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Getting Google to Love Your Website:
presented by Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts
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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
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Part 1: What Is SEO? Application Development with SQL Server 2005
and Visual Studio 2005 Part 1: What Is SEO?
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Everything Evolves Around Search
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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)
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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
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Paid Natural Paid
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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
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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
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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%
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People Are Googling… Are You There?
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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
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Keyword Research Tools to check popularity of keyword searches
Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool ( WordTracker.com Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery.com Google’s Keyword Tool Google Trends Google Suggest
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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.
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Keyword Popularity – According to Yahoo!
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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
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Keyword Popularity – According to WordTracker
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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
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Keyword Popularity – According to KeywordDiscovery
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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 (
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Keyword Popularity – According to Google AdWords Keyword Tool
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Keyword Popularity – According to Google AdWords Keyword Tool
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Keyword Popularity – According to Google Trends
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Keyword Popularity – According to Google Suggest
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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)
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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
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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”
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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
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Part 2: Seven Steps to High Rankings
Application Development with SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 Part 2: Seven Steps to High Rankings
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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
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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
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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
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Results in “Supplemental Hell”
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Not Spider-Friendly GET --> 302 Moved Temporarily GET --> 302 Moved Temporarily GET --> 302 Moved Temporarily GET --> 200 OK
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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
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Pretty good title
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Not so good title – where’s the phrase “credit card”?
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Good link text and body copy
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Good link text and body copy
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No link text or body copy
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No link text or body copy
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Take a peek under the hood
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The “meta tags”
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Unnecessarily bloated HTML
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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™
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Google’s Toolbar – with handy PageRank Meter
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Google Directory – listings are organized by PageRank
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Conduct any Google query and get results organized by PageRank
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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”
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4) Leverage Your PageRank
Avoid PageRank dilution Canonicalization ( 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
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Duplicate pages
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Googlebot got caught in a “spider trap”
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Search engine spiders turn their noses up at such URLs
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Thus, important content doesn’t make it into the search engine indices
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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
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Where do searchers look? (Enquiro, Did-it, Eyetools Study)
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Search listings – 1 good, 1 lousy
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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
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Indexation tool –
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Link popularity tool –
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ROI – Sales by keyword
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ROI – Sales by referrer
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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
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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
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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)
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BMW.de hosted many “doorway pages” like this one
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“Sneaky redirect” sent searchers to this page
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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
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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”?
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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
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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
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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
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Further Reading blogs.cnet.com/seosearchlight
google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com blog.outer-court.com
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Q&A! For an ebook on Google power searching, SEO checklists & worksheets, and audio recording, executive summary & transcript of an SEO thought leaders teleconference, your request to To contact me:
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