Web Entrepreneurship

S.E.O.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation Making webpages more search engine friendly.

SEO should be considered from the start. Domain Name Site Structure Site Design Site Navigation Site Topics Headings Subheadings Content Links Usability Accessibility

Why is it important?

24% of marketers said that >75% of their traffic comes from search engines

60% of students use search engines to find online retailers

55% of online purchases were made on sites found through search engines

80% of users reach sites through search engines

48% of websites depend on search engines for the majority of their traffic

(Various sources)

Why is it important?

Following Search Engine rules. If your webpage fits the criteria for a certain

search term, you’ll get top ranking.Search Engine Optimisers

Modify webpages to fit the criteria to give a page a better chance of being selected.

Design with SEO in mind

It’s tempting to build a website, and then think about SEO.

Better to design with SEO in mind

Domain Name

Get a domain name that contains your keywords

But make sure it is still memorable…www.AAA1-Chiang-Mai-Travel-Hotel-Gui

de-Bookings-Tourist.com Is not a good domain name!

Website Structure

Usability It doesn’t matter how good the content is if

the site is frustrating to use.Linkability

Remember the internal linking structure, and its effect on PageRank

Website Design

Flash? NO! Search Engines rely on keywords to classify

pages, while flash is mostly for entertainment. Search Engines do not index flash files.

HTML Yes! It’s easy and spiders have no problem

indexing it. But PHP etc. is fine so long as you use search

engine friendly urls & links

Website Navigation

Spiders will rarely crawl deeper than the top 2 or 3 levels of a website. So possibly spiders won’t index lower level pages; www.chiangmaiplan.com (level 1) www.chiangmaiplan.com/golf/ (level 2) www.chiangmaiplan.com/golf/maejo/ (level 3) www.chiangmaiplan.com/golf/maejo/hole1/ (level 4)

Site maps can still lead spiders to lower level content.

Website Categories

You need to split your site into categories, but what are the right categories?Digital CameraCanon Digital CameraEtc.

Make sure you have content that will cater for all types of searches.

Webpage Content

Spiders use the content to know where to categorise each page.A page with no text (flash site)

Where should it be put?A page with lots of text on lots of topics

Where should it be put? There are too many competing keywords.

The amount of content is also important.

Links

After content, links are the most important thing… Some would even argue it’s the opposite way

around. PageRank

The link text is just as important as the link. It is tempting to use an attractive graphical button

for the link – but how can the spider associate keywords with the link?

Usability - Frames

SEO quite often goes against good site usability design.

Frames can make webpages much easy to use, but spiders can’t index framed pages as well as standard pages.

Internet Marketing Plan & SEO

How do you promote your site? Affiliate Marketing Pay per Click search engine advertising Banner advertising Newsletter advertising Viral Marketing

Optimise your landing pages! If you optimise your affiliate program page then

more affiliate marketers might find your program

Keywords, Keywords, Keywords

There are many factors that search engines use to decide SERPS Link popularity Click through popularity Webpage age Webpage size Number and quality of competition …

Probably the most important factor though is keywords If a page has no text, there is nothing to index

Web designers

Do a good job of designing attractive looking websites But not such a good job of SEO, as they aren’t

marketers. Web designers also don’t know what keywords

people search for. And people use a lot of different words to search for

the same product / service Unless you have all the keywords, you’re not

going to ‘win’.

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation Search Engine Optimization Search Engine Ranking Search Engine Placement Website Optimisation Website Optimization Search Engine Positioning High Search Engine Ranking Webpage Optimisation Search Engine Promotion Top Search Engine Ranking High Search Engine Rankings Better Search Engine Placement Search Engines Optimisations

What Keyword?

Before you can start SEO, you need to know what keywords to target.

Fortunately there are plenty of tools out there to help you.

Which Keywords

Each webpage should concentrate on the following1) One keyword or phrase matching the

page content2) Most frequently used by the target

audience3) With the least number of competing

pages.

1) Target one keyword / phrase per page

Sprinkle the keyword throughout the page to remind the spider that the page is important for that keyword.

But, if you have half a dozen different keywords on a page, the spider might think the page is too broad to be the most relevant for the keyword.

2) Most frequently searched for keywords

But how do we know?Google AdwordsCheck the “related searches” lists – this will

give you an idea what other people have searched for.

Analyse the keywords used in your site search engine

Server Log File Analysis (or Google Analytics)

Educated Guess

Target keywords with little competition

Google AdwordsWordtracker

Sprinkle uncommon keywords

Sprinkle less common keywords through your main body text.

If someone searches for a slightly obscure phrase, then your page will only be returned if it contains all the words in the phrase.

How many keywords?

Keyword FrequencyThe number of times a keyword, or phrase,

appears within a page.Keyword Density

The ratio of keywords contained in the page within the number of total indexable words

Perhaps 1-3%

Keyword Density

Is more complicated than that.Different search engines have different

preferencesDifferent search engines will also calculate

a different density for your page;Stop words?Word Stemming?Keywords in particular HTML tags

Keyword Prominence

As well as frequency and density, prominence is also a factorWords appearing near the beginning of the

page, paragraph, sentence.Certain HTML tags (title)

Keyword Proximity

How close keywords are together could also be a factor.

Consider a search for ‘dog biscuits’ “We sell delicious biscuits for all breeds of

dogs!” “We sell the most delicious dog biscuits in

the world!”

The <Title> tag

The title tag is perhaps the most important place for keywords.

Consider it as a short version of the page, where frequency and density are important.Don’t have the same title for all your pages.

The heading tags are also important;With <H1> having more priority than <H2>

etc.

Images

Always add an ALT parameter to your image tags.Not just for visually impaired users, but for

keyword embedding too.You can add a title parameter too.

Some search engines index the keywords stored in the tag.

Add keywords to links

Add a title parameter to your links too. It’s spoken for disabled users, and adds a

place for keywords too.<a href=“mypage.html” title=“Ken’s

Keywords”>

Word Stemming

Some search engines manage word stemming to return results beyond what is searched for.CheapCheaperCheapest

Stop Words

Some search engines use stop words to avoid having to process every word in the page.

Stop words are common words that are simple ignored.

File Names

It’s probably pretty obvious……but you can place keywords in your

filenames and directory structure as well.

To Hyphen or Not to Hyphen?

Some SEO experts say keywords in a domain name don’t need to be separated by hyphens.

Others think that the keywords in the domain are important and should be separated.http://www.chiangmaiplan.comhttp://www.chiang-mai-plan.com

What do you think?

Hyphens

Consider:http://www.newshut.comhttp://www.sportsexchange.com

A case study investigated the hyphen question, and found that hyphens did actually perform better in serps, but will people remember the site?

Subdomains

Subdomains are another great place to add keywords;golf.chiangmaiplan.com

vswww.chiangmaiplan.com/golf/

Meta Tags

Meta tags describe the content of a webpage, and some search engines use the information stored in it.

The 2 most important tags are;Meta Description Meta Keywords

Meta Description

<META NAME=“description” CONTENT=“Welcome to Chiang Mai”>

Some search engines use the contents as the search result description.

Because this unseen tag can be maliciously abused, many search engines have devalued keywords in it, and some simply ignore it.

Only the first 135-250 characters are used, so there is no point in writing too much.

It should be enticing to visitors.

Meta Keywords

Most search engines now ignore the keywords meta tag as too many webmasters abused it.

Some search engines or results providers (Inktomi?) still use it, so it might be worth adding a few keywords.

Robots.txt

Add a robots.txt file to a directory to give instructions to spiders about what pages to index.

Search engines don’t have to follow the instructions, but most honour them.

But, why might you not want a spider to visit a page?

Robots.txt

Suppose you optimise the same page for different search engines (Google, Altavista, yahoo). If they are all indexed they will be tagged as duplicate content.

Perhaps you have some sensitive content, or content that isn’t ready to be published.

Robots.txt

Contains; User-agent: the name of the spider you want to

refer to e.g. googlebot. * indicates all robots. Disallow: specify the directories / files that shouldn’t

be crawled. E.g. What would this do?

User-agent: * Disallow: /

And this? User-agent: * Disallow: /*.gif$

Pet Spiders

Google: GooglebotAltavista: ScooterAlltheWeb: FastInktomi: SlurpLycos: Lycos

robots.txt

Find out what people are blocking (or their sensitive files, by looking at their robots.txt:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/robots.txt

Things to avoid

Splash PagesLittle content to indexFlash applets aren’t indexedWhat does the flash page do for the site?

FramesJust use CSS instead!There is a <Noframes> tag where you can

duplicate the content

Things to avoid

Keywords in comments tagsComments aren’t included in the index

Keywords in Hidden CSS layers If the search engines catch you…

Keywords in Hidden form fieldsConsidered spam by all search engines

Keywords in Style tagsAgain, not indexed

Getting more “Black Hat”

DoorwaysHallwaysCloaking…

Doorway pages

Doorway pages are pages created simply to gain higher rankings for particular search phrases.

The content is aimed towards the search engine spiders rather than human visitors

Human visitors are then encouraged to follow links into the site, or often redirected with a meta-refresh

Doorway Pages

Google, Inktomi have publicly stated that doorway pages are spam.So they might ban you.

But it is difficult to tell the difference between doorway pages and regular pages.Often even humans can’t tell the difference.

Automatic Doorways

There is software available that can automatically generate hundreds of doorway pages, virtually identical.

Around 30-40% of the web is spam, with automated doorway pages responsible for much of it.

Search engines will remove doorway pages and penalise the responsible sites, if they catch you.

Hallway pages

While doorway pages are doorways into part of your site, hall way pages contain links to different doorway pages.Similar to a sitemap

But because doorway pages are controversial, you don’t want to include them in your sitemap, so use a hallway instead.

Dynamically Generated Content

We use dynamic content already – PHP.But dynamic content doesn’t exist until

someone follows a link, giving certain parameters.

Search engines don’t like ?$ken=3&$cosh…

How can we get around this?

Dynamic Pages

One common approach is to use Apache’s mod_rewrite module.

This rewrites the URL into something that search engines can index

We’ve seen pretty urls in the OS software we’ve played with.

Cloaking

The practice of serving optimised pages to spiders and unoptimised pages to human visitors.

Very controversial, as search engines consider it as spam.

Cloaking works by detecting the IP address of the request, and redirecting human visitors to the real content, while spiders index the optimised content.

Benefits of Cloaking

Optimise pages without compromising your site’s look and feel.Consider adding graphics and multimedia,

that otherwise wouldn’t be indexed.Deliver dynamic content as static HTMLDeliver local versions of webpages.Hide the source code of optimised

pages, so competitors can’t see your hard work.

Themed Websites

The idea is that search engines give more relevance to webpages within a website, if all pages are based around a single topic or theme. i.e. all the pages are about ‘Chiang Mai’.

This sounds logical, but… Search engines rank pages, not sites. Each page is ranked on its own merits, rather than the other pages stored for the same domain.

Themed Websites

“I think people sometimes mean different things by ‘themes’. The statement that somehow your blue widget site would be ‘weaker’ if it contained a page about Tigers is completely wrong. No search engine would want to do that; having a page on Tigers doesn’t affect your ability to be a resource for blue widgets. We’d miss good blue widget pages if we excluded the sites that also talk about Tigers. However, there is a difference between having a little bit of content about blue widgets and having in-depth content about blue widgets. Clearly we prefer in-depth (more useful) content. That’s not so much a preference for themes as a preference for depth.”

Off site SEO

So far we’ve considered SEO which is done on the site It’s important to get the site right before

focusing on incoming links etc.Next lets look at offsite SEO

Finding Links

Who links to your competitors?Surely they might be good choices to link to

you!You can find out which links have been

indexed by doing: link:http://www.chiangmaiplan.com

Finding reciprocal links

Search for;Links chiang maiResource chiang mai Info chiang maiResources chiang mai Information chiang maiPartner chiang maiPartners chiang mai

Finding Site Submissions

Add url chiang mai Add site Add a site Submit site Add link Submit link Add url Submit url …

Reciprocal Linking

Have your backlink ready to submit;<a href=http://www.chiangmaiplan.com

title=“Chiang Mai Plan”><b>Chiang Mai Travel Plan</b></a> : all the information you need to plan your trip to Chiang Mai.

There are tools to help you find and manage link partnerships…But be careful to avoid link farms.

Reciprocal Linking

Link to your home pageUse the exact keyword phrase in the link

text.Make sure the link text also appears on

your landing page.Add a description that will encourage

click throughs.

Minisites

As well as exchanging links with other people’s sites, you can create your own minisites to exchange links with

To channel traffic towards your monetising site.

Submit your site to the search engines

Most search engines accept url submissions.

This can speed up being indexed, rather than waiting for a spider to find a link from another site.

Use a spam email address when doing this!