Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization

Prepared by:www.almondsolutions.com

Search Engine Algorithms

Common things of the search engine algorithms:



Relevancy

The algorithm will determine whether this web page has any relevancy at all for the

particular keyword.

Individual Factors

Each search engine has unique algorithms.

Off-Page Factors

Click-through measurement and linking.

Google Algorithm Updates



Google Hummingbird

The goal is that pages matching the meaning do

better, rather than pages matching just a few words.

Google Panda

To stop sites with poor quality

content.

Google Penguin

To better catch sites deemed to be

spamming its search results.

Google Pigeon

To provide more useful, relevant

and accurate local search results.

Google Payday

Cleaning up search results for

traditionally “spammy queries” such as [payday

loan].

Google Pirate

Designed to prevent sites with many copyright

infringement from ranking well in

Google’s listings.

Google Top Heavy

To prevent sites that were “top

heavy” with ads from ranking well

in its listings.

Understanding the SERP



IP Location

It is used for checking user Geolocation – Geolocation is

already more than country - based on

city locations.

Search Engine TLD

The results will be different if the

search will be done on Google.com or

on Google.jo.

Search Language

The search results will be based on

language.

Account Settings

For logged in users Google is usually displaying results based on search

history.

Device Type

Google has started delivering different

results based on device type screen

size.

On-Page SEO



On-Page SEO

Website Content

Page Title

Meta Tags

301 RedirectALT

Name

Page Load Time

URLRewritin

g

Sitemap

Flash

404 Errors

On-Page SEO

Website Content

Your website content should be 100% original, valuable and well-written. Google and the other search engines will not give value to duplicated content.

Each web page should contain at least 250 words and 1-2 important keywords or phrases – remember, write your content for readers and not for search engines.

Web Page Title

Page’s title should not exceed 70 characters - include 1-keyword within your title.

Example:

Keyword/phrase: Website Design

Page Title: Website Design | Your Idea Needs a Great Website.



On-Page SEO

Use heading in every web page: H1 is the most important heading followed by H2, H3, H4 and so on.

Example:

<h1> Website Design | Your Idea Needs a Great Website. </h1>

Avoid using the stop keywords (in, the, on, at, etc.) in your page’s title.

Meta Tags

Write a well-descriptive Meta description and do not make it too long or too short. Meta keyword is not important for Google, but still working with the others such as Yahoo, Bing, etc.



On-Page SEO

Meta Tags

Write a well-descriptive Meta description and do not make it too long or too short. Meta keyword is not important for Google, but still working with the others such as Yahoo, Bing, etc.

301 Redirect

By not doing so, you're creating essentially two versions of your website that can confuse the search engines when it comes time to rank your site. Smaller infractions of duplicate content, like the www redirect (the one we're looking for here) can have a moderate impact on traffic. You may see after doing the proper 301 redirect from www to non-www (or vice versa) will result in moderately better rankings. Actual duplicate content, where you post the exact content on two different websites for instance, have a much higher impact. It is highly likely only one of those sites will rank with the content and a small chance that both will not rank at all. Avoid duplicate content!



On-Page SEO

ALT Name

You should add ALT name to all images.

Page Load Time

You'll want to work on getting your page load times to 2.00 seconds or less. Studies have shown that visitors will start to bail from your site the longer past 2.00 seconds the page takes to load. Faster load times improve bounce rates and other visitor metrics. Having slow loading pages can affect your rankings, and ultimately your traffic. Even the traffic you do get may bounce at a higher rate on slow loading pages. If you have an e-commerce site, expect a loss in sales for pages that load too slowly.

URL Rewriting

It is about to convert complex URLs to simple user friendly ones. Ex:

http://www.sitename.com/your-product-name.html



On-Page SEO

Flash

Make sure you use alternate HTML content, and avoid full Flash intros as this will lead to high bounce rates on your traffic.

Sitemap

Particularly for sites with complex navigation, it is possible the site has an indexation problem where only a small percentage of all pages are actually in the search engine index. The XML sitemap can prevent this issue.

Google Analytics

While this won't affect your traffic, it is what you need to measure YOUR traffic.



On-Page SEO

Robots.txt

Your robots.txt file, located in your root folder, is a way for webmasters to indicate which pages/folders/directories should not be accessed by crawlers or search engines. A good example is any pages behind a login. However, there are some serious misuses of the robots file that we come across sometimes, and we want to try and alert you to those. Overusing or blocking too many sections of your site could cause harm to your inbound link effectiveness.

404 Errors

Handling 404 errors improperly can actually lead to a lot of duplicate content. If we find that you're sending us a 200 OK server response code on a page that does not exist, you also allow the search engine to index that page too. Not what you want happening.



Off-Page SEO



Off-Page SEO

Blogging

Forum Marketin

g

Directory

Submission

Social Bookmar

kingPhoto Sharing

Video Marketin

g

Business Reviews

Local Listings

Article Submissi

ons

Social Media

Off-Page SEO

Social Networking Sites

Social Networking is bigger than ever these days! Sometimes known as “Online Reputation Management”, getting involved with social media sites is the fundamental step with which you begin to advertise, market and build your online reputation within your niche.

Blogging

Blogging is one of the best ways to promote your website online! By writing a blog for your website, you give a reason for visitors to keep returning to your site and keep up to date with your latest posts. It also helps search engines to crawl your site more frequently, as they have to update your latest blog post entries, which ultimately helps you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Blog Marketing / Commenting

Post comments on other blogs within the same niche as yours, which allow you to add a link in the comments section. These links can then be crawled by search engines, helping to point them towards your site. You need to focus on “Do-Follow” Blogs.



Off-Page SEO

Forum Marketing

Find forums online that are related to your sites niche and get involved within that community. Reply to threads, answer peoples questions, offer advice, etc. This all helps to build up your reputation as someone who is an expert within that niche. Try to use “Do-Follow” Forums so that you can include a link to your site within your signature, which helps search engines crawl your site.

Search Engine Submission

Search engines will eventually find your site online, but that can take a while. To speed everything up, you should submit your website to the most popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

Directory Submission

Many people may say that directory submission is dead! I believe that it isn’t as you are increasing the likely hood of people seeing your website. It is purely based on how effectively we are selecting those directories and how efficiently we are choosing the category for submission. You could submit to general directories, but for maximum effect, you are better off submitting to niche directories. Of course, I agree that it gives quite delayed results, but it is worth doing it.



Off-Page SEO

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is another great way of promoting your website. Submit your latest blog posts and pages to the most popular bookmarking sites, like StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, Reddit, etc. Search engines really like these types of sites because the content on these sites is updated very frequently.

Photo Sharing

If you have used any of your own photos or images on your site, then you can share them on many of the major photo sharing websites like Flickr, Picasa, Photo Bucket, etc. Other people will be able to see them and comment on them, hopefully following a link to your site.

Video Marketing

Just like photo sharing, if you have any videos that you have used on your site, then you can submit them to sites like; YouTube, Vimeo, etc. allowing people to find your content in other ways.



Off-Page SEO

Business Reviews

Write reviews about others businesses or ask your friends/clients to write a review of your business in major business review sites like RateitAll, Shvoong, Kaboodle, Stylefeeder, etc.

Local Listings

Depending on your site’s niche, you might find that listing in local directories may be useful. You may have a website promoting your local business, therefore instead of going global and facing huge competition, listing your website locally, so that search engines can easily view your website and fetch the content, will be much better. This will help you to reach a targeted audience. Submit your website to sites like; Google Local, Maps, Yahoo Local, Yellow Pages, etc.

Article Submission

If you write your articles yourself, then you can submit them to popular article directory sites like; Ezine, Go Articles, Now Public, etc. This can help drive traffic to your site, whilst you can also gain some links to your site from other people (though it’s usually a slower process).



Off-Page SEO

Answer Questions

You can actively participate in answering questions on sites like Yahoo Answers. By answering and asking relevant questions on your site niche, you help to build up your reputation as someone that is an expert in your chosen field. You can place a link to your website in the source section if necessary so that people can easily find your site. If you don’t spam, this is another great way to increase your link popularity.



12 Steps To Optimize A Webpage For Organic Keywords

1. Choose The Keywords To Focus On

Look at Google analytics to “map” those keywords to existing pages on the site.

2. Prioritize Your Keywords

This can be done by evaluating the difficulty of reaching top organic results.

3. Check That Important Content On The Page Is Getting Indexed

As I start optimizing a page, I check to make sure all the important content on the page is getting indexed by checking Google’s “text-only” version of the page’s cache, Bing’s cache, and/or using one or more page analyzers or crawlers.



Find the page in Google or Bing’s index with a “Site:domain.com keyword phrase” search. In Google, hover over the search listing then hover over the arrows that appear at the end of the listing to see the page snapshot. Then click on the “cached” link above the page snapshot.

Finally, when the Cache version of the page appears, click on the “text-only version” link.

In Bing, you also hover over the listing, then hover of the arrow that appears. A window with info about the page will appear. Click on the “cached page” link.

By doing a “Site:domain.com keyword phrase” search, the keyword phrase will be highlighted if Bing can read it. You can also select sections of text on the page to see if the text is editable text that can be read by search engines or whether the text actually part of an image.

I put the cache version of the page side by side with the actual page and compare the two. I’m looking to make sure that all important content on the page is getting indexed.

I make note of any issues that we need to discuss with the web developers such as the use of techniques that are not indexed easily by search engines (Flash, content included by JavaScript calls etc). I also make note of text in images that we’d ideally like change to indexable text.

If employing more search engine friendly methods isn’t currently an option, I’ll make a note not to optimize that content since it isn’t being indexed anyway.



4. Ensure The Indexed Text Is Unique

Next, I make sure the content on the page I’m going to optimize is unique.

Copy a snippet of what appears to be unique text from the page that you are going to optimize. Then search for it in Google with parenthesizes around the text.

If you get multiple results for a search on unique text, examine the files to see if a large portion of the content is indeed duplicate or very similar.

If the pages are duplicates or very similar content located on multiple websites, this may be a case of multiple web sites using similar content (very common with affiliate or ecommerce sites that use content provided by manufacturers etc).

If you find this to be the case for a significant amount of the content on a page you are going to optimize you’ll need to decide whether to rewrite the content or attempt to include “enough” unique content on the page otherwise you’ll be competing with all those other sites for listings.



5. Try To Improve The Search Listings For The Keywords

Search for each keyword phrase you are going to focus on and determine how the search engine is generating the search listing so that you can attempt to improve it if needed.

In this case, you’ll want to search for the phrase the same way most people search, that is without putting quotes around the phrase.

Tip: Rather than searching through pages of listings to find a search result you can append the keyword phrase to a Site:DomainName search. It’s the same listing. I’ve checked this many times. A Google search for “site:domainname.com chrome frame sliders” for example returns the same listing as does a search for [chrome frame sliders].

6. Update Or Add A Headline

Page headlines are usually read by your human visitors so I try to make sure most pages I work on have one. If I can include one or two important keywords in it all the better. This not only should help rankings but also help assure site visitors who just searched on the keyword that they came to the right place.



7. Optimize Existing Text

Next I make suggestions to optimize the rest of the visible text on the page. These are usually very subtle changes as I try not to negatively impact the conversion rate. I look for ways to include variations of the important keywords without forcing them into the text and making the messages awkward (Remember your human visitors come first).

8. Look For Text In Images

There is often content on webpages that can’t be read by search engines including text within images. I’m working on a website now, for example, where the only visible text on the home page is actually within an image.

As search engines are extracting text to create search listings from the only text they can read, they are only grabbing a few news items that appear on a mouse over. This is leading to irrelevant search listings that won’t help entice people to click though to the site. Plus, we can’t optimize the text to improve rankings and listings.



So, I’ll be recommending they have a Web developer rebuild the image using text that the search engines can read. A skilled web developer should be able to rebuild most images so that text is search engine friendly using CSS, background images, etc. I’m amazed at how many clients use Web developers that have no clue how to do this. If search engine results are important to you (you’re reading SEL so I assume they are) then find an experience developer who can do this.

9. Possibly Add New Content On The Page

After editing the existing content, I may look for places to add new content on the page, especially if we need more content in order to focus on important keywords. Here are some ideas.

Left/Right Column Content

I look for places on the page to add content that can be both helpful to the user and may help improve search results and conversions.

For example, I might suggest some sales or positioning messages in the right of left columns. I’ll ask if the client has any testimonials and possibly insert snippets from one or an entire testimonial in right column, ideally on that includes one or more important keywords. If they have some useful articles they’ve written, I might suggest putting a summary in the right column that links to the full article.



Content Below The Fold

I sometimes develop a paragraph or more of text and suggest they add it below the fold. This is usually the case for the often image heavy homepages. In that homepage, I mentioned above the text contained in the image only talks about a couple of broad important keywords.

I’ll suggest they add some new text lower on the home page to talk about some important services they offer and ideally link to pages for more information about each service.

10. Develop Alt Tags for the Image Links

Alt Tags for static images (images that are not used as links) are used to provide information about what is in the image for those who mouse over the image, those with slow speed connections, those who turn off image downloading, or for the visually impaired who use page readers.

Alt Tags for images that are used as links should provide additional information about what can be expected when someone clicks on the image link.

If you can develop keyword rich Alt Tags for image links this can help improve the rankings for both the page where they are embedded in and the page they link to.



11. Update The HTML Page Title & Meta Description Tag

Remember that the purpose of Titles and Description tags is to tell people what the web site, site section/category, or the specific page is about. So craft Title and Description tags to work together to try to attract visitors scanning search results to click to your website.

12. Increase Internal / External Links & Social Engagement

Internal links from within the Web and even more so external links from other sites affect rankings.



Search Engine Optimization

Marketing

Transcript of Search Engine Optimization