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

2. 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

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

4. Everything Evolves Around Search

5. 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)

6. 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

7. Paid
Natural
Paid

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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%

11. People Are Googling… Are You There?

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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.

15. Keyword Popularity – According to Yahoo!

16. 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

17. Keyword Popularity – According to WordTracker

18. 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

19. Keyword Popularity – According to KeywordDiscovery

20. 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 (

21. Keyword Popularity – According to Google AdWords Keyword Tool

22. Keyword Popularity – According to Google AdWords Keyword Tool

23. Keyword Popularity – According to Google Trends

24. Keyword Popularity – According to Google Suggest

25. 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)

26. 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

27. 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”

28. 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

29. Part 2: Seven Steps to High Rankings
Application Development with SQL Server 2005
and Visual Studio 2005
Part 2: Seven Steps to High Rankings

30. 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

31. 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

32. 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

33. Results in “Supplemental Hell”

34. Not Spider-Friendly
GET --> 302 Moved Temporarily
GET --> 302 Moved Temporarily
GET --> 302 Moved Temporarily
GET --> 200 OK

35. 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

36. Pretty good title

37. Not so good title – where’s the phrase “credit card”?

38. Good link text and body copy

39. Good link text and body copy

40. No link text or body copy

41. No link text or body copy

42. Take a peek under the hood

43. The “meta tags”

44. Unnecessarily bloated HTML

45. 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™

46. Google’s Toolbar – with handy PageRank Meter

47. Google Directory – listings are organized by PageRank

48. Conduct any Google query and get results organized by PageRank

49. 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”

50. 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

51. Duplicate pages

52. Googlebot got caught in a “spider trap”

53. Search engine spiders turn their noses up at such URLs

54. Thus, important content doesn’t make it into the search engine indices

55. 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

56. Where do searchers look? (Enquiro, Did-it, Eyetools Study)

57. Search listings – 1 good, 1 lousy

58. 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

59. Indexation tool –

61. Link popularity tool –

63. ROI – Sales by keyword

64. ROI – Sales by referrer

65. 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

66. 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

67. 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)

68. BMW.de hosted many “doorway pages” like this one

69. “Sneaky redirect” sent searchers to this page

70. 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

71. 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”?

72. 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

73. 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

78. 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

79. Further Reading blogs.cnet.com/seosearchlight
google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com
blog.outer-court.com

80. 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
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