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I have been marketing videos for clients for years now, but this is my first video that
I am doing myself. I wanted to create this video because there are too many people out
there that are confused about SEO for their websites and what that entails. First of all,
what I am going to tell you here today, I can't take the credit. Everything I know,
I learned from someone else over the years. That being said, Hi! My name is Max and I
hope that you'll learn a couple things here today and this might help you out.
Now, First of all, there is a difference between website optimization and search engine optimization.
Website optimization is a component of SEO but it is not the end all to be all. Now Most
people hear the word “optimization” and assume it is all the same thing. There are
some companies out there that try to do take advantage of that fact. As an example, one
of my clients sent me a proposal he got from a company in Ohio, now I'm going to keep that
company nameless. In that proposal they had Organic SEO and what it entailled was adding
meta data and submitting their website to 42 major and minor search engines. Thats it.
Now You can Google 'submit website to search engines' and find more than 42 on your own.
And if you are a website design company and you're not including meta data when you build
websites, you should be ashamed of yourself. Of course, this same company wanted to charge
450 dollars to integrate Facebook in the website, 400 dollars to integrate Twitter, and another
400 dollars to add the Google Analytics tracking code. SCAM ALERT! You can set up all 3 of
those things in less than 5 minutes, oh, and they are all FREE to do! Seriously, if you
don't know how to set up Facebook and Twitter, or input the tracking code for Analytics,
contact me - I will help you do that for free. But, I digress.
Now Website Optimization is creating good RELEVANT content, meta data, relevant keywords,
internal link building and PageSpeed, which is the loading time of your website. now It
does not include external link building or activity or even structured data. Search Engine
Optimization combines website optimization with link building and activity as the main
ingredients. SEO also includes authorship, structured data and schema markups. For local
SEO it would include directory listings, places or map listings, gps navigation, et cetera.
Now today I am going to focus on website optimization because one thing I have learned is that most
websites are not optimized properly. Maybe you built your own website or maybe you hired
a website design company that isn't experienced in optimizing the websites they build. Let's
be honest, anyone can build a website but not everyone knows how to optimize a website.
So if you are planning on hiring someone to design a website for you, that is a question
you should ask. "Do you optimize the website or are you just building it?" If they say
they do optimize the sites, then ask them what they do to optimize them. If they can't
answer the second part, don't hire them.
Now Hopefully you will learn enough about website optimization in this video to understand
what to look for. So If you are using Wordpress for your website, there are some plug-ins
that can assist you in optimizing your website. Especially when it comes to PageSpeed. Now
For Meta Data, one of the best plug-ins out there is Wordpress *** Yoast. They make
it very simple for you to add your Title, Description and your focus keyword for that
page.
What Meta data is the Title, Description, and keywords for that particular page. Now
Google doesn't use keyword meta data any more but there are many search engines out there
that still do. So using keyword meta data can still be useful. Speaking of keywords
though, I should point out that does not mean that you take a keyword and input it all over
your website, that's called keyword stuffing and it will have a negative impact on your
rankings. Now Keep in mind that the most important thing in your website is the actual content
that you put on your pages. So you Make sure that your content is relevant to the page
you are building, so for example, if your page is about fixing cars, don't put a bunch
of content that talks about driving cars. If you your focused on making your content
relevant, you just may have enough keywords and keyword phrases on that page. Now Your
Title should immediately tell your visitor about the content on that page. So if the
page is about Website Design, the Title should include that. The description is a synopsis
of the content of that page and is what will show under your website url in search engine
results. Now Try to keep it around 150 characters. Of course, you can leave out the description,
in which case what will happen Google will create their own synopsis based on the content
of your page, but I suggest you create your own description as one marketing tactic you
can utilize is putting your phone number in the description.
Internal link building, to put it simply, is creating links within your website to other
areas or pages of your website. Try to avoid using Click here when creating these links.
Now Building links within your site is a perfect opportunity for you to use a keyword or keyword
phrase to link to the relevant content. Now you can say click here but just dont link
those words. As an example, as an example you can say click here to learn about fixing
cars. Then link "fixing cars" to the relevant page or area on your website that talks about
fixing cars. so My suggestion to you is just avoid using phrases like click here. create
a sentence with your relevant keyword and link it to the relevant content. Simple.
Besides having relevant content, the one part of website optimization that most people miss
is PageSpeed. Google doesn't like slow. A couple of good tools to test your page speed
is of course Google PageSpeed Insights and Gtmetrix.com. Metrics is spelled with an X.
When you look at the suggestions on improving PageSpeed, most people aren't going to know
what leverage browser caching is or minify CSS or defer parsing of Javascript. But that's
Ok. I am going to show you how to improve your PageSpeed without knowing what those
things are.
First, if you are using Wordpress, you will want to install a caching plug-in. You will
see a lot of people talk about W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache, which are both good plug-ins
but most of you won't know how to set it up properly or you're going to have to watch
a tutorial just to set it up so that it doesn't conflict with the scripts on your site. If
you use one of those you can find many tutorials about them online. However, I have found a
newer plug-in that is much easier for the average person to use and much less intrusive
to your website. Its called WP Fast Cache. Simply install the plug in, activate it and
then add your pages to it.
Second, if you don't know how to optimize your images before uploading to your website,
install a plug in called ewww image optimizer. Now Ewww is one E and 3 W's. Simply install,
activate it, then you can bulk optimize, excuse me, bulk optimize your images and any new
images you add will automatically be optimized. Speaking of images, when you put images on
a page, make sure your image is the correct dimensions and don't get resized after the
fact. For example, if you have an about us page and the image dimensions of your headshot
are 190 by 190, don't upload a picture that is 250 by 250 and then it gets resized either
by html or css on the page. When you input your image into that page, even though it
is the correct size, make sure you put the width and height dimensions as well.
Now this next part is the technical and most difficult for the average person when it comes
to optimizing your website for PageSpeed. There is some code that needs to be entered
into your dot htaccess file where your website is hosted. When you go into your Cpanel, go
to your file manager for your website. You should see your htaccess file underneath your
wp-includes file. It would be too much to explain in this video what that code is so
what I have done is made this code availabe for you on my website. You can visit www dot
local marketing us dot com and go to the About Max page. At the bottom I have created a download
link for the code. so You will be able to simply copy and paste the code with instructions
on entering it into your htaccess file.
Now Just doing those three things are going to dramatically improve your PageSpeed score.
If you still don't have an A rating, which is 90 or above on gtmetrix, then I suggest
one of two things. First, you can run your site through Google PageSpeed Service. You
will have to apply, but know that as long as you own your domain, you won't be denied.
Just google 'Google PageSpeed Service'. Now It's free. The second option is to use a content
delivery network. Now I have been using bluehost for my websites and they make it very simple
to use Cloudflare as your CDN. You just enter your email address and then it is a simple
click of a couple of buttons. Then you will want to go to your advanced seconds and click
rocket loader, its still in beta but it still helps the PageSpeed of your site. And again
that's free. You don't need Unless you are running an e-commerce site, or are a large
company with a network of people or if you have a membership site where people log in
to access certain areas of the website, you don't need to pay for a content delivery network
to improve your PageSpeed.
If you are on Gtmetrix, I'll tell you. I don't worry about YSlow just PageSpeed. Let's face
it, Yahoo stinks and if you are still using Yahoo as your search engine - just stop it.
All my websites are an A grade which is 90% or better. You do try to get as close to 100
as you can but many plug-ins that you use will affect your PageSpeed but some plug-ins
are worth the couple points difference. if you like the functionality of a plugin even
though it does affect PageSpeed, just keep it.
Now as an example, here is the gtmetricx report for my website. Now You can see that I have
an A rating for PageSpeed and YSlow. But the important thing you see is that my load time
is zero point eight three of a second. So it takes less than a second to load my website.
On that note, for any of you podcasters out there, I have noticed the BluBrry Powerpress
plug-in will have a significant negative impact on your PageSpeed score. Now I do know its
a popular plug in, so I'm not suggesting you uninstall the plug in. so maybe you podcasters
should write the developers of the powerpress plugin either support or email and see if
they can revise their scripts some so it doesnt affect PageSpeed as much.
Well, I hope you learned a little about Website optimization today and if you have any questions
feel free to put them in the comment box. Don't forget to like me on Facebook and follow
me on Twitter at Local M k t i n g u s. Of course you can always visit my website at
www dot local marketing us dot com. and Ill put all that links that you need, especially
for that htaccess file in the comment box as well as a description of the video so that
you can easily find anything that you are looking for. If you have any suggestions on
any future videos on things you would like to learn about, feel free to put those in
the comment box as well. I'm always open for suggestions. Well, I hope you did learn a
little bit today and I appreciate you taking the time to watch the video and have great
day! Thanks.