Post-click Optimization

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

HTML headers

We’re next moving on to HTML headers. These are the main headings you see on a page, including secondary headings and sometimes tertiary headings that you see on a page as well. And where people sometimes go wrong is that they’ll just try and work too many keywords into the heading. And that will sometimes come at the expense of the message that you want the user to get from the page.

So SEO training, SEO courses, London UK, it looks like it’s written for a search engine. It doesn’t look very user-friendly. What can we do to improve this?

Well, in this case, because it’s a product or a service, we’ve just gone for a what-it-says-on-the-tin approach, SEO Training, that’s what we’ve gone for.

Now if you want to, you can be more creative than that and you can include other phrases that might be more engaging. But for product pages, sometimes that’s best. iPhone, let’s just call it an iPhone. If it’s a blog post, you probably do want to write something a little bit more engaging than just a keyword. But that’s something to bear in mind. Don’t try and force additional keywords in. I’m just trying to make it look relevant to the page itself.

Keyword best practices

Here are some best practices:

• Avoid keyword stuffing: You should work keywords into the page one, two, three times for your main phrase. But you really want to kind of pull away from stuffing keywords.
• Avoid having no keywords: You don’t want to have no keyword at all as it will be hard for search engines to pick up the relevancy.
• Consider keyword intent: It’s important to try and think about what the keyword intent is. Are you satisfying what the user is looking for? And that’s different to just trying to sell your product. In recent years, there’s been a shift away from just trying to make a page relevant by putting a lot of keywords in, to making a really good user experience page.

Issues with image optimization

So we’re moving on to images. So how do we optimize images and what things can we need to look for that we can get wrong?

• Missing or misleading ALT text: When it comes to images if we want to give the image a description we do this through the ALT text and this is really aimed more for accessibility reasons. If you’re blind or you’re partially blind and you need a screen reader, it will read out the ALT text to describe what the image is. If you’ve got a missing ALT text, then you’re missing out on adding some relevancy to the page. And if it’s misleading and sometimes it’s misleading, because we’re trying to force keywords in there, then we could lose search engine trust, because it makes everything else less believable. And it’s not very good user experience for those that do need a screen reader.
• Over-optimized ALT text: That ties in with over-optimization with the ALT text. If you’ve got five images on a page, it doesn’t make sense to label them all the same, with your main phase on them. It sounds a bit crazy, but it is quite a common thing that people do.
• Irrelevant filenames: Consider this filename:
  <img src=”/uploads/DSC-19854.jpg" alt=“seo training courses in London, UK">
  This filename has got lots of numbers in it and there’s no relevancy there at all. That’s not a good thing to do. And when you do search your file names you want to try and get them right before you upload them, because that’s kind of how you set file names.
• Image sizes too big: The last one is to try and make sure that the images are web-friendly. We don’t want them to be a really big size. For example, 410 KB for a relatively small dimension image is pretty high. It should probably be under 50KB.

How can you optimize your images?

Here are some best practices:

• Add meaningful and descriptive filenames: Give the image a relevant file name. For example, if you have an image of a training room, call it it trainingroom.jpeg.
• Add meaningful and relevant ALT text: For the ALT text of a training room, you could use ‘SEO training rooms’. It’s very similar to the filename. In fact, I could have used the same ALT text and file name. That would be fine, but I think it’s quite fair to call that an SEO training room, because I’ve trained SEO in that particular room.
• Ensure images are web-friendly size: If you have a small image size, it’s going to be quick to load on mobile devices and it’s going to help with the paid speed.

The importance of optimized content

If your page isn’t optimized or relevant, the first thing a user does is they scan the page, and if they can’t see what the relevancy is about, they’ll probably bounce.

And the other thing as well is if a page isn’t optimized, then it’s going to be more difficult for search engines to rank that page.

The role of RankBrain

What are the consequences with content not being RankBrain-friendly?

Now the goal with RankBrain is to say, let’s look at key phrases, what do they mean, and let’s match them up with the most relevant content we can. Not necessarily the best keyword-optimized pages.

So if you’re not matching that search or intent of what the user wants, then Google isn’t probably going to actually rank your page. And that’s a key point. We’ve mentioned RankBrain quite a few times, but really do think about providing a very good user experience, wherever you can.