SEO Toolkit

 in Early Train Blog  tagged SEO by (updated on )

Here is a handy SEO Toolkit to get you started with SEO. It doesn’t include every term, tool and idea out there, simply what you need to be able to start working on your SEO.

The learning curve can be quite steep with SEO, and like with all digital marketing, the jargon can be quite intense. Therefore we start with a glossary of the most important terms, then move on to useful resources from other sites. After that, we give you some basic processes which will get you started in a strong way.

There are basically infinite SEO guides out there if you look (including many we have published by different authors). This is because SEO is not really a specific thing. It just means any tactic you use to improve a webpages ranking in search engine results pages. It’s also because search engines keep changing, so SEO does too.

This SEO toolkit is designed to make you able to get started SEOing your own webpages, and understand SEO guides you come across. Use it to get better at this vital digital marketing discipline.

 

SEO Toolkit

 

Glossary of SEO terms

Algorithm – How search engines rank webpages (this changes over time).

Alt-Tag – The text that shows up when you hover over an image.

Bounce Rate – the percentage of people who came to a webpage and left without doing anything.  This either implies a page wasn’t interesting, or that it provided enough information straight away.

CTR – click-through rate. This is clicks divided by impressions as a percentage. It strongly implies how enticing something is – a high click-through rate means more people clicked on something after seeing it than a low click-through rate.

Entrances – means that page is the first one people visited, and can tell you if people are finding your site (via search or advertising) because of that page.

Impression – the number of times something is viewed. In organic search, getting more impressions means that Google is taking your webpage seriously enough to show it to people.

Inbound Link – a link to your site from another site.

Inbound Marketing – marketing which focuses on getting more links to your site.

Internal Link – A link from one webpage on a site, or another on the same site.

Keyword – a searched term. Even if it’s multiple words, it’s still called a keyword.

Local SEO – SEO which for a business which operates in a specific location (such as a shop, or local delivery service). This is different to other types of SEO in that it is about a business, rather than a webpage, and means making sure all mapping sites know about the business (as well as any sites which talk about that location).

Long Click – When someone clicks on a search result and is satisfied so doesn’t return to the search results (or search the same thing again) for a long time.

Long Tail Keywords – Search terms with lower volume make up the majority of overall searches (and have less competition for them).

Meta Description – what Google displays under the title of a page.

Meta Title – what Google displays as the title of a page.

Off-Page SEO – any SEO activity you do without editing the page you are working on (such as inbound marketing).

On-Page SEO – any SEO activity you do on the page (such as improving content, or the technical set up of a page).

Organic Search – the means when something turns up in search results without it being paid for.

Outbound Links – A link to another site from your site.

Paid Search/AdWords – these are ads at the top of search results.

Ranking – Where on a search engine results page your link appears.

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation.

SERP – Search Engine Results Page.

Sitemap – In SEO this refers to a file which lists all the webpages on a sites in a way that search engines can read it.

Spider – How search engines crawl the internet looking for webpages

Technical SEO – SEO efforts which don’t revolve around content.

 

SEO Definition (Search Engine Optimisation)

 

Resources

 

SEO

 

On Page SEO Checklist

All pages should hit as many as possibly of the following points in order to be considered ‘good’ in terms of SEO.

  • Be over 300 words long
  • Contain at least one image
  • Have at least one image which contains the targeted search term as an alt-tag
  • The title of the page should contain the targeted search term
  • The targeted search term should appear in the url of the page
  • The targeted search term should appear in the first paragraph of text
  • The page should contain subheadings (using h2 or h3 html tags)
  • Each subheading should have no more than 300 words under it
  • The majority of subheadings should contain the targeted search term
  • Paragraphs should have no more than 300 words in them
  • The targeted search term should make up more than 1% of all the text, but less than 2.5% in total (see the keyword density checker in the tools section)
  • Each page should contain at least one link to another site
  • Each page should contain at least one link to a page on your site
  • A meta title and description should be used, with both containing the targeted keyword
  • No more than 25% of sentences should contain more than 20 words
  • You shouldn’t have three sentences in a row start with the same word

Note: You should choose one term per page to try to rank for, as it is easier to compete when pages are highly focussed.

 

What Search Engine Optimisation looks like

 

How to get Inbound Links

Here are some simple ideas of what you can do to get inbound links:

  • Answer questions on Quora with links back to relevant pages on your site.
  • Enter awards (which often have links on their sites).
  • Write blog posts that other bloggers will want to talk about.
  • Write Guest blog posts on other people’s blogs.
  • Create shareable infographics, and then (6 months later) use Google Search to find any sites which have used them. Ask the sites to credit you with a link.
  • Encourage supporters to blog about events you are holding that they are part of.

Just generally – be likeable!

 

SEO

 

Ongoing SEO Activities Checklist

  • Keep your online profiles up to date. This is especially important for Google My Business.
  • Update your site frequently.
  • Blog. This can help small business in so many ways.
  • Use Social Media – this can improve your authority, and have knock on effects.
  • Get Inbound Links.
  • Review and improve your pages on an ongoing basis.
  • Make a point to read up on SEO at least once a year.

 

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

 

Deciding Which Pages To Work On

  1. Go into Search Console (if you haven’t registered, register NOW – it really is important)
  2. Under Search Traffic (on the left hand side menu), select Search Analytics
  3. Set the Date Range to Last 90 Days
  4. Change the filter to Pages (instead of queries)
  5. Change the metrics to Impressions & CTR (instead of clicks)
  6. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Download
  7. In the spreadsheet, order the pages by Impressions (largest to smallest)
  8. Delete all rows with under 1,000 Impressions
  9. Order the spreadsheet by CTR
  10. Delete all rows with a CTR that is more than your average for the last 90 days (flick back to Search Console to check)
  11. Order the remaining pages by Impressions
  12. SEO the top 3 pages which haven’t been done before (keep a note of the pages you choose this time, and then don’t choose them again – for a while at least)

 

SEO