SEO(Search Engine Optimization)

How do search engines work

• Search engines are text driven

• They can’t listen to cool sounds on websites and can’t see the amazing videos on them

• They also don’t under stand the pretty design of the website

So what do they do?

• Search engines use a piece of software called spider to crawl the web.

• The follow links within a website and record what they see

• Crawlers/spiders cannot see password protected content, flash animations, javascripts i.e. anything except text.

Original website tribune.com.pk

Spidered text tribune.com.pk(what the search engine sees)

• The Express Tribune – Latest Breaking Pakistan News, Business, Life, Style, Cricket, Videos, Comments RSS Today's Paper Subscribe Tuesday, 27 Sep 2011 beta 2.0 Faisalabad Gilgit Hyderabad Islamabad Karachi Lahore Peshawar Quetta Sargodha Sialkot High: 30°C Low: 25°C Home Pakistan Business World Sports Life & Style Multimedia Opinion Magazine Blogs Jobs Classifieds Trending: uspakriftdenguehaqqani-networkimrankhanshoaibakhtarfloods2011 Alerts Top News US allegations only helping terrorists: Senate Defence Committee Javed Qazi says US pressu rising Pakist an to hide its own failur e in Afghan istan. Comments (4) National security: Military leadership rejects US allegations Pakistan has right to maintain contact with Haqqani network: Qazi Hussain Afghan militant killed in Bajaur Agency clash Four milita nts from Afghan istan cross into Pakist an and open fire on tribal militi a. Comments China announces aid for Pakistan law enforcement agencies APP / Express / Reuters China announ ced aid of eight millio n yuan (over Rs110 millio n) for LEAs. Comments (22) Taliban insists it controls Haqqanis, …

Indexing

• Once spiders crawl the website, they then index it.

• It means identifying the words and expressions that best define the content of the page and storing it in a large database

• The page is hence assigned to particular keywords

• When a search request comes it is compared with these keywords and results are returned

Relevance

• Since more than one pages are assigned to a keyword, a relevance factor is calculated for the pages.

• Every search engine has a different criteria to determine relevance, hence different search results for same search term on different search engines

• Search engines also change relevance criteria over time.

• Yahoo and Bing give importance to on page keyword

• Google gives importance to links as well

• Google also likes old sites as compared to new sites

Elements of SEO

• Keywords• Title• Heading• Links• Anchor Text• Metatags• Content

Keywords

• Keywords are the most important SEO element for a web page.

• These are words that are compared with the search term by the search engine

• One word keywords are no longer beneficial

Keyword guidelines

• The web has so many websites that generic one word keywords return millions of results.

• It’s good to be specific regarding keywords.

• Keyword quality and placement is important too

• Keyword present in the title, url, first paragraph is more important than keyword present many times at the end of the page.

• Keywords should be relevant to the content present on the page

Keyword examples

• For a site about cat adoption, cat-adopt.com will be a better option than cat.com or animal-care.com

• Keyword can also be used in the page title. It appears in the <title> tag in the HTML code of the page.

• So for the cat adoption website, a suitable would be “Adopt a cat – Bring joy to your home”

•Also add keywords in headings on the page.

Links

• Links are another important SEO element in a web page.

• There are two types of links– Inbound/Backlinks– Outbound

• Outbound links– Lead to an external website from your page

• Inbound links/backlinks– Lead from external websites to your page.

• These backlinks are very important for a website to gain higher ranking in search results. If they are coming from similar sites, they help increase the relevance factor. If coming from unrelated sites, relevance factor is decreased.

Anchor text

• Links can be added as follows – “Search on www.google.com for best search

results”

• Or as follows– “Search Google for best search results”

• The word “Google” in the second example is called anchor text i.e. the words representing the actual link.

• Backlinks with a proper anchor text help increase the relevance factor

• For our cat adoption website example, if there are inbound links/backlinks with the anchor text Adopt Cats or similar will help with the relevance factor.

Ways to increase backlinks

• Backlink builder tools: Search and suggest relevant websites which can give you backlinks

• Directories: Getting listed in a directory like Yahoo helps gain backlinks

• Forums and blogs: Respond to relevant discussions and posts and publish your link with the relevant anchor text.

• RSS feeds: If another site publishes your RSS feed, you get backlinks.

Metatags

• Metatags summarize information on the page for crawlers

• This information is found in the HTML code for the page

Content

• Good SEO content has three primary characteristics:

– Offers useful information presented in an engaging format to human readers

– Boosts search engine rankings

– Attracts plenty of links from other sites

Visual Content

• Most visual content like images, videos and flash content should be properly described using the <alt> tag.

• Search engines cannot see images, videos and flash content but they can read the <alt> tag.

• The <alt> tag should provide meaningful imformation about the content, which is also relevant to the website.

•<alt> text looks something like this

<img src = “know_ur_apples.jpg ” alt=“A picture of different kinds of apples and their uses”>.

Questions?