What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is the process of making improvement on and off your website
in order to gain more exposure in search engine results.

Exposure in search engine results will leads to finding more visitors finding you for the right
reasons.

Search engine quickly deliver relevant and authoritative results based on any phrase that
user might be searching for.

Link – Vote on internet

A webpage linking to your website is almost like saying, hey, I trust your content
enough that I'm willing to reference your page and possibly even send my traffic to your
site. It's a vote of trust, and the search engines pick up on this as they scour the web,
reading, evaluating, and storing all the data they can find on all the pages of the internet.

a search engine is more likely to trust a link if it comes from a well-respected or industry-
related site, like an industry-leading blog or a non-profit or a government agency involved in
your field of work.

Reading Search Engine result pages (SERPs)

Paid Listing

A typical search engine results page will have 10 organic results that link out to different
web pages, sometimes referred to as the 10 blue links. Each result might look a little
different, but they'll all have at least a headline, a description, and a visible URL.

Search engines have done a really good job of keeping pace, and while we still view web
page results, they also return things like videos, images, news, products, and maps. All of
these can appear on a search engine results page. A common way of describing this would
be that we now have blended search results, that include all kinds of different
content. Sometimes the blended results will have a group of video clips that match a user's
search query. Or it might show a list of local businesses, accompanied by a map. It could be
a group of images and prices for a particular product that you can buy. Social results will
often feature prominently when you search for a company. And if that company has made
the news, chances are there will be a block of recent news items too. 

Take the time you need

  Develop your strategy
 Research Keywords
 Create Valuable Content
 Attract relevant links & Authority signals
 Resolve technical issues

Keywords – search terms that people enter into search engines

Let's take an example, say you sell cars, you might think that the keyword car is something
that you want to rank for. But after you've done a little keyword research, you'll probably
find that it won't make your list. Why, well even though that word gets typed into search
engines with a very high frequency, think about its relevance, how many reasons could
somebody type the word car into a search engine. They might be looking for toys, a place
for repairs, a car wash, car parts, a rental car, any one of hundreds of things that have
nothing to do with actually buying a car. And think of all those people out there that are also
trying to rank for the word car in the search engines. This is an extremely competitive
term, a phrase like buy new blue Toyota Camry might not get typed in as much, but if that's
what you're selling, it's extremely relevant and much less competitive.

How to research keywords?

1. Brainstorming & answering basic questions.

 What products & services do you offer?

 Be as comprehensive as possible and list out as many keywords and phrases as you can. But
make sure that you do it from the customers perspective. As people who work in our
businesses day in and day out, we might have a very different way of explaining our
products and services. Take for example, a discount travel website, you might be tempted to
write down keywords like high-value air transport or fare class eligible discount ticket. But at
the end of the day, none of your perspective customers are typing that into a search
engine. While those things makes sense to you, your customers are looking for cheap
flights. It all comes back to intent, understanding the intent of your customer base is critical
in developing a good seed list of keywords. While brainstorming can get you started, there
are some great tools that can find and suggest similar keywords and expand your list of
possibilities considerably. To seed your keyword list, Google Search Console offers insights
into exactly how people are finding your site today. And it's a great place to start. Once you
have a solid seed list of keywords, you'll need to expand on it. Two favourite keyword
expansion tools in the SEO industry are Google Trends and AnswerThePublic. Both offers
suggestions around new target phrases based on your chosen keyword and both help you
understand exactly how people are searching for things on the live web. Once you've got
that list of potential keywords, the next thing you'll need to do is take a look at search
volume metrics to see what kind of demand there is for those phrases.

2. Search Volume
  Long-tail Keywords – Descriptive keywords used in less common variations
3. Keyword Categorisation – A process used to group keywords into themes or topics

Keyword Research Tools

- Moz Keyword explorer tool
- Google Trends

Keyword Attributes

While choosing Keywords consider 3 things:

 Relevance
 Search Volume
 Competition – Keyword competition and difficulty

Relevance – Nature of product or services you offer

Understanding keyword attributes

- There's a lot of data available to us about the keywords people are typing into search
engines. And it's important to be able to evaluate the different attributes of a
keyword before we decide whether or not to target one with our SEO strategy. There are
three key things you'll need to consider when choosing your keywords. Relevance, search
volume, and competition. Let's start with relevance. The first thing you need to do when
you're deciding whether a keyword is relevant to your business is ask yourself one simple
question. Does the keyword you found accurately reflect the nature of the products and
services that you offer? If so, you've nailed it. Remember, the number one objective of a
search engine is to find and deliver the most relevant content to its users for a given search
term. The best way to understand your customers' search behavior is to put yourself in their
shoes and really try to get at their intent. If you were in the market to buy a car, how would
you use a search engine? You probably wouldn't type the word car in and click
search. Instead, you'd use something very specific to what you're looking for. Like, used late
model Toyota Camry. Now, if you're selling late model used Toyota Camrys and have a page
on your website dedicated to them, then that is a relevant keyword. And the best part
about relevant keywords is that they're much more likely to drive conversion actions on
your website than more generic ones. The second item to look at is search volume. While
used late model Toyota Camry might be extremely relevant to your business and likely to
lead to an eventual sale, it's also not typed in to a search engine all that often. Search
volume is the number of searches being done for a particular keyword. And if you use a tool
like the Moz Keyword Explorer, WordStream, Ahrefs Keywords Explorer or SEMRush
Keyword Magic, it's represented as the potential monthly search volume. If you have a
seasonal business or if you want to take a look at trends over time, many of these
tools break down keywords volume seasonally, and you'll also want to take a look at Google
Trends, where you can look at time periods, going all the way back to 2004. Now let's have a
look at competition. Keyword competition, or keyword difficulty, as it's often called, is just a
measure of how difficult it's going to be for us to rank a keyword in front of our competition
on a search engine results page. Unless you're introducing a brand new product or
technology into the market, you're probably going to find content similar to yours already
on the web. And we can look at things like the number of pages about a given topic,
authority and trust of the websites competing with you, back links to their sites and more to
really understand the competitive space for a given keyword. And again, many of the great
tools mentioned earlier can help you really dig into some of these competitive metrics. For
now, let's take a look at the Moz tool to dive in a little deeper. Here's a keyword list I've
created around iPhone cases. This tool makes it easy for us to see where we can get the
most bang for our buck by looking for the most potential traffic at the lowest levels of
competition. And if we want to get a feel for the specific competitors you might be up
against, we can drill deeper into the SERP analysis report. This kind of analysis can give us a
gut check and a realistic look at just what it would take for us to rank for a keyword we're
researching. Another way to look at competition is by evaluating the keyword in page
search or cost per click markets. Looking at how actively and aggressively search advertisers
are bidding on a keyword can be a good proxy for just how difficult a keyword is going to be
on the organic side. And if you have an active Google Ads account, the Google keyword
planner has a competition column, as well as bid information, that can help. While the
competition metric gives you only low, medium, or high ratings, you can also look at the
high and low bid ranges to get a sense of how competitive keywords are in the page search
market. And don't forget, you can customize and filter right here in the interface. And you
can also download these lists to work with in a tool like Excel. Let's tie it all together by
going back over this quick example with respect to the three pillars of keyword
research. Relevance, volume, and competition. We saw how terms like used late model
Toyota Camry would actually be considered much more relevant to a company selling used
late model Toyota Camrys than a generic word, like car. And on the competition side, we
saw just how competitive those generic terms like car can be. We can also clearly see the
trade off between search volume against relevance and competition. And hopefully you're
now seeing that for many organizations, finding lots and lots of these specific types of
keywords that don't get a lot of search volume, but are very relevant and not
as competitive, can be a solid strategy to guide their SEO efforts. Often, if you add up all
those relevant, less competitive keywords together, you'll find that you can be attracting
lots and lots of highly relevant, likely to convert visitors, to your website. So let your
competitors spend all their budgets going after the keyword car, and let your keyword
research be your guide as you balance how to get as much relevant search volume as you
possibly can with the least competition.

Understanding keyword distribution

- [Narrator] Keyword distribution is the process of assigning keywords to specific pages on
your website. This is an important step in the content creation process and results in the
content on the page being aligned and relevant to the keyword you're targeting on that
page. Remember, you can't have an optimized page unless you know what keyword you're
optimizing it for. Once you've identified all your target keywords through that keyword
research process working in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, or another
spreadsheet program allows you to create this mapping of keywords to the pages in your
site structure in an organized way, and it has the added benefit of keeping a record of which
pages are targeting which keywords to refer back to in the future. Of course, you'll be listing
out all the current pages of your website, but keep in mind that for many of your target
keywords; you won't yet have a page and you'll probably need to create one. By using a
spreadsheet, you can easily see where in your sites architecture you'll want to put it and you
can define some key pieces of information about it, before you even start writing. Here's an
example of a spreadsheet that we've created for a fictitious sample winery. Feel free to
format your spreadsheet any way you like, but there are some common fields that you
should include. Down the left hand side, we like to use cells or tabbing to show us the
hierarchy of the various sections and pages of our site. As you can see, for each page we
have a column for the keyword we'll be targeting with this page, the URL of the page, the
title tag meta-description, and h1 header. We've even used a formula function to count our
characters so that we can see how close we are to our general targets. Again, our targets of
65 characters for a title and 156 characters for a description, are not hard limits by any
means, but they're guidelines that will minimize search engines truncating this information
on the search engine results page. The first step is to populate this spreadsheet with your
existing webpages including the title tags, meta-descriptions and h1's or first headers from
the page. Be sure to include every page of your site including your Home page, your About
page your Location page, Contact page, and other general kinds of content. Remember,
search engines want to see unique information for each and every page and listing them all
out here is a good way to quickly spot and correct duplications. The second step is to take a
look at the keywords from your keyword list and find the most appropriate pages of your
site for each of the keywords. You should make sure to distribute one keyword per page and
try not to force anything. Remember, search engines prefer unique and relevant content, so
if you have a keyword that doesn't match any page of your site; you'll probably want to
create a new one. When you add a new page to your spreadsheet the good news is that
you've got a blank canvas; you can define the SEO friendly URL, title , description, and
header right here in the spreadsheet; that will define this new page of content. Writing
content when you know the keyword you're optimizing it for up-front; allows you to really
dial in on all of the best practices of content writing for keywords that we'll be covering later
on. Remember, the meat of each page is the body copy , and you'll probably need to go
back through your existing pages to make sure that they're really optimized for the
keyword you've defined as a target, and now that you've got your target keyword in mind,
it's a pretty good time to head over to one of the on-page analysis tools that we'll talk about
in the course as well. The suggestions from these tools can really help guide the changes
that you'll be making on your pages. Using a keyword distribution spreadsheet will help you
in a number of different ways. First, it gives you one place to organize and document the
content of your site that will support the keywords you're targeting. Second, it serves as an
excellent resource your copywriters and will help streamline workflows across the different
members of your website production team ,and treating this as a living document will
ensure that you can quickly adapt to the changing nature of the search landscape and keep
your content strategy on track month after month, and year after year.

Understanding content optimization

- Content optimization is the process of improving the quality and relevancy of your site's
content. We'll discuss a number of things about how both users and search
engines interpret what makes good content. But first let's go through a few examples of
how you and I as human beings might read a piece of content and figure out what it's
about. Let's take a look at the example of Backpacking in California. Let's pretend that
someone gave us a one-page document, and they told us that the document was about
backpacking in California. We read some text describing some landmarks along the West
Coast of the United States. We might see some pictures of oceans and beaches, and we
might read about parking regulations along the sides of highways. Now, this might be about
backpacking in California, but by reading this document it's not very clear. You put the page
down and you're probably disappointed. Even if the exact phrase, backpacking in
California, was used in the text here and there, the narrative was all over the place, and
there's really no central theme to focus on. Both people and search engines expect
clarity and quality from your web pages. They want to know without any hesitation what
your content is all about. And even more importantly, they want that content that they can
trust. If I ask you to find me a resource on backpacking in California and you come back with
a piece of paper with a few mentions of the term and text about some loosely related
landmarks and things about the state of California, I'm not going to ask you next time. Or if I
do, I'm not going to trust you with quite as much. On the other hand, if you give me
content that's truly remarkable, discussing how to backpack through all of those California
landmarks with maps and hiking guides, trail recommendations, descriptions of California
flora and fauna that you might see while backpacking, and reviews of California backpacking
trips from other hikers, I'm going to come back to you with more questions in the
future. And I'm going to trust your answers. In the online world, when people find content
that they like, they tend to share it. Search engines can see a lot of this sharing, and they
view it as a sign of trust that will reward you with more search engine visibility. So when we
think about content optimization, keep in mind that we're optimizing our content so that it
benefits both users and search engines. And the two key concepts to focus on are tight,
relevant themes and building trust.

Optimizing site structure

- As you focus on more and more keywords and themes, you'll be developing more content
on your website and you'll start to have a lot of pages to hold this content. It's going to be
important to structure all of these pages in a meaningful way, because in order for search
engines to return your pages to searchers in response to relevant search queries, they need
to understand how your pages relate to one another. Let's imagine that you're visiting a
bookstore for the first time. You're looking for a fiction book written by an author whose
name starts with the letter J. Since it's your first visit, you don't know where anything is and
you're going to have to learn the layout of this new bookstore. Fortunately, the bookstore
has some really good navigation to help you out. You look at the store directory to
find where the fiction section is located. Once you reach the fiction section, you can identify
the specific shelf that has fiction books written by authors whose name start with J. You
then look at that shelf and you find the specific book that you were looking for. Now,
imagine you keep going through this process to learn the entire layout of the
bookstore. You'll figure out all the different sections and shelves, categories and
authors, and eventually you'll end up knowing about all of the individual books. This is
exactly what a search engine does. It crawls and navigates an entire website to learn what's
there, how it's organized, where exactly all of the content can be found, and what it's all
about. Now, imagine that instead of simply visiting the bookstore, you now work at the
bookstore. You've learned everything about how this store is laid out and where specific
books are. If a customer walks in the door and says, hey, I'm looking for a fiction book
written by an author whose name I can't quite remember, but it starts with a J, you'll be
able to immediately guide them to the book they're looking for. Now, you're the search
engine. People come to you looking for information and you point the way to it. You can do
this quickly and efficiently because you've understood the content and how it's
structured. On the web, a search engine will find your home page and start to navigate
through your website using your links. The way you link to pages within your own site is very
important and it's known as internal linking. If you're an online store, for example, you
might have a system of product categories that link to subcategories that hold links to
individual products. If you're an informational site, you may be organized by authors or
topics, and then dates of publication. Whatever structure and strategy you use, a clean site
structure will really help search engines understand your entire website, find your
content, and help searchers find what they're looking for. On the other hand, a bad site
structure can be detrimental to a search engine understanding your site. You might find
websites that have no navigation at all or they might force you to scroll and click around
aimlessly to find what you're looking for. You might see links that take users down a dead-
end path with no way to get back to where they started, or you might click on links that go
to pages that don't even exist anymore, or the link might not properly describe the page it's
linking to, so you can't even be sure that it's worth clicking in the first place. Back to our
bookstore example, think how difficult it would be if you walked in the front door and there
was just one big sign that listed every book in the whole store, line-by-line, in random
order. Or worse, what if they never updated that sign when people bought a book and it
wasn't even in the store anymore? If a search engine can't understand the layout of your
site, doesn't believe that the structure makes sense, can't tell what distinguishes one link
from another, or finds all kinds of missing pages, they may not come back that much and
they certainly won't be recommending you to other people. Because everyone's websites
and objectives are different. There's no right structure that works for everyone. The most
important thing to remember is that your site structure should be clear to you and it should
be clear to people. Remember, search engines are just trying to emulate human
processes, so once you spend some time designing and developing a site structure that's
logical and easy for people to understand and navigate through, you can feel confident that
search engines will understand your site structure as well.

Recognizing different types of content

- [Instructor] To understand the different kinds of content that users and search engines can
interact with on the web, we're going to be taking a look at the Explore California
website. And before we start focusing on what search engines like, it's important to take a
moment to appreciate just how many options we have to provide humans with different
formats and mediums. At the end of the day, it's these humans that we need to
impress with our pages. So let's do a quick review of some of the content types we have
available to us on the web. One of the most common forms of content on web pages is text
content. We see some text here on the Explore California homepage that helps let us know
what kind of information we would expect to find on this site. When we click into the
Resources section, we find more text content presented in a few different ways. There are
some organized headings and subheadings along with the paragraphs of body text. There's
even a checklist at the bottom, organized by bullet points. And when we click on the FAQ
link, it takes us to a page of text content organized by a series of questions and answers. All
of this different content is formatted in different ways so that it's easier for both users and
search engines to understand that content. Another form of content found on webpages is
imagery. Images can often be more effective than text in conveying a powerful message. For
example, on this Mission page, we're immediately drawn to the image of a person standing
on the beach and it helps us understand the experience of standing on a pristine California
beach watching the waves crash in. While the text of this page says the same thing, the
feelings and emotions of the message are much better communicated through
imagery. Video is another form of content that we find on the web. If we head over to the
homepage and scroll down a bit. We see a featured section around the Explorer's Podcast as
well as a video clip. The rich sights and sounds of video can do what images and text alone
cannot. Here we get to see and hear from people that are actually there allowing us as
website visitors to almost experience it. There are, of course, many other creative forms of
content out there as well. Audio clips, interactive animations, social clips, augmented and
virtual reality, infographics, games, and more abound across the internet. The key is to think
about what kind of content will be effective, useful, and helpful for your specific
audience. And while the search engines are what may bring your visitors to your site, once
they get there it's up to you to engage them and ultimately convert them on your business
goals. And using a mix of the most effective content types is sure to help the user
experience.

Optimizing textual page elements

- [Instructor] The main goal of a search engine is to guide people to content that is
relevant to the keyword or phrase that they search for. We can fine tune the relevance of a
page for a certain topic through the process of on page optimization. The Explore California
website has a page focused on backpacking tours in California. And let's imagine that
through our keyword research we decided that we wanted to optimize this page for the
phrase backpacking tours in California. Let's walk through how we might optimize the
different elements on this page for that particular search term. The first element we're
going to optimize is the URL. The URL is the location of the page we're looking at and you
can find it up in the address bar. You can think of it almost like a file on your computer, and
much like the path to any file on your computer, we can follow some simple guidelines that
allow us to create a good URL that can be found and understood quickly. The URL length
should be as concise as reasonably possible. While at the same time, contain some usable
information about the page itself. You might find that your website structure uses a
system of sub folders and this can be good in that it helps with the site structure. Just be
cautious about too many of them appearing in a URL. Generally speaking, shorter and more
succinct is best Perhaps most importantly, you'll want to make sure that the keyword
phrase we're targeting is found in the URL. Here, we can pick out the individual words of
California, tours and backpack which is certainly helpful. But if we're targeting this page for
backpacking tours in California, we can probably tighten that up a bit. Let's go ahead and
change this page name to backpacking-tours-in-california.html. It's short, it's very
descriptive of this page and it matches the keyword phrase we're targeting. Also, notice how
we use hyphens instead of spaces or underscores in the URL. This is important and helps the
search engines break up words properly. Of course, it's best that you choose a proper URL
from the outset. Generally speaking, you never want to rename already existing URLs solely
for SEO purposes. But if you do, you'll need to ensure that you're using the proper
redirects from the old URL to the new. The next element we'll look at is the meta title
tag and here, we're going to dive into the source code of this page. If you're a programmer,
you'll be right at home here and if you're not, don't worry, just keep watching so you'll be
able to talk the talk when it comes time to implement these items on your own
website. This page's title is pretty generic, and doesn't really give a search engine any
indication that this page is about our target keyword phrase. So let's go ahead and change it
to backpacking tours in California - explore California. Once our programmers have made
this change and pushed it live, we see that we've got a title that's fairly short, very
descriptive, and very targeted to the phrase we want to rank for. Notice that we didn't
simply use our target phrase by itself or just repeat it over and over. Here, we included the
hyphen explore California at the end. One reason for this is that the meta title tag is also the
title that's used for the page's search engine results listing. Not only are we trying to
optimize a title so that search engine identify the theme of our page, we're also trying too
entice users to click on it when they see it in the search results. In this example, we believe
that mentioning the website name might reinforce the context of where this page lives and
help convince people to click our result over the competition. But don't make the title too
long or detract too much from your target keyword phrase as it will need to be
readable. Too long and it will get cut off by the search engines. Tools like the Moz Title-Tag
Preview Tool can help you visualize and test how your title will look on a search engine
results page. Another meta tag we can configure is the meta description. Although
optimizing this tag won't likely do much to improve your search engine rankings and is
largely ignored by the major search engines it can improve your search engine result's click-
through rate. And that's a metric that informs how search algorithms evolve. You'll want to
pay attention to it, because this tag can often be used as the text that shows up under the
title of a listing in the search results, and optimizing it properly can both improve your click-
through rate in the present and positively impact your rankings over time. Spend some time
writing compelling text that will lead people to click on your site and using keywords in your
description will help reassure users that this is exactly what they're looking for. And as with
many other aspects of SEO, you'll want to tweak it over time to see if you can improve how
it helps drive engagement with your page. Next, let's take a look at the h1 header tag. This is
typically the markup used for the main visible headline of your page and search engines
know this. The purpose of using it is to give the reader a clear idea of what the content
below is about, much like a newspaper headline does. The current header tag, backpack
Cali, is not very descriptive or specific to our target keyword phrase, and you'd have to read
through the text to realize that this is actually the name of an organization. The truth is most
people won't stick around long enough to do that and think about how confusing that must
be to a search engine. Well, that might be important information to include later in the
content, it's probably a waste of a header. So let's try to improve this element with
something like: Backpacking Tours in California provided by Backpack Cali. This not only
clarifies the message it also works in our target keyword phrase. There are no defined
character limits to headlines but much like in the news world, it's more effective to be
concise. Now at this point, if you were a search engine, you've seen a URL, a title and a
headline that are all talking explicitly about backpacking tours in California, and you're
starting to get a pretty good idea of what this page is all about. And now we have the
content itself. The most important thing about your content is that it needs to be optimized
for people first and search engine second. Make sure that you're content is written so that it
communicates to your target audience in a way that's really engaging. As far as the search
engines go, there's no magic formula for the perfect page. But what you want to remember
is that search engines are trying to emulate a human being reading something and then
figuring out what it's about. Search engines are looking not only for your target keyword but
also for variations of that keyword. It just makes sense that in a piece of content about
backpacking tours in California, words like backpack, trip, outdoors and vacation will popup
here and there. Different word orders are likely to be a part of the narrative and if you were
a search engine, you probably wouldn't be surprised if related words like tent and map
show up here as well. Search engines can get very sophisticated trying to map the semantic
and thematic relationships between words on a page which is exactly what we as humans
do. So ultimately, writing the way you would for a human is the best way to optimize these
for algorithms. And while there's no hard and fast rules, you might generally shoot for
including your target phrase one to three times in the text, depending on the length of your
content. Don't over think it and don't overdo it. One last element to optimize on this page
are the images. Let's take a look at this first image. As human beings, we can look at this and
quickly figure out that those are some footprints next to the words Backpack Cal. But when
a search engine looks at it, all it sees is a bunch of dots and different colors. While machine
learning and artificial intelligence are tackling this problem, search engines aren't yet
relying on a machine's ability to read words that appear in an image, or see the image like a
person does. So search engines rely on a few other signals to understand just what those
images are. Let's take a look at the code behind this image. Inside this image tag, you can
see a few attributes. The first one is the source file name, or the URL of that image. This tells
the browser where to go find the image so it can be loaded. The alt text is reserved for a
description of the image for those people or browsers that can't see the image itself. Both of
these elements can be optimized to accurately describe what the image is about and also
help support the keyword phrase we're trying to optimize for. Just like we changed the file
name of this page in the URL, we can change the file name of actual the image on the
server. To use the keyword phrase we're targeting on this page, and then update the
reference to that file in our code. Something like backpacking-tours-in-California.gif. We can
then update the alt text to something like Backpacking Tours in California by Backpack
Cali to be more descriptive to both the humans that need this description and the search
engines that are trying to figure out what the image is all about. While there are many more
items on a page that can be optimized, focusing on your URL, title, description, headers,
body text and images will take care of a very big chunk of your on page optimization. Of
course, doing this from the very beginning is the ideal situation. But take a look at the
existing pages of your site after you've done your keyword research and mapped your pages
to your target phrases. You might be surprised at just how much optimization there is to do.

Optimizing nontext components of a webpage

- [Instructor] Search engines are generally very good at analyzing and understanding the text
content on web pages. But search engines have a more difficult time with other forms of
content like images, videos, and audio clips. Let's take a look at a few different ways we can
go about optimizing these types of content for our target keywords. One simple best
practice is to use the text surrounding the non-text elements to describe what it's all
about. This makes perfect sense, if you think about it. Having a paragraph of text
describing a particular video right next to that video is very common practice, and images
embedded inline with text often have text titles under them, and they're typically very
relevant to the text on that page. Image slide shows or carousels often contain a textual title
and description of each photo, and an audio clip typically has a description and may even
have a complete transcription as well. Search engines do analyze the text that's in close
proximity to the non-text components, making the assumption that there is some topical
correlation between those elements. On the Explore California homepage, we can see this in
action. For example, this logo for Cycle California is an image, and even though those pixels
are arranged in such a way that humans can quickly read Cycle California, and see that it's a
logo, remember that search engines can't do this quite as easily. So while the search engine
will look at the image filename and the alt text, it will also look at the text nearby. And, in
this case, we can see that it's all about a Cycle California tour that's being featured, telling
search engines a little more about that image. You can also make use of image captions, and
when an image is also used as a link, you can use a title attribute to give search engines even
more information about the image itself. Aside from using the text that's near the non-text
elements, there's also some code we can use to help the search engines out. What's known
as structured data allows us to markup our code with some very relevant, very specific
metadata, specific to a certain type of content. It's useful to note that there are different
ways of marking up your structured data, but for this example, we'll format the schema.org
markup using JSON-LD, which search engines tend to favor. These are some of the
properties that you can define for an image object. And if we scroll down, you can see
examples of the difference between your standard image tag, and one that's been enhanced
with schema.org markup. Note that there are markup specifications for audio and video
clips as well. Let's take the example of the video that's on the homepage of the Explore
California website. We can see that there's some code that embeds the video, and right
now, there's not much that can tell a search engine about the contents of that video. But by
adding in some special markup, we can provide search engines with all kinds of rich
metadata, and this will help them really understand what this content is all about. Now,
when a searcher types in something like explore California podcast, we've positioned
ourselves for this page, or even this video, to pop up in the search results. Take a look
through schema.org, and you can see all of the different properties and elements that you
can define for non-text data. Making sure to provide as much information as you can to the
search engines can only help your overall search engine visibility. And when you're adding
markup to your site, be sure to test it using search engine tools like Google's Structured
Data Testing Tool. Using a mix of content types in your pages can be a great way to engage
with your visitors and help them down the conversion path. And just because a piece of
content doesn't use words, doesn't mean we can't help a search engine understand just
what it's all about. Through surrounding text, some code elements, and structured data, you
can open up all of your content to search engines, and be well on your way to attracting
new traffic to your pages

Analyzing content quality

- [Host] We've covered how we can optimize a page for a target keyword phrase using the
URL, title, headers and overall content of that page. But determining just how well a page
has been optimized can often be difficult to gauge. And we may want to isolate more
opportunities for improvement. To help us do this we're going to use the on-page grader. A
tool that's part of the SEO Moz Pro Tool set. It's important to note that if you're going to get
serious about SEO, you'll probably want to invest in some tools. And while for these
examples we're using a Moz Pro account you'll find lots of excellent tools like
SEMrush, Ahrefs and more. Any of these services will give you access to a whole suite of
tools designed specifically to help you with search engine optimization. So you should do
some research to see which is the best fit for you. Let's go back and take a look at the
backpacking tours page on the Explore California website. We're already determined that
we want this page to be optimized for the phrase backpacking tours in California. And we've
taken a look at many of the on-page elements that could stand to be optimized. But we
haven't actually made any changes to the page yet. So let's run this page through the tool to
see what recommendations for improvement we can find. We'll start by adding our keyword
phrase backpacking tours in California. And entering the URL of the page we want to have
analyzed. Then we'll let the tool go to work. As you can see this page isn't very well
optimized currently. And there are a lot of things we can do. After we get over the shock of
our low score remember this is out of a hundred, we can scroll down and see that this
tool has just provided us with a to-do list of all the things that might help this page be more
optimized for our target keyword phrase. The factors analyzed are grouped by level of
importance. And we can switch between factors that are hurting and helping the overall
score. For each issue we can see why these things are problems, suggestions around how to
address these issues, and even some commentary and links to more information. In this
example our keyword phrase doesn't show up in the title, the URL, the description, any of
our headers, anywhere in the body, anywhere in bolded text or in any image alt text. If you
were a search engine would you rank this page for the keyword phrase? Probably not. It's
not all doom and gloom though. Reviewing the elements that we've done well can be
helpful in making sure that we carry these best practices over to other pages as we
optimize. And again, there's lots of great information here to help us understand more
about each element that was analyzed. If you're looking for a way to quickly generate a
fairly comprehensive evaluation of the pages of your site along with a list of recommended
actions, this is the type of tool you'll want to use. And following these recommendations to
clean up the on-page factors of your webpages, is what will end up showing the search
engines what keywords your content has been optimized for.

Exploring the benefits of user-generated content

- An important strategy for growing search engine visibility is to continually generate new,
unique, and quality content. But, there's only 24 hours in a day, and it can be pretty difficult
to do that with your own resources. Fortunately, you can leverage the interest and
knowledge of your website visitors to create new content for you, and this is better known
as user-generated content. User-generated content is content that normal website visitors
create for your website, and given the right circumstances, user-generated content can be a
very scalable and cost effective means of content creation. So, what are some good
examples of user-generated content? Blog comments and forums are examples where
allowing people to simply express their views can help generate new content for your
site. Some websites take this to the next level by cultivating expert comments, or allowing
users to vote or assign weights to certain members of the user community. And allowing top
contributors or other experts from outside your organization to write guest blog posts and
articles can be a great way to post new and enticing content, and have others generate
comments and conversations around that content. If you sell products on your site, you can
allow users to leave reviews of your products as a means to generate new and relevant
content. Again, you could find ways to organize and display these reviews, and you can work
on ways to solicit more from your customers. In the business to business space you might
ask your happy customers to work with you to create testimonials or case studies. And keep
in mind that content doesn't necessarily need to be textual. If users want to share
interesting information in the form of video clips or photos or other media formats, by all
means, let them. And don't forget to take advantage of user-generated content through
social media outlets. A big reason for the explosive growth of these social media services in
recent years is that people have a natural tendency to share interesting content with other
people, and these services make it easy to do that. Remember, sharing content, whether
you've created it or your users have, provides even greater opportunity for people and
search engines to find and see your content as authoritative. Last, you'll want to make
sure that you have some kind of approval process in place if you're going to let visitors write
or post whatever they want. Unfortunately, the world is full of potty mouths, and
automated bots, and angry people that can and will take full advantage of the ability to post
inappropriate things on other people's websites. You can have a blacklist of words and
phrases that flag a post as needing approval, or you can set all posts to require
approval. You'll also want to consider if you'll be allowing any code, HTML markup, or
links in your user-generated content, which can pose some additional issues. And no matter
how you structure your user-generated community, you'll want to read, watch, or listen to
what's going up on your pages. In a world where content creation costs time, resources, and
money, leveraging user-generated content can be a great way to help with your continuous
stream of new relevant content that search engines can find and make available to your
prospective customers.

Optimizing for personalized search

- Understanding the process of personalized search,
requires understanding search intent
and the role of search engines.
Remember, the goal of a search engine
is to provide the best results to a specific person
at just the right time and in the right place
and to do that, there is personalization that's being done.
Two different people doing the same search
may see different results.
So how does this personalization impact your SEO strategy?
Well first, you have to understand
that there are many factors
that influence personalized search results.
Search engines take into account things
like the device you are using,
the location the device is connecting from,
and even your previous search history.
Let's take a look at how location influences
the search results that you might get.
Search engines can use location information
from an IP address, GPS, or other signals
to understand where you physically are.
So a search for 'pizza place' done
from New York will give some very different results
than that same search done in Seattle.
But searchers can also indicate a location
by adding it to the search query.
For example, if I'm in a Seattle airport,
about to board my flight to New York,
and I want to find a pizza place to go to when I land,
I might type in 'New York pizza place'.
Here I might see results showing
both New York style pizza places in Seattle
as well as restaurants located in New York.
This complexity means that your strategy
for keyword targeting should absolutely consider
location based search intent
and what people are really looking for
with the different searches that they're doing.
Personalization is also done at the device level
and you'll probably notice that search engine results
with the same query can be different
across mobile and desktop.
Knowing that many mobile searchers are on the go,
search engines often adjust the mobile results to cater
to maps, paid results, knowledge graph results,
and even the ordering of mobile rankings.
Keep in mind that search engines test interactions
with these results often, refining those results
to provide you with the relevant information
and then evolving your personalized experience.
Last, your search history can be used
to populate future results.
The websites that you visited in the past,
as well as your personal search settings,
and linked account activity, will influence the way
that search engines provide information in the future.
There are a few ways that they do this.
And it's important to know that this can effect
both paid and organic results.
On the paid side, clicking on a search result
can activate targeting criteria
that advertisers can use to show you related ads
regardless if they're related to that initial website.
On the organic side, search engines are always prodding
and testing because they want to understand
your click preferences.
Take the example of a search on the term 'avatar'.
At first a search engine doesn't know your intent
with this search so you might be presented
with generic options at first.
If I were to click on the results related to the movie
rather than those related to online personas,
the search engines would remember this,
and when I perform future searches,
my preferences can be used and results related to the film
are more likely to be displayed.
As search engines continue to evolve with voice inputs
and adapt to increasingly complex queries,
their ability to solve human problems
like where I might like to eat or the best place for me
to purchase something are tailored more and more
to the individual conducting those queries.
Personalization means that the future of search
is about catering results to the individual.
And as we develop and refine our SEO strategies,
knowing that the search experience will provide
more personally relevant ads and organic results
will help us stay ahead of the curve
and leverage this personalization ourselves.

Interpreting the code behind webpages

- [Instructor] The end goal of a search engine, when it's crawling a page, is to try to
determine what a web page looks like to regular people. But the search engine can't see a
page like we do. Instead, it sees the code that web servers send back to our browsers, and
to help illustrate this, let's take a look at the Explore California home page. To us humans,
we see a rich and colorful web page with lots of content on it. Pictures, text, menus, and
videos, and all kinds of colors and styles. It's visually appealing, and we know how to
absorb all of this information and navigate through it. But to a search engine crawler, the
same page looks like this instead. This may not look like the same page to the untrained eye,
but it is. All of this markup and code is really just a bunch of instructions web browsers can
follow in order to render a great-looking web page onto our screens. And the important part
is that this is what search engines look at when trying to understand what your page is
about, and how it should be ranked. Web pages are ultimately created with HTML
code: scripts and other markup, which helps browsers figure out where to find and
download all the files needed to produce this pretty page, where everything is visibly placed
on the page, how things are laid out, which fonts, colors, and sizes to use, what side menus
will look like, where links will point to, and where content elements are going to be
placed. If you take a close look, you can see that there's lots of stuff in the HTML that may
not end up on the screen. And these items provide us with extra opportunities to help
search engines understand our content better. HTML, or hypertext markup language, is also
responsible for referencing and loading styles sheets, which are extra instructions that help
define the visible attributes of a page: font coloring, content sizing, line spacing, background
images, page conventions, all kinds of rules for the visual representation of a page can be
found here. And HTML is not the only language that browsers can understand. These days,
web pages are made more interactive through the use of things like traditional JavaScript,
JQuery, Angular, AJAX, HTML5 elements, and more. These advanced frameworks and
languages make possible things like animation, slideshows, dynamic menus, and lots
more. You can also find code that produces different types of non-text content. For
example, this is the block of code that's responsible for rendering the video we see on the
home page. While we as humans can watch that video and hear its message, this block of
code is all that a search engine can see. While this isn't the course on web design or
programming, it's important to understand the perspective of a search engine as we
examine what it sees. As you can probably guess, making sure that your website's code is
clean, efficient, and free of any coding errors, will help ensure that your pages are
displaying properly to your users, but also save the search engine some confusion. The
cleaner your code, the easier it will be for you to make adjustments to improve your on-
page optimization, and the more search engines will trust that your pages will be a good
experience for your users.

Understanding how search engines index content

- It's important to understand how search engines discover new content on the web. As well
as how they interpret the locations of these pages. One way that search engines identify
new content is by following links. Much like you and I will click through links to go from one
page to the next. Search engines do the exact same thing to find an indexed content. Only
they click on every link they can find. If you want to make sure that search engines pick up
on your new content, one of the easiest and most important things that you can do is make
sure that you have links pointing to it. One great way to do this is to create an HTML
sitemap. Link to from the footer of every page of your website that mirrors the exact
structure of your site with links to all of your important content. Another way for search
engines to discover new content, is from an XML sitemap. XML stands for extensible markup
language. And it's a different type of meta language that like HTML is used to share data on
the web. Unlike the HTML sitemap, which is a list of links on a webpage. An XML sitemap is a
listing of your site's content in a special format that search engines can easily read
through. You or your webmaster can learn more about the specific syntax and how to create
XML sitemaps by visiting sitemaps.org. Once you've generated your HTML and XML
sitemaps, you can submit them directly to the search engines and this gives you one more
way to let them know when you add or change things on your site. Another important thing
to recognize is that while search engines will always try to crawl your links for as much
additional content as they can find, you may not always want this. There can be times when
you might have pages on your site that you don't want search engines to find. Think of test
pages or members only areas of your site that you don't want showing up on search engine
results pages. To control how search engines crawl through your website, you can set rules
in what's called a robots.txt file. This is a file that you or your webmaster can create in the
main root folder of your site. And when search engines see it, they'll read it and follow those
rules that you've set. Robots.txt blocks can help control bandwidth stream and make your
site more crawlable. Helping to more readily surface important pages. But there's a
downside, as well. A robots.txt block will not stop a page from being indexed or ranked. To
stop pages from showing up in search engine results entirely, a noindex meta tag is
preferred to a robots.txt block. Which method you use really comes down to why you need
it. To control how easily a site is crawled, use the robots.txt file. To ensure that pages are
never returned in search results, use the noindex meta tag. And if you use the noindex meta
tag method, be sure you don't also block the page in the robots.txt or the tag will never be
found. With a robots.txt file, you can set rules that are specific to different browsers and
search engine crawlers. And you can specify which areas of your website they can and can't
see. This can get a bit technical. And you can learn more about creating robots.txt rules by
visiting robotstxt.org. Again, once search engines discover your content, they'll index it by
URL. Which stands for uniform resource locator. As the name implies, URLs are the locations
of webpages on the internet. It's important that each page on your site has a single, unique
URL, so that search engines can differentiate that page from all the others. And the
structure of this URL can also help them understand the structure of your entire
website. There are lots of ways that search engines can find your pages. And while you can't
control how the crawlers actually do their job. By creating links for them to follow, unique
and structured URLs, sitemaps for them to read, meta tags to inform them and robots.txt
files to guide them. You'll be doing everything you can to get your pages in the index as fast
as possible.