Getting Google to Love Your Website: presented by Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts

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? Application Development with SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 Part 1: What Is SEO?

Everything Evolves 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 – 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

Paid Natural 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 engine share (Google = 60%) expected click-through rate average conversion rate average transaction amount x x x x Or being outranked by affiliates of your own company name - like Bissell.com is for "Bissell cleaners” and LernerCatalog.com is for "Lerner catalog"? 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 Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool (http://inventory.overture.com) WordTracker.com Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery.com Google’s Keyword Tool Google Trends Google Suggest

Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool Pros Free! Data is from a large sample of Internet searches (including all searches on Yahoo!) Cons Variations of keywords are aggregated (e.g. verb tenses, plural & singular, misspellings) Rife with bogus data from automated searches Only a month’s data. No historical archives.

Keyword Popularity – According to Yahoo!

WordTracker.com Pros Cons 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. Lots is changing… Personalization & customization Vertical search services (Images, Video, News, Maps, etc.) “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”

My daughter, SEO-in-training. She makes $1000 / month passive income Application Development with SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 SEO – Easy Enough a Child Could Do It! My daughter, SEO-in-training. She makes $1000 / month passive income

Part 2: Seven Steps to High Rankings Application Development with SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 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 & PageRank 4) Leverage Your PageRank 4) Encourage Clickthrough 6) Track the Right Metrics 7) 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

1) Get Your Site Fully Indexed 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”

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”?

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”

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

ROI – Sales by keyword

ROI – Sales by referrer

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”?

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

Q&A! For an ebook on Google power searching, SEO checklists & worksheets, and audio recording, executive summary & transcript of an SEO thought leaders teleconference, e-mail your request to seo@netconcepts.com To contact me: stephan@netconcepts.com