Search Engine Optimization Tutorial

Hi, I’m Liz Maritz with The Net Impact. We’re gonna be talking about search engine
optimization. And I think a great starting place is to distinguish
the difference between search engine marketing or SEM, and search engine optimization or
SEO. Search engine optimization is actually a part
of search engine marketing. And so, search engine marketing can encompass
a lot of other tactics that don’t fall under SEO, like PBC and display ads. There are also many facets to SEO as well,
and it’s important to know what those facets are. We have keyword research, metadata, and a
variety of other things. Today, we’re going to be focusing strictly
on metadata. But I wanted to include keyword research because
it’s extremely important not to start filling out your metadata before you’ve executed a
really well thought-out and well-researched keyword research campaign. And we can talk all about that at The Net
Impact. We know a lot about keyword research and we
can definitely help you with that as well. But today, let’s dive into metadata. Metadata consists of keywords that you list
on your page, your page’s description, headings, alt text for images, and title tags for your
page. Now, it’s important to know that all this
metadata is behind the scenes. If you’re looking at a web page, you will
not see any of this metadata actually rendered on the page that the consumer or that your
web visitor sees. It’s all in the background, and it’s all for
the search engines. So, first of all, keywords. Keywords are very important to metadata. You want to make sure that after you do your
keyword research, you’re applying the best keywords that are focused to your page, not
too broad, not too overly specific, and you wanna make sure that you use a lot of those
to attract visitors to your page. So, two things to remember about keywords
are that they are…you have an unlimited number of space, but don’t abuse it, and you
want them to be focused to your content. Next is the description. The description is what will actually show
up in your Search Results Snippet as Google calls it. So, the description is your search result. You got the search right here and you’ve got
the listing, one-two-three listing. This is your snippet. Now, it used to be that the descriptions would
show up exactly as you had entered them into the snippet, but now Google will pull from
a lot of different areas to create that snippet. So, if you have a really well-written description,
a lot of that description should show up in the snippet. Headings. You’ll see headings in your source code. One of the things that a lot of people do
for search engine optimization is they’ll check source code. And all you have to do to check source code
is CTRL+click or right click on the page, and you have the option to view source code. And you can see all of the code that’s behind
your website, which includes the metadata. So, headings will be listed in your source
code as H1, H2, H3. And these are all really important because
they basically tell Google what the hierarchy of your content is. An H1 is more important than an H2, is more
important than an H3. And, you know, a lot of times, they’re headings,
they’re bolded, so they show how your content is organized on your website. We also have alt text for images. This one is… There’s a little debate about how to do alt
text. I know even among the team here, we might
have a little disagreement about what exactly alt text should be. But let’s say you’ve got a picture right here,
and we’re gonna, you know… Don’t judge my art skills, but we have a tree
with a sun rise in the background. Well, typically, alt text is supposed to describe
exactly what that image is. So, it’s basically describing the image, it’s
not giving any additional information about it. So, you have… The alt text would be, you know, Tree at Sunrise. Now, a lot of times, there’s a deeper meaning
to that image than just what it shows in the physical sense. And so, there’s also another metadata field
that you can add to an image, it’s the long description field. And in the long description field, you can
provide more info about that picture. So, maybe this is a tree at sunrise right
before a rainbow appeared over the Grand Canyon. That would be where you can add content that
would maybe connect that image specifically to the content on your page. Title tags. This is a big one. A lot of the search engines will use different
lengths of title tags, but you wanna keep your title between 60 to 70 characters. And you might wanna do a little research on
these. There’s a lot of speculation that title tags
are changing, that Google is changing how they create title tags for pages. Typically, title tags were given a lot of
weight in search engine rankings and they were used to basically determine the content
of the page. But now, there’s evidence that Google was
possibly creating title tags with additional information from H1s and descriptions. And they may be updating title tags or adding
title tags where there were no title tags before. So, there’s a lot of discussion going on in
the SEO community about that right now. And, you know, some companies will create
title tags for their pages and they’ll render exactly as they listed them, and other companies
will create title tags and they’ll show up slightly different than how they have them
on the page or even completely different. So, that’s, sort of, a controversial item
right now, but just keep your eyes open to see how that discussion progresses. What else is there? We have, basically, all of your main metadata
listed out right here, but what else can influence your SEO? Well, because of how Google is now creating
new snippets, it’s increasingly important to make sure that you have good content on
your page and make sure that you have a great website information architecture. So, basically, what that means is when someone
visits your page, make sure that it’s really easy to find the content that they’re looking
for, your navigation is very intuitive. And a lot of that comes through a wire-framing
process and we do a lot of that work here at The Net Impact. Other things you might look at are ADA compliance
for those with disabilities who might be looking at your website. I think part of that is having your alt tags
filled out, but there’s also a lot more that goes into ADA compliance as well. You wanna make sure that you are minimizing
your validation errors as well. So, if you have a 404 error, page not found,
you wanna make sure that you’re going through and checking your website, and that all of
your links lead to a good page, and that everything is well connected on your website. Finally, your URL. That’s probably one of the hardest things
to change because you have to register a new domain. But make sure that when you’re starting a
webpage or if you’re redoing a website and you can potentially change the URL, make sure
that your URL still fits exactly what you want for your content, and that your URL,
in and of itself, will be intuitive to people who wanna know exactly what to expect to find
on your website. That’s about it for our discussion of search
engine optimization. If you need any additional assistance with
search engine optimization or search engine marketing, please contact The Net Impact. We’ll be happy to help.