Video Transcript – 2 SEO Tweaks To Get The Edge

2 SEO Tweaks To Get The Edge – original post here

Hey, welcome back, Rankers. This is my fifth attempt at recording this show today. Periscope people have already gone forward in life. So, look at this. I found this video about SEO.

That’s from 10 years ago. Ten years ago today, I started doing this show. I started doing it in my car, because that’s all the time I could find. And that was done on a USB camera glued to the sun visor of the passenger seat and the PC laptop sitting on the passenger seat, very safe, extremely safe. So yeah, so we’ll get the cake. Where’s my cake? For 10 years. Okay, that’s one less wage I have to pay next week.

I want to talk to you a little bit today about the process of cleaning up the index, and once it’s cleaned up, what to expect. It can take some time and this is a case in point. So the product that I’ve been working on for bloggers, for bloggersSEO.com.au… You can go and register there, by the way. We’re looking for beta testers. So head across there and register for us. If you think it’s something you’d be interested in doing, it’s for WordPress and people who blog, basically. It’s geared towards the mummy blogger crowd, because they’re the ones who seem to have the most issues with SEO and the most need for good SEO.

So one of the sites that I’ve been working on is keepcalmgetorganised.com.au, that’s Michelle who’s over at that site. And we’ve given folks here a number of key phrases. One of them is LEGO storage ideas. And you can see here, when we started, she was ranked about 22. I got her to write a great article. She wrote a great article, I just gave her the structure I wanted for SEO. And then you can see, when we published that, she went to number 17 for that. And currently she’s number five or six and now I want to get her to number one.

So I want to show you what to expect for the time frame if you’ve got a really untidy index, and then what you do next once you get to that front page. So we, Michelle’s site, she had about, I think it was about 1300 pages that had been indexed, where in reality she had only about 200 blog posts. So there was a massive problem: Categories duplicated, tags being crawled, tag pages being crawled. She had a gallery plug-in, which was doing, basically putting images out on pages by themselves and Google was indexing those pages. So it was a quality issue of Panda signal, if you like. And she had a whole bunch of other things that just shouldn’t have been. She had a duplicate home page for instance, a whole lot of stuff that shouldn’t have been crawled.

So we did all that index cleaning sort of around here. But you can see it still took all of this time to get onto that front page, in fives and sixes. And that’s, if you’ve got a big messy site, that’s how long it takes. We had to go and do manual removal of some pages. We had to do basically blocking off pages in the robots.txt file and getting all that stuff out of the index. So it’s a time consuming thing. But it took us about a week to do all that stuff, and then you’ve got to wait for Google to re-crawl everything and then make a new assessment about what the site’s about and where it’s at.

So it took that long. So now it’s a case of, okay now that Google’s got us onto page one, what are the next steps that we need to do. So I asked, with this blog post that Michelle wrote, and we’ll just go look up LEGO storage ideas, that’s her site there, and I’ve gone offline, excellent or her site is down, one of the two. Let me just see. No, we’ve gone offline. That’s all right. I can still do the show without the internet. Thank you for our internet provider, AAPT.

So what I will do next, and for the document that I asked her to write or the blog post that I asked her to write, I said it’s got to follow these guidelines and this is what every blog post that, when I write, I go through this and we do this thing. So I want the key phrase in the page title. I want the key phrase in the URL. I want the key phrase in the H1 and the H1 has to be the only H1 on the page. It’s got to be the first H1 on the page and the only one. It’s got to be up at top of the page and I want those key phrases early in all of those things as possible.

And then I want two images in this blog post. One post has to be about 500 words. I want two subheadings and I want those to be H2s, and I want those H2s to have our key phrase in it as early as we possibly can. In a 500-word article, you’d probably want to mention the key phrase three or five times. And if you can’t get the exact key phrase, if it doesn’t make sense to the reader, if it looks unreadable, you don’t want to do that. You maybe want to do variations of that key phrase or semantics of it. Like if you’re talking about frogs, make sure you talk about tadpoles as well, okay. So you use phrases that are related to the topic if it doesn’t make sense to use that exact phrase in those titles or in those positions. In the images in the blog post, I want to have the key phrase in the file and the key phrase in the alt tag. Don’t necessarily want it in the title element of image. I would kind of leave that.

And what I’ve just done to Michelle’s, I’ve just got her key phrase all the old tags after it’s already at page one, number five. And then I want to link that article maybe two or three times, within the article, I want to link a key phrase or related key phrase to another article deep within my own site. So this is all about your own site, not getting external links. So that’s what the article did and that got us onto page one.

So now, we have to go and do some more tweaking. So what I’ll do now is, or what I’ve already done, actually is I’ll go and have a look at the Google Webmaster tools, Google search console and I’m going to have a look at the traffic to your site section in Google search console. And what you want to have a look at is internal links, and in links to your site. What you’re looking for in internal links is what pages Google thinks have the most backlinks to them internally. Now you can go and do this with a tool like Screaming Frog and it will tell you all the links and everything else. But that isn’t necessarily what Google is seeing. So I’ve got you doing it through Webmaster tools, Google search console. You will be able to see which pages Google thinks have the most backlinks to them.

In the case of Michelle, it was a recipe about coffee scrolls. I don’t think I’m going to be able to get a contextual link about LEGO storage ideas in a recipe about coffee scrolls. I’ll think about that, maybe we can make a container out of LEGO, I don’t know. There’s got to be some way we can do it that’s logical to the reader. And so that avenue isn’t really open to me with her site’s internal linking.

So then, I went ahead and looked at external links, and there’s a couple of pages with the external links that… And once again, you can go and check that with an external tool like MagesticSEO.com. But the problem with that is it’s not what Google is seeing. With using the Google search console, Google will tell you what it thinks is back linking to you, not what another tool thinks is back linking to you, which is important, so you get the right page.

So I’ve done this for another site where we’ve just gone in and found a couple of pages that had the most back-links externally and we’ve linked them now to our new blog post, our target page. Think of it as a bit of a boost so Google sees it as an authority, because it’s getting a backlink from another important page, and then I’ll leave it probably 5 to 6, maybe 5 to 10 days, to wait and see if it comes up a bit, and then you’ll know where you are. What you can find in this situation and what we’ve found many times before, you can leave it a month and nothing will happen, and then all of a sudden, it will just go bang and up will go the rankings.

So it is important to look at all these things. It’s so important to get that whole index cleaned up. Like that LEGO storage idea’s blog post, that was indexed within a day of posting it. But you could see, it took several weeks without doing anything else to that post, Michelle just went on posting blogs as she normally would. Without doing anything extra, it took that long, just for Google to reassess the site and that page, and where it should rank in the search results.

And that’s it for this week’s show. Hopefully that’s helpful. I will see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.