Search Engine Optimisation: A High Level View
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Transcript of Search Engine Optimisation: A High Level View
Search Engine Optimisation
Justin Spratt // twiitter: @justinspratt // [email protected]
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”