SEO – HIGH TRAFFIC ROUTING Global Information Internship Program from BUDNET

www.budnetdesign.com

Today’s Agenda What is SEO? The Seven Steps to Higher Rankings

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?

Everything Revolves Around Search

Search Engine Optimization 6 times more effective than a banner

ad Delivers qualified leads 80% of Internet user sessions begin

at the search engines (Source: Internetstats.com)

55% of online purchases are made on sites found through search engine listings (Source: Internetstats.com)

SEO is NOT Paid Advertising

SEO – “Search Engine Optimization” – seeks to 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

Google Listings – Your Virtual Sales Force

Savvy retailers making 6-7 figures a month from natural listings

Savvy MFA (Made for AdSense) site owners making 5-6 figures per month

Most sites are not SE-friendly Google friendliness = friendly to other

engines First calculate your missed opportunities

Not doing SEO? You’re Leaving Money on the Table

Calculate the missed opportunity cost of not ranking well for products and services that you offer?

# of people searching for your keywords x

engine share (Google = 60%) x

expected click-through rate

average conversion rate

average transaction amountx x

E.g.10,000/day x 60% x 10% x 5% x $100 = $3,000/day

Most Important Search Engines Google (also powers AOL Search,

Netscape.com, iWon, etc.) – 60.29% market share (Source: Hitwise)

Yahoo! (also powers Alltheweb, AltaVista, Hotbot, Lycos, CNN, A9) – 22.58%

Live Search (formerly MSN Search) – 11.56%

Ask – 3.63%

People Are Googling… Are You There?

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 WordTracker.com Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery.com Google’s Keyword Tool Google Trends Google Suggest

WordTracker.com

Pros Based on last 60 days worth of searches Singular vs plural, misspellings, verb tenses all separated

out Advanced functionality: keyword “projects”, import data

into Excel, synonyms, … Cons

Requires subscription fee ($260/year) Data is from a small sample of Internet searches (from the

minor search engines Dogpile and MetaCrawler) Contains bogus data from automated searches No historical archives

Keyword Popularity –According to WordTracker

Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery.com Pros

Full year of historical archives Data is from a large sample of Internet searches (9 billion

searches compiled from 37 engines) Singular vs plural, misspellings, verb tenses all separated

out Can segment by country Advanced functionality: keyword “projects”, import data

into Excel, synonyms, … Cons

Access to the historical data requires subscription fee (~$30/month)

Contains bogus data from automated searches

Keyword Popularity –According to KeywordDiscovery

Google AdWords Keyword Tool Pros

Free! (Must have an AdWords account though) Data is from a large sample of Internet searches (from

Google) Singular vs plural, misspellings, verb tenses all separated

out Can segment by country Synonyms

Cons No hard numbers

Augment this tool with other free Google tools: Google Suggest (labs.google.com/suggest) Google Trends (www.google.com/trends)

Keyword Popularity –According to

Google AdWords

Keyword Tool

Keyword Popularity –According to

Google AdWords

Keyword Tool

Keyword Popularity –According to

Google Trends

Keyword Popularity –According to Google Suggest

Keyword Research

Competition for that keyword should also be considered Calculate KEI Score (Keyword

Effectiveness Indicator) = ratio of searches over number of pages in search results

The higher the KEI Score, the more attractive the keyword is to target (assuming it’s relevant to your business)

SEO. A Moving Target. A lot is changing…

Personalization & customization Vertical search services (Images, Video, News, Maps, etc.) “Blended Search” – aka “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

Central, Live Search Webmaster Center, Yahoo Site Explorer)

Rel=“nofollow” tag Meta NOODP tag Speaking at search engine conferences Publishing blogs dedicated to helping

webmasters Participating on SEO forums “Weather reports”

SEO Can Dramatically Improve Traffic/SalesNon-optimal site with few pages indexed

Optimized site with many pages indexed

Few visits/sales per day Many visits/sales per day!

$=

Part 2: Seven Steps to High Rankings

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

Lack of links down into all content pages;

Common Barriers to Spidering:

!Non-textlink sitewide navigation;

• Search-form-only;

• Javascript/Java-only (ie: dynamic menus);

• Flash apps / Splash pages;

Non-optimal URL formats of pages;

http://www.example.com/app.jsp?sid=abc123xyz

URL Framed Content

1) Get Your Site Fully Indexed (cont’d)

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

Results in “Supplemental Hell”

Example of Non-Optimal Site Design:PR 8 site has META refresh redirect on homepage – spiders not redirected to destination page:

Also, indexed “shell” page doesn’t contain any text content!

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”?

Dynamic Site Leaves Session IDs in URLs:

Titles not specific to page (“jewelry”)

Main text on page just nav labels –Little text/keyword content

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 Live Search and Yahoo have similar measures to

PageRank™

Google’s Toolbar – with handy PageRank Meter

Google Directory – listings are organized by PageRank

Conduct any Google query and get results organized by PageRank

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”

Ideal internal site linking hierarchies:Homepages often will be highest-ranking

site pages since they typically have most

inbound links.

Good link trees inform search engines

about which site pages are most

important.

*Sitemaps can also be used to tell SEs about pages, & to define relative priority.

4) Leverage Your PageRank Avoid PageRank dilution

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

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

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

Indexation tool –www.netconcepts.com/urlcheck

Link popularity tool –www.netconcepts.com/linkcheck

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”?

Review Errors/Messages in Webmaster Tools

Content Opt Opportunities via Webmaster Tools

Check Robots.txt Exclusions in Webmaster Tools

Case Study: Homestead.com

What worked Comprehensive SEO & usability audit Intensive on-site training sessions with

their IT and marketing teams 6 months of support

What didn’t work No significant changes to the look of the

home page were allowed for political reasons, significantly reducing the options available

Case Study: Homestead.com

Results Within 8 weeks of launch of some

preliminary optimization work, on page 1 for “website hosting” in Google

With our audit as a blueprint, later that year launched an internally built site redesign which landed them the #1 Google position for “website hosting”

Consistently held #1 position for 2 years

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

Further Reading blogs.cnet.com/seosearchlight google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?

answer=35769 www.google.com/webmasters/ www.mattcutts.com/blog googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com blog.outer-court.com www.searchengineland.com www.seroundtable.com www.naturalsearchblog.com www.stephanspencer.com

Q&A!

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