The Fundamentals of SEO

Brendan Cottam

@bjcottam

This is how I felt 3 months into learning SEO.

Now that I built a

foundation, learning SEO

is fun!

Why is search important?

0

500,000,000

1,000,000,000

1,500,000,000

2,000,000,000

2,500,000,000

3,000,000,000

3,500,000,000

4,000,000,000

4,500,000,000

5,000,000,000

1998 2000 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011

Average searches per day

Average searches per day

http://www.statisticbrain.com/google-searches/

Interactive marketing will reach $77 billion in 2016…

…this spend will represent 26% of all advertising budgets combined

http://blogs.forrester.com/shar_vanboskirk/11-08-24-interactive_marketing_spend_will_near_77_billion_by_2016

Let’s Distinguish SEO and PPC

Paid Results

Organic Results

Increasing a websites visibility through search engines

SEO is…

Major search engines and sending traffic worldwide

90.62% of traffic3.72% of traffic

3.78% of traffichttp://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/how-people-interact-with-search-engines

3 Functions of search engines

1. Crawling2. Indexing 3. Ranking

Saw Hello To…

…They navigate the web by crawling pages

BTW, the web is made up of 30 trillion pages, and it is constantly growing

http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/thestory/

After a page is crawled, search engines

index webpages and add them to servers

Then…search engines rank pages in order to return relevant information to the consumer (you!)

In the previous slide, was a result for “sweet twitter bios.” Included in the results was an old post I wrote.

In this case:1. Google bot crawled the page2. The page was indexed in the Google servers3. Google began ranking the page for the term “sweet twitter bios”

3 types of search queries a user can type in

This is a transactional query

Paid Results

Organic Results

A search that implies a specific online destination

This is a navigational query

This is an informational query

Ok sweet, now how do I do SEO

Keyword Research

Get into the mind of your potential customers, and think about what they are searching for to find what your business offers.

Use Mergewords to collect all permutations of a given phrase.

Use Keyword Planner to find search volume for given phrases.

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

Head Terms vs. Long Tail Terms

On Page Elements

http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development

Off page - Link Building

A link from another site is like a vote in the eyes of Google

Questions?