Join the conversation!

43. GO OUT AND RANK!
• You’ve got a website already, leverage your
content
• You have insight into what worked in the past
• You know what your audience is looking for?
By looking into the past organic traffic you can identify areas for
improvement. You may also find opportunities to repurpose past content.
Who are you writing for?

44. I’M WATCHING YOU

45. ANY
QUESTIONS?
Twitter: @jesephm
email: jeseph@qcmny.com
web: qcmny.com