SEARCH ENGINEOPTIMISATION

AN ADVANCED GUIDE TO

CONTENTS

• How does Google populate a SERP?

• Google Rank Brain & Knowledge Graph

• Technical SEO

• Google’s Search Quality Guidelines

• Maintaining a healthy link profile

HOW DOES GOOGLE POPULATE A SERP?

SERP

A search engine results page (SERP) is the list of results that a search engine returns in response to a specific word or phrase query.

SPIDERS - CRAWLERS - BOTS

SPIDERS CRAWLERS BOTS

A browser like program that downloads webpages and

websites

A program and follows the links on a webpage

An automated computer program that visit websites & perform predefined task.

SERP FEATURES

• Spelling suggestions, definitions, related searches, related questions, calculator, translator, answers, featured snippets, maps, images, videos, movie showtimes, sports scores and fixtures, weather, flight statuses, news results, tweets

• The Knowledge Graph

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A USER SEARCHES?

• QUERY UNDERSTANDING AND EXPANSION

• RETRIEVAL AND SCORING

• POST RETRIEVAL ADJUSTMENTS

(PRE-QUERY)

• Crawls all available pages and URLs on the web

• Analysis of crawled pages (extract links, annotate semantics)

• Store this data and build an index

• Index is like the index of a book

• For each ‘keyword’, there is a list of pages it appears on

• Broken up into groups (known as shards)

UNDERSTANDING THE QUERY

• Does the query have any known entities?

• Beyonce, Cristiano Ronaldo, Sydney Opera House

• Are there useful synonyms?

• Are the synonyms ambiguous? (gm = general motors, genetically modified)

• What’s the context?

RETRIEVAL AND SCORING

• Send the query to all the shards

• Each shard then:

• Finds matching pages

• Computes a score (S1) for query+page

• Sends back the top N pages (by S1)

• Combines the top pages and then sorts (ranks) by score

POST RETRIEVAL ADJUSTMENTS

• Too much duplication in results?

• Negative user interactions?

• Search abandonment

• Need for spam demotions/manual actions?

RANK BRAIN & KNOWLEDGE GRAPH

RANK BRAIN

KNOWLEDGE GRAPH

KNOWLEDGE GRAPH

Depending on the brand and business model, these panels might include:

• Basic info and a brief description from Wikipedia

• Photos from Google Plus

• Stock prices from Google Finance, Yahoo Finance and MSN Money

• Reviews from Google

• Social profiles

• Competitors

• Related searches

KNOWLEDGE GRAPH

https://developers.google.com/structured-data/customize/overview

TECHNICAL SEO

TECHNICAL SEO

• Indexation & Accessibility

• Site Speed & Performance

• URL structure

• Search Verticals

• Search appearance

INDEXATION & ACCESSIBILITY

HOW DOES GOOGLE VIEW YOUR SITE?

http://www.browseo.net/

WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR

• Can you see all of your menu links (drop downs too!)?

• Do all of the menu items and links appear as plain text?

• Are all the links clickable?

• Does this reveal any text that was previously hidden? (Hidden text can send a red flag to Googlebot. It might not always be there maliciously, but it shouldn't be there.)

• Is your sidebar or widgets content all the way at the top? Remember, your most important links and content should be at the top of the HTML. This is more important the bigger the site is.

BROKEN LINKS & DEAD ENDS

• Broken Link Checker https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ojkcdipcgfaekbeaelaapakgnjflfglf

• Site Liner http://siteliner.com/

• Dead Link Checker http://www.deadlinkchecker.com/

SITE SPEED & PERFORMANCE

http://tools.pingdom.com/

SITE SPEED & PERFORMANCE

Website performance radically impacts our success, 64% of smartphone users expect websites to load in under four seconds.

• Avoid plugins where possible. Features like carousels, tabbed interfaces, lightboxes and scrolling are often implemented using plugins, but these plugins are heavy, as they try to solve every scenario imaginable.

• Optimise Images

• Optimise fonts

URL STRUCTURE

URL STRUCTURE

homepage.co.uk

homepage.co.uk/volunteering-opportunities

homepage.co.uk/volunteering-opportunities/leeds

homepage.co.uk/volunteering-opportunities/leeds/elder-care

SITEMAPS - XML

• www.homepage.com/sitemap.xml

• https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

• Upload via Google Search Console

• Helps Google identify all the pages on your site

• Only include indexed pages on the sitemap

SITEMAPS - HTML

• Allow bots to navigate the site better

• Can help Google establish a page hierarchy

MAINTAINING A HEALTHY LINK

PROFILE

LINK THEORY

The more links you have to your site from other relevant sites, the higher your rankings will be (especially if the Anchor text used is optimised and targeted).

LINK THEORY

Vary your link anchor text

Don’t submit to too many directories online

SEARCH VERTICALS

SEARCH VERTICALS

• Mobile friendly sites

• Optimising online slide decks

• Deeper social integration

• Image optimisation

MOBILE FRIENDLY SITES

• April 21, 2015 ‘Mobilegeddon’

• March 2016, Google announced it would update the algorithm in May

• April 2016, Google warns webmasters that their site’s aren’t mobile friendly

• May 2016, Expected slow rollout of algorithm update

• Google Mobile Friendly Checker - https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

SEARCH APPEARANCE

SEARCH APPEARANCE

SEARCH APPEARANCE

TITLE TAG

META DESCRIPTION

URL

SEARCH ANALYTICS

Google Search Console: