Search Engine OptimisationSEO for tourism businesses – Part 2
Hi Good Morning and welcome to this sixth in a series of webinars delivered by VisitScotland in conjunction with Business Gateway's Digital Boost program my name is Andrew Craig from VisitScotland and today's session is part of a recovery program a recovery package of webinars aimed at giving digital support to tourism businesses and once again this week we're joined by Gary Ennis from NS Design in Glasgow a company that offers social media and digital skills training if you remember who were here last week last Wednesday Gary led part one on search engine optimisation for tourism businesses and he's leading again today as we delve a little bit further into the world of seo a few intimation reminders as we before we kick things off you're all in microphone webcam off mode and we'll be as per usual we'll be distributing a link to the pdf version of the presentation Gary’s presentation later on and during the session as well as asking for your feedback via a link that you'll see later on and we'll put out via the chat functionality of go to webinar later on the session as well if you have any queries about any aspects of search engine optimisation then as usual you can ask them via the questions tab in your go to webinar control panel and as this is the same as last week this is a 90 minute session today and we'll spend 10 to 15 minutes at the end sort of around a quarter to one Gary will finish up and we'll spend 10 to 15 minutes discussing any questions on search engine optimisation that you have and again we're offering the opportunity for participants to take part in a free VisitScotland digital review with one of our industry relationship managers these reviews will assess many elements of your digital output including I suppose not limited to social media online bookings your social media press sorry your presence on search engines and your website performance itself and a sign up opportunity for that will come as soon as you leave today's session you'll a little notification will pop up in your screen and ask if you want to participate in one of these digital reviews if you've already signed up previously you don't need to sign up again what we would say is if you're signing up you do need to remember that it will be the onus will be on you to take action as a result of the review itself and you do need to be a tourism business and it's open to all tourism businesses in Scotland and then finally just before I let I hand things over to Gary a quick screenshot of the digital based homepage program delivers a lot of free services including up to 21 hours of one-to-one specialist digital support and as well as workshops and webinars and being advertised there on begateway.com show boost you can book places on the website there on a lot of upcoming web webinars and you can also look at a bunch of online guides on I think it's 21 digital topics and video tutorials on a further nine digital topics so that's enough for me as per usual I speak too long I will hand things over to Gary who's here representing ns design and he's going to lead at today's session Gary over to you and i'll just make sure that you can thank you Andrew wait and i'll just quickly take control of the screen when I can there we go let me just that that should be us now are you seeing the agenda Andrew if you can just confirm that and i'll crack her in oh good well thank you very much right well again as Andrew has just said thank you to everyone who attended last week I know there's a few names that are here again today so hopefully I didn't put you off too much thank you also for some great feedback on last week as well which we've had a little look at if you're here today for the first time didn't attend last session's seo part one but you're here for seo part two don't panic you'll learn a lot of good things today and what I would suggest and i'll remind you of all of this at the very end as well I would suggest that you go and re-watch the the video that we recorded last week and kind of catch up so that you're kind of covering all the seo aspects not just what we're going to look at today so today's agenda very quickly an awareness of some of the technical factors regarding seo last time last week we looked at they can have what we call the on page seo the keywords the content today we're moving away from that to talk about the technical side and it will be a wee bit geeky at times but I promise to make it understandable depending on the level that you're at on all of this so some of the technical issues we'll look at some of the off page seo again i'll explain all of what that means later on in essence that means the things that the other people do away from your site your web pages etc we'll look at the importance of local seo the fact that many locals are looking for your business and how do we attract them for the right reasons and that will then lead us into the latter part of today's session which is all around google my business and making sure that you have a google my business profile you're actually using it and have optimized it to best suit you again all with the goal of driving awareness visibility traffic about you your business your website again all part of the seo remit this slide I i'll be very quick on I showed this last week again just to confirm last week we looked at the off page element sorry the on page element my apologies of seo the content the how you write things the words you use your choice of keywords again if you didn't attend last week's session I do strongly recommend that you revisit that because it is the kind of the heart of seo you know what you should do before you tackle maybe some of the things we're going to look at today as I say we're moving on to some of the more technical and off-page stuff so back links technical setup local and making sure things were kind of mobile and how that influences google and so on so just a reminder based on the slide I showed last week again i'll spend no time over this I showed this last week as well what is seo what is search engine optimisation let's not use jargon we shouldn't use acronyms without making sure everybody knows what they mean well there's the google the Wikipedia definition of seo at the top and in other words underneath my own definition it's about convincing google to get our website higher up the rankings when the right people search for the right things so that we get more right traffic leading to the potential of business now again I kind of stress that and expand on it a little bit in the recorded session from last week so you can go and have a little look at that when you get the chance a little reminder to all of you before we crack on if there are any questions please just ask away and the question section of go to webinar Andrew will be keeping an eye on that and he will be interrupting me if there's any pertinent questions coming in and of course we will be dealing with questions at the end as well so if you've got anything you want from today under the banner of seo please just ask away so let's get technical I think that was a song from Olivia newton john it was a lot of physical I can't remember so let's move on to the technical side of social media and let's start with a little bit of are you even there in the first place question you know all of this good stuff we looked at last week other things we will look at shortly none of that is in any way worthwhile doing unless of course you're you have the chance of google returning your website in what they call their index so here's a little thing that you should all try and again you can do this while i'm talking to you live if you're if you're feeling like multitasking if not revisit these slides later on and go through this in a wee bit of detail you want to make sure that you are listed on google now the one exception here is if you're a brand new website you've only just launched the thing last week Google’s not yet the chance to find you to index you i'll steer you on that side of things in just a second but the big danger is that you're not on google for a very particular reason and until you change such things you might never be on google so if you go to a google web browser yeah again I won't do this live i'll just use my slides for just now and you and you type into the search box site s-I-t-e colon and then your domain name so the example on the right site colon visit scotland.com and you should see something like that you should see the pages of your website coming up in a google search results box with the URL with the title with the snippet or the meta description we talked about all of this and a wee bit of detail last week and that's an indication that google has your website in its index therefore could be delivered to somebody searching using relevant keywords okay if you don't see that if instead you see nothing or nearly all or most of your pages missing or you just see something like this and I should just warn visit Scotland and the guys from visit Scotland with us today I mocked this up so don't worry this isn't what it shows when you search for visit Scotland and if you see maybe just the domain name and just a very generic title usually related to the name of the business and underneath that we usually get a nice little description it says no information available learn why if you see that then don't quite panic but you have a problem and it's usually because you're using what's called a robot.txt file now again this is a wee bit geeky as I’ve already said a little reminder to you as per last week there are kind of links on all of these slides for more detail for more in-depth awareness about all of the topics i'm going to cover today but what I mean by a robot.txt file well these things are usually
added to a website on purposely usually for a good reason to hide certain pages or indeed your entire website itself and often they are done depending on you know who's built your website if you're getting a web development company to build it sometimes they will add what's called the robot.txt file because they don't want google looking at your site while it's under development and that kind of makes sense you know the pages are half built the content is just kind of mocked up there's no actual you don't want to indexing the wrong content or fake content or content which isn't finalized yet so the developer will sometimes drop in a robot.txt file the problem is and I’ve seen this so many times I mean it's ridiculous but true that if they then forget to remove it you've got a live site people can access it people can type it in manually they can visit all your pages but google is being told not to index the site it's been told to hide the page you not have you in their index so a quick check on this and we'll quickly move away because i'm focusing on the negative here but I’ve seen this so many times that I want to just make sure this was introduced right at the start a quick check is if you go to your domain name in a browser and you add on slash robot.txt and you know what i'll quickly do this live let me just bring over the ns design website so here's my own website and this design call uk and i'll add in slash robots.txt and up comes an actual let me just zoom in on this just a little bit up comes an actual file it doesn't say 404 it doesn't say file not found it actually gives a robot text because I am actually using one to not block google from my entire website but to tell google not to have certain things in the results that I don't think are actually worthy of anybody ever finding in google results so I’ve got a couple of files a couple of pages that are kind of pretty pointless it's mainly just for people who are looking for our stuff on email consent and there's a whole category of stuff that we used to do which have now blocked the whole category and also that last one don't ask me why i'm blocking the Gary and Jan page I really don't know I need to check myself to be honest there's nothing dubious I promise and but one of the things I am blocking is the WordPress admin system because why would I want google to ever return my back-end CMS login page you know here's Gary’s login to you why would why would I ever what so i'm telling google to disallow it okay disallowed this allowed to slow but on the whole i'm saying allow everything else okay so i'm using a robot's text file not in any great detail and really it's just to kind of tell google to block a few things what you will see is something very similar or you'll maybe see a photo 404 file not found you're not using one at all and that's fine because by not having one you're basically telling google that you're not blocking anything worst case scenario you see something like this on the right of the screen user agent star that just means telling every search engine so google Bing and you know yahoo so every search engine disallow everything the slash means everything the slash is basically means your domain name and everything under it so if you see something like that and as I say as daft as it sounds I’ve seen that on so many live websites who are then asking me why does google not ever show me you know I’ve done all you've told me I did my keywords I’ve done all my technical I’ve done and they've left a robot text file live and basically google is doing what it's told not indexing anything it's being disallowed access to everything on this site so I just wanted to start with that hopefully nearly all of you when you go and check you don't have one or indeed you are allowing access rather than disallowing access to everything but it is important and I do see that a lot so what I want to move on and talk about is if that's how you kind of tell google not to index you how do you tell google to index you now there are a few ways to do it the simplest way and actually the way that you can and kind of take maybe a more hands-off approach and just let it happen on it by itself is to make sure that you are using a google site map now by a google site map I don't mean a link in the footer of your email and sorry in the footer of your website which is just another page for the for the users of your website with links to all of the other pages and again you'll see many websites with exactly that I mean a google site map which again is quite a geeky file written for google not for the general public that you can give to google and it will be aware of all of the pages that exist on your website and you're telling google to go and look at them go and index them go and look at all the keywords go and analyse my titles my headers all of the things we covered last time but the keyword density and my body text that goes and indexes all of that and decides whether or not you have authority on certain keywords again just to revisit a little bit of last week and rather than me just tell you a little bit more about sitemaps I want to quickly just to give you another voice to listen to i'm going to quickly play a little video hi i'm Daniel Weisberg search advocate at google and today i'll talk about how to use the search console sitemaps report by the end of this video you should be able to understand what a sitemap is decide whether you need one or not and learn how to submit a sitemap and track its status using search console a sitemap is a signal about which URLs you would like google to crawl on your site it may provide information on URLs that were recently created or modified and give us some extra information about them google supports four main ways for you to provide additional information you can extend a URL with images included in it you can also extend the URL with videos included in it you can include information about alternate languages or country versions with reflag annotations and finally for new sites you can use a special variation of sitemaps to give us information about the most recent updates note that this information won't necessarily be highlighted on search console but you can still provide it in your sitemap but if I don't have a sitemap will google find all my pages i'm glad you asked john usually if you have a relatively small website and your pages are properly linked Googlebot can discover your content so you don't need to worry about a sitemap however if your site meets one of the following criteria a sitemap might help google decide what and when to crawl your website if your site is really large a sitemap will help google prioritize the URLs to crawl if your pages are isolated or not well linked to each other a sitemap might help google find those pages if your site is new or it has a lot of quickly changing content such as a nil’s website a sitemap will help google discover your content please remember that using a sitemap doesn't guarantee that all your pages will be crawled and indexed but in most cases your site will benefit from having a sitemap and there is no disadvantage for having one in addition sitemaps don't replace normal crawling and not including URLs in a sitemap won't result in those URLs no longer being crawled interesting I might need a sitemap but how can I create one another great question john ideally the system running your website will make sitemap files for you automatically for example you can find a WordPress plugin or Drupal extension if you use those content management systems check the documentation from your provider as every platform is slightly different we recommend finding a way to automatically generate sitemaps rather than creating them manually usually this will involve running code on your server so if you're not a developer you might need help from one there are limits to the number of URLs and the maximum size of a sitemap file i'm going to pause it there because that's all we need to show for today if you need more space sorry let me just close him down so again it was a little bit geeky and it's always good to see somebody present and be even more cheesier than me which is a bonus from my perspective here's just a quick summary of what Daniel just said to you okay a site map is essentially just a list of your pages and not having one shouldn't impact small sites if you're a very small website with just five pages a home page and about us page a services page a contact us page and one other page that I can't think of if you're just a small set as long as those are clearly linked as long as you've got a good navigation structure and every page is clearly linked from the home page then google will probably find your website and crawl it will send out what it calls its spider to follow the little links and to index all of your small volume of pages because they're easily carefully linked together if you're a large website with you know tens fifty hundreds of pages or more and then not every page is easily linked not every page is certainly linked to the home page some pages might not be linked at all what we'll often call an orphaned page so I’ve got a particular page but I don't really have any links to it so how's google ever going to find it so under those conditions a site map is always a good thing to do and I personally myself think that even small to medium websites will benefit from a site map because you'll always be telling google to look at all of your pages to index them to get them onto the google results page and to tell google about these things in just a wee bit more detail now also what Daniel said he says you don't want to be creating these things manually because they are quite geeky files you want to have them generated automatically and if you use something like WordPress my advice would be looking at it and I think we talked about this last week the yoast plug-in yoast y-o-e-s-t is a plug-in for WordPress which makes WordPress that a little bit more seo friendly and one of the things yours does is create your site maps for you and then what you do once you've got this link to a site map is you submit it to google search console so I want to just quickly show you where you would do that in google search console just in case this helps in previous visit Scotland digital boost webinars we have talked about google search console in a little bit of detail and so here's me logged into my own google search console you should have one for yourself for your own website and if I scroll down to the site map section of google search console it basically because I’ve already submitted one there is what looks like my set my site map if I just go into here and click this and show you so there it is I I’ve submitted in actual fact what use produces is a number of site maps one for your pages one for your blog posts one for your events if you're running an event plug-in type of thing the point is it's generating these pages for you manually and if I just quickly show you what one of these things looks like just to show you it's fairly geeky ns design cool uk slash oh randomly typing in nonsense here bear with me should have prepared this in advance let me just go and grab the link it's page sitemap.xml let me just go and grab that
and paste it in there we go so it looks like this and this is why you don't so there's the main pages on our website we have 12 main pages we also have you know 3 000 blog posts written over the last 20 odd years so there's the 12 links to the pages there's the 3 000 links to the blog post there's the 64 links to the events and as you can see it's not just a link to the actual page itself it shows us when it's last modified it tells google if there's any obvious images on there and so suddenly you create these things via yoast or some other system of your own choosing and then you upload them into a google search console it through what's called the site maps section and basically what you're telling google is here are all of my pages when they were last updated kind of what's in them a summary etc go and look at them go and index them and so you know that if you create a blog post today then your site map will be automatically generated almost immediately because that's what you know that the systems tend to do and google search console because it knows where to go and look it will look every so often you can see that my google search console last looked at my site maps back in July at end of July so maybe I’ve done a wee update since then and it will look in the next day or so i'm certain and now google has all of that data in it knows about every one of my pages again wee bit maybe time to take your head to get around all of this but it's really important it's important we understand robot.txt how to block google how to tell google not to index things and making sure we're not doing it accidentally and it's more so important to understand how to tell google here is here are the pages that I want you to index I want you to look at that I want you to return to people because if google has none of that done if it's not able to find our pages if you haven't properly linked your files your pages together and it's hitting kind of these blank orphan pages it's not able to reach them then you might have a lot of great content that will never be returned to google because that's how it does it does it via you telling it what to allow and what to block sitemaps and robot.txt files important stuff bit technical bit geeky but hopefully that's been beneficial to you let's move on to deal with some easier concepts things that you can all get to grips with very quickly and the first thing I want to mention is the need for speed you can insert your your movie quote of choice in there and you can tell i'm a big top gun fan sad but true let me want to talk about speed google ranks websites that are faster higher okay now it's not quite as black and white as that but today i'm going to say it is if my website is identical to your website and we are optimizing for the same keywords and we are basically about the same thing and you came to last week's session two and you know all about your title optimisation and your body text and all other things being equal if my website's faster i'm going to appear higher and the reason is google wants to deliver a good fast convenient you know you know suitable experience that don't have people fed up waiting for your site to appear so general advice is your site should load under three seconds repeat visits even faster and i'll explain why in just a second so again do you know it's a rhetorical question you can chat to me in the chat box if you like you can ask any questions of your own if you want in the questions box do you know how long your site takes to load because you should and there are some easy ways to go and test it on this slide there are a few links to some things which you should definitely play with later on i'm going to go and play with the google the top link just now i'm going to show you this live just in case you want to play with it as well let me go and paste it into the chat box so that if you if you like you can give that a click well let me just send that to everyone rather sorry there we go there we go let me show you what this looks like this is the google page speed tool and if I go and just search for my own domain name i'll just make my life easier and I won't embarrass anyone too much today by being overly critical then this this returns quite a again quite a geeky detailed there'll be things on the on the on the results page you maybe don't quite understand i'll talk about some of them but what it does give you quite nicely is a nice score now straight away you can see that oh my goodness Gary’s website is only a 59. 59 out of 100. you
know i'm not gonna lie I’d like to be a hundred out of a hundred and notice it breaks it down over mobile speed and desktop speed if I change the desktop speed i'm a lot better i'm a 92 and it's basically kind of warning me that maybe my website has a few biggest images maybe my website from a mobile perspective people loading it up on a 3g or a 4g phone maybe it's acceptable on desktop the speeds but on mobile certainly room for improvement now what I like to do at this stage is pause and say nobody panic depending on what your speed number is what your speed score is because this is all comparative so if I if I am you know I i'll just go with the number if i'm a 59 that only really matters if other people around about me on google i.e my competitor type businesses those people who could be above me that only really matters if they are higher than 59 so one of the things I urge you to do when you're doing tests on your own website is do similar tests on your competitor websites do similar tests on the businesses which are appearing above and below you on google and if every one of your competitors in my case is a 40-something I don't really need to I guess of course I’d love to get higher and higher and higher but I don't really need to obsess over changing this because i'm faster than they are because this is about google putting me ahead of other people doing similar things when somebody's googling for it so don't panic use it as a nice little benchmark and use it to go and kind of compare others and just be aware as to where you sit comparatively to everyone else so that's the kind of google what they call the page speed insights test what you might also want to do is play with the next link as well it's called the think with google test and it gives you a kind of I don't mean this badly it kind of dumbs it down a little bit more it basically says slow medium fast type of thing but it also gives you the capability to download a free report from google with loads of great advice as to how to speed things up so there's loads of places where you can go and test the speed of your website the third little link on there is a is a free tool again you do need to create an account with it if you want to change server so you can use gt metrics to do some very clever things if you know that most of your customers are from the united states or Australia or you know Canada or china you can actually isolate the tests to people under those conditions you can choose American servers you can choose Canadian servers so again this is all about having a real understanding of your customer we talked a lot about this last week understanding the customer their behaviour where they are where they're from how they do things so the gt metrics tool is a nice one to go and do speed tests from different locations to check that you are comparatively faster than some of your competing businesses that you that you want to do better than on google so do some speed tests again you know running your site through some of these and nice little simple test sites they give you some ideas for improvement some of the things that they suggest you do that's kind of top tips at the bottom of the screen they suggest that you very much start by doing the obvious thing which is reducing your image size often a slow website is caused by big images big images that you've maybe taken off your mobile phone because that's capable of producing some very large file sizes and high quality images that you've uploaded but so you've uploaded this huge pixel size huge resolution image which actually is going to be showing quite small on your website and especially when that website is viewed on a mobile phone so you want to make sure your images are optimized sometimes you can do this automatically through clever plugins for your website or your WordPress or again depending if you're if you're a photoshop wizard then you'll know how to do this yourself on the assumption that many of you aren't that there are tools nice and easy free tools to allow you to do some of this yourself and let me just demonstrate the link that's on the slides right now reduce images i'm just going to quickly show you this it's the free simple little tool an online based tool so here is here is the website reduce images and as it says it says drag in your image so i'm just going to go and get a bit of a cheesy image of me so first thing i'll show you i'll actually show you this image of me so you can see what it is there's there you go there's me sitting with my very cheeky t-shirt on about to start a digital boost webinar so that's the image which is too big and it is too big because you see when I drag it in if I just drag it into here it says it's one megabyte in size and it's 2 800 pixels length and breadth it's a big sizable image i'm probably going to show this on one page of my website maybe on my blog it's going to be showing you know a fraction of that size and that's a megabyte somebody needs to download which doesn't sound very much if they're on a high speed broadband but if they're on their mobile phone if they're on 3g Google’s not gonna like it so that's me uploaded it then using this free tool I can go and reduce the size i'll make it 70 percent of the size that which will bring the file size down a little bit I could probably go a lot more than that I will change the quality of it to 60 because at the moment it's a big high resolution image and i'll click on the resize button and for free very quickly there we go it's now done it it's now created the image which is available for me to download it started at 1.1 megabyte it's now telling me it's 300 kilobytes so it's under a third is a third of the of the file size and if I click it just to prove to you here is the tweaked image very quickly for free much smaller size much a smaller resolution and as you can see it looks almost identical to the original why because it didn't need to be that big and high resolution etc so go and play with tools like this go and learn how to use photoshop and Canva and any other image manipulation tool and get better at optimizing your website content especially your images okay that's usually the thing which can slow an awful lot of websites down dramatically other things to consider and again i'll just introduce these to you today I won't go into them in too much detail because again they're fairly complex fairly geeky it says there you consider using caching and minify your website code again if this this means something to you great because you've already looked into it you're already doing it again my advice to you if you're using a particular system CMS system content management system like WordPress or whatever let's go and investigate caching plugins or minify plugins what these things do is they crunch down the code okay they crunch them so a minify plugin basically takes all of this nicely formatted code gets rid of all the empty blank spaces all the things which aren't actually required and crunches it down to the bare minimum code which I won't lie when you go and look at the code if you're ever so inclined it makes it a nightmare to work with because it's basically all on one big line there's no line breaks there's no spacing but from Google’s perspective you've crunched the file size down to the bare minimum which means a much faster website attaching is quite similar caching is all about making sure that somebody visits your website and this is what I said earlier on at the top of the slide repeat visits should be faster caching makes repeat visits faster caching basically means when somebody comes for a second time to visit your website they don't need to download everything again your website is not telling them they go and grab all these images again you've already got and it's telling the visitor that they don't need to go and do the database lookup again because they've just done it and so they're basically kind of pulling static content or indeed not pulling anything because it's there it's already on their systems so caching is all about just improving the efficiency for repeat visits and again you can usually massively improve websites by installing caching and functionality caching again it's a whole topic in its own right but be aware of it maybe do some investigation other things you might want to consider what's called a cdn a content delivery network again a little bit advanced this one but if you're at this stage it's worthy of mentioning because it can make a huge difference to speed the principle here is you're not hosting your content just in one location you're hosting your content on multiple locations how is that possible well you host your images on a uk server an American server a new Zealand server using a content delivery network provider there are many of them and what that means is if somebody from new Zealand is looking at your website they are pulling an awful lot of the content from much closer to them they don't need to come all the way to the uk to get the data off that server to pull it back over the internet they're getting it much more localized to them and again a cdn is certainly something you should consider if you know if you're a big website if you're trying to really push the boundaries in terms of optimisation that can make a big difference and as I’ve already said all of this chat around faster websites you should always compare against competitor you know don't obsess over oh my goodness i'm only a 57 I want to be a hundred at 57 only matters if everybody is above 57 you know for our the competing businesses that you're trying to make sure that you are ranking higher van so again I hope this is all making sense but speed is important google wants fast websites and you should certainly do all you can to technically optimize for speed my top tip start with your images always start with your images go and go and go and look at every image on your website go and go and run your run your website through one of these reports and it will probably flag up you have a lot of big images and you probably don't need half of them reduce them compress them optimize them makes a big difference if you want a real further boost the speed and again this is just an introduction to this because again it's far too complex to talk about in the time we have available you could consider implementing amp emp accelerated mobile pages the amp was developed by google it's now used in a variety of guises elsewhere Facebook have a version of it themselves and basically what this means is if google detects somebody is on google on a mobile phone and they're about to click through to your website on their mobile phone they could just send them the actual page which might be quite big and big images and too much code and all these other things that we've just talked about or if it exists it could give them the amp page the emp the accelerated mobile page and these are things that again you can create yourself manually don't do that it's incredibly complex you will definitely want to look to generate these automatically again depending on the content management system you're using you can maybe get a plug-in for it or there's maybe an option for it again I know I keep mentioning WordPress because it's the site the system I use myself loads of great plugins to do loads of great additional things one of them is to create amp pages for all pages of my website which means if somebody from google search comes on a mobile when they click the link to my website it returns almost instantaneously to them and the reason is Google’s already fetched the content in advance it's being served from google they're pre-loaded now the example to show you is on the screen on the left on my mobile on a mobile phone interface is the actual page with a slightly better design which is with this you know there's my cookie checker at the bottom of it and there's my full menu and on the right is the amp page and it's been stripped back it's just mainly text and there's one image which has been compressed to be really small the interface is gone there's no there's no clicks to the rest of the navigation so i'm missing out a little bit on people getting the full experience of my content and the rest of my website but I am massively telling google that you probably want to favour my content because it's going to load instantly for your users so you might want to investigate emp again it's kind of pushing the boundaries even more so but it does make a huge difference to the whole concept of speed because arguably it's loading instantly rather than causing any delay whatsoever because it's being served by google themselves notice that was very much focusing on the mobile okay this is google created these amp pages because of delivering a faster mobile experience and google have gone what we now see is mobile first google is basically looking at your mobile version of your website to rank you so the point here is if you don't have a well optimized mobile website using what we often call responsive design and poor old unicorn paddle let me just use them as my quick example here you know there's unicorn paddle on the on the left there on our kind of typical mobile phone interface and you can see that it's all kind of squished and minimized and all the whole page is kind of reduced in size so that it fits the problem with that is the font size is tiny it's very illegible I can't click on the navigation it's a difficult site to use and compare that to rugged paddle okay rugged paddle well they're based in Glencoe very similar business immediately it looks like it is going to work better for me on a mobile phone lovely big image optimized to the size of the mobile phone screen I can do what I call thumb scrolling on this one where I can easily scroll down and click big buttons with my big clunky thumb the navigations the nice little pull-down menu at the top those three lines what we call the burger icon and suddenly because they are using a mobile responsive and web design maybe it's a template maybe they've designed it themselves maybe they had a developer maybe it's a WordPress you know theme they are going to get a higher score on google not because of all the things we previously talked about but simply because they work better on a mobile so my point here is are you checking your website on mobile are you checking Google’s mobile test so again let me just quickly paste in this link for you into the chat box just in case any of you want to play with it it's dead simple it basically gives you a yes no let me just type this into here again it tells you whether your website is mobile friendly whether it's going to rank highly under the mobile criteria or whether it's not mobile friendly therefore work to do before google really like you because google has gone mobile first you can check via the mobile friendly test you can also again here's me mentioning it another time search console google search console you'd probably guess by now if you don't have a google search console account you are missing out there's loads of clever analytical type information and data in search console one of them is google analysing your website to warn you against any pages which are problematic on mobile devices and if you have any pages which have mobile errors or warnings you want to address these because all you're doing is technically telling google that you haven't bothered you bothered your backside enough to do any of this technical stuff therefore it's going to creep down the rankings you want to make sure it's mobile fast works well seamless experience for all of your customers so do some checking and if you do go and check on search call as I say the good news is it will give you a hint so tell you know what you say doesn't work you know search console especially will give you some errors and give you know a bit of detail on them well what does that you know your text is too small to read the navigation is too close together your clickable elements can't be clicked by people's thumbs the content is wider than the screen that usually means you've got some horizontal scrolling let alone vertical scrolling which is a big mono on a mobile so all of that information and guidance is in there for you depending on the system you're using and again a wee reminder to all of you there are detailed links throughout all of these slides if you want more on this if you want more detail if you want to kind of obsess over some of this stuff and you know get all geeky on it like I like I take pleasure in doing then please feel free to do more reading do more research follow up via these links and just make your site better okay um should the amp page so the accelerated mobile pages the age look as appealing as nice as the original website no it shouldn't and that's the whole point of an amp page and again this is why some people take the view of not using them me i'm more they can as you've discovered i'm more like of geeky analytical I want you know the optimal some people choose not to use them because oh they don't look as good and they don't look as good it strips out the interface it strips out the nice design it strips out some of your font choices etc and what it only returns is not quite but i'll say it like this is pure content somebody googled to get some good content here is the content being given to that given to them as fast as we possibly can and so it will look up like a much more basic page as I say again i'll gladly share some of the way we create amp pages of our blog posts no of the other pages of our websites so if somebody goes to visit our home page from a google mobile they get the fully featured all singing all dance and designed home page because from there I want them to understand us our brand visit the rest of the pages learn about if somebody is googling something which ultimately is resulting in a click directly to a blog page they want to read the blog so I create amp pages of all of our blogs because i just want to get them up quickly easily i've now satisfied the need for them to consume that content and the blog pages as a result are going to be featured higher on google than not doing it like that so I hope that's answered the question that it's they're not for everyone and it is about you obsessing over speed and how you choose to use them is up to you but it will scale back the design a whole lot so if that annoys you maybe don't even entertain them but if it's about saving content quickly there's nothing comes closer in terms of the increase in speed okay so thank you for that Andrew if there's any other questions please just ask away i'm going to quickly move on we're going to look at a few other technical issues and then we're going to move on to other topics just a little time what else is google looking to see google is looking to see security and web accessibility what I mean by security you all kind of know what I mean by this they're looking to see the we padlock the https i'll make an assumption that nearly all of you are running secure websites these days okay normally hosting providers now make it default not all of them though okay so if you are and again I hate doing this but i'll quickly i'll quickly use an example just to show you poor old brave you guest house and layer week here is here is the lyric guest house again we could debate all day long the kind of quality of the website we'll leave that for another day the point is hopefully you can see this up at the top in the web browser preview guesthouse. Cool uk
and the browser is warning me this site is not secure the browser has won it and if I click on that not secure link it says it flashes it all up almost in red hey be careful entering data here this is not secure it warns me about passwords and click oh my goodness it's freaking me out okay and some people are a little bit wary and some people would literally take that you know word per word then go oh my goodness the preview guess the house is insecure i'm not booking with them closed down going all because of google the chrome browser all of the browsers do it warning you that a site is not secure listen it's important for your users to get trust and reassurance it's also important for google uses security as a ranking factor so if you're not running an https website if you're not running out if the vpadlock is not appearing in the browser when I visit your website you are repeating lower in the rankings than you need to be irrespective of anything else because security is part of the ranking and so having a secure web address increases you in the ranking and let's just very quickly make a comment on all aspects of your website should be secure one of the worst things you can do to absolutely plummet in google rankings all of this good work that you've been doing hey good i'm now on page one and i'm doing really well and it's past me like oh I blew my bombs why did I bomb because google detected your website got hacked google detected the actual content on your website was compromised so while that's a whole topic in its own right you know when it comes to security google prioritizes security so make sure that your own website your own content management system your own password is strong and you're applying all these updates and patches and because security is vital in Google’s eyes not just in customer eyes other things which you should definitely be aware of i'm not going to go into any of the detail today because it's again a whole other topic web accessibility again good websites should be built for all users many of you will be familiar with things like the disability discrimination act which basically says you know if a wheelchair user has a challenge getting up the big steps of your guest house then that's a bit of a problem you should try and make efforts to put in a ramp or make it easier for them etc well the reality is web accessibility applies to the digital world as well and so you can check your website so that people with visual impairments or heating impairments or motor skills issues you can check your website for some of the basics to make sure that it's going to be usable by people with accessibility or disability issues and again there's a link to some of the kind of trusted checkers etc and links to more on accessibility on these slides if you want a little bit more than that one of the basic things you can do with the guard accessibility you might remember this slide if you were here last week I showed you this about where to start applying some of your keyword research well I want to quickly zone in on the out tags remember we talked about this last week alternative text descriptions for images if you don't have out tags on your images that's a big no-no from an accessibility point of view and it's also a big no-no as we talked about last week i'm going to quickly expand on that now from Google’s point of view so why should you have one well from an accessibility point of view if you just have an image that I can't see because i'm blind I don't know that that's a picture of a kid skiing lesson on the cairngorms I don't know that because i'm blind I can't see the image and you have no text alternative so google doesn't like that from an accessibility point of view google also doesn't like that from an seo optimisation keyword authority point of view so if you really want to push the boundaries with regard optimizing your images so that your whole website gets better a boost for certain keywords and phrases all the things we talked about last week and maybe actually the image itself again we haven't really mentioned this last week or we probably won't mention it much today but you'll know that google is what I call a variety of vertical search engines it's made up of different search engines and one of the kind of search engines within google is the image search you can do an image search on google and if you use good out tags on your images your images might start appearing on google image search so here's just a few things you can start to do to really push the boundary worst case scenario is this is what it looks like in the code i've uploaded an image from my mobile phone onto my website on my mobile phone it was called df00121.jpg and i've uploaded it like that and given it zero out tag tells google nothing better seo optimisation well it's still called the same file because it's still that same file name and i've used the out tag cairngorms at least i've called it cairngorms at least it's now got a little bit more of a keyword density a little bit more of a mention of a word which somebody might search for the image i'm now telling google is about Cairngorms you want to get better at this you go the extra mile you rename the actual file name before you link to that file name so instead of df00121 it's now called cairngorms.jpg and my alternative text becomes a little bit more detailed describe the image not just some so family skiing can dorms that is now a nicely optimized image and that will do you no harm whatsoever in terms of google ranking etc if you want to almost go the professional seo route again you make it even better the image is called cairngorm license.jpg there is keywords in the actual file name now
reinforcing to google this is an image about Kieran ski lessons reinforced by the alternative text family ski lessons at cairngorms there's a kind of long tail search which might actually be used by somebody looking to find exactly that service so one image on one web page is now helping optimize that web page because you've given a better out tag great for accessibility you've given a good out tag for seo keyword authority and you've actually renamed the image itself that's pushing the boundaries that's doing some real kind of professional level seo optimisation if you get to that level consider me impressed you can start taking these webinars in the future because it's really pushing things so that was out tags again just before I move away from this particular screen again I introduced all of this last time I just want to focus in on two other things descriptive links you'll remember last time I talked about how links need to be descriptive if you're linking to another page on your own website or indeed another page on anybody else's website a link to a third party you want the link to be keyword not just click here you want some descriptive content in there well one thing I wanted to talk about when it comes to technical optimisation you want to make sure there are no broken links okay if I link to and let's just say that you know four years ago I linked to a visit Scotland blog post as I probably have done things like that on a regular basis but it was four years ago so my website now has a link to visit Scotland and maybe last year for whatever reason they changed their website they redesigned it they got rid of some other old content i'm now linking to a 404 page not found you want to make sure that you analyse your own website make sure that you are you have no broken links either to internal pages page links to your own content or links to third-party content google hates broken links google works by following links Google’s whole organization of the entire internet is based on all good links we can follow to find new stuff and here's you providing a whole load of broken links wasting Google’s time sending people down rabbit holes so again do some analysis on your own website it's technical there are easy checkers to do so there's a link on this slide called the ahrefs a broken link checker you should definitely go and make sure that you're checking for no brief broken links on your website and fixing them fixing them removing them or changing them to the actual link if the link has changed or moved or whatever and the last thing just to make a mention of is that whole thing we talked about last week about keywords in the body of your content so when you write the paragraphs of words on every web page whether it's blogs or the about us page or a product description or whatever it is again a little reminder because arguably it's technical related no keyword stuffing no just repeating the word for no obvious reason other things to stay clear of what we call black hat seo no invisible text I’d like to think none of you would even consider this but believe me it used to be done to kind of fool the search engines many years ago invisible text what do I mean by that I mean white text on a white background I want google to read all of these words which have nothing to do with my website because I to my content because I want my site to appear higher for searches around anything and everything so I use lots of invisible text saying all of these words commonly used we are doing it was you know every town and city in Scotland mentioned on a web page hoping that you then start being returned for holiday in any town in Scotland again that's not google best practice that's considered very bad practice so non-relevant text invisible text is stuffing in keywords etc big no no trying not to do any other kind of black hat seo techniques most of you probably wouldn't even have dreamt about them but again just be aware okay we're gonna move on and talk about off-page seo Gary well Gary Westbrook doing that there's somebody's coming with I think you might sort of be covering around this area just now in terms of inbound links but some of these that's the question just related to what you were discussing here about broken links and websites about one business is just about to change their website structure content and design yeah I can make sure that anyone linking to this site doesn't return broken links okay so if you if somebody's linking to a particular page on your website and you know because you're just about to do a whole redesign a redevelopment you know that that page is not going to be there anymore if you do nothing all the all the kind of source website gets is a 404 page not found instead what you should be doing and again my apologies this is actually isn't mentioned in today's into this slide but you should because the question has been asked and you should definitely that person go and research this you should look to implement what's called google 301 redirects okay again i'm just going to try and give you a quick link to go and look at myself here 301 redirects and let me just send you the google advice itself so let me just paste this into the chat box this is basically you telling google and my blog post used to be on this web address it's now moved to another web address so anybody who's still linking to the original address don't you just give them a 404 error automatically take them to the news to the new destination therefore the link is still valid they might technically be linking to the old non-existent file URL but you're you what's called these 301 redirects on your end you can set this up you can’t you can kind of on your website tell google all of these old pages now exist on these new pages one of the simplest ways of doing this it's not the best way of doing this is let's just say that you scrap your entire website and start fresh therefore we haven't just moved pages we've deleted all the pages so anybody linking to arguably any of our previous pages are going to get an error well you can do a 301 redirect at the very least taking them all to your home page so they thought they were going to somewhere specific but that no longer exists so it now redirects to your home page and that still keeps the link live and active and there it's not an error it's not a 404 so look into these 301 google redirects definitely important if you are changing your website if you're doing a big rebrand redesign restructure arguably important for us all to know if we are deleting moving changing content so hopefully that that's explained that a little bit in detail for you let's quickly talk about off page seo i'm aware of the time so we've never got about another 20 minutes or so and then we've still got time for q an off-page seo basically refers to anything that other people can do to help you in the google ranking so last week's activity was what we called the on-page seo activity you can do all of this you can make the changes you can change your content you can change your titles off page is about other people doing things to benefit you so some strategies would be link building we've just talked about there's somebody linking from their website to me an inbound link it could be guest blogging me blogging on somebody else's website is off page activity is somebody else's website that i'm contributing a blog or an article to hoping that I get a link back to my own it could be basic social media it could be doing you know trying to work with influencers this is all off your website trying to bring people to your website it could be forum submissions directory submissions the gist of all off page seo is about getting a click a click back to your website back to your website from somewhere else somewhere independent somewhere somebody else on the internet and google basically go oh good lots of people linking to you we use that as a measure of trust we use that as a measure of we should probably rank you a little bit higher your competitors don't have that many links your competitors don't have good links from other people again it's almost not quite but it's almost a case of if you know how many links you've got to your website what we call inbound links and if you know that that's higher than your competitors then again you stand a better chance of being higher in the rankings than your competitors all links are important i'll kind of do you know contradict t
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