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Week 3

Apply SEO

You will examine how to optimize a website for search engine optimization, including strategies for content, images, and linking. You’ll also learn how to help search engines better understand your content. Next, you’ll explore how to craft effective website titles and add structured data markups to help users and search engines find what they need. Then, you’ll learn all about how to use SEO tools to analyze search performance and user behavior.

Dedication to study

  • Videos: 33 min

  • Leitura: 2 h 50 min

  • Teste: 1 Teste com avaliação

Learning Objectives

  • Optimize website content for search engine optimization.
  • Understand internal, outbound, and inbound links.
  • Create effective titles and meta descriptions for users and Google.
  • Understand structured data markup and its benefits.
  • Establish business details on Google.
  • Use Google Search Console and its reports to monitor a site’s presence in Google Search results.
  • Explore Bing Webmaster Tools and its benefits.

Content

  1. Optimize a website’s content for search engine optimization
  2. Help Google (and users) understand your content
  3. Analyze search performance and user behavior
  4. Review: Apply search engine optimization (SEO)

1. Optimize a website’s content for SEO

Welcome to week 3

Video. Duration: 1 minute

Welcome back, everyone. Now that you’ve learned about how search works and foundational search engine optimization concepts, you’re ready to learn about how to apply them.

In this video, we’re going to discuss strategies, tips, and recommendations that can help the website content you create perform better in search engines. Applying SEO is an important skill as a digital marketer. You may be tasked with creating SEO-friendly content in your new role so that potential customers find it when they type queries in a search engine. The information in this section will really help you with that task.

We’ll start this section with general recommendations and how to optimize a website’s content. Then we’ll cover internal linking and how to optimize images for a website. You’ll also learn about making a website mobile-friendly. Then we’ll review strategies that help search engines better understand your content, such as crafting effective titles and meta descriptions. You’ll also learn how to create structured data markups and make your content unique in the search engines.

We’ll wrap up this section with an SEO tool Google provides called Search Console. It produces several SEO-related reports and metrics. You’ll also learn about an SEO tool that the Bing search engine provides called Bing Webmaster Tools. I’m super excited to help you further your digital marketing and SEO knowledge. Are you ready? Great, let’s get started.

Optimize a website’s content

Video. Duration: 4 minutes

While you may believe there are tips and tricks to search engine optimization, it really comes down to first creating great content. If the content is well-written, informative, and on topic, it will help satisfy the searcher’s query. And as a marketing and e-commerce professional implementing SEO, you should try to satisfy the searcher’s query better than the competition.

In this video, we’re going to discuss how to optimize your website’s content. These recommendations come directly from Google’s SEO documentation. While none of these guarantee that a webpage will rank high in a search engine, they’re great to consider when creating webpages.

The first recommendation is to make the website useful and interesting. Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any other factor we discuss. Users find good content engaging. When users are engaged, they will likely want to share it and direct other users to it. Visitors sharing and talking about the website is what helps build the site’s reputation with both visitors and Google. The sharing rarely comes without quality content.

The next recommendation is to know what visitors want and give it to them. This starts with keyword research. Once you have the right keywords and topics, then create the great content. How to best create great content is often a matter of opinion. However, the Google Search guidelines do provide some suggestions, such as to make sure the content is well-written and easy to follow, and to carefully check your text for spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. Fresh, unique content also performs better in searches. Don’t rehash old content. Google tries hard to show pages with distinct information. If there are pages on a website that are duplicates or similar in content, those pages are likely to not be shown in search engine results.

The third recommendation is to act in a way that cultivates user trust. Users feel comfortable visiting your website if they believe it’s trustworthy. A site with a good reputation is trustworthy. Cultivate a reputation for expertise in your industry or a certain area. Provide information about who publishes the site, provides the context, and the organization’s goals. If you have an e-commerce website, make sure you have clear and satisfying customer service information. This helps visitors solve problems. You also want to use the proper technologies. For example, if your e-commerce checkout page doesn’t have a secure connection, users cannot trust the site.

The next recommendation is to make expertise and authoritativeness clear. Be sure that content on the site is created or edited by people with knowledge in the topic. If you as a digital marketer are tasked with writing content that you aren’t knowledgeable in, just make sure someone who is an expert edits your content. Or, you can provide expert or experienced sources. The source helps users understand the expertise you base the content on.

The fifth recommendation is to provide an appropriate amount of content for your subject. Creating high-quality content takes a significant amount of at least one of the following: time, effort, expertise, and talent or skill. Make sure your content is factually accurate, clearly written, and comprehensive. For example, if you’re publishing a recipe, provide a complete recipe that is easy to follow. Don’t just publish a set of ingredients or a basic description of the dish. Ensure the instructions make sense and are correct.

Those are the five content recommendations from Google Search guidelines. Use them to create content that delivers a great experience to your potential customers. If you deliver a great experience to searchers, you have a great start to get the webpage to rank in the SERPs.

Reading. Duration: 20 minutes

Links are an important way to help visitors find the information they need on your website. They’re also an important way to optimize website content for SEO, which you’re learning about in this course. This reading will help you become familiar with the best practices for internal and external links. You’ll also learn about promoting a website and attracting backlinks.

When it comes to website links, there are two main types: the links on your website, and the links that point to your website.

Links on a website can be either an internal link—pointing to another page within the website—or an external link—pointing to a page on another website. For example, imagine you’re the digital marketer for a travel planning website. An internal link may direct a visitor from a webpage with a list of hotels to another internal webpage about a specific hotel. The visitor never leaves your travel planning website.

An external link, however, may take a visitor from the list of hotels on your website to the hotel’s official website. The visitor leaves your website to go to another website. External links on your website are also commonly known as outbound links. The links are pointing out of the website to another site.

Links that point to your website from another website are called backlinks—also known as inbound links. Continuing the example above, if an online article about the best vacation packages includes a link to a webpage on your travel planning website, that would be considered a backlink.

The following are best practices to keep in mind when creating internal and external links.

Use appropriate anchor text

Anchor text is the visible text in a hyperlink. In the example below, “Learn more” is the anchor text.

Anchor text example with learn more as the visible text in a hyperlink

Good anchor text helps visitors navigate your site and helps Google understand what the page you’re linking to is about.

Anchor text should be:

  • Descriptive: Use anchor text that provides a basic idea of what the page linked to is about.

    • Avoid using generic anchor text like “page,” “article,” or “click here.”

    • In most cases, you’ll want to avoid using the URL itself as anchor text.

  • Concise: A few words or a short phrase is all you need for anchor text.

    • Avoid linking an entire paragraph or long sentence.

  • Easy to spot: Use formatting that makes your links stand out from the regular text on your website.

    • If the link only becomes apparent when a visitor moves their mouse over it, they can easily miss the link—or even accidentally click on it.

  • Helpful: Use anchor text only when it helps a visitor navigate your site to find the information they need.

    • Avoid using lengthy anchor text just for search engines.

    • Avoid stuffing the anchor text with keywords.

Pro tip: Avoid using the same anchor text multiple times on one page (even if you’re linking to different pages each time) as this may confuse both users and Google.

Linking to other websites can be beneficial, but you need to avoid linking to sites that may not be reputable or that may include information you don’t want to endorse.

Some users may try to take advantage of external linking for their own website’s benefit. For example, they may add a link to their site in the comments section or message boards of a website. Or, a third-party software application added to a site, such as live chat, might include unwanted external links.

In these cases, you can use nofollow links, which are links that feature HTML code that tells search engines to ignore that link. This means the search engines won’t associate your website with the site you’re linking to.

If your site includes public comments or message boards, it’s a good idea to automatically use nofollow links for all comments and messages added by users. This is generally a faster and more efficient process than manually removing external links every time they appear in the comments section or message boards.

Promoting your website

One of the ways that Google determines a website’s ranking is by analyzing the sites that link to it. Both the quality and quantity of links count towards a site’s ranking.

Creating quality content that other people want to link to is the best way to promote your website and attract backlinks. This is a gradual process that happens as people discover a website’s content and link to it. Promoting your website can help this process along by making it easier for people to find your content.

Ways to promote your website

Here are some ideas to help you promote your website and attract backlinks:

  • Publish blog posts about new content or new services you offer.

  • Share quality content on social media.

  • Feature helpful articles, such as buying guides, in your email marketing.

  • Connect with online communities related to your site, such as forums or message boards, social media groups, or related websites.

  • Only share content that will interest your users, instead of sharing every update to your site’s content.

Google warns against using paid links unless they are for advertising purposes and properly labeled. Buying and selling links in order to manipulate search results is not an acceptable practice and can negatively impact a site’s ranking. It can also lead to low-quality backlinks from sites with a questionable reputation.

Key takeaways

Using internal and external links with appropriate anchor text helps visitors find the information they need. Promoting your website and attracting backlinks helps you increase the quality and quantity of links pointing to your site, which can build your site’s reputation.

Resources for more information

To learn more about linking and promoting a website, read this article:

AND

Read more guides from Semrush below:

Optimize images for a website

Video. Duration: 5 minutes

Search engines use images as a way to visually discover information on the Internet. Images are also how customers can visually understand your products and services. Remember when we discussed image appearance in the Google SERPs? Well, those images mostly come from websites. Yes, it’s possible to get the images you upload to a website to display in Google Image results. In this video, we’re going to discuss best practices to get your images in Google Image results. You’ll find that these recommendations are for users, not just search engines. When you satisfy your users, the search engines often recognize that satisfaction and display your website, images, or content.

While it may seem like a simple process to upload images to your website, there are several factors to consider to make them friendly to both users and search engines. Let’s get into it.

One of the best ways to boost your visibility in Google Images is to first create a great user experience with images on the website. Now, how do you do that? Well, first, ensure that visual content is relevant to the page topic. Display images only where they add original value to the page. Also, whenever possible, place images prominently on the page and near relevant text. When it makes sense, consider placing the most important image near the top of the page. To provide a great user experience, you should also ensure your images are device-friendly. That means they should load properly on the computer, tablet, and mobile. Sometimes the image may resize on mobile. Is it cutoff or does it look the same as it is on your computer?

A second best practice with images is to include descriptive titles, captions, and filenames. When pulling an image from a website to display in Google Images, Google will automatically generate a title and snip it to describe the photo. You can assist in this by creating a descriptive page title. You should also consider including a caption with any photo. This helps Google understand what is going on in the photo. Likewise, the filename can give Google clues about the subject matter of the image. For example, “my-new-grey-kitten.jpg” is more descriptive than “IMG0023.jpg.”

A third image best practice is to use descriptive alt text. Alt text is text that describes an image. It improves accessibility for people who can’t see images on a webpage, including visitors who use screen readers or have low bandwidth connections. Google uses alt text along with computer vision algorithms and the content of the page to understand the subject matter of the image. When writing alt text, focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately. The alt text should also be in the context of the page content. You should also avoid keyword stuffing in alt text. It results in a negative user experience and may cause Google Search to recognize your site as spam.

Let’s go over an example of keyword stuffing in alt text for a photo of a puppy. Keyword stuffing alt text would read like “puppy dog baby dog pups doggies litter retriever Labrador Dalmatian terrier cheap dog food puppy food.” A more clear alt text example would be “Dalmatian puppy playing fetch.”

A fourth image recommendation is to optimize for speed. Images are often the largest contributor to overall page size, which can make pages slow to load. When uploading images to a website, you typically don’t upload the original image. Without losing the image’s quality, you should resize the images to a size more appropriate for a website. To determine if images are slowing the load speed of a website, use a free-of-charge tool provided by Google called Page Speed Insights. This tool analyzes a webpage and provides information about its load time. It also provides suggestions on how you can decrease the load time, such as what images are taking a long time to load.

Now you know more about how to get website images to appear in Google Image results. Whether you’re a digital marketer or an e-commerce analyst working on a website, social media, online advertising, or email marketing, visual features such as images will be an important aspect of your job. Remember, a little SEO knowledge can have a large impact. Apply these image best practices to ensure your content gets found in Google Images and drives even more traffic to your website.

Make your website mobile-friendly

Reading. Duration: 20 minutes

Making a website mobile-friendly means making it functional on a smartphone. In many countries, the number of smartphones has surpassed the number of personal computers. In the United States, 95% of people with smartphones search for local information on their phones. Having a mobile-friendly website has become a critical part of having an online presence.

Why make a website mobile-friendly?

If a website is not mobile-friendly, it can be difficult to view and use on a mobile device. A non-mobile-friendly site requires users to pinch or zoom to read the content. Users find this frustrating. When frustrated, users may abandon the website.

When a website is mobile-friendly, it is readable and immediately usable on a smartphone. This ensures that visitors have a good experience on a site when they’re visiting from their mobile devices.

The work to make a website mobile-friendly depends on a company’s resources, business model, and expertise. Many website themes and builders, such as Wix, take content and automatically make it mobile-friendly. Always check the mobile version of your site to ensure the content reads well and is easy to navigate.

What to know when building a mobile-friendly website
  • Make it easy for customers to use.

Consider your customers’ objectives. Do they want to be entertained by your blog post? Do they need your restaurant’s address? Do they want to read your product’s reviews? Design your website so it’s easy for them to achieve their objectives.

To do this, outline the steps in your customers’ journey. Make sure they can easily take these steps and achieve the journey on a mobile device.

In the example below, a customer is trying to purchase a lamp. First, they click on a website after searching for a lamp to buy. Then, they browse through a selection of lamps. Finally, they purchase the desired lamp.

Three step process finding a lamp online and purchasing it
  • Measure the effectiveness of your website by how easy mobile customers can complete common tasks.

Make a list of common tasks customers make on your website. Then, have several people test doing those tasks. How easy were they to complete? Focus on consistency in your interface and produce a unified experience across all platforms.

  • Use a responsive web design.

A responsive web design means that the website uses the same code whether the user is on a desktop computer, tablet, or mobile phone. The display adjusts according to the screen size.

Google recommends using a responsive web design over other design patterns. One benefit of using a responsive web design is that you only need to maintain one version of your site instead of two—one for mobile and one for desktop.

Top three mistakes beginners should avoid
  • Forgetting their mobile customer

Remember that good mobile sites are useful–they help visitors complete their tasks. Don’t focus solely on creating a mobile-formatted site and forget about providing full functionality. A mobile-formatted site may appear fine on a smartphone, however, if it isn’t as functional as a website on a computer, it may hinder the user. Additionally, ensure that mobile formatting and functionality is inclusive for those who don’t have access to a computer and do most of their tasks on a smartphone.

  • Implementing the mobile site on a different domain

Creating separate mobile URLs significantly increases the amount of work required to maintain and update your site. It also introduces possible sources of technical problems.

You can simplify your website management by using a responsive web design. This design will serve a desktop and mobile website on the same URL.

  • Working in isolation rather than searching for inspiration

Before you begin making your website mobile-friendly, review other sites in your industry, such as competitors for inspiration and best practices. Learn from features you find useful and not useful on their websites.

Mobile-Friendly Test

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test uses Googlebot to fetch your website and determines if it is mobile-friendly. If it is not, the results will describe issues that can affect your page when accessed on a smartphone. It’s a best practice to resolve these issues on your website so that it doesn’t negatively affect your customers.

Key takeaways

Having a mobile-friendly website is essential. An easy to use website on a smartphone helps customers achieve their objectives. When building a new website, consider using a responsive web design. This design is much easier to manage than having a separate website for desktop computers and smartphones.

If you don’t know if your website is mobile-friendly, use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test . The test will determine if there are any issues affecting visitors.

Explore: SEO do’s and don’ts

Ungraded Plugin. Duration: 3 minutes

Categorization exercise

By understanding SEO best practices, you can make it easier for search engines to crawl, index, and understand your website’s content.

Test your knowledge: Optimize a website’s content

Practice Quiz. 4 questions. Grade: 100%

2. Help Google (and users) understand your content

Craft effective titles and meta descriptions

Video. Duration: 5 minutes

Think about the webpage results in the search engine results page. What makes you decide to click on a certain result? Is it the URL? The name shown? Or a description of the page? Or is it a combination of all three? You, as a digital marketer creating a new webpage, have control over what page name—also called the title link—appears in the results page. You also have some control over the description of the page as well.

In this video, we’re going to discuss crafting effective webpage titles and descriptions that connect with searchers and potential customers. In general, every webpage has a title element, and most webpages have a meta description. The webpage title element provides both the user and search engines with a page’s topic. The meta description provides the search engines a summary of what the page is about. A page’s title may be a few words or a phrase, whereas a page’s meta description might be a sentence or two or even a short paragraph.

Let’s discuss a few recommendations for page titles. When creating a page title, you should make it accurately describe the topic of the page’s content. It should read naturally. Avoid writing a title that has no relation to the page’s content. Also, avoid creating a title with default text like “Untitled” or “New Page 1.” When a searcher reads a page’s title link and then clicks on the link, the webpage content should closely match that page title. Now, if it doesn’t, they’re likely to click back and revisit the search results page.

Another recommendation is to ensure every page has a unique title element. This helps users to understand the unique value which this page provides. So avoid using a single title in all pages across the site or in a large group of pages. An example of this is if a company had “Services” as the title for their services-related page. They should change it to a name that specific service the page content discusses. A third recommendation is to make titles brief but descriptive. If the title is too long or deemed less relevant, the Google search engine may share only a portion of the text in your title. An example of a less-relevant title is one that is keyword stuffed. Now, it’s okay to include a keyword, but don’t repeat it. Remember, the title should always be helpful to the searchers.

In general, even when following the best practices, Google may show title links that are different from the title elements on a page. This can happen when our systems determine that it’s valuable to provide a slightly different context to users, or if the given title element doesn’t fit the available space.

Let’s discuss meta descriptions. These are important because Google Search might use them in the results for your pages in the SERPs. Note that we say “might.” This is because Google Search may choose to use a relevant section of a page’s text if it does a good job matching the searcher’s query. Here are a few recommendations when crafting meta descriptions. You want to make sure there is a meta description for every page of the website. Google will show a snippet from the meta description or webpage in the search results. Writing a clear meta description may influence the page’s snippet in the search results.

A second recommendation when writing a meta description is it should accurately summarize the page content. Write a description that would both inform and interest searchers if they saw your meta description in a search result. Now, there is no minimum or maximum length for a meta description. Make sure it just contains all the relevant information a searcher would need to determine whether the page will be useful to them.

A third recommendation is to use unique descriptions for each page. Having a different description for each page helps both users and Google. For instance, if the search results displayed multiple pages of the same website. If you’re working for an e-commerce company with thousands of web pages, it’s likely not beneficial to spend time writing meta descriptions for each page. In this situation, you could automatically generate descriptions based on each page’s content. This is a more advanced technique. However, just remember, with a large website, not every single page’s description must be written manually.

You now know how important page titles and meta descriptions are to both search engines and users. They help them better understand what the page is all about, and they encourage people to click on the page link. If you create a webpage with great content but the title doesn’t reflect that content’s topic, it can frustrate searchers. This frustration may be reflected in analytics, and Google Search may choose to show different title links in the SERPs. Always craft effective titles in addition to excellent page content.

Reading. Duration: 20 minutes

When you enter a search query in a search engine, you’ll be met with a multitude of results across many search engine result pages (SERPs). Most search engines have a similar results structure. The results usually contain a bold title link (the title of a search result that links to a webpage) above a snippet (the description or summary part of the search result).

One search The title link and snippet are labeled

As you learned previously, Google automatically generates these results based on a page’s webpage title element and either its meta description or a relevant section of the page’s visible text. As a reminder, a webpage title element provides the user and search engine with a page’s topic. A meta description provides the search engines a summary of what the page is about.

The webpage title element and meta description

This reading provides some best practices for influencing title links and snippets to help you capture your desired audience.

Title links provide users with quick insights into the content of a result and why it’s relevant to their query. They are often the primary piece of information people use to decide which result to click on.

Google generates title links from both the content of a webpage and references to it that appear on the web. While Google automatically determines these title links, you can influence them and increase their effectiveness by following these best practices:

Do:

  • Accurately describe each page’s content in your title elements.

  • Write descriptive but concise titles.

  • Make sure your titles read naturally.

  • Create unique titles for each page.

  • Give each page’s main headline greater visual weight and prominence.

Don’t:

  • Use text in your title elements that has no relation to the content on the page.

  • Use default or vague text in your titles, like “Home,” “Untitled,” or “New Page 1.”

  • Use a single title in all title elements across your site’s pages.

  • Make your titles too lengthy or wordy.

  • Use repeated or boilerplate text in your titles.

  • Stuff unneeded or excessive keywords into your titles.

Control your snippets by creating quality meta descriptions

Google sometimes uses the meta description from a webpage to generate a snippet in search results. A meta description informs and interests users with a short, relevant summary of what a particular page is about. It can help convince the user that the page is exactly what they’re looking for. Follow these best practices to write effective meta descriptions:

Do:

  • Accurately summarize the page’s content.

I- nclude all information users need to determine whether the page will be useful and relevant to them.

  • Create unique descriptions for each page on your site.

Don’t:

  • Write a meta description that has no relation to the content on the page.

  • Use generic descriptions like “This is a web page” or “Page about women’s clothing.”

  • Fill the description with too many keywords.

  • Copy and paste the entire content of the webpage into the meta description tag.

  • Use a single meta description across all of your site’s pages.

Key takeaway

Effective title links and snippets can encourage people to click on the link to your webpage. When you follow the best practices described in this reading and approach crafting webpage title elements and meta descriptions thoughtfully, you can help get your brand noticed.

Activity: Improve webpage titles and meta descriptions

Practice Quiz. 1 question. Grade: 100%

Activity Overview

In this activity, you will create titles and meta descriptions for two webpages in an online store.

Titles and meta descriptions make it easier for search engines and consumers to find different pages on a website. Well-crafted titles and meta descriptions explain what a page is about and encourage consumers to click your links in search engine results pages.

Be sure to complete this activity before moving on. The next course item will provide you with a completed exemplar to compare to your own work. You will not be able to access the exemplar until you have completed this activity.

Scenario

Review the scenario below. Then complete the step-by-step instructions.

Founders’ Dairy is a specialty foods retailer located in Burlington, Vermont, USA. They began as a small farm in 1873, selling milk and cheeses to their local community. Since then, they have grown to include several brick-and-mortar shops, as well as an online store that ships nationwide. Founders’ Dairy sells a range of cheeses, jams, meats, syrups, and baked goods. They are especially well-known for their smoked cheddar cheeses and small-batch maple syrup.

You’re part of the digital marketing team that’s helping Founders’ improve their search engine optimization (SEO). As part of these efforts, you’re updating the page titles and meta descriptions to better reflect the content of each webpage. You’ll begin by making recommendations for two pages: the product page for buying cheeses online and a page of recipes that use Founders’ products.

Step-By-Step Instructions
Step 1: Access the template

To use the template for this course item, click the link below and select “Use Template.”

Link to template: Webpage titles and meta descriptions

OR

If you don’t have a Google account, you can download the template directly from the attachment below.

Link to DOCX file: Webpage titles and meta descriptions

Step 2: Review the title and meta description for Page 1

Review the current title and meta description for Page 1 (Cheeses). Then examine the URL and page summary. Consider how you can use this information to improve the existing title and description.

Note: Founders’ Dairy is a fictional company and the URL in the template will not work.

Step 3: Write a new title for Page 1

Write a new title that more accurately reflects the content of the page. Enter your title under Recommendations for Page 1.

Your title should be brief and make sense when read. It can include elements like the name of the website or business or its main offerings.

Step 4: Write a new meta description for Page 1

Write a 1–2 sentence meta description to accompany your new page title. Enter your new meta description under Recommendations for Page 1.

This description should accurately summarize the page content. It should read naturally and interest users who might encounter the page through a search.

Step 5: Write a new title and meta description for Page 2

Repeat Steps 2-3 for Page 2 (Recipes). Remember that each page should have a unique title and description that reflects its content.

Pro Tip: Save your work

Finally, be sure to save the work you did to complete this activity. This can help you work through your thought processes and demonstrate your experience to potential employers.

What to Include in Your Response

Be sure to address the following elements in your completed titles and meta descriptions:

  • The new titles accurately reflect the website URL and page content.

  • The new meta descriptions accurately summarize content of each page.

Activity Exemplar: Improve webpage titles and meta descriptions

Reading. Duration: 10 minutes

Here is a completed exemplar along with an explanation of how the exemplar fulfills the expectations for the activity.

Completed Exemplar

To review the exemplar for this course item, click the link below and select “Use Template.”

OR

If you don’t have a Google account, you can download the exemplar directly from the attachment below.

Assessment of Exemplar

Compare the exemplar to your completed titles and meta descriptions. Review your work using each of the criteria in the exemplar. What did you do well? Where can you improve? Use your answers to these questions to guide you as you continue to progress through the course.

Note: The exemplar represents two possible webpage titles and two possible meta descriptions. Yours will likely differ in certain ways. What’s important is that your titles and meta descriptions accurately reflect the URL and page content.

Let’s review the title and meta description for each page:

Page 1 - Cheeses

  • Title: Cheeses | Founders’ Dairy - Premium Specialty Foods

    • The title accurately reflects the URL and the content of the page (cheeses). It also mentions the full name of the business and describes its main product focus (“premium specialty foods”).

  • Meta description: Shop hand-crafted cheeses made the traditional way. Buy our mozzarella, Swiss, and best-selling smoked cheddars.

    • The meta description flows naturally and reflects the content of the page: Founders hand-crafted cheeses, including its smoked cheddar.
Page 2 - Recipes

  • Title: Family Recipes | Founders’ Dairy - Premium Specialty Foods

  • The title accurately reflects the URL and the content of the page (recipes). It also mentions the full name of the business and describes its main product focus (“premium specialty foods”).

  • Meta description: Time-honored recipes from our family to yours. Try homemade macaroni and cheese made with our hand-crafted cheddar.

  • The meta description flows naturally and reflects the content of the page: recipes from the Founders family that use Founders’ products.

Create structured data markup

Video. Duration: 4 minutes

Have you ever noticed that some search results show different information than others? Maybe you’ve seen a result with a star rating? Or with a price? Or a recipe that looks different from the other results? These unique results in the service are called rich results. Think of rich results as enhanced results in Google Search with extra visual or interactive features.

To get rich results for a webpage, you should add structured data to the page, which is code used to describe a webpage’s content better to search engines. Structured data markup is a way of providing additional machine-readable information within a webpage. Search engines use structured data to display content in useful ways in search results. That, in turn, can help attract just the right kind of customers for a business.

For example, if you’re an e-commerce analyst for an online store and use structured data to mark up an individual page, this helps the Google Search engine understand the page features for the product, such as its price and customer reviews. In addition to a product, you can mark up information for an organization, such as its location, opening hours, events, videos, recipes, and its logo.

It’s important to know that just because you add structured data markup to a web page, doesn’t guarantee it will show up in the search results. Ultimately, the Google algorithm will determine if the rich results display and for what type of searches. Schema is the type of code used for the structured data markups. Now, depending on the type of platform a website is built on, there may be third-party software that helps you add the markups without dealing with the schema code. To make the process easier, try to determine if the software is available before trying to learn the code. Additionally, if you work for a larger company, they may have engineers that write this code. It may not be the responsibility of the digital marketer.

Once you add the structured data markup to your content, you can ensure there are no mistakes with your implementation with a Google rich results test. To run the test, enter in the URL for the webpage. You’ll have results within a minute or two. Running this test ensures you aren’t using invalid markup on the webpage. If it’s invalid, it won’t show up in the search results. After you’ve added structured data to several pages of your website, Google Search also provides information about which pages it detects have a specific type of markup. You can review this data in a tool you’ll learn more about called Google Search Console.

One important note to remember: Never add fake data to the structured data markup. For example, you don’t want to provide fake reviews or any irrelevant markups that don’t add value to the searcher. Let’s cover some of the most popular rich results and what they visually look like.

The rich results for a product may include the price, availability, and review ratings. These pieces of structured data are information that a potential e-commerce customer may be interested in. Having this rich result may make them more likely to click on your results over competitors. Rich results for a review snippet may include the review rating and the number of ratings. The review is usually an average of the combined rating scores from reviewers on the website. A review snippet can be about a book, a recipe, a movie, a product, software app, or local business.

The rich results for an article are typically for websites that publish timely information. This rich result isn’t just for news sites. If your website publishes any articles with industry information, you may want to consider the article markup.

The last rich results example we’ll review is for a video. The information for a video may include the option to play the video, specific video segments, and if it’s livestream content. You now know more about the different types of enhanced results in the SERPs. The next time you perform an Internet search, look closely at the results. Which results have rich results? Do you find the websites with rich results more appealing to those without? Are they providing you with more information? Becoming aware of what information is available in the search results will help you be more successful in digital marketing and e-commerce analyst roles.

Establish your business details on Google

Reading. Duration: 20 minutes

The Google knowledge panel is a Google search engine results pages (SERPs) feature that displays brand and business information separate from general search results. This reading describes knowledge panels and provides set-up steps to establish business details.

The Google knowledge panel

Knowledge panels are information boxes that appear on Google when you search for entities such as people, places, organizations, or things. You can compare the knowledge panel to a person’s personal identification card. Like an ID, the knowledge panel consolidates essential and official information regarding a business or brand. Knowledge panels are automatically generated, and information that appears in a knowledge panel comes from various sources across the web.

Below is an example that shows the details listed on the knowledge panel for Coursera.

A knowledge panel of Apple company

As displayed in the image, business details can include a(n):

  • Official website link

  • Site logo

  • Brand industry

  • Brand description

  • Social profile links

Including this information makes it easier for searchers to identify a brand’s official site to find the exact information they were seeking.

Set up business details on Google

The following steps detail the process of setting up a brand’s business details for a knowledge panel on Google.

Step 1: Create a Google Business Profile

For business owners who run local brick-and-mortar businesses, like a restaurant or shopping retailer, the first step in establishing business details is to create a Google Business Profile.

Google Business Profile is a free tool that allows local businesses to tailor how their business information appears on Google Search and Google Maps. Owners can post hours of operation, their products and services, accept online orders, and more. You can create and manage a business profile directly in Google Maps or Google Search.

Step 2: Verify website ownership

The next step is verifying the website ownership in Google’s Search Console. Search Console is a powerful Google tool that helps you better understand how your website is performing, allows you to optimize visibility of your websites, and provides other services.

You’ll learn more about services the Search Console offers in a later section of the course.

Verifying your website through Search Console is important because it ensures that you have control over how your website is presented on Google and have access to sensitive Google Search data for your site.

Step 3: Update the website’s Google knowledge panel

After you’re verified as an official representative, you can sign in to the Gmail account associated with the entity that you represent and update your Google knowledge panel information.

Updating these details overrides the publicly available information that Google algorithms automatically find and inputs for you.

Step 4: Add structured data for rich results

Rich results are Google Search results that go beyond the standard blue link. They can include carousels, images, or other non-textual elements. As a digital marketer, you’ll want to make sure your website is eligible for rich results because it helps your business stand out.

To help your business become eligible for rich results, you must add structured data. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. It should be noted that adding structured data doesn’t automatically ensure that rich results will be added to your business’s search results page.

You can learn more about creating structured data by reading a document on the Google Search Central website title: Understand how structured data works

Once you’ve added structured data, you can check its accuracy by entering your website’s URL on: Google’s Rich Results Test page

Step 5: Highlight customer support methods

Be sure to include ways that your website’s visitors can access helpful information or reach you for customer support needs. These include but are not limited to your contact number and email address.

Key takeaways

Displaying accurate information about your business helps you get recognized by search engine users quickly. Getting noticed helps direct your audience to your website to potentially complete a desired goal, such as making a purchase.

Learn more: Add Business Details to Google

Test your knowledge: Help Google (and users) understand your content

Practice Quiz. 4 questions. Grade: 100%

3. Analyze search performance and user behavior

Introduction to Google Search Console

Video. Duration: 4 minutes

When working on search engine optimization for a website, there’s a no-cost tool that helps you better understand how the website is performing on Google Search. The tool is called Google Search Console. Search Console provides information on a range of different website metrics and reports. For example, you can learn how many people visit the website by searching on Google, or you can confirm Google is crawling your webpages. You can also learn if there are any technical errors on the site.

In this video, we’re going to discuss how to get started on Google Search Console, and how a beginner in digital marketing may use this tool. For some of the following videos and screenshot examples, we’re using a company called Happy Clothes. They are a fictional company we use to demonstrate SEO and SEM tools.

There are a lot of features on Search Console. Some are more advanced than others. Let’s discuss first steps a beginner should do.

First, add and verify website ownership. Verification is a process of proving that you own the website. And once you finish the verification, Search Console will start to collect data, and you’ll gain full access to the tool.

And after a few days, once the Search Console collects sufficient website data, the second step you should take is to ensure Google can find and read your pages. The index coverage report provides an overview of all the pages Google indexed or tried to index on the website. Review the rest available, and try to fix page errors and warnings.

For the third step, you should review another report called the mobile usability report. This report shows issues that might affect your user’s experience while browsing the site on a mobile device. The report includes information about specific issues, a sample list of the pages affected, and how to fix an issue.

The next step is to consider submitting a sitemap to Search Console. A sitemap is a file that provides information about the pages, videos, and other files on the site and the relationship between them. Search engines like Google read this file to crawl the site more efficiently.

You don’t have to have a sitemap because Google is still likely to crawl the website. However, it’s a best practice to submit the sitemap to improve the crawling, particularly if your website is larger and over 500 pages. You should also include a sitemap in case Google has difficulty crawling your site and cannot discover important pages. Submitting a sitemap is a slightly technical SEO task. However, many website platforms such as WordPress, Wix, or Blogger automatically create and make a sitemap available for search engines. You don’t have to do anything. If your website is on a platform, confirm it is doing this for you.

The fifth step is to monitor your site’s performance. The search performance report shows how much traffic you’re getting from Google Search. The report breaks down the traffic by queries, pages, and countries. For each of these breakdowns, you can get trends for impressions, clicks, and other metrics.

We’ll discuss Search Console reports later in this course. As a digital marketer using Search Console, let’s discuss what the general usage is like. The day-to-day usage will be minimal. You’ll receive an email when unusual events occur, such as if the website is hacked or if Google has any issues crawling the website. Every month or so, review the Search Console dashboard. Get a quick health check to check on the website. Make sure there aren’t any errors on the site. Also, check that there aren’t any unusual dips in click count to the website.

You should also review Search Console whenever you add new content to websites. If needed, submit a new sitemap with the recently-added content. A few hours after adding new pages, confirm that the number of indexed pages are rising. If you’re ever working on website content, review the Search Console metrics and reports to ensure the website is functioning properly. If it isn’t, that could affect the performance of your content.

Great job! You’re really learning a lot! I hope you’re feeling more confident in your SEO and Search Console knowledge.

Google Search Console reports and metrics

Video. Duration: 4 minutes

One of the most beneficial features of Google Search Console is its reports and metrics. In this video, we’ll discuss popular reports you should be aware of. We’ll also cover terms and features in those reports.

Let’s start with the Overview page. This is the page you’ll see after logging into Search Console. While not a report, this is still an important page to understand. The Overview page shows a summary of your site’s health, including any security issues, graphs of metrics, and summaries of enhancements for the site, such as structured data. You should check on this page periodically to ensure that there are no security issues or enhancement errors. Also, confirm there aren’t any dips in the click count to the website. If they are found, you should investigate the cause.

The Web Search Performance report focuses on several SEO-related metrics. Let’s quickly cover some of those. Impressions are how many times your site has been seen by someone in Google Search. Clicks are how many times a searcher clicked on your website’s results in the SERPs. The click-through rate is the percentage of people who saw your listing and then clicked on it. The average position is where your site ranks in the search results. Position one is the top position. See, all these metrics are connected. For example, if your website receives a lot of impressions but its average position in the SERPs is low, it won’t receive many clicks. If the website isn’t receiving many clicks, then its click-through rate will be low as well.

Another report to review is the Links report. This shows which websites link to yours, what the link text is, and what your top-linked pages are. Use this report to better understand which webpages are receiving the most links from other websites. Ask yourself, why is this page receiving more links than other pages? Also, you can use a Links report to determine if a website is linked to by spammy or useful sites. If it’s linked by spammy sites, you can generally ignore them.

The Coverage report shows the index status for all pages in your site. Pages are grouped according to whether they are or can be indexed. Also included is a description of why the pages could or could not be indexed. Use the Coverage report to periodically scan for spikes in errors or drops in index counts to identify crawling problems on your site.

Another report to review is the Manual Actions report. A manual action is Google’s way to demote or remove webpages that are not compliant with its webmaster quality guidelines. Typically, manual actions are for websites or webpages that tried to manipulate the search index. An example of why a manual action is placed against a website is if it has been keyword stuffing. If you follow Google’s quality guidelines, it’s likely your website won’t receive a manual action. Still, it’s important to check the report in Search Console to confirm.

The Security Issues report lists indications that your site was hacked or behavior on your site that could potentially harm a visitor or their computer. An example of this is installing unwanted software on a visitor’s computer. If you do see a security issue in this report, Google will provide details about the issue and how to fix it.

While there are several more reports in Search Console, those are some of the more popular and important ones. As a beginner in digital marketing, you’ll use these reports to better understand how a webpage is performing in Google Search. You’ll also use it to identify any major issues with the website, such as if it’s been hacked or its pages are not being indexed. Google Search Console is a really helpful tool to learn and implement SEO. Great work! You’re really learning a lot!

Learn more about Google Search Console

Reading. Duration: 20 minutes

Google Search Console is a free tool that allows people to learn useful information about their business’ website. The tool lets users monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot their site’s presence, which increases the site’s overall performance and makes users more likely to enjoy spending time on the site.

Google Search Console has lots of capabilities. Whether you want to see an analytics report of your site, make HTML improvements, set up sitemaps, or something else, Search Console gives you total control over your website.

If you are interested in learning more about Google Search Console, check out the video series below.

Google Search Central: Google Search Console Training

More tools and reports in Google Search Console

Reading. Duration: 20 minutes

As you learned in a video, Google Search Console is a tool that helps you better understand how your website is performing. It helps you manage your website’s presence in search engines and make it easier for more people to find your site. This reading will introduce a few of the tools and reports available in Google Search Console.

Sitemaps report

The sitemaps report in Google Search Console allows you to submit or update your sitemap, which is a file that provides information about the pages, videos, and other files on a site, and the relationships between them.

A sitemap helps Google find the most important pages on your website that you would like to appear in search results. It also helps Google understand the relationship between the pages on your site.

You might not need to submit a sitemap if your site is small and already being crawled by Google. However, submitting a sitemap can help Google improve how it crawls your website—especially if your website is larger and includes more than 500 pages.

Some website platforms, such as WordPress, Wix, and Blogger, automatically create a sitemap for you and make it available to search engines. In that case, you don’t need to submit a sitemap. If your website platform doesn’t automatically create and submit a sitemap, you can use the sitemaps report in Google Search Console to do so.

The sitemaps report allows you to find out which sitemaps have been submitted for your website, access sitemap statistics, and monitor any errors that Google may have encountered when processing your sitemaps.

A view of a sitemaps report in Google Search Console
URL inspection tool

Another tool that Google Search Console offers is the URL inspection tool, which provides detailed crawl, index, and serving information about your pages, directly from the Google index. It allows you to access the information that the Google index has about a specific URL on your website. It also allows you to test a live page on your website.

The URL inspection tool reveals errors on the page, such as HTML or JavaScript code errors. It also reveals other technical information. This tool is helpful for troubleshooting any crawling errors that Google encountered on your site. It’s also helpful for fixing and retesting a page with errors.

Change of address

If you move your website from one domain to another, you’ll need to let Google know by using the change of address tool. For example, if your website address was example.com and you later changed it to example.org, you would use this tool to let Google know about the change. Then Google can migrate your Google Search results from your old website to your new one.

The change of address feature in Google Search Console’s settings
Removals tool

In some cases, you may want to prevent a webpage on your site from appearing in Google Search. A temporary fix is to use the removals tool, which allows you to temporarily block pages from Google Search results and manage SafeSearch filtering.

The temporary block will only last about 6 months, however. To permanently remove the page from Google Search results, you will need to do one of the following:

  • Remove or update the page

  • Block access to the content by requiring a password or using another method to restrict access

  • Add code to the page that tells search engines not to index it (this method is less secure than the other two methods)

A view of the removals tool in Google Search Console
Key takeaways

Google Search Console provides tools to help you monitor and manage your website’s performance. Using these tools can help more people find your website.

Resources for more information

Get an overview of the tools and reports available in Google Search Console.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Reading. Duration: 20 minutes

In a previous reading, you learned about Google Search Console and the tools it offers. Now, it’s time to explore an alternative resource called Bing Webmaster Tools. In this reading you’ll learn what it is, its features, and how to use it.

What is Bing Webmaster Tools?

Bing Webmaster Tools (or Bing WMT) is a free service developed by Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which allows digital marketers and web developers to add their websites to the Bing index crawler and see their site’s performance in Bing. Basically, Bing Webmaster Tools is to the Bing search engine, as Google Search Console is to Google Search.

Why use Bing Webmaster Tools?

It’s important for digital marketers to stay knowledgeable about other search engines and their available resources. While Google and Google Search Console are incredibly popular, digital marketers should also pay attention to additional opportunities to market their brand. Bing is a notable example of this with more than 1 billion visits each month. Using Bing Webmaster Tools to market on Bing could potentially drive traffic to your website.

What features do Bing Webmaster Tools offer?

Bing Webmaster Tools helps users monitor how well their website is performing, improves SEO visibility, and identifies how customers are finding their sites.

Bing Webmaster Tools offers similar features that were described in previous course material related to Google Search Console, like site verification, crawl control, sitemaps reports, URL inspection tool, change of address tool, and a removals tool.

Bing Webmaster Tools also offers other features, including:

  • Backlinks: Users can access and analyze data about their referring pages, domains, and anchor texts.

  • Keyword Research: Users can check the phrases and keywords that searchers are querying for and their corresponding search volumes.

  • SEO Report: This feature collects all the errors found across an entire website.

  • Site Scan: This on-demand site audit tool crawls a site and checks for common technical SEO issues.

Key takeaways

Exploring additional tools and resources outside of the Google community is critical to becoming a well-rounded digital marketer. Bing Webmaster Tools are a resource to advertising successfully on Bing. Like with the Google Search Console, using Bing Webmaster Tools can help more people find your website.

Resources for more information

Get an overview of Bing Webmaster Tools.

Dave: My career path into SEO and SEM

Video. Duration: 2 minutes

Hi, my name is Dave, and I am a shopping specialist. I’m responsible for helping retailers promote their products on Google. The best part of my job is being a trusted advisor for the retailers that I work with. I like being able to bring solutions to help them maximize their investments across Google properties.

After high school, I joined the United States Marine Corps. I spent two years in Tradepoint, North Carolina, and another two years in London, England. The skills I learned in the Marine Corps have been invaluable in my professional career. One of the first things you receive in the Marine Corps is an “honor, courage, and commitment” card. It’s given to every Marine as a foundation for how one should live their life. Honor represents integrity, responsibility, and accountability, while courage is about doing the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. I got out of the Marines in 2002, and I’ve carried this card with me ever since. It translates into my job now as I apply these values to all the decisions I make for my retailers.

I learned about digital marketing and e-commerce primarily through the Internet, by researching tactics to drive more traffic to websites, both organically and through paid methods. My journey into digital marketing began with a passion for golf. I started playing golf in college and wanted to find a way to do more golf without breaking the bank. So, I started a golf blog, covering various aspects of the sport, from the professional tour to course reviews and golf products.

I learned about digital marketing, SEO, and SEM through my blog. Eventually, we began advertising and selling products through affiliate marketing. Google Ads became a fantastic way to drive high-quality traffic to our site.

For those of you deeply immersed in creating content, remember that there’s a reason you started this journey. Keep pushing towards the end because, when you earn that certificate, it will unlock opportunities that you may not have had when you began. Stay motivated and keep pushing forward.

Test your knowledge: Analyze search performance and user behavior

_Practice Quiz. 4 questions. Grade: 100% _

4. Review: Apply search engine optimization (SEO)

Wrap-up

Video. Duration: 1 minute

Excellent work in completing this section! We’ve delved into numerous strategies on how to effectively apply search engine optimization. Your journey started with understanding general strategies and principles for optimizing website content, encompassing images. Then, you explored recommendations for making a website mobile-friendly, along with a tool to assess its mobile-friendliness.

Next, you gained insights into crafting effective titles and meta descriptions to ensure search engines can comprehend a webpage’s content clearly. Furthermore, you delved into structured data markup and the importance of creating unique content for improved visibility in search engine results.

Finally, we introduced you to Google Search Console, a valuable SEO tool. You learned about essential metrics and reports to detect usability errors on your website. Additionally, you discovered the SEO features provided by the Bing Webmaster tool.

Whether you’re tasked with creating website content or enhancing the ranking of a webpage, your newfound SEO knowledge will be invaluable. Even mastering the basics, such as optimizing content and images, can significantly impact a page’s search engine ranking. For example, by addressing issues like page load speed due to large images, you can boost a page’s visibility in search results. Utilize this SEO expertise to impress your employer and help them achieve their website goals.

I want to commend you on your fantastic progress in mastering search engine optimization. It’s not an easy topic to grasp, and your dedication is truly commendable. I hope you’re enthusiastic about continuing your learning journey, and I look forward to meeting you in the next section. Well done!

Glossary terms from module 3

Reading. Duration: 20 minutes

Terms and definitions from Course 2, Module 3

Module 3 challenge

Due, Nov 5, 11:59 PM WET. Quiz. 10 questions. Grade: 100%

END! - Week 3 - Course 2