Intro to SEO

Summary

This SEO course introduction is designed for project managers, particularly those at Scandiweb, focusing on key SEO areas such as technical SEO, content optimization, and link building. The video explains how to ensure websites are fully accessible to search engines, how to create and optimize content with relevant keywords, and how to build authoritative backlinks to improve search rankings. Practical examples and SEO tools are discussed to demonstrate these strategies, with additional topics like site migration, Google Search Console setup, and structured data markup covered in detail.

Takeaways

• 🔍 Technical SEO forms the foundation of website optimization, ensuring websites are accessible to search engines and users.
• ⚙️ Key technical aspects include platform migration and making websites easier for search engines to crawl and understand.
• 📚 Content is still king in SEO, with a focus on creating unique, keyword-rich content that caters to user intent and search engine requirements.
• 📝 Keywords research helps identify terms with high search volume and low competition to optimize content for better ranking.
• 🔗 Link building is essential for proving website authority, trust, and relevance, with more backlinks from reputable sources helping to improve search rankings.
• 🏙️ For local SEO, creating optimized, location-specific pages can help a business rank higher in local searches, like for 'Magento development agency in New York.'
• 📈 SEO tools help track backlinks and referring domains, which can influence a page's ranking by showing its authority.
• 🤖 Google aims to deliver personalized, relevant, and trustworthy content quickly to meet user needs, especially on mobile.
• 🛠️ Tools like canonical tags, robots.txt, XML sitemaps, and hreflang tags help guide search engines to the most valuable content and avoid indexing duplicate or irrelevant pages.
• 📊 Google Search Console provides insights into website performance, while techniques like pre-rendering and 301 mapping support SEO efforts, especially during website migrations.

Q & A

What is the primary focus of the SEO introduction course for project managers?

The primary focus of the SEO introduction course for project managers is to cover technical aspects related to website migration between platforms and their impact on SEO. It also provides an overview of key SEO focus areas, such as technical SEO, content optimization, and link building.

What is technical SEO and why is it important?

Technical SEO involves a set of rules, best practices, and assumptions made by the SEO community to improve website accessibility and visibility to search engines. It ensures that search engines can easily identify important content and avoid indexing irrelevant or duplicate content.

How does content optimization contribute to SEO success?

Content optimization is crucial for SEO because it involves creating unique, relevant content that incorporates the right keywords. This helps search engines understand the page's focus and rank it higher, while also providing valuable content for users.

What is the role of keyword research in SEO?

Keyword research helps identify the specific terms people use when searching for products or services. By targeting keywords with high search volume and low competition, SEO specialists can create content that ranks well for those terms.

Why is link building important for SEO?

Link building signals to Google that a website is authoritative, trustworthy, and important. The more high-quality backlinks a page has, the higher it is likely to rank in search results, as backlinks are considered endorsements from other reputable websites.

How does Google determine which pages should appear at the top of search results?

Google uses various factors to determine top search results, including the relevance and uniqueness of content, site speed, mobile-friendliness, backlinks, user engagement, and trustworthiness. Pages that meet these criteria are more likely to appear higher in search results.

What are canonical tags, and how do they help with duplicate content issues?

Canonical tags are used to indicate the preferred version of a web page when duplicate or similar content exists. They help prevent search engines from indexing multiple versions of the same content, which can harm SEO rankings.

What is the purpose of the robots.txt file in SEO?

The robots.txt file is used to instruct search engines on which parts of a website they should or should not crawl. It helps ensure that low-quality or irrelevant content is not indexed, allowing search engines to focus on the most valuable pages.

What is the role of XML sitemaps in SEO?

XML sitemaps guide search engines to the most important content on a website. They help ensure that all key pages are indexed properly, especially on large e-commerce websites with many URLs.

What is structured data markup, and how does it benefit SEO?

Structured data markup helps search engines understand the content and purpose of different types of web pages (e.g., product pages, FAQ pages). It can improve visibility in search results by providing rich snippets, which enhance the way information is displayed to users.

Outlines

00:00

📊 Introduction to SEO for Project Managers

This paragraph introduces the course focused on SEO, tailored specifically for project managers at Scandiweb. It covers the core areas of SEO relevant to technical website migrations and search engine optimization. The key focus is on technical SEO, which encompasses best practices ensuring websites are accessible to search engines, enabling them to identify important content. It touches upon the complexity of technical SEO, mentioning that there are over 100 elements to be addressed, and highlights that these will be explored in detail throughout the course.

05:05

📑 Content Optimization: The Power of Keywords

Content optimization is described as the second key area of SEO, focusing on the importance of written content for Google rankings. The phrase 'Content is King' is still relevant, with an emphasis on creating unique content that incorporates keywords identified through research. The paragraph explains how keyword research is done to find terms with high search volume and low competition. Properly incorporating keywords can help a website rank for new and existing keywords, improving visibility in search results. The ultimate goal is to balance content creation for both users and search engines.

10:06

🔗 Link Building: Building Authority and Trust

Link building is the third pillar of SEO, focusing on the importance of backlinks from trusted websites to increase a site's authority in Google's eyes. The more quality backlinks a site has, the more trustworthy it appears, leading to higher rankings. A case study is mentioned where Scandiweb attempts to rank for 'Magento Development Agency in New York.' Although their page is ranking well, they identify that competitors have more backlinks, suggesting that acquiring additional backlinks could improve their ranking further. The paragraph ends by explaining how backlinks from trusted sources, like the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, can contribute to ranking improvements.

15:08

🔍 Google’s Criteria for Top Rankings

This paragraph explains how Google prioritizes content to meet user needs. Users expect fast, trustworthy, and personalized results, especially on mobile. Google aims to display unique content that answers user queries, avoiding outdated or duplicate information. The search engine favors sites that are fast, reliable, mobile-friendly, and have social proof (such as backlinks and reviews). Additionally, Google’s ranking system can vary by user, providing personalized search results. The paragraph emphasizes the importance of ensuring client websites meet these expectations to achieve top rankings.

🛠 Technical SEO Tactics to Improve Crawl Efficiency

The paragraph covers tactics to help websites optimize their crawl efficiency and avoid wasting Google’s resources on low-quality or duplicated content. It explains how canonical tags can prevent duplicate content issues, robots.txt files can restrict crawling of certain sections, and noindex tags can keep sensitive content out of Google’s index. The focus then shifts to ensuring Google can easily find and understand the most important content on the site, especially for large e-commerce websites. Techniques like XML sitemaps and hreflang tags are highlighted to guide Google’s crawlers effectively and handle international content.

⚙️ Structured Data and SEO Tools

This final paragraph introduces structured data markup as a tool to help Google better understand a website's content, marking different types of content like product pages or FAQs. It outlines other essential tools and tactics for effective SEO, such as prerendering, 301 redirects for migrations, and setting up Google Search Console to gain insights into page performance. These elements will be discussed in more detail in upcoming videos in the course, providing practical steps for optimizing websites for SEO.

Keywords

💡Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to the practices that ensure a website is fully accessible to search engines and can be properly indexed. This is foundational in SEO, as discussed in the video, where technical SEO forms the base of the pyramid of SEO tasks. It involves ensuring the website follows best practices, such as managing duplicate content, site speed, and mobile optimization.

💡Content Optimization

Content Optimization is the process of refining written or media content to better align with search engines and user needs. In the video, it is highlighted as a key step in SEO, where specialists identify relevant keywords, create unique content, and incorporate these keywords naturally into the page to improve rankings. The popular phrase 'content is king' is referenced, emphasizing its importance.

💡Keyword Research

Keyword Research involves identifying the terms and phrases that people use to search for specific products or services. In the video, it is described as a process of finding high-volume, low-competition keywords, which are then integrated into the website's content. This is crucial for helping the website rank higher in search engine results.

💡Backlinks

Backlinks are links from external websites that point to your website, acting as endorsements of its content. The video explains how link building signals to Google that a site is authoritative and trustworthy. It also discusses how having more backlinks from reputable sources can improve a website's ranking.

💡Google Algorithm

The Google Algorithm determines how websites are ranked in search results based on several factors like content relevance, backlinks, and user experience. In the video, it is explained that Google works to ensure users receive high-quality, relevant, and fast results, making understanding this algorithm crucial for SEO success.

💡Duplicate Content

Duplicate Content refers to instances where the same or very similar content appears on multiple URLs, which can negatively impact SEO. The video highlights the importance of dealing with duplicated content using canonical tags, ensuring Google focuses on the most important versions of a page.

💡Robots.txt

The Robots.txt file is used to manage how search engines crawl and index certain sections of a website. In the video, it's mentioned as a tool for preventing Google from wasting resources on low-quality or irrelevant pages, guiding its attention to more valuable content.

💡XML Sitemap

An XML Sitemap is a file that helps search engines discover the most important pages on a website. The video discusses how this tool guides Google to focus on high-value content, especially in the context of e-commerce sites with many URLs, ensuring proper indexing of key pages.

💡Structured Data Markup

Structured Data Markup is code added to a website that helps search engines understand the type of content on a page (e.g., product pages, FAQs). In the video, it’s emphasized as a way to make it easier for Google to comprehend what a page is about, potentially improving visibility in search results.

💡301 Mapping

301 Mapping refers to the use of 301 redirects, which permanently point old URLs to new ones, typically used during website migrations. The video explains its importance in preserving SEO value and ensuring that both users and search engines are directed to the correct new page during migrations.

Highlights

Introduction to SEO for project managers at Scandiweb, focusing on technical aspects related to website migration and interaction with SEO.

SEO pyramid: Technical SEO as the foundation, followed by content optimization, and finally, link building.

Technical SEO includes best practices and assumptions that improve website accessibility for search engines and highlight important content.

Content optimization focuses on identifying high-volume, low-competition keywords to create unique content and improve rankings.

Emphasis on organic incorporation of keywords for both search engines and users, with a focus on user experience.

Meta titles and descriptions play a role in ensuring keywords are represented on the page to improve search engine rankings.

Link building increases authority and trustworthiness by obtaining backlinks from reputable sites, improving search engine rankings.

Practical example of ranking for 'Magento development agency in New York,' demonstrating how content and backlinks affect ranking.

Scandiweb's page ranking example shows success in SEO efforts but highlights the importance of backlinks for further improvement.

Backlink strategy includes identifying resources for potential link placements, such as blogs, forums, and news portals.

Google prioritizes fast, trustworthy, and mobile-friendly websites with unique, relevant content that matches user intent.

Importance of canonical tags and robots.txt for handling duplicate content and limiting Google’s crawling of low-quality pages.

XML sitemaps and hreflang tags guide Google to the most important and region-specific content on a website.

Structured data markup helps Google understand the type of content on a page, improving visibility in search results.

Additional topics include pre-rendering setup, 301 redirects for migrations, and using Google Search Console for insights on performance.

Transcripts

hello

dear project manager and welcome to

introduction course to seo

in this course we will focus on those

topics

which are more the most common ones for

project managers working in scandiweb

so mainly we will focus on technical

things

which are related to migration

of the websites from one platform and

another one

to another one and how they interact

with

search engine optimization aspects but

before

we go into details let's

get some big picture about how seo works

and what are the main

focus areas for seo specialists

when working on website optimization

and for that we have placed here a

pyramid

consisting of three parts and in the

very basis

of this pyramid we can see technical seo

technical seo is a set of rules

best practices and just assumptions

made by seo community

which are supposed to improve

probability of the websites and in

flexibility

basically ensure that websites are fully

accessible

for search engines and that they can

easily identify the most important

content content

on the website and skip the one

which shouldn't appear in

google or any other search results

when we are speaking of technical seo

it's

consists of a lot of details

and when we are running now that we are

covering around

100 elements or sometimes even more

however they are split in some bigger

topics

which we are also

which will be also covering in scope of

this

course in quite details

the second part of the pyramid

is more creative it's about

content optimization because what

is still a big thing yeah that's that's

the content and that's

for in case of google it's actually

written content and

probably have heard this saying that

content is the king

it's still valid so what is our role

as seo specialists in this case

it's to understand what keywords

people are using to search for specific

products or specific services

for that we run keywords research so

that

when we identify

keywords with the highest monthly search

volume

and lower competition we can actually

create the content unique content

that's very important which contains

the specific keywords we want to rank

for

and we need to incorporate them

organically

so that it makes sense for both search

engines and users

because still we don't want to put

crawlers

as the main priority so user still is

the most important one

once we have created the content we

implement it on the website

on plp or maybe create some new landing

page or

simply added method title or meta

description to

make sure that keywords are there

so it's really depends from project and

project

and when we have made then updates

if everything goes well in a while maybe

in the months

maybe less maybe more we can see how our

website

starts to rank for new keywords which

were included on the

page and also improve rankings for the

ones

which already were present just now with

the higher density of keywords

google understands that this is really

the page

about this topic it's quite extensive

so it brings it higher

in the rankings

and last but not least is link building

link building is important to show

google that your page is

important authoritative and trustful

and how it's connected

the idea is that

well-known websites and basically known

brands

and trustful brands are quoted often

and people are sharing links to such

websites

in blogs in forums news portals are

writing about them

social media shares etc etc so

um obviously people talk about not so

good things

as well but overall

non-brands should have more backlinks

it means that in general the more

backlinks you are having

from good resources you are more

trustful

so google will place you higher in

search results

so let's see a practical example

for example scandiweb would like to rank

for magento development agency

in new york why not

so for that first of all we need to

create

a page

page containing related to

new york city and magento development

and first overall like discover this

topic from

various perspectives so we have this

page

and if we have done our job well

there is a big probability that if we

scroll

in search results for magento

development agency in new york

we will actually see our page so this is

our page

so oh wow we have done a good job

and it's with the united states vpn

we are ranking pretty high so what is

the next step

next step would be to get even higher

and how we can achieve that

in top of us is clutch.com and

magebit.com

it's another agency she also have

created

a really nice

nice optimized page about them

being working in new york and being

magento developers

however what is happening is that

we can look in seo tools and actually

see that

magebit has more backlinks

and more referring domains pointing to

their

page about new york city

and in our case we are having a little

bit

less backlinks and less referring

domains

so in order there is hypothesis that

if we have more backlinks we will rank

higher

that's why

there are identified possible resources

where we can place links because

in general we can scan the web has quite

a lot of backlinks already

but for specific internal page it might

need some help

to gather this 10 backlinks and for

example

there is a working spreadsheet there are

listed

pages which is planned to

get some additional backlinks too and

here's our page

and we can see that there are some

backlinks already posted

so we open the page which was linked

here

and we see that in manhattan chamber of

commerce

there is link to scandiwave magento

developers nyc

over the time if everything goes well we

should

get a bit higher in the results

so that's in very simple explanation

how backlinks building is working

and now a bit more about how

google decides which pages should appear

in the very top

so what's behind

those very first results in google

so obviously as any business

uh google also cares about about its

customers

and

if you look at the user journey of the

people who visit

google usually they have very specific

requirements

or some idea in mind what they would

like to find

for example they might be looking for

ticket to mexico or

how to publish a book or maybe they want

to even buy a car online users

when they type in any query

in google they actually expect

that they will receive unique content

that it's not some copy of the copy

which was published like 10 years ago or

something like that

so something unique and answering their

question they want to receive results

now

especially in on mobile so they

want to see now and maybe something near

them

so it should be very fast

users also expect that results are

trustful

so that google won't show them some

scammy websites in the very top

and yeah results also should be

personalized

so that when user types

in google cats thinking about musical

it actually expects cats results about

cats

musical to appear in in google

so knowing all this what google's google

is working on

it's working very hard to make it uh

algorithm uh

meeting user needs basically so google

really tries on

making sure that in the very top

positions in google appear rich and

regional

content that websites which are ranking

higher

they work fast they are not buggy

and they're mobile mobile friendly as

well

also that websites have a lot of

backlinks reviews

social proof so high authority

and yeah google also is not same for

everyone

so results might be different and some

things may appear specifically for you

however the question we are caring the

most about

when we are speaking about website

development

projects is how can we help

our clients websites to

be considered by google as the best of

the best

to meet user expectations and therefore

to be selected to appear in the very

top results in google

to do that we can apply different

tactics and techniques and

first of all what we need to do is to

ensure

that google doesn't waste its resources

and don't need to crawl

and index low quality sensitive content

or some duplicates

to deal with duplicated content we need

help of canonical tags

to limit crawling google from crawling

certain parts of the

website we can use robots.txt file

and if you don't want some certain pages

to appear in

google index we can apply no index

meta robots or x robots

and after we have done it next thing

what we want to do

is to guide google to the most unique

and valuable content we have on the page

so again drive uh resources of google

to the specific direction because even

though google is

like really big and

[Music]

basically covers almost all the internet

still it has its limitations

and as our e-commerce websites have

quite a lot of urls usually

and if we count all possible

filters and their combinations there

might be millions of urls

so we want google to easily find the

most unique content out of those

millions which probably could be like

few thousands of pages

and for that we can use xml sitemap to

guide google to the most important

content

and if you are speaking of international

websites then

hreflang is a tag which will help us

to guide google among different

languages and different target countries

and last but not least we also want

google to easily understand what is our

page about

does it sell something is it a pdp

uh or for example it's a fake you where

can i

find some answers to the questions or

maybe it's a home page

to that we can mark

mark different types of content using

structured data markup

so these are elements which we are

practically implementing in our projects

and which we'll cover today in all the

videos

you have in this edu series and on top

of that

we will also look in prerendering

setup of prerender io or any other

solution

to make sure that google can easily

access the page

we will cover 301 mapping which is

important topic when it comes to

migrations

and how to set up google search console

which is a tool

which can provide us valuable insights

about

overall performance of the page so all

these topics

we will cover in details in the upcoming

videos