Search Engine Optimization with Ralph Desmornes

Ralph is an SEO analyst and marketing strategist who has worked with Pearson and Eclipse digital media and has over five years of experience in the field of SEO, working with brands in e-commerce such as BluntPower, FitTea, optimizing for Google and LinkedIn and working with several different universities.

In this webinar, Ralph went through what SEO is, the difference between organic and paid data, how search engines work, as well as some quick actions to take to start optimizing websites right away.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

“The practice of increasing the quality and website traffic through what’s called organic search, which is the non-paid version of any type of traffic that you’re getting to your website.”

What is the difference between organic and paid traffic?

“organic search is the non-paid version of any type of traffic that you’re getting to your website. And paid is anything that has ads or sponsored content next to it.”

How do search engines work?

Search engines, especially Google, crawls sites using what they call “bots” and these bots end up storing all the information that a particular website has on it from the words, the imagery, and the site structure to understand as much as they can about the website and store it in their database and from there as soon as you type in a particular search query, within a matter of seconds Google aggregates millions of different sites and orders them into what they felt was the most relevant to least relevant. So Google is constantly scouring the web and constantly adding to its database and its index in order to serve up the best results.

Factors affecting the SEO performance of your website:

“What impacts SEO and helps these search engines choose what is the most relevant versus what’s not, are the SEO factors. There could be thousands of different factors that are grouped up into several categories that play a part in how well a particular website ranks in the search engines. 

There are factors that can help improve your ranking and factors that could hold you back so we always try to get familiar with the search engine guidelines to better understand the parameters that these search engines expect us to play in.

what google expects their people to do; they want you to keep the users in mind and for you to create a website experience that’s user-friendly and performs well and helps the user get what they need when they type in parts of particular information and get it done in the most efficient manner, and so what they don’t want is people trying to game the system and do things such as create automatically generated content or creating link farms.

through Maslow’s hierarchy of SEO needs which goes from the bottom of the pyramid that is ‘crawl accessibility’ to compelling content, keyword-optimized, great user experience, share-worthy content, and URL or description to the top of the pyramid which is snippet/schema markup.

Initial steps to optimizing your website:

Step One

Using Google search console to check for crawl errors.

Step Two

research queries, topics, and questions that users will use to search for content. Examples of which are (Google Trends, Ubersuggest,) which help you find out which geographical areas certain types of questions or searches are mostly done.

Step Three

create keyword-optimized content based on your research and optimize title tags and meta descriptions.

Step Four

off-page and local SEO: Make sure your name, address, and phone number appear throughout the site. Create citations and directory listings with your business information. Get as many citations as you can.

Also, In an answer to a question asking “will implementing SEO be costly?” Ralph answered that the amount of money invested in SEO definitely depends on the industry that you’re in and what your competition is actually doing. In comparison to ads, SEO is your lowest-cost investment. 

You can watch the whole session on our Youtube channel from the link below!