Mark BranomContinuing Studies CS 22

Agenda

What is SEO? The Seven Steps to SEO

Get Your Site Fully Indexed Get Your Pages Visible Build Links & PageRank Leverage Your PageRank Encourage Clickthrough Track the Right Metrics Avoid Worst Practices

Part 1: What Is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization 6 times more effective than a banner

ad Delivers qualified leads Most user sessions begin at the

search engines Most online purchases are made on

sites found through search engine listings

SEO is NOT Paid Advertising SEO – influence rankings in the

“natural” (a.k.a. “organic”, a.k.a. “algorithmic”) search results

PPC – paid search advertising on a pay-per-click basis. The more you pay, the higher your placement. Stop paying = stop receiving traffic.

SEM – encompasses both SEO and PPC

Natural

Paid

Paid

Most Important Search Engines Google – 67.6% market share Bing – 18.7% Yahoo – 10% Ask – 2.4% AOL – 1.3%

Source: searchenginewatch.com: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2345837/google-search-engine-market-share-nears-68

What Are Searchers Looking For? Keyword Research

“Target the wrong keywords and all your efforts will be in vain.”

The “right” keywords are… relevant to your business popular with searchers

Keyword Research

Tools to check popularity of keyword searches http://WordTracker.com http://KeywordDiscovery.com http://adwords.google.com/

KeywordPlanner http://www.google.com/trends/ http://ubersuggest.org/

SEO. A Moving Target.

Lots is changing… Personalization & customization Vertical search services (Images, Video, News, Maps,

etc.) “Universal Search”

Fortunately, the tried-and-true tactics still work… Topically relevant links from important sites Anchor text Keyword-rich title tags Keyword-rich content Internal hierarchical linking structure The whole is greater than the sum of the parts

The Search Engines Are Your Friend Sitemaps.org Webmaster tools (e.g. Google Webmaster,

Bing Webmaster) Rel=“nofollow” tag

Part 2: Seven Steps to SEO

Begin The 7 Steps

1) Get Your Site Fully Indexed 2) Get Your Pages Visible 3) Build Links & PageRank4) Leverage Your PageRank4) Encourage Clickthrough6) Track the Right Metrics7) Avoid Worst Practices

1) Get Your Site Fully Indexed

Search engines are wary of “dynamic” pages - they fear “spider traps”

Avoid stop characters (?, &, =) ‘cgi-bin’, session IDs and unnecessary variables in your URLs; frames; redirects; pop-ups; navigation in Flash/Java/Javascript/pulldown boxes If not feasible due to platform constraints, can be

easily handled through proxy technology (e.g. GravityStream)

The better your PageRank, the deeper and more often your site will be spidered

1) Get Your Site Fully Indexed Page # estimates are wildly inaccurate,

and include non-indexed pages (e.g. ones with no title or snippet)

Misconfigurations (in robots.txt, in the type of redirects used, requiring cookies, etc.) can kill indexation

Keep your error pages out of the index by returning 404 status code

Keep duplicate pages out of the index by standardizing your URLs, eliminating unnecessary variables, using 301 redirects when needed

Not Spider-Friendly

GET http://www.bananarepublic.com --> 302 Moved Temporarily

GET http://www.bananarepublic.com/browse/home.do --> 302 Moved Temporarily

GET http://www.bananarepublic.com/browse/home.do?targetURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bananarepublic.com%2Fbrowse%2Fhome.do&CookieSet=Set --> 302 Moved Temporarily

GET http://www.bananarepublic.com/cookieFailure.do --> 200 OK

2) Get Your Pages Visible 100+ “signals” that influence ranking “Title tag” is the most important copy on the page Home page is the most important page of a site Every page of your site has a “song” (keyword

theme) Incorporate keywords into title tags, hyperlink

text, headings (H1 & H2 tags), alt tags, and high up in the page (where they’re given more “weight”)

Eliminate extraneous HTML code “Meta tags” are not a magic bullet Have text for navigation, not graphics

Pretty good title

Not so good title – where’s the phrase “credit card”?

Good link text and body copy

Good link text and body copy

No link text or body copy

No link text or body copy

Take a peek under the hood

The “meta tags”

Unnecessarily bloated HTML

3) Build Links and PageRank “Link popularity” affects search engine rankings

PageRank™ - Links from “important” sites have more impact on your Google rankings (weighted link popularity)

Google offers a window into your PageRank PageRank meter in the Google Toolbar

(toolbar.google.com) Google Directory (directory.google.com) category pages 3rd party tools like SEOChat.com’s “PageRank Lookup” &

“PageRank Search”

Scores range from 0-10 on a logarithmic scale

Google’s Toolbar – with handy PageRank Meter

4) Leverage Your PageRank Your home page’s PageRank gets

distributed to your deep pages by virtue of your hierarchical internal linking structure (e.g. breadcrumb nav)

Pay attention to the text used within the hyperlink (“Google bombing”)

Don’t hoard your PageRank Don’t link to “bad neighborhoods”

4) Leverage Your PageRank Avoid PageRank dilution

Canonicalization (www.domain.com vs. domain.com)

Duplicate pages: (session IDs, tracking codes, superfluous parameters)

http://company.com/Products/widget.html http://company.com/products/widget.html http://company.com/Products/Widget.html http://company.com/products/Widget.html

In general, search engines are cautious of dynamic URLs (with ?, &, and = characters) because of “spider traps” Rewrite your URLs (using a server module/plug-in) or

use a hosted proxy service (e.g. GravityStream) See

http://catalogagemag.com/mag/marketing_right_page_web/

Duplicate pages

Googlebot got caught in a “spider trap”

Search engine spiders turn their noses up at such URLs

Thus, important content doesn’t make it into the search engine indices

5) Encourage Clickthrough Zipf’s Law applies - you need to be at the top

of page 1 of the search results. It’s an implied endorsement.

Synergistic effect of being at the top of the natural results & paid results

Entice the user with a compelling call-to-action and value proposition in your descriptions

Your title tag is critical Snippet gets built automatically, but you CAN

influence what’s displayed here

Where do searchers look? (Enquiro, Did-it, Eyetools Study)

Search listings – 1 good,1 lousy

6) Track the Right Metrics Indexation: # of pages indexed, % of

site indexed, % of product inventory indexed, # of “fresh pages”

Link popularity: # of links, PageRank score (0 - 10)

Rankings: by keyword, “filtered” (penalized) rankings

Keyword popularity: # of searches, competition, KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Indicator) scores

Cost/ROI: sales by keyword & by engine, cost per lead

Avoid Worst Practices

Target relevant keywords Don’t stuff keywords or replicate

pages Create deep, useful content Don't conceal, manipulate, or over-

optimize content Links should be relevant (no

scheming!) Observe copyright/trademark law &

Google’s guidelines

Spamming in Its Many Forms… Hidden or small text Keyword stuffing Targeted to obviously irrelevant

keywords Automated submitting, resubmitting,

deep submitting Competitor names in meta tags Duplicate pages with minimal or no

changes Spamglish Machine generated content

Spamming in Its Many Forms… Pagejacking Doorway pages Cloaking Submitting to FFA (“Free For All”)

sites & link farms Buying up expired domains with high

PageRanks Scraping Splogging (spam blogging)

BMW.de hosted many

“doorway pages” like

this one

“Sneaky redirect” sent searchers to

this page

Not Spam, But Bad for Rankings Splash pages, content-less home page,

Flash intros Title tags the same across the site Error pages in the search results (eg

“Session expired”) "Click here" links Superfluous text like “Welcome to” at

beginning of titles Spreading site across multiple domains

(usually for load balancing) Content too many levels deep

What Next? Conduct an SEO Audit! Is your site fully indexed? Are your pages fully optimized? Could you be acquiring more PageRank? Are you spending your PageRank wisely? Are you maximizing your clickthrough

rates? Are you measuring the right things? Are you applying “best practices” in SEO

and avoiding all the “worst practices”?

Before SEO

Before SEO

AfterSEO

AfterSEO

In Summary

Focus on the right keywords Have great keyword-rich content Build links, and thus your

PageRank™ Spend that PageRank™ wisely within

your site Measure the right things Continually monitor and benchmark