1 Dr Alexiei Dingli Web Science Stream Search Engine Optimisation.

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Dr Alexiei Dingli

Web Science Stream

Search Engine Optimisation

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• 60% of consumers use the web as their first-line to search for items (source comScore)

• 60% of those consumers make a purchase

• 73% of users find search engines as important source of information (source AOL)

• 62% of users click on results displayed in first page of search results (source iProspect)

Some stats ...

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Helps searchers get what

they are looking for!

Why SEO?

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• Step 1 - Stocktaking

– What are your goals• Primary Goal• Additional Goals

– Write them down

How to SEO?

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• Step 2 – Evaluating what we have

– Rate each and every goal with • Poor• Good• Excellent• Future Goal

– How good does your site fare?

How to SEO?

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Your SEO campaign must support the overall business goals and not just your

website!

Important

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• Start one page at a time

• Spring-clean (Remove outdated stuff, etc)

• Check what your competitors are doing

• Work on getting traffic

Some quick fixes ...

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• Step 3 – Finding my target audience

– For each Primary Goal and Additional goal, write down who is your Primary Audience

How to SEO?

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• Step 4 – For each person in the target audience, identify what would you like them to be doing in your site? Let’s call them conversion pages

– Purchase a product– Fill out a form– View a certain page– Subscribe to a mailing list– Comment on a blog– Phone a number– Contribute– Persuade them– Find information...

How to SEO?

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• Step 5 – Identify the entry pages

– Generally each conversion page should also be an entry page with direct access from the search engine

– However, it should also have a path back to the home page

How to SEO?

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If the information is more than 3 clicks away then people will just abandon your site

A good entry page has just the right information that your target audience is

looking for

Important

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• Step 6 – What cannot be measured, cannot be evaluated

– Without clear goals we cannot measure accomplishments

– Different departments working on the same site might have different goals

– Tracking might not be that easy but ...• It helps to justify your work • Helps you stay up-to-date and tune your site

How to SEO?

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• Niche Target Audience• More conversions = more entry points (long tail approach)• Text-Heavy Content (which is relevant)• User generated content (reviews, etc)• Identify the value of each conversion• Making news where possible• Friendlier personal touch• If you start from Zero, you can only move up• Your own name (domain names, etc)• Make use of blogs properly (mind your manners, optimize every

post, provide links but don’t spam, add that personal touch, don’t sell but gain their trust, etc)

• If you’re in a community, exploit the cross links to drive traffic• Keep websites simple (flash, etc are not understood by search

engines so keep them to a minimum plus they might confuse users)

Some advantages to look for

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• Gain quality links• SEO life cycle can be slow• Less-Web-Savvy Audience• Unexpected Search Competition (who is featuring in search

engines with your keywords? a book, a website, a product, etc)

• Page views conversions and algorithmic changes (a slight change might effect you badly!)

• Internal Bureaucracy (Deploy rapid features)• Brand maintenance• Paid search pitfalls (what matters are the clicks?)• Lack of time (as popularity increases so does its

maintenance)• Budget• Don’t believe the quick and dirty SEO schemes

Some challenges to overcome

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• But they’re very useful

• Their work is to crawl and index WebPages– Text– Images, videos and other media

• Other results come from– Directories (compiled by humans)– Paid search Ads

Robots, Spiders, CrawlersSounds like a horror movie ...

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How Crawlers works ...

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How pagerank works today ... but not tomorrow!

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• Misspellings

• Dialects

• Punctuation

• Pictures, videos, music, are meaningless

However crawlers are not smart ...

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• What would a crawler see?– http://www.seo-browser.com/– http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/

• Statistics• Links• Broken links• Indexed text

Eye of the spider ...

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• Create a publically available robots.txt

• Help direct robots on what to index and what to exclude

• Contains (http://www.robotstxt.org)– Which robots to exclude or allow– Which directories to exclude from indexing

Working with bots ...

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Case study: www.jesuite.org.mt

User-agent: *

Disallow: /administrator/

Disallow: /cache/

Disallow: /components/

Disallow: /editor/

Disallow: /help/

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /includes/

Disallow: /language/

Disallow: /mambots/

Disallow: /media/

Disallow: /modules/

Disallow: /templates/

Disallow: /installation/

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• Eternally important – the food of search crawlers

• Can be found in ...– Titles– Content– Frames– Meta Tags

What’s in a keyword?

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• What are the top keywords in the site?– Expected?– Actual?

• http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-analysis-tool.shtml


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• Shocking results ...


Word Frequency %

fr 8 1.75

viagra 8 1.75

by 7 1.6

valium 6 1.45

report 5 1.3

phentermine 5 1.3

30pm 5 1.3

president 5 1.3

malta 5 1.3

generic 5 1.3

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• Is this a mistake?

• Let’s look in the code ...


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>Jesuits in Malta</title> <meta name="description" content="The official site of the Jesuits in Malta." /> <meta name="keywords" content="jesuit, jesuits, malta, news, events, event, history, retreat, retreats, inygo, ignatius, loyola, manresa, chaplaincy, st. aloysius college, gizwiti, kumpanija ta' Gesu, ġiżwiti" /> <meta name="Generator" content="Joomla! - Copyright (C) 2005 - 2007 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved." /> <meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /> <base href="http://jesuit.org.mt/jml/" /> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://jesuit.org.mt/jml/images/favicon.ico" /> <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://jesuit.org.mt/jml/templates/s5_digital_systems/css/template_css.css" type="text/css"/><link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://jesuit.org.mt/jml/../images/favicon.ico" /> </head> <body> <div id="s5_wrapper"> <div id="s5_inner_wrapper">  <div id="s5_banner"> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="moduletable"> <tr> <td> <table class="contentpaneopen"> <tr> <td valign="top" colspan="2"> <div style="text-align: left; vertical-align: top; width: 968px; background-image: url(http://www.jesuit.org.mt/jml/images/stories/mainheader2.jpg); background-position: right top;"> <img src="http://www.jesuit.org.mt/jml/images/stories/ihs.png" /> </div> </td> </tr> </table> <span class="article_seperator"> </span> </td> </tr> </table> </div> <div id="leftcol"> <div id="s5_user2"> <table class="contentpaneopen"> <tr> <td valign="top" colspan="2"> <h2>Upcoming events</h2> </td> </tr> </table> <span class="article_seperator"> </span> <table class="mod_events_latest_table" width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" align="center"><tr><td class="mod_events_latest_first">Sat, May 2nd, @7:15pm - 08:30PM : <span class="mod_events_latest_content"><a href="http://jesuit.org.mt/jml/component/option,com_events/task,view_detail/agid,83/year,2009/month,05/day,02/Itemid,98/">Sarria Youth mass</a></span></td></tr> <tr><td class="mod_events_latest">Sat, May 2nd, @9:00pm - 10:30PM : <span class="mod_events_latest_content"><a href="http://jesuit.org.mt/jml/component/option,com_events/task,view_detail/agid,82/year,2009/month,05/day,02/Itemid,98/">Saturday late evening mass</a></span></td></tr> <tr><td class="mod_events_latest">Fri, May 8th, @7:30pm - 11:00PM : <span class="mod_events_latest_content"><a href="http://jesuit.org.mt/jml/component/option,com_events/task,view_detail/agid,87/year,2009/month,05/day,08/Itemid,98/">Inygo Pasta Night</a></span></td></tr> <tr><td class="mod_events_latest">Fri, May 8th, @7:30pm - 02:30PM : <span class="mod_events_latest_content"><a href="http://jesuit.org.mt/jml/component/option,com_events/task,view_detail/agid,75/year,2009/month,05/day,08/Itemid,98/">Irtir fil-Kampanja: Wiċċ imb'wiċċ ma' Ġesù Rxoxt</a></span></td></tr> </table> </div> <div id="s5_main"> <table class="blog" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td valign="top"><div> <table class="contentpaneopen"> <tr> <td class="contentheading" width="100%"> </td> </tr> </table> <table class="contentpaneopen"> <tr> <td valign="top" colspan="2"> The Society of Jesus is a religious order serving in the Catholic Church, founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola in 1540. From the very beginning the Jesuit priests and brothers were always on the move, ready to go where they could advance the faith in Jesus Christ and his Good News with all its radical and practical implications for the world and for every human person.<br /><br /> </td> </tr> </table> <span class="article_seperator"> </span> </div><div> <table class="contentpaneopen"> <tr> <td class="contentheading" width="100%"> The President of Malta visits College </td> </tr> </table> <table class="contentpaneopen"> <tr> <td valign="top" colspan="2"> <img src="http://jesuit.org.mt/jml/images/stories/EddieatSAC.jpg" width="450" height="277" style="float: right;" hspace="6" alt="The president at College" title="The president at College" border="0" /> H.E. the President of Malta, Dr E. Fenech Adami, on 3rd March, during his official visit to Birkirkara, called on the College, In the theatre hall, Fr Rector Patrick Magro welcomed the President. Then Dr Fenech Adami delivered a moving address to the students in which he recalled his student days at the College and highlighted the values he received from Jesuit education. </td> </tr> </table> <span

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• Cases in the code ...

• Right click on the web page, press page source and search for the keyword

<a href="http://www.kmxt.org/?86943" title="non prescription viagra in uk">non prescription viagra in uk</a>


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• How did it get there?

• “Free” tools from the net?

• “Free” components which we copy and paste?

• A virus on the pc?

• Site has been hacked?


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• Ask co-workers• Ask customers• Check other websites, magazines, ezines, etc• Check website statistics• Check what people are looking for

– www.alexa.com• Get suggestions from online tools

– http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com– https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

What are the best keywords?

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• According to Alexa.com people are searching for ...


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• Imagine you own a high-quality baby shop called BabyZ, how would you rate the following keywords?

• Infants• Baby clothes• Unique baby clothes• Cheap baby clothes• Unique baby shower gifts• BabyZ

Keyword quiz

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• Imagine you own a high-quality baby shop called BabyZ, how would you rate the following keywords?

• Infants – poor, too generic• Baby clothes – good, close to what clients search• Unique baby clothes – excellent, very specific• Cheap baby clothes – very poor, no match to quality• Unique baby shower gifts – excellent, very specific• BabyZ – excellent, the company’s name

Keyword quiz

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• Nice title

• But the crawler does not understand pictures!!

• So this title is meaningless to search engines!


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• Anything which is not text is hard to parse

• Flash, Images, Ajax or whatever technology makes the site wonderful to view but a pain for agents to parse

• In fact, most agents just skip through

Flashes, Images and Ajax?

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<meta name="description" content="The official site of the Jesuits in Malta." />

<meta name="keywords" content="jesuit, jesuits, malta, news, events, event, history, retreat, retreats, inygo, ignatius, loyola, manresa, chaplaincy, st. aloysius college, gizwiti, kumpanija ta' Gesu, ġiżwiti" />


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• High ranking is not a guarantee of success

• Ranks change frequently because– Search engines change their ranking

algorithm– Competitors might produce a better site– Server performance might disrupt crawler

visits

Common pitfalls

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• A lot of traffic is a guarantee of high ranking - Search engine do not calculate traffic but links to your site

• A site has a ranking - Its the keywords and links in it that do

• Promoting just the homepage is good enough - a guarantee of failure

Common misconceptions

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• Add links all over your site in order to ensure a smooth navigation for both bots and humans

• Ensure that a large portion of these links go to landing pages

• Give meaningful textual descriptions to – Links– And other media (images, etc)

Links, links, everywhere ...

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• Buzz Generation– links from other sites out of

• Admiration (what a good product)• Recommendation (I think you should visit ...)• Reciprocity

• Niche Directories

• Paid Search Campaign

• Good writing and usability

Take a holistic approach

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• What sites link to your competitors? Can you get a link too?

• What sites with similar keywords are high ranking? Can you get a link from them?

• Do you provide a service? Maybe your good clients can link to you?

• What about partners? Do you have their link?

• Local and Regional directories? Are you there?

• Are you associated in any organisation? Any link from there?

• Ask related sites? (www.alexa.com)

• What about sympathetic sites? Youth groups, etc

Guerrilla approaches

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• If you trick you won’t get the treat!

• Cloaking– Method of identifying robots and showing them special content

to fool them

• Duplicate Content– If a paragraph works to get a good ranking, why not include it in

every page?

• Keyword Stuffing– Repeating the same word over and over again

• Invisible Text

Trick or treat?

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• Google– 58.4% of search traffic– Source

• Robot Crawlers• Open Directory (http://www.dmoz.org/)• XML Sitemap

– http://www.sitemapbuilder.net/Default.aspx– http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Knowing your search engine ...

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• XML Sitemap– No links!!

• Why? – Some components might prevent crawlers

from venturing further into the site– Be careful on what to use


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Name Traffic Primary results

Secondary results

Yahoo 22% Crawler Yahoo! Directory

MSN/Live.com 9.8% Crawler Open Directory

AOL 4.6% Crawler None

Knowing your other search engines

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• Check

– HTML page title– Visible HTML text on the page– Inbound links (quality + quantity)

SEO a page at a time

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URL Product

Yahoo Searchmarketing.yahoo.com Sponsored Search

Google adwords.google.com AdWords

Microsoft adcenter.microsoft.com adCenter

Paying your way to the top

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• Go to Google or Live.com

• Type– Site:jesuite.org.mt

• Result– 4,700 pages indexed with Google within the

domain jesuite.org.mt– 608 pages indexed with Live.com within the

domain jesuite.org.mt

Check the rankings ...

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• By simply typing the full URL, if its reutrned, then the site is indexed

Check that the landing pages are there ...

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• Type your site in – Blogs search engine

• http://technorati.com/search?advanced

– Social sites engine• http://www.socialmeter.com

– Forum search engine• http://www.omgili.com

– Stay informed when your site is mentioned using http://www.google.com/alerts

How social is my site?

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• Social Bookmarking Buttons

• Add microblogs and incentivise top commentators– Feature them on home page– Give them a label “Power User”

• Photo or Widgets Giveaways

• “E-mail this page” link

Make people work for you ...

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• The Google Toolbar

• Google Analytics

• Firefox extensions– SEOQuake– SEO for Firefox– Web Developer

More tools to the rescue ..

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• Unique Visitors – based on IP address so be careful• Page Views – how many times a single page was

downloaded• Referrers• Keywords• Entry Pages• Exit Pages• Bounce – entry in one page and out again

Analysing pages ...

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• No of conversions vrs Paid searches

• No of conversions vrs keywords

• No of conversions vrs sales

Tracking the converts

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• Contact details– Phone– Mobile– Email– Address

• Unique campaigns which feature the site

• Include coupons or promotions on your site

Making offline conversion easier

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• Mobile computing– Android– Netbooks

• Grid computing

• Cloud computing

• Semantic Web

• Ubiquitous computing

Future challenges ...

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Questions?

1 Dr Alexiei Dingli Web Science Stream Search Engine Optimisation.

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