If content is entered into a WordPress site and no one finds it, does it make an impact?Optimizing content visibility

Teresa Lane @teresaalane

Image Credit: armedwithvisions.com

What’s Content Visibility?

1. Getting found – relevance, search engine rank, social media,

blogosphere, word of mouth

2. Getting clicked when you are found– relevance, search engine display (page title, meta

description, structured data, Google+)

3. Getting conversions when you’re clicked– relevance, usability, navigability, valuable content

We’re #1!

• Good places to be first:– On the Scene

– In Search Engine Rankings

– In the Hearts of Users

Image Credits: birthdayexpress.com, the1709blog.blogspot.com

Thinking First: Headlines

• EyeTrack III study showed “big, bold” headlines are:– viewed first– most viewed, even above

images• Clear, concise, focused• Start with the punchline

http://blog.crazyegg.com/2012/08/22/website-design-mistakes/http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/08/01/7-conversion-optimization-lessons-learned-from-eye-tracking/http://www.nngroup.com/articles/writing-style-for-print-vs-web/

• Information at the top of the page gets the most attention from users.

• Average user spends 69% of time looking at page’s left side.

• Important content: top of page, first in paragraph, first in sentence

Thinking First: Body Content

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/website-reading/http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/08/01/7-conversion-optimization-lessons-learned-from-eye-tracking/http://www.nngroup.com/articles/writing-style-for-print-vs-web/http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-little-do-users-read/

Visibility in Body Content

• Scannable– Subheadings– Short paragraphs:

3 sentences, 1 topic

http://myblogguest.com/blog/the-art-the-necessity-of-using-subheadings-myblogguest/http://rafaltomal.com/5-easy-tips-to-improve-every-blog-design/http://www.copyblogger.com/formatting-wordpress-posts/

• Give users next steps– No dead ends– Conversion or relevant content

Thinking First: Site Hierarchy

• Site hierarchy/structure often expressed primarily through navigation

• Reflect idea organization in site hierarchy

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/working-with-navigation-in-seohttp://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/site-navigation-for-seo/http://searchengineland.com/how-to-use-effective-navigation-labels-for-search-engine-optimization-76300http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-filing-cabinet-theory-of-site-architecture

Site Structure

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-linkhttp://searchengineland.com/information-architecture-is-crucial-to-good-seo-14736

Home

Main Categories (likely the top-level navigation)

Internal Link

Content can link throughout the structure but lives in only one place to avoid duplicate content

Site Structure: URLs

• Keyword-focused page names are friendly for users and search engines

• Tailor your permalinks (change the default)– Post Name (/%postname%/) usually best practice

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-cheat-sheet-anatomy-of-a-urlhttp://searchenginewatch.com/article/2262638/5-Basic-Tips-to-Improve-WordPress-for-SEO-and-the-User-Experience

Topic Structure

http://http://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-vs-deep-hierarchy/

Home

Categories: “Big,” Top-Level Topics, Likely General

Link = Topical Relationship

Content on specific subtopics that gets down into the nitty gritty, interlinks to promote next steps

• What you want your site to be visible for• Queries that users type into search engines– Tap expressed interests– Deliver what users are looking for

• For inspiration:– Article topics– Updating existing content– Creating categories or sections of content– Targeting social media

• Remember: put keywords first!

Keywords

Image credit: bubblews.com

Keyword Research Sources

• http://www.google.com/insights/• http://www.google.com/trends/ • http://www.semrush.com/• Google search with ~keyword to see terms

Google considers synonyms (resulting SERP shows related words in bold)

• http://www.youtube.com/keyword_tool• Analytics, Webmaster Tools, keyword lists

The Optimized Page

Midwest College

_______ Midwestcollege _______.The university ____________________________ schoolin the Midwest.

Choosing a Midwestern College__________________________________ St. Louis, Missouri colleges. _________________.

Photo with Alt Tag:

Midwest college campus

Discover the Midwest college you're looking for at University of the Middle, a Midwestern school offering students the right education for today's world.

Midwest College| University of the Middle

http://www.middle.edu/prospective-students/midwest-college/URLTitle Tag

Meta Description

H1 Tag

Image Alt Tag

H2 Tag

Body Content

Author Authority

• Identify article or post’s author whenever possible

– Link to author profile on your site

http://searchengineland.com/secret-staying-relevant-authorship-184815https://plus.google.com/authorship

Author Authority

• Connect author identification with Google+ profile

• Optimize Google+ profile (good headshot photo, be in circles with influencers, be active, etc.)

– (rel=“author”) tag<a href="https://plus.google.com/Profile?rel=author">Google</a>

– link from Google+ profilehttp://searchengineland.com/secret-staying-relevant-authorship-184815https://plus.google.com/authorshiphttps://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2539557?hl=en

Duplicate Content

• Duplicate content can hinder findability, user comprehension and trust

• Can make search engines unable to distinguish the most relevant content, causing them not to display any of the site’s content in search results

• The essential rule: every URL must contain unique, valuable content.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-worldhttp://meetcontent.com/blog/duplicate-content-bad-web/

Sitemaps

HTML Sitemap XML Sitemap• Made for users to navigate• No more than ~100 URLs• Use global <a href> format

• Helps spiders find more pages• Uploaded to the root directory• Submitted to Webmaster Tools

http://www.w3.org/Consortium/siteindex http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

http://www.sitemaps.org/http://www.seomoz.org/q/big-site-seo-to-maintain-html-sitemaps-or-scrap-them-in-the-era-of-xml

Other XML Sitemaps

• News http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=2527688

• Video http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472

http://wordpress.org/plugins/xml-sitemaps-for-videos/

• Mobile http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=8493

http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-mobile-sitemap/

• Images http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=178636

http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-image-sitemap/

• Tools for Building Sitemaps– Yoast SEO Plug-In– http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/bing-sitemap-plugin-beta-f50bebf5– http://code.google.com/p/googlesitemapgenerator/– http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/– http://gsitecrawler.com/– http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

http://searchengineland.com/a-primer-on-how-to-get-the-most-out-of-sitemaps-152092http://www.seomoz.org/blog/do-sitemaps-effect-crawlers

More Than Words…

Video

Images

News

Information pulled from the web

Social Media

Images

• Search engines can’t “see” images when crawling a page.– Use descriptive, keyword-focused alt text (alt=“”) – Descriptive file names

• Alt tags for usability and ADA compliance

(e.g., screen readers)

Fill it in!

Video

• Drives user engagement• Social/community• Visibility in SERP • Titles, descriptions,

transcripts• Video page is a

“normal” page

Visibility across Devices

• Optimize for mobile– Let your site be wherever your users are

• Responsive design goes with the flow– Show essentially the same content to all users, no

matter where they’re looking

• Quick-loading site = good user experience• Lower bounce rates• Ranking factor, helps spiders to index more

content• Just a couple of the many ways

to prepare content for speed:– Optimize images– Enable compression

Page Speed

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/optimizing-page-speed-actionable-tips-for-seos-and-web-developershttp://www.mattcutts.com/blog/site-speed/

Leverage Monitoring

• Monitoring a site alerts you when something is wrong.

• Monitor internal search queries and organic search queries for new content ideas

http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/beating-the-panda-diagnosing-and-rescuing-a-clients-traffic/http://searchengineland.com/the-seo-guide-to-getting-started-with-google-webmaster-tools-150345http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-updated-guide-to-google-webmaster-toolshttp://searchengineland.com/deep-dive-into-bing-webmaster-tools-part-1-137778

Teresa Lane @teresaalane

Image Credit: armedwithvisions.com

Content must, ultimately, be great!