Search Engine Optimization Chapter 6 Internet Marketing: A Highly Practical Guide to Every Aspect of Internet Marketing by Alex Trengove Jones, Anna Malczyk, & Justin Beneke, 2011, University of Cape Town: UCT OpenContent.
Web site is your virtual office The purpose of any website is to reach existing and current customers. When people search for specific keywords, like in the example above, the aim is for your website to be at the top of the page, or somewhere on the first page at the very least.
What are search engines? A search engine, like Google or Yahoo, is a specialized kind of database containing software programs (called spiders, robots, or bots) that discover sites on the web and then order them based on relevance to a particular search query.
What are search engines? (cont.) Search engines continuously crawl the web using these spiders to index information in their database.
Search algorithms As search engines crawl websites, they use special mathematical formulas called “search algorithms”, which help organize, file and rank information in order of relevance to a particular search query.
The Tagging system! Imagine that there was a system that could read the text of books in a library (before the emergence of ebooks) and tag each book with relevant keywords.
The Tagging system! (cont.) When someone searches the library database for “Turkish cooking books”, all relevant publications appear in the search results. Library databases do add keyword tags to each book in their database, but this is a manual process and takes time to update. Search engines work on the same premise.
Search engine optimization (SEO) This is where search engine optimization plays a role. By making small modifications to parts of your website, your website’s user experience and performance in organic search results may increase dramatically.
Benefits of SEO 85% of internet users find websites through search engines. 90% of internet users do not go past the top 30 search results (10 results per page). 75% of internet users have the intention to purchase a product or service by using search engines.
Page optimization Knowing which terms are rising in popularity will help you plan your next campaign and optimize your site content.
Page optimization There is a variety of on-page optimization tactics that can be applied to your site in order to increase search engine rankings and resulting traffic: 1. Page titles (title-tag) 2. Description meta-tag 3. URL structure 4. Website navigation 5. Content
1. Page titles (title-tag) You should always create a unique title for each page on your site that closely matches the contents of that page.
1. Page titles (title-tag)(cont.) Figure 2: A user performs a search query for “south african getaway”.
1. Page titles (title-tag)(cont.) Figure 3: Getaway shows up as the fourth listing, with the words “Africa”, “Getaway”, “South”, and “South-Africa” in bold and the title tag on the first line. Page titles (title-tag)
1. Page titles (title-tag)(cont.) The title of the page (the page’s title tag) is: “Travel News and Accommodation Southern Africa – Getaway Magazine http://www.getaway.co.za”. 1. Page titles (title-tag)(cont.)
1. Page titles (title-tag) (cont.) The title of the page (the page’s title tag) is: “Travel News and Accommodation Southern Africa – Getaway Magazine http://www.getaway.co.za”. 1. Page titles (title-tag) (cont.)
2. Meta description-tag A page’s meta description-tag gives search engines a summary of what the page is about. Descriptions are usually sentences or a short paragraph.
2. Meta description-tag (cont.) As with title tags, the description tag is placed in the <head> tag of your HTML document.
2. Meta description-tag (cont.) Meta-description tags are not used in Google’s algorithm to rank a page, but they’re still important since they show in search engine results. This snippet is the brief description that appears below the title and below the URL in a search listing.
2. Meta description-tag (cont.) (no more than 156 characters)
A brief note about what a HTML document is! HTML = Hyper Text Markup Language HTML is a markup language for describing web documents (web pages).
A brief note about what a HTML document is! The purpose of a web browser (Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari) is to read HTML documents and display them.
A brief note about what a HTML document is! The browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses them to determine how to display the document.
3. url structure An URL (uniform resource locator) is like a postal address for your website and all the files, documents and images that make it up. Getaway’s global address is www.getaway.co.za and it is vital that this URL is structured and named correctly, not just for the home page but for all lower- level pages as well.
3. url structure (cont.) “Guest houses”, “Getaway” and “La Fontaine” are bolded in the title, description and URL. in the title in the description in the URL.
4. Website navigation Imagine the navigation of a website is a filing system on your computer. Instead of having a thousand pictures under “My Documents”, you could organize your pictures by date (e.g. 2001, 2002, 2003) and place them into folders accordingly. You could also group your photographs by theme (e.g. holidays, work, admin, weekends).
4. Website navigation Websites operate in the same way. A well-organized site helps visitors move between pages in a seamless fashion. All websites have a “root” page, which is usually the home page – the starting place for most visitors. Think of your content in terms of hierarchy (remember chapter 2 on web development).
5. Content Writing interesting and compelling content is the most important part of your website, especially for visitor retention and search engine crawling. Once you have decided on your keyword list, make sure that you integrate these keywords into the meta description-tag, title-tag and content of each page in a relevant and informative manner.
Social Media & Viral Marketing
Social networks are growing three times faster than Internet use as a whole.
The popularity of Facebook! The largest and most famous social media community of all, Facebook, has exceeded 1 billion 4 hundred million subscribers and is still growing steadily; by population, it is the first largest country in the world.
The popularity of Facebook! According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats8.htm
Various social bookmarking buttons You are probably familiar with the various social bookmarking buttons and how to use them. You may even share your favorite sites with your network of friends and colleagues with 'Tell- a-Friend' button.
Viral Marketing Viral marketing refers to the strategy of getting visitors to a Web site to forward information on the site to their friends to make more consumers aware of the product.