Build a simple weebly website and search engine optimize it

Understanding how search engines work

How does ranking a website work?
It is a pretty simple concept, if you break it down into simple terms. I will use this analogy to help explain.

Say you are a yoga instructor. There are many yoga instructors out there as well. What makes you better (rank higher) than the others? Well you have a ton of referrals that say how great you are and these people are really into yoga as well.

The referral, in the web world is a link. The link in this case could say something like "yoga instructor" and send people from the referrers website to your website. That helps build your rankings for that keyword. We call these referrals, "backlinks".

It used to be back in the day that your website had a chance of ranking based on the fact that there were not that many competing websites. Rankings could be achieved through good onsite SEO. Now backlinks have become the strongest part of SEO and understanding how this works is crucial to your success.
Major search engines and their ranks
Here are some of the major search engines you should rank for in order of importance.
- Google 66%
- Bing 17%
- Yahoo 11%
- Ask 2%
- AOL 1%
The percentages represent 2013 Comscore rankings for Search Engine usage. As you can see that goolge is used by way more people then any other out there. This obviously means you want to focus your efforts on ranking for google, but do not over look the others.

Keep in mind that the search engines do not react exactly the same, Google is much tougher in ranking then say Yahoo.

- I have found that Google and AOL rank website similiar, same goes for Yahoo and Bing.
Search engine bots and spiders.
Search engines have programmed algorithums that crawl over all the websites out there to rank them. These programs are referred to as bots or spiders and travel through links to absorb all the data of each page.

After the code is viewed and parsed the Search Engines assign rankings according the specific keywords. Lets call them 'bots' for now. These bots travel through links and are constanlty being updated.

Measure current traffic before doing anything!

Setup our project website
Let's setup our website that we are going to tweaking and optimizing throughout the class. We are going to be using the Weebly to help with the creation of our website. Weebly is free, easy to use, and has some built in SEO functionality that we are going to need.

I know that many of us will have existing websites already. Don't worry all the skills you will learn can be applied to your own business or personal websites.

Follow these steps to setup a weebly website
1. go to weebly.com
2. On the left side, fill out your info and hit signup!
3. Choose whatever theme you like
4. Choose the first option - Use a subdomain of weebly.com - for "Choose a website domain"
5. Watch the one minute video.
6. To publish your website (go live) there is a button in the top right. Click publish to make our website live for the first time.
I encourage you guys to post your websites to the skillshare project gallery for community feedback
Install analytics and get comfortable with using them
A fundamental step that is overlooked by many companies and website owners is setting up analytics on their website before their SEO begins. You want to be able to record that your SEO efforts are working and have detailed website data is a must.

We are going to be using Google Analytics because it provides a great amount of reporting, easy to intstall, and is free. Here are the steps to setup the google analytics account.
1. If you don't already have a gmail account, it will ask that you create one.
2. After creating an account, you will be asked to add a new account. (call it whatever the website will be called)
3. Enter the website information and copy your tracking code.
4. Login to your weebly account and navigate to - Settings => SEO
5. Paste the tracking code in the footer code box and click save
I setup a google analytics account from scratch in the lesson video. Please watch it if you need more direction.

I also mentioned Crazy Egg for help with conversion analytics. It is great for analyzing visitor behaviour.

I am not in any way affiliated to either of these tools, just think they are great products.
Setup Google Webmaster Tools
Google web master tools was created to help us website owners view the traffic and information that google perceives our website having. I used to not think very positvely of this tool because all the information provided could be bettered reported using other analytics.

They have improved this over the years and give a few tools that really help. One of the major tools being, the disavow function.

Use a meta tag to verify ownership of your website. After verified you can view all the tools available. I recommend take a good look at the search traffic tab.

Choosing Keywords

What are keywords?
Keywords are individual or combined words that represent content of a page. In terms of search engines like Goolge keywords help with finding content that we are in search for.

A quick example of keywords would be a search in google for "yoga classes san clemente"

In terms of SEO, we can have rankings for all individual words and the whole combined set as well.
Figure out our customer and product
A website can be about anything like a product, service, information...

Lets keep things simple for now and say we are selling a service (yoga classes). Keyword selection has a few elements going on. I thought it would be easier to understand if I bullet point them out for you.
1. What is our service. about?
2. Who are the people searching for my service?
3. What keywords do they type in to search for that service?
4. How much do those keywords get searched in the search engines
5. How many websites are competing to rank for those keywords?
6. How targeted are the keywords (will they create conversion)
Try to use your marketing mind for the first three points.
1. Our service is about yoga and our location"San Clemente"
2. People searching are either into yoga already or maybe just into fitness and health
3. Maybe they type in "yoga classes san clemente", "yoga school", "yoga instructor"
Fot the next 4-6 points we can use tools to help determine these. Check out the next step for a breakdown on tools.
Keyword selection tools
Here is a review on where we left off with selecting keywords
1. How much do those keywords get searched in the search engines
2. How many websites are competing to rank for those keywords?
3. How targeted are the keywords (will they create conversion)
For number one we can use google adwords to help with finding out how much those keywords get searched. Since we already have a google account when we signed up for analytics we can just go to Google Adwords and follow the setup process.

The tool is called the Keyword Planner and can be accessed in the tools section of your google adwords. Keyword Planner, sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com. Click the Tools and Analysis drop-down menu and select "Keyword Planner."

I recommend to watch the video because this is better understood through watching. Type in some keywords that you came up with after thinking about your website is about and what your customer would search for keyword wise.

You have different filters you can use, but I would keep all these open to see all results. Click get ideas to see results. There will be displayed adgroups, which are groups of keywords that all are similiar, and the monthly searches. You will also see the competition ranking as well. The competition pertains to adwords, but can often be a good indicator of competition for organic traffic as well.

Organic traffic refers to the results to searches on search engines that are given through their search algorithms. Google adwords is a paid search result. Paid listing on Google search results are highlighted yellow if at the top and also display on the right hand side.

The key is finding something that is targeted, high traffic, and low competition. Sounds tough huh? It is, but this tool will help you get there.

I wanted to add another free keyword selection tool that some of you may find usefull. It is called wordtracker and provides a rough estimate of search keywords.
Track keyword rankings
Your rankings for our weebly website should be not found because we just created the website. We must fill out content for the website to even be ranked. Most likely you will not rank for the words that you are targeting for seo in the beginning.

It is still important that we setup the ranking tracker so, we can view our changes if any. If you are implementing an already existing website that has rankings, it is even more important that you get a baseline of where you are at before doing SEO.

In the video I used twitter.com as an example so we could get and idea of what a website with rankings could look like.

Advanced Web Ranking is a great tool. They charge a one time fee, the program has a bunch of cool features, and they offer a free trial for 30days. I am placing a link in the additional resources area of the project guide.

Another awesome tool, but is more expensive is Moz

Onsite SEO

Internal linking
A website is a collection of pages and each page should be thought as its own existing page. Most websites have a navigation in the header or footer that does not change.

That means we are telling the search engines that these pages are the most important pages on our website because we have more links going to them, then any other of our pages.

We should have our keywords be a part of our internal linking structure. If our targeted keywords were "hot yoga studio" we would want to place those keywords in a link that appears on everypage and links to our targeted seo page. In the video example it is our home page that we want to increase in rankings.
Content
The content of our website should include our keywords more then other words on the page. We call this keyword density. For example I should have the word yoga be the highest percentage on my weebly website, if I am SEO'ing for that keyword.

Here is the link to a great tool that is free to use and displays our keyword density

Here is an example of hulu's keyword density

Head tags and image tags should also have the keyword placed in them. A head tag looks like this
Head Tag
. An image tag will look like this . You will notice that the keywords got placed in the alt attribute for the image tag.
Title and meta tags
Titile and meta tags tells the search engines what the particular page is about. These should be unique for every single page of your website. Do not have these duplicated across your site, which occurs more then you would think. The title tag has the most value in helping your ranking. Make sure that you use your keyword as the first words for your title.

Title and meta tags can not be seen visually on the page, you will have to view the page source like we did for the google analytics script tag.

The description should have your keyword in there but be more human sounding. Keep this short 1 or 2 sentences.

You should place around 8 meta keywords.
Indexing
Indexing refers to the bots bringing information back to the search engines. When you create a brand new website. None of the pages have been indexed yet, meaning the search engines need to send bots to crawl the content, then decide what pages to rank for what keywords.

After your website has been indexed for the first time, if you make updates you will have to reindex the changed page. The bots will have to crawl over your website again to collect the updated content.

There are a few ways that we can increase the speed of our indexing.
- go into google webmaster tools and increase the crawl rate
- ping pages using a tool like pingomatic
- post link to page on a website that gets crawled frequently
- blog on our website to increase frequency of crawl rate
- post link to our social networks

Offsite SEO

Analyze Traffic and Keyword Rankings

Analyze our seo efforts
Using our tools to interpret our SEO is the best way to get better. If you want to interpret results better I would limit changes to one or the other. For example I would change my title and meta tags, index the page, then analyze the results.

I would not change title and meta tags, change internal linking structure, and create some backlinks. You would be making it more difficult to distinquish what seo technique helped or hurt you. Try to be patient and make sure your results are indexed before moving onto the next phase.

Use a combination of all three tools to get the full story of your seo change. They are very much connected. For example if you see a big spike in traffic you may also see a big increase in keyword ranking
Analyzing SEO Example
I wanted to talk about one way I go about checking my SEO. The flow would be me checking my search rankings, checking my backlinks, then checking my google analytics.

Open Advanced Web Ranking tool and click update to get the latest search engine rankings for your keywords. Examine which keywords have increased or decreased and take note.

Go to you Ahrefs Site Explorer and place the url of the page you have been targeting for SEO. Examine the new backlinks.

Sometimes a backlink appears that is acutally hurting your rankings. I have noticed that sometimes these pages look way to spammy with links all over the place and content that does not really make sense.

If these are substanitally hurting your rankings you can use the disavow tool to let google know that you do not want to be connected with the backlink.

Last open up your Google Analytics. Pay attention to the aquisition tab on the left. Click all traffic and inspect the sources. Also make sure to check out Keywords - Organic.

This area shows the keywords that people typed in the search engines. If our keyword ranking was higher then we should see more visits from this keyword here.

Do's & Do Not's, Tips and Tricks

SEO'ing Website that is not weebly
Download ftp program called filezilla. FTP stands for file transfer protocol. It helps us to take files from our computer and place it on your server or vice versa.

You will need your ftp login info before you can connect to the server. The ftp login info can be created through your hosting account. Say you have hosting with godaddy, you can login to your account and create a ftp user. write down that information.

Login to your server using filezilla
- once logged in drag and drop the files from your remote server onto your desktop
- edit whatever file you want to edit the save.
- drag and drop the file from your local computer to the remote server.
- it will ask you if you want to overwrite the file, say yes
For more detailed explanation, please watch the video.

For wordpress you can use a plugin called All In One SEO to edit title and meta tags. To edit files directly you can go to appearance - editor and choose the file you want to edit. You can directly edit the code and save.
Tips and Tricks
Here are some tips and tricks I have picked up along the way.
- Offer to write original content for someone in exchange for backlinks
- Google chrome Nofollow Simple Extension
- Inspect the highest ranking pages for keywords "SEO Company"
- Create your own websites (make sure to age them and place fresh content on them)
Things not to do
Things not to do in SEO
- Make sure backlink is on website with different ip address
- No link exchanges
- Do not build backlinks too fast
- Don't spam backlinks
- Do not lose track of your keyword rankings
SEO Words To Know
List of words you alreay know
- Backlink
- Page Rank
- No Follow
- Title Tag
- Meta Tags
- Organic Search
- Keyword Density
- Duplicate Content
- Internal Linking Structure
- Bots or Spiders
- Indexing
- Location Reliant
- Anchor Text
More SEO Words
- Alexa - another way to rank websites go to alexa.com to check it out.
- Redirect - When user is taken automatically to another web page addresss without clicking anything. A 301 redirect is the proper way in seo to let the search engines know that you website has been moved.
- SEM - Search Engine Marketing
- SERP - Search Engine Results Page
- Trackback - When a blog links to another blog, it notifies you.
- Below the fold - Anything below the computer screen when the page loads. Usually refers to laptop dimmensions as the standard. Links that are above the fold are seen as more valuable because they get seen first.
- Drip feed - is gradually creating backlinks to your website.
- Linkbait - a piece of web content on a website that is so intriguing that people create backlinks to it.
- Sandbox - this is a theory that Google basically has a separate index, the sandbox, where it places all newly discovered websites. When websites are on the sandbox, they won’t appear in the search results for normal search queries.I have also heard this term used to describe someone who has been penalized.
Thank you very much guys! I encourage you to leave me positive or negative feedback. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

- Josh

Once again I encourage you guys to post your websites to the skillshare project gallery for community feedback

Update Build Backlinks Naturally

Keep things Natural
Your backlinks must follow a natural link building pattern.
- have no follow links as well as do follow
- add "click here" and "yourdomainname.com" anchor text
- make sure most desired keyword does not exceed 30%. Over optimized
Don't spend a lot of time looking for backlinks in blog posts. Forums still work good.
- Don't post to Vbulletin
- Sign up and make sure your first post does not have a link in it.
- wait one or two days, then edit post and place backlink in there.

Additional Resources

Inside Google Search Algorithms
Google Analytics

Detailed guide to using google analytics
Crazy Egg
Webmaster Disavow Tool
Keyword Ranking Tool
Advance Web Ranking
Keyword Selector
MOZ
Wordtracker
Keyword Density Tool
Submit Brand New Website To Be Indexed
- Google
- Bing
- Yahoo
Pingomatic
Browser Tools

Command F - in view source will open up the find function

Command Option I - in google chrome brings up our developer tool bar
Page Rank Checker
Disqus
Ahref Site Explorer
Keyword Ranking Tool

Backlink Checker

Website Traffic
No Follow Simple - Google Chrome Extension
Filezilla
All In One SEO
W3 Schools
Get you started websites

http://www.skillpages.com/

http://www.crowdco.de/

http://www.memecenter.com/

https://coderwall.com

Phil Brown

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