Project SEO Blog 17:

Project SEO

SEO Website Project url: https://k00121609.github.io//SEOEWT

Git-hub repository: SEOProject.

This Blog url name: creativemultimediaprogrammingsb.blogspot.com

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April

Part 3: SEO actions to take and results of these actions (update):

Actions	Expected Effects/Effects
Audience considerations to inform this SEO process:           What is my potential audience?          What are their expectations?         How can I enhance the user experience? From conversations with people in my class and my own knowledge. Potential users are people interested in finding out about this type of course, people looking to find out more about the course, people looking at the course but also the context in terms of LIT facilities, general browsers.	The “Micro-moments” technique, also known as the “3 Types of User Intent defines 3 types of intentions users have on visiting a website as transactional, informational, navigational.” As I detail further on in this table, I am using query language to target the website audience. In practice these 3 factors translate into “go, know, do queries.” “Go” is a query relating to the brand i.e. “Creative Multimedia “Know” for query searches for people know about the course and want more information. Programming.” “Do” is a query search related to what the site does i.e. Postgraduate course etc. For my website, I have targeted <meta> tag and <h1> headings to achieve this effect. This involved an update of my current headings. These headings I had carefully thought out to be relevant keywords as per my keyword research. (With this new information on “query targeting” I have updated these as follows: ****)
Research and Brainstorming for rich keywords	This image from my research imbues a lot of the key phrases associated with “Creative Multimedia.” In addition to these are the Programming aspect which is not referred to above of our course which includes: Advanced Web Programming. There is the full list of course modules which relate to many in the diagram, but, I am including them as specific titles to link to specific user query searches. These are: Evolving Web Technologies, Web Development, 3D Graphics, Interaction Interface Design, Web Programming, Project Management, Multimedia Database Systems and Design, Project, Work Experience, Blogs. These all are primary key phrases. There are secondary phrases that are associated with these of: courses, jobs, art, Psychology, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, Brackets, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, DOM, PHP, SQL, Code Ignitor, Microsoft Excel, Access, Word, PowerPoint, Balsamiq.
URL selection: -clean URL’s-no special characters, (ID’s?) etc.	Address visitors type to find my site. That Google looks at for understanding what site is about and ranking. That it has heuristic principles of being: memorable, recognisable and being professional as well as easy to access and use. My url for this website is: https://k00121609.github.io/SEOEWT/ The GitHub Repository name is: SEOProject. My blog name was my student k number at blogspot.com, however, as I h gained more knowledge through the process of this project, I updated the url name to be more keyword specific to: creativemultimediaprogrammingsb.blogspot.com This contains the key words from the brief being targeted for i.e. “Creative Multimedia Programming.”
Create quality authentic content in titles and descriptions for each page + keywords & phrases mixed in. Create a unique perspective that adds value to the topic. Site title Site descriptions Keywords – use “Moz Keyword Explorer” & list others I have used. Content: check for high quality content and that there’s no duplication. Audience: revise content to ensure that it will interest a wide audience e.g. industry experts, websites, blogs etc.	One of first things Google does to determine sites rank status. Visitors to the site to read the title and description and decide whether to check it out. Google favours less website with duplicate content, seeing it as not an expert website.  “Google Panda” screens for good/bad content, penalising low-quality content. Its algorithm checks for this & de-ranks sites with low-quality content. The unique perspective I created was to include the Creative Multimedia Programming Course in the context of the overall experience of a student at LIT and both the course and LIT facilities. I think in Marketing terms that this will appeal to a wider audience and may stem further interest in the course by browsers looking at the course at LIT’s context.
Add Location Map using Google and add my API + code to the html for this. The above is another way of increasing possible site access through using the “Site-Booster App”	For users to know location of the Creative Multimedia Programming course at LIT, Moylish. Using the Google map, to explore pictures of LIT. Using the Google feature of “Google Penguin” to use location and distance as key factors in ranking the results. “Google Pigeon” launched in 2014 can provide high quality, relevant local search results. Like the above launched in 2016, “Possum” delivers better, more diverse results based on the searcher’s location and business address. It uses physical location of the searcher and the phrasing of the query.
Utilizing anchor text:	Here I expect that visitors having opened the site will read the information and click on associated links for more information. I have tested this and all anchor links are working. Also, a user can navigate back to the website easily after selecting a link to view. In design terms, I have chosen a light-grey colour for these links that are plentiful in the website and text-decoration on hover of underline, to show these are links. Also, for design, they tie in with the headings which are in the same font colour, signifying that they are important. (all anchor links are in place and operational)
Images: Be specific including images of this course output e.g. student projects or logos. I am formatting current images including an animated .gif image currently on the website. I am including images from my 3D Graphics project, which I will format, compress and minify to ensure that they do not interfere with on-load page speed. For these I will include titles and descriptions for the search engine to pick up on.	Format, compress, minify are the key actions which through the following description of their characteristics should increase my on-load of page speed for current images. The current speed is quite good, However, I will be adding more images to the project, hence, it will be more important to have the current images and the next to be added images formatted for optimal SEO. As, one of the biggest issues on plus-sized websites is pictures. Unless they’re compressed and resized to suitable formats, they can be over-large and slow page speed to a crawl. For photographs, with a wide number of colours and much finer details, .png can compromise the quality of the image. It is common to use .jpg files instead, or WebP, an open source image type format from Google, which supports both lossy and lossless compression. (all images are compressed)
Adding “alt text” to all my images To accurately describe what is shown in the image + keywords of my site there also (>70 characters). Make descriptions vivid.	Google understands images by reading their associated “alt text.” I am adding “alt text” that is descriptive and specific for search engines to discover more easily and to enhance the richness of the content which is a feature Search Engines look for. (alt text added to images nb check names I have given images as these are significant for SEO in Google.
Image checklist: §  Name the images to relevant terms §  Compress images for adjustment of file size (as they affect page speed) §  Make sure all images have alt text and a title for the images §  Think from the perspective of a user when naming my images §  Focus on quality images	An example of this from my research is the following: (images are optimised)
Check the site structure to confirm there are the right “headers,” “subtitles,” and in the heading hierarchy: h1, h2, h3 etc. are in the right order	Clarity of text structure to make it easier for search engines to analyse my site’s content. The basic site structure is: ****
<meta> tags (html attributes that provide concise explanations of the content of web pages), preview snippets on SERP’s. Head section order is very important here. It is an advertisement for the website My choices are: Creative Multimedia Programming, LIT, Awards, Read Review etc. Write in natural and clear readable way so they will not appear as spam. Look at LIT surveys/ratings/other data. Adding the metadata to my HTML page: <head> <meta name= “description” content= “Here is a precise description of my awesome webpage.”> </head>	This is to provide the heading used to link my site on search engines & how my page titles will appear on search engines. The purpose is also, to give users unfamiliar with my site an idea of its content, when clicking the title. (Add my examples here****)
Title Tag: ~9 words. Put important words first (before the Google cut-off in the SERP ~600 px=~70 characters.	(work on the header of my website, to put important words first...)
Description Tag: to include the most important information before SERP cut-off ~24 words/~160 characters (including spaces) making best use of real-estate here. Marketing Strategies: Use emotive sentences to gain attention: emotive language in a naturally spoken sentence with plenty of action words/verbs such as: offers, rewards, challenging possibilities, learners, interested, in undertaking, Opportunity Add a selling point e.g. “Have you 20 seconds, would like to help testing this, just follow these quick suggestions…	Power words and direct relevance will help to provide an overview of my websites content. Adding “User Engagement” to a website has been proven to optimise a site in search engine searches.
Keyword Tag: I’m using rich keywords, especially in the metatag. Using researched and brainstormed key words and phrases and those with most relevance from audience analysis. With a keyword tag, record a primary and secondary keyword in the meta keywords tag. Important: list key words in longest->shortest in length and separate by commas. Use medium-tailed keywords mostly for best SEO ranking effect. Look at user intent behind keywords. Methods of keyword selection: Websites: Google, Yahoo, Moz, Quora, Wikipedia,	Not important for Google considerations. Is important for optimising guidance and tracking over time. Putting the key words and phrases first, means that these will be the words most likely to appear in the search results. Having these key words that are relevant to users as per my audience analysis could increase the probability of after search the onclick to look further at the website content/answer a query. Keywords are classified into: -Short-tailed keywords: 1-2 words – difficult to rank for due to extensive competition. -Medium-tailed keywords: 3-4 words-optimise these, do not have the same volume of short-tailed keywords, but do have a better change of ranking. -Long-tailed keywords: longer than 4 words-easy to rank for, but, are often neglected due to their low volume. Key here for best effect is to rank a lot for them at the same time.
Word count: checked for other search results of the key words I’m using in this website, to see what a search engine sees as normal for word-count of this topic. ~450 words for an information website. Make sure that I am within the correct character count & my titles and descriptions are relevant to the page content.	This is important as if Google sees page titles and descriptions do not meet character count or were not correct for the actual page content, Google may choose other content from my page to plug in as the page title or description. As Google checks for these with SERP cut-off points, it is important to maximise the points I wish to put across in this marketing strategy.
Turning queries into action items: In using the “Micro-Moments” technique of: “go, know, do:” “Go” is a query relating to the brand i.e. “Creative Multimedia. “Know” for query searches for people know about the course and want more information. Programming.” “Do” is a query search related to what the site does i.e. Postgraduate course … This technique is also known as the “3 Types of User Intent: transactional, informational, navigational.” Examples of what I am including are: What is the programme about? Who is the programme suited to? Top 3 reasons. Class Contact Hours. Other Information. Did you know? Want more?	This understanding of my target audience and categorizing user query types may enhance the user experience of visiting the website. Here, with categories of query based searches considered, I am aiming at three potential audience categories. With this Google understands the websites requirements. “Google Hummingbird” checks this and produces more relevant search results by better understanding the meaning behind queries. “Rank Brain” is a machine learning system that helps Google better decipher the meaning behind queries, and serve best matched results in response to those queries. It identifies the relevance factor of a page in the index and arranges the results respectively in SERP’s.
Addition of social media links to the site and a Google search bar. Add Twitter Tweet-button for users to Tweet on-site. Broadcast content through social media.	Enhance the UX/UI experience of the website, increase their anticipation of returning to the website to see more tweets. Increase the opportunity that Google will rank site higher due to a discussion forum link. Enhance the user interaction experience and Googles interpretation as an active website which may increase the sites search ranking. Search Engines rank higher sites with interactive and multimedia content.
Editing, checking spellings and proofreading for readability Consideration of visually impaired customers in this process.	For website to be viewed as professional, attention to detail, a voice that can be trusted.
Continue updating my website	Ongoing
Submit website to Google using: http://www.google.com/addurl	This may speed up Google recognising my website. Google can take anything from 1-3 months to index new websites. This emphasises the importance of being specific about elements in the website. This method is where I can submit my website directly to Google. (important to do this after connecting a domain.)
For “Voice Searches,” I have added, how? Where? When? type queries.	Voice Searches have implications for website designers and marketers in terms of SEO: In last year’s Google IO conference Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that 20% of search queries were coming from voice search. Terms returning voice search results are query words as would be used in natural speech:
Mobile Usage: Checked website to make sure it is mobile friendly. Checked mobile usability report to see how the site has been performing on mobile devices (in the search traffic section of the Google Search Console). Check here for reports on: touch elements, content sized to viewport, flash usage, font size etc. Used “Fetch as Google” (crawl section of Google Console) to render the site the way Google sees it on different mobile devices. Ran my URL through the “Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.” Checked page load speed.	As this is now a “Mobile First World,” considerations of mobile usage are important. “Googles Mobile Friendly Update” gives mobile friendly pages a ranking boost in mobile SERP’s and de-rank pages that are not optimised for mobile.
Checked Mobile site configuration, that the content and mark-up for my site is the same on mobile as desktop.	For consistency of viewing, and heuristic principles of memorability and recognisability.
Used internal and external links. Check these on Google Console to see ratings within the website of most visited links.	This would give me an idea about what to optimise further within the site. I have internal links in the form of navigation. External links are plentiful in this website and are further sources that support my content. These links are to reputable sources at LIT which have very good credibility.
Imbedded testimonial video of Creative Multimedia video on the LIT Clonmel website for the 3D experience. I Used <object> based embed code as this can be crawled naturally by search engine spiders (as opposed to what I have found in the research of “Search Engine Watch,” the new embed code that puts a movie into an iframe renders in Google the movie un-crawlable.) Changed the next details form <iframe> to <object>: This is the <embed> code from the LIT Website Embed code: <iframe width="360" height="203" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QBnQHTx3q70" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> I changed the format form <iframe> to <object>.	Adds value and visual excitement and multi-media interest to the page. Videos have additional SEO benefits and social sharing power to improve the main Marketing aspect of the project for SEO. Screen of video: .
Add “Micro-data Markup” involves highlighting text with the mouse, marking it and hit publish-then Google applies these “patterns” to the site.	In this way, Google can show my structured data snippets.
Link to my blogs.	Increase potential visibility volumes
View incognito and in different search engines.	Notice any patterns/trends/different or similar interpretations of website code.
Added recent news streaming on the main LIT Website. Look for ratings charts/ e.g. recent award winners in C.M. course at LIT, that is streaming news in the main LIT news website.	Google favours rating charts/graphs/infographics for improved rating status.
Look at AMP (Accelerated mobile pages).	This enables web pages to load instantly for mobile users. AMP pages get a ranking boost in the mobile search results. During testing on the websites in a “Search Engine Watch” study, AMP was found to have a 71% faster load speed for blog posts, and a reduced page size from 2.3MB to 632kB. Another “Search Engine Watch” study had these relevant findings: This study compared ad performance on AMP and non-AMP mobile pages across 150 publishers. The results are: §  80%+ of the publishers realized higher viewability rates §  90%+ of the publishers drove greater engagement with higher CTRs §  Most the publishers saw higher eCPMs (Impact and proportion of lift varies by region and how optimized the non-AMP sites are)
Included call-to action (CTA) clarity in website.	Through the audience analysis and research, I have found that the main queries are: transactional, relational and navigational. This means in practice that they are about: go, know, do queries. Using this information, I have adjusted my website with <h1> queries rather than statements. From these it is clear for the three types of query what the call-to-actions are in the website.
Use the “Structured Data Mark-Up Helper” in Google (in WMT Other Resources Section). My actions for this are:          Articles: use article tag          Local Businesses          Restaurants          TV Episodes with Ratings          Book Reviews          Software Applications         Events         Products         TV Episodes The process for this is to: enter my url, tag data and view html.	My actions here are to include the following: Articles: use article tag          Local Businesses: add Enterprise centre at LIT          Restaurants: add ‘Insomnia’ at LIT          TV Episodes with Ratings: look to see if there’s any LIT ratings on their news page          Book Reviews: check if any publications in Creative Multimedia          Software Applications: look at the Creative Multimedia recent competition winners          Events: highlight my academic calendar of events in the website          Products: products derived from student fyp projects and similar          TV Episodes: in the LIT news section of website
Use the “Data Highlighter” in Google: Click “Optimization”, then “Data Highlighter”. It gives you the option to tag a single page or multiple pages, verify the tags, and then “publish” it to Google. The process will take webmasters about 5 minutes for single pages, and 15 minutes of a series of similar pages. Add Event listings, using the Data Highlighter to tag data (name, location, date, and so on) for the events my site. Note: that Data Highlighter can only access pages that have been crawled by Google recently. If Google hasn't crawled or can't crawl some pages, such as pages behind sign-in forms, the Data Highlighter cannot be used for those pages. The advice is to create “page sets” that follow a certain structural pattern. There is no need to change website html. Just highlight data items with the mouse and select their type like this next image:          As I make the changes there is a window to the right of screen that shows how Google is applying the changes I am making to the website for structured data.         When complete I click ‘Publish,’ and Google will apply these patterns to my site.         Google can then show this structured data in my snippets.	Using this tool helps Google understand the websites data. The end-product is that Google can “present data more attractively and in new ways, in search results.” Google has updated their Data Highlighter to now cover eight types of structured data, which allows webmasters to easily tag key fields on their sites for the applicable structured data. The tool now includes the following types: §  Events §  Products §  Local businesses §  Articles §  Software applications §  Movies §  Restaurants §  TV episodes ~Next, you will go into your CMS (or source code if you’re not using a CMS) and add the highlighted snippets in the appropriate spots. Find the yellow markers on the scrollbar to find the schema mark-up code~ ~ A simple alternative is to download the automatically-generated HTML file, and copy/paste it into your CMS or source code~ ! (Practise this on a separate file first) After tagging events, the next time Google crawls the website, the event data will be available for rich snippets on search results pages. I have designed my website so that it is one long scrolling page. Therefore, all the information is one set. From this I have created out-links for more information on the topics included.
Monitoring Search Traffic Queries: Use this in Google to identify the domains that link to me the most, along with my most-linked-to-content.	This gives more detail and links that I would see compared to performing a regular search with my website url.
Monitoring Google Index: Index Status: This allows me to track the status of my site within the Google Index. Look for any trends on this.	I can obtain information here on indexing of my site and statistics on this.
Using Fetch as Google: They return the HTTP response, date and time and HTML code (including the first 100kb of visible text on the page. (If the page looks as I expect it to I can submit it to the index).	Here I can view my pages as Google sees them.
Robots: Test out current robots.txt comparison to verify if pages are being crawled or not.	No reports of not being crawled.
Sitemap created and linked with my website and Webmaster Tools: The page shows you the sitemaps that you’ve submitted, the number of pages they found in each, and the number of those pages that they’ve indexed.	Improves Googles ability to analyse and perform searches on categories of information.
Use Instant Preview: This tool allows me to see how the website looks using Google’s Instant Preview feature (this is the view of my site that can be seen in the search results when I mouse over the double arrows that show up next to a result).
Metrics: Bounce rate, average time on site, pages per visit. “User engagement metrics” evidenced to improve rankings.	Add charts and data
Other items:	Here I have saved a link to SEO Content to my Pintrest Board.