Search Engine Optimisation

Justin Spratt // twiitter: @justinspratt // justin.spratt@quirk.biz

1.  Intro to SEO 2.  Key Concepts: Conversant in SEO 3.  Keyword Strategy & Research 4.  SEO savvy website design 5.  Some Technical SEO considerations 6.  White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO 7.  Social Media & SEO 8.  The Future of SEO

Agenda

66.1%

16.7%

11.2%

2.7%

SERPs

Google Innovation

•  Crawling (Googlebot) •  Your blog: about once a week •  Media24 sites: many times a day

•  Indexing – decoupled from database – relevancy key •  Serving - relevancy paramount •  PageRank algorithm – citation model •  Hilltop algorithm – semantic model for relevance •  LinkJuice – popularity – sites linking to your site •  TrustRank – Stanford model for spam tracking

Key Concepts

Onsite - what you can do on your site to optimise organise search

Offsite – links to you; popularity contest; biggest gravitas

Onsite vs. Offsite SEO

•  Google Trends is broader – what is hot, regionally, now •  Google Insights more specific, designed for advertiser

research – excellent for keyword determination ….Both valuable for SEO

Google Insights & Google Trends

•  Show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?

•  Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines? •  Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to

complement your organic search business? •  What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what

timeframe? How do you measure your success? •  What's your experience in my industry? •  What are your most important SEO techniques?

Hiring a SEO

Universal Search

Pushes textual searches down But can offer richer real estate

Based on… Search history Previous SERP interactions Location User selection

Personalised Search The SEO nightmare

Local Search Big opportunity for local specific

•  The age of the domain

•  Add regular fresh content

•  Text navigation is better than images r

•  Rich content creation (video, podcast, eBooks)

•  Offer RSS feeds (AND RSS to email)

•  Blogger birthdays

•  Competitions

…bottom line: be remarkable – make your site a resource!

Some other SEO considerations

•  Paid search does not help SEO

•  Submissions to search engines don’t help

•  Meta keyword tag not that useful – spammed to death

•  Title and Description Tags on other hand, very useful for end user experience

•  “Keyword Stuffing” is baloney

SEO Myths debunked

•  Used to be big business. Top ranked Viagra query once yielded $20,000 in business… for a single day

•  Link farms suck, badly – organic search will deprecate

Search Engine Spam

Primary goal: Site must be fully indexable and optimised around a set of well researched key phrases Your own site should take the top two positions Used to be near impossible to get more than two, but Google has relaxed this recently with Universal Search

•  Keyword based indices – faster crawl •  Keywords also drive search queries, therefore content

needs to match •  Titles, text and meta data •  Example: books vs. War & Peace – competition much

higher the more specific due to less results •  “Keyword Density Myth” – relevancy & quality issues

Keywords & Keyword Strategy

What is important for keywords: 1. Search Volume – “common sense” only right about half the time. Google Insight and Trends are your friends 2. Competiveness of the keyword 3. Propensity to convert – Google Insights; run trial campaigns 4. Value of that conversion – “hotel” vs. “bed and breakfast”

Keyword Strategy

•  Keyword optimisation: •  At least once in title (70 characters max) •  Once in H1 •  x3 in body, one of which in bold •  Once in the alt attribute of image •  Once in URL •  At least once in Meta data (description in SERPs) •  Not in link anchor text

Keywords & Keyword Strategy

Popular keywords only make up 30% of searches, the rest is the “long tail”

seomoz.org

Keyword Research

•  Common sense words and phrases – call to action •  Search for it: are there ads running along top and right?

Then powerful keyword / key phrase •  Buy sample adwords campaign and check the conversions

over 200 clicks •  Make educated guess of value of each visitor •  Example: 100 visitors, 3 converted at total profit of R300,

then each keyword is worth R3 •  Click-thru rates for number 1 ranking can be as high as 30%

Keyword Exercise

Blogonomies

“Content should be as natural as possible. Use semantic rich concepts that reinforce content. Use HTM DOM. Ignore blogonomies”

Edel Garcia

ORM: Automatically route unlinked, low positive mentions to the SEO Team

-  Indexable content (images, flash, java, CSS) -  Crawlable link structures -  Keywords paramount (obviously) -  Defend against scrappers; verbose URL embeds

High level considerations

Roughly speaking, a webpage should have around 250 words of content only, surrounded by your keywords Remember, no keyword stuffing! “Keyword Density is a myth” - Garcia

Content

•  Usability key – if user can predict content by URL, good •  Shorter is always better •  Keyword is important (don’t overuse) •  Static URLs, good (rewrites for Apache & IIS)

•  Studies: in excess of 15% increase in traffic

URL structures

-  Process that unique content has only one URL -  Engines don’t like duplicate content generally and will

discount your rank accordingly -  Use 301 re-directs or use the canonical tag

Canonicalisation

They help search engines crawl your site Examples: -  XML -  RSS -  Text files

Site Maps

Tell search engines what not to index Indicates sitemap location Dictates who quickly a crawler can crawl its site (CPU cycles and bandwidth costs)

Robots.txt

Reasons Sites are not crawlable

•  Index / NoIndex – content crawl instruction •  Follow / NoFollow – links crawl instruction (wikipedia) •  NoArchive – no cached copy

Meta Robot Tags

Understanding the Search Conversion Funnel

•  Reciprocal link requests •  Directory/Portal Submissions •  Article writing •  WebPR Submissions •  Blog Comments •  Social Media Sites •  Link buying/renting

Link Building

In conclusion: Valuable websites build links and those links will guard your

online reputation

Link Building

Link Building Case 1: An example of simplicity earning 6000 links…

Often it’s just how you package content which makes the difference

Link Building Case 2: Almost 500k downloads

More people downloaded this book in the first week, than had read our articles in the previous year

Google Earth layers

Link Building Case 3: Boston Globe Pictures

Most news sites have small photos.

These are not…

Run as a “side project” by one of their web developers...

1,5 Million page views and 1500 comments in the first 20 days!

Bottom line: cheap to run with massive ROI

Link Building Case 4: Links you don’t want

12 million people search for “Ryan Air”

A Ryanair employee comments on a random blog…

Followed by the official response…

Then the online community got hold of it….

Then the newspapers got hold of it…

These powerful sites often linked to this site…

And we know how important good links are…

•  Black Hat = gaming and manipulating, often unethically the system

•  White Hat = confirms to Google’s Policy

Black Hat vs. White Hat

•  Invisible Text – white text; same colour text as background

•  Cloaking – showing one page to Googlebot and another to the user

•  Keyword Stuffing – poor quality, Google dislikes •  Doorway Pages – worthless pages designed

specifically for ranking well and yielding advertising revenue

Black Hat

1.  Clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link

2.  Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site

3.  Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number 4.  Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that

clearly and accurately describe your content 5.  Think about the words users would type to find your pages,

and make sure that your site includes those words 6.  Try to use text instead of images to display important

names, content, or links

White Hat – part one

•  crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If using images for textual content, consider use the "ALT”

•  Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate

•  Check for broken links and correct HTML •  If you decide to use dynamic pages, keep the parameters

short and the number of them few

White Hat – part two

Real Time Search brings Social Web to forefront

•  Choose good handle (no underscores) •  Twitter uses “nofollow” •  Retweetability •  Select first few characters carefully •  Write keyword rich tweets if possible •  Provide linklove in tweets

Social Media Optimisation twitter

Put simply, real-time search inclusion can help SEO immensely It can show what new keywords and provide insights

Social Media for Insights

The Link vs. The Like

“60% of searches in South Africa done on weekends are done on mobile phones” Google Employee

Search & Mobile Phones

Bing buying travel, flight and health insurance data companies

Vertical Search

The meaning of language (intention) No longer need to know “Google Code” to search effectively Semantic HTML (XML) – intentions rather than layout

The Semantic Web “Web 3.0”