Working with search engine optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEOStands for "search engine optimization"; making website content attractive to website visitors and, as a result, achieving high rankings in search results.) is more than just getting your website to rank high in search engines such as Google or Bing. It is the art of understanding your website visitors and optimizing your site to the needs of those visitors. If you succeed with that, your website will automatically be ranked higher on search engines such as Google.

SEO is an enormous area, employing lots of people, and the details of it are not in the scope of this user guide. However, this topic contains a checklist with the most important things you can do, as an editor, in Optimizely to improve your site's attractiveness and thereby ranking in search engines. Google's algorithms for ranking websites are based on hundreds of different criteria (known and unknown) that can change without any notice.

SEO tasks are partly handled by developers and administrators, such as:

• Setting up Google Analytics and Google Web Master Tools
• Creating a responsive design
• Setting up the templates with relevant and consistent SEO properties
• Setting up canonical links
• Optimizing site speed

For more information on the developer tasks, see Optimizely and SEO on Optimizely World.

As an editor or content marketer, you also play an important part in SEO. Your tasks may consist of:

• Creating quality content and easy navigation
• Keywords research
• Adding meta descriptions and title tags
• Performing A/B tests and making sure there are no broken links
• Analyzing site search and site traffic data

Prepare your content and navigation

First and foremost, you have to make sure that your content is original and relevant, and that your navigation is easy. If visitors cannot find what they are looking for, or if the content is not genuine or engaging, they will not stay on your site, they will not make purchases, and they will not return. Also, they will not create any backlinks (that is, links from their content to yours) which are very important for your site’s ranking; see Internal and external linking, backlinking.

As content is key element of site optimization, write for your visitors and create quality content. You should also try to create content that can be relevant for a long time. Google is refining its algorithms and is putting less weight on individual keywords and more weight on content quality and user experience. Focus on everything that keeps your visitors on the site (relevant and searchable content, easy navigation, internal linking, videos, site speed etc.)

Try to use compelling language and make your point early. Do not save your selling points until the end.

Internal and external linking, backlinking

An administrator should make sure that your site is using canonical URLWebsites may contain identical, or almost identical, pages and the canonical link points out which of these pages are the most important one. This page is displayed in the search results and the search engines can disregard the other pages.s. A canonical link specifies which page is the preferred version of a web page. This is useful if you have a website with subdomains that contains identical or almost identical pages. The canonical link points out the main page to the search engine, indicating that it is the most important page and that it can skip the other pages. The canonical link is defined in the HTML head tag.

Use a friendly and short URL that still describes the page content. The URL does not necessarily have to match the topic title, so you can set the URL manually; you do not have to stay with the automated option.

Create simple addresses for your campaigns, so you are using, for example www.example.com/christmas2020 instead of www.example.com/product_campaigns/en/content/2020/competitions/christmas.

Keywords

Keywords are the words visitors use when searching for your site. It is important to use the same words in your content that are actually used by people when searching. Keyword research, that is, analyzing which terms people are using when trying to find your content, is therefore very important.

Equally important is knowing your target audience. Who are your visitors, how many are they, what type of information or items are they looking for, when are they searching and why? Finding out the answers to questions like these will help you to sort out the most valuable keywords when you research your keywords.

You should define a few keywords for each page and use them in your content. However, note that keyword stuffing (that is, overusing your keywords) is considered bad practice by search engines such as Google.

Use your keywords consistently in your content and track your keywords to make sure that they are up-to-date and match what people are searching for.

Meta elements - descriptions and titles

Meta elements are pieces of information describing the page and found in the page's HTML head area. They can describe the content, who has written the page, when it was last updated and so on. The metadata elements, especially the title and description, are used by search engines and often displayed in the search results.

The meta title specifies the title of a web page. It is displayed as the clickable link in the search results, and is important for usability, SEO, and social sharing.

A meta description is a summary that is displayed in the search result beneath the page title.

Use short and concise meta titles and descriptions and include your keywords. Meta descriptions do not necessarily affect your site ranking, but the better the meta description, the more likely it is that visitors will click the link in the search results.

Note that search engines may display your meta description if they find it relevant to the search term. But they might also display another piece of content found on your page if it considers that more relevant.

Test your content

When you have created your content, you want to make sure that it is optimized and that your visitors are finding it. One way of checking that your content is compelling and that it creates conversionsWhen a website visitor takes a desired action. This desired action can be, for example, buying an item, filling in a form, or clicking a link. is by using A/B tests. The A/B test lets you compare two versions of a content item and see which of the two versions creates the most conversions, that is, which version makes the visitors stay on the page for the longest time, makes them click your links, or buy the most items, or whatever goal you have set up for your content.

Check for broken links to make sure that your visitors are finding the content they want. Optimizely CMS has a link status report for that.

Optimize and fine-tune

SEO is ongoing work, so you should continually analyze the search statistics, and to optimize and fine-tune your website.

Schema.org markup

Adding schema.orgSearch Engine Results Page. The page with search hits you see in search engines, such as Google, when you have searched for a term. In SEO, you want to improve how your website looks in the SERP to encourage more people to click-through to your website. (or just schema) markup to your pages improves the search results (also known as “the SERPExecution string or execution order of processes, such as API requests.” in SEO talk – the Search engine results page). The schema markup is a set of HTML tags that, among other things, creates so called “rich snippets”. The rich snippets enhance the descriptions in the search results by displaying, for example, contact information, event information, product ratings, or videos. The rich snippets do not affect Google's ranking of your site directly but they can entice more visitors to click your links in the search results.

This search result uses schema markup for recipe ratings.

See Getting started with schema.org using Microdata for more information on schema.org markup.

Responsive design

The website developer has most of the responsibility for adjusting your site for mobile users, but as an editor you can consider visitors with small screens when planning your content and your website structure. Preview your site on different devices with the preview tool. Smaller screens mean that the content is often more important than images and should be at the top. Focus on the content, and thereby on the user.

Automate your SEO with add-ons

SEO used to be the handiwork of specialists only, but now there are SEO automation tools that can help even those who are not experts to organize meta tags, manage keywords, monitor the SEO impact, and estimate the search traffic and make recommendations to improve SEO.

SEO automation tools increase your ROIStands for "Return On Investment" with three main features:

You can find a number of SEO add-ons on Optimizely Marketplace, for example, these two free-for-use:

• Site Attention. Provides easy-to-understand optimization tips while you write your content and can send you directly to the fields that need to be optimized. With SiteAttention, you can also organize keyword categories in one place, for everyone to use, and get suggestions on keywords to use.
• SiteImprove Website Optimizer. Scans your website for errors when you publish a page, letting you fix mistakes, optimize content, and manage your site more efficiently.

Images

Ideally, you want to serve your visitors top-notch images in high resolution, but high resolution images can increase your website’s loading time, especially for users on smaller devices. A longer loading time affects the user experience negatively and also decreases your SEO ranking. Your website developer should set up your environment so that the visitor is served whatever image quality that is appropriate for their screen size while getting a fast loading time. If this is automated, you do not have to consider image placement, image sizes and image resizing too much.

For SEO purposes, spend some time on the image HTML alt attribute (which stands for “alternative text”). The search engines cannot “see” your images, but they use the information they find in the images’ alt attribute to determine the content of each image. Keep the alt attribute short and concise, clearly describing the topic of your content; use your main keywords, if they fit in the context. Just remember to avoid keyword stuffing.

Use image alt attributes together with clear image descriptions (which is displayed when a visitor hovers over an image with the mouse) and image file names. All these factors may affect your SEO ranking.

Note that the alt attribute is mainly intended as an accessibility tool, so the main purpose of the alt attribute is to describe the image for the visually impaired, not to search engines.

Website analytics

As an editor, you can also learn how to use Google Analytics and how to interpret the vast data that can be found there, such as page views, audience (for example, returning visitors), and how to set conversion goalsA conversion goal is the measurement of actions on web pages. The actions can be completed purchases, pages visited, time spent on site and so on. Also known as Key Performance Indicator (KPI).. You may also find it useful to learn Google Search Console (which contains tools and reports which help you measure your site's search traffic and performance), Google Tag Manager (which lets you keep track of the ROI of your advertising), and Google Ads (which lets you buy advertising spaces in Google).

The Google Search Console also includes a Disavow backlinks tool. If Google believes that your website has unnatural links pointing to it, it can affect your SEO ranking. In this case, you can manually disavow these links, that is, tell Google to disregard these links.

Google My Business

If you run a small local business, it might be difficult to get your message across in the competition with much larger businesses. In that case, Google My Business might be a good tool for you. Google My Business is a tool that lets you manage how your business is displayed in the Google search results and on Google Maps. It is free to use but it is a requirement that you have face-to-face interactions with your customers and that you are not only an online company.

The Don'ts

Don't duplicate content, overuse keywords and ads, or buy links from link farms.