1. Mark Branom Continuing Studies CS 22

2. Agenda  What is SEO?  The Seven Steps to SEO  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?

4. Search Engine Optimization  6 times more effective than a banner ad  Delivers qualified leads  Most user sessions begin at the search engines  Most online purchases are made on sites found through search engine listings

5. 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

6. Natural Paid

7. Most Important Search Engines  Google – 67.6% market share  Bing – 18.7%  Yahoo – 10%  Ask – 2.4%  AOL – 1.3% Source: searchenginewatch.com: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/23458 37/google-search-engine-market-share-nears-68

8. 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

9. Keyword Research  Tools to check popularity of keyword searches  http://WordTracker.com  http://KeywordDiscovery.com  http://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner  http://www.google.com/trends/  http://ubersuggest.org/

10. 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

11. The Search Engines Are Your Friend  Sitemaps.org  Webmaster tools (e.g. Google Webmaster, Bing Webmaster)  Rel=“nofollow” tag

12. Part 2: Seven Steps to SEO

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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?targe tURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bananarepublic.com%2Fbr owse%2Fhome.do&CookieSet=Set --> 302 Moved Temporarily  GET http://www.bananarepublic.com/cookieFailure.do -- > 200 OK

17. 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

18. Pretty good title

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

20. Good link text and body copy

22. No link text or body copy

24. Take a peek under the hood

25. The “meta tags”

26. Unnecessarily bloated HTML

27. 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

28. Google’s Toolbar – with handy PageRank Meter

29. 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”

30. 4) Leverage Your PageRank  Avoid PageRank dilution  Canonicalization (www.domain.com vs. domain.com)  Duplicate pages: (session IDs, tracking codes, superfluous parameters)  http://company.com/Products/widget.html http://company.com/Products/widget.html  http://company.com/products/widget.html http://company.com/products/widget.html  http://company.com/Products/Widget.html http://company.com/Products/Widget.html  http://company.com/products/Widget.html http://company.com/products/Widget.html  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/

31. Duplicate pages

32. Googlebot got caught in a “spider trap”

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

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

35. 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

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

37. Search listings – 1 good, 1 lousy

38. 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

39. 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

40. 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

41. 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)

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

43. “Sneaky redirect” sent searchers to this page

44. 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

45. 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”?

46. Before SEO

48. After SEO

50. 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