1. Web Entrepreneurship S.E.O.

2. What is SEO? Search Engine Optimisation Making webpages more search engine friendly. SEO should be considered from the start. Domain Name Site Structure Site Design Site Navigation Site Topics Headings Subheadings Content Links Usability Accessibility

3. Why is it important? 24% of marketers said that >75% of their traffic comes from search engines 60% of students use search engines to find online retailers 55% of online purchases were made on sites found through search engines 80% of users reach sites through search engines 48% of websites depend on search engines for the majority of their traffic (Various sources)

4. Why is it important? Following Search Engine rules. If your webpage fits the criteria for a certain search term, you’ll get top ranking. Search Engine Optimisers Modify webpages to fit the criteria to give a page a better chance of being selected.

5. Design with SEO in mind It’s tempting to build a website, and then think about SEO. Better to design with SEO in mind

6. Domain Name Get a domain name that contains your keywords But make sure it is still memorable… www.AAA1-Chiang-Mai-Travel-Hotel- Guide-Bookings-Tourist.com www.AAA1-Chiang-Mai-Travel-Hotel- Guide-Bookings-Tourist.com Is not a good domain name!

7. Website Structure Usability It doesn’t matter how good the content is if the site is frustrating to use. Linkability Remember the internal linking structure, and its effect on PageRank

8. Website Design Flash? NO! Search Engines rely on keywords to classify pages, while flash is mostly for entertainment. Search Engines do not index flash files. HTML Yes! It’s easy and spiders have no problem indexing it. But PHP etc. is fine so long as you use search engine friendly urls & links

9. Website Navigation Spiders will rarely crawl deeper than the top 2 or 3 levels of a website. So possibly spiders won’t index lower level pages; www.chiangmaiplan.com (level 1) www.chiangmaiplan.com www.chiangmaiplan.com/golf/ (level 2) www.chiangmaiplan.com/golf/ www.chiangmaiplan.com/golf/maejo/ (level 3) www.chiangmaiplan.com/golf/maejo/ www.chiangmaiplan.com/golf/maejo/hole1/ (level 4) www.chiangmaiplan.com/golf/maejo/hole1/ Site maps can still lead spiders to lower level content.

10. Website Categories You need to split your site into categories, but what are the right categories? Digital Camera Canon Digital Camera Etc. Make sure you have content that will cater for all types of searches.

11. Webpage Content Spiders use the content to know where to categorise each page. A page with no text (flash site) Where should it be put? A page with lots of text on lots of topics Where should it be put? There are too many competing keywords. The amount of content is also important.

12. Links After content, links are the most important thing… Some would even argue it’s the opposite way around. PageRank The link text is just as important as the link. It is tempting to use an attractive graphical button for the link – but how can the spider associate keywords with the link?

13. Usability - Frames SEO quite often goes against good site usability design. Frames can make webpages much easy to use, but spiders can’t index framed pages as well as standard pages.

14. Internet Marketing Plan & SEO How do you promote your site? Affiliate Marketing Pay per Click search engine advertising Banner advertising Newsletter advertising Viral Marketing Optimise your landing pages! If you optimise your affiliate program page then more affiliate marketers might find your program

15. Keywords, Keywords, Keywords There are many factors that search engines use to decide SERPS Link popularity Click through popularity Webpage age Webpage size Number and quality of competition … Probably the most important factor though is keywords If a page has no text, there is nothing to index

16. Web designers Do a good job of designing attractive looking websites But not such a good job of SEO, as they aren’t marketers. Web designers also don’t know what keywords people search for. And people use a lot of different words to search for the same product / service Unless you have all the keywords, you’re not going to ‘win’.

17. SEO Search Engine Optimisation Search Engine Optimization Search Engine Ranking Search Engine Placement Website Optimisation Website Optimization Search Engine Positioning High Search Engine Ranking Webpage Optimisation Search Engine Promotion Top Search Engine Ranking High Search Engine Rankings Better Search Engine Placement Search Engines Optimisations

18. What Keyword? Before you can start SEO, you need to know what keywords to target. Fortunately there are plenty of tools out there to help you.

19. Which Keywords Each webpage should concentrate on the following 1) One keyword or phrase matching the page content 2) Most frequently used by the target audience 3) With the least number of competing pages.

20. 1) Target one keyword / phrase per page Sprinkle the keyword throughout the page to remind the spider that the page is important for that keyword. But, if you have half a dozen different keywords on a page, the spider might think the page is too broad to be the most relevant for the keyword.

21. 2) Most frequently searched for keywords But how do we know? Google Adwords Check the “related searches” lists – this will give you an idea what other people have searched for. Analyse the keywords used in your site search engine Server Log File Analysis (or Google Analytics) Educated Guess

22. Target keywords with little competition Google Adwords Wordtracker

23. Sprinkle uncommon keywords Sprinkle less common keywords through your main body text. If someone searches for a slightly obscure phrase, then your page will only be returned if it contains all the words in the phrase.

24. How many keywords? Keyword Frequency The number of times a keyword, or phrase, appears within a page. Keyword Density The ratio of keywords contained in the page within the number of total indexable words Perhaps 1-3%

25. Keyword Density Is more complicated than that. Different search engines have different preferences Different search engines will also calculate a different density for your page; Stop words? Word Stemming? Keywords in particular HTML tags

26. Keyword Prominence As well as frequency and density, prominence is also a factor Words appearing near the beginning of the page, paragraph, sentence. Certain HTML tags (title)

27. Keyword Proximity How close keywords are together could also be a factor. Consider a search for ‘dog biscuits’ “We sell delicious biscuits for all breeds of dogs!” “We sell the most delicious dog biscuits in the world!”

28. The tag The title tag is perhaps the most important place for keywords. Consider it as a short version of the page, where frequency and density are important. Don’t have the same title for all your pages. The heading tags are also important; With having more priority than etc.

29. Images Always add an ALT parameter to your image tags. Not just for visually impaired users, but for keyword embedding too. You can add a title parameter too. Some search engines index the keywords stored in the tag.

30. Add keywords to links Add a title parameter to your links too. It’s spoken for disabled users, and adds a place for keywords too.

31. Word Stemming Some search engines manage word stemming to return results beyond what is searched for. Cheap Cheaper Cheapest

32. Stop Words Some search engines use stop words to avoid having to process every word in the page. Stop words are common words that are simple ignored.

33. File Names It’s probably pretty obvious… …but you can place keywords in your filenames and directory structure as well.

34. To Hyphen or Not to Hyphen? Some SEO experts say keywords in a domain name don’t need to be separated by hyphens. Others think that the keywords in the domain are important and should be separated. http://www.chiangmaiplan.com http://www.chiang-mai-plan.com What do you think?

35. Hyphens Consider: http://www.newshut.com http://www.sportsexchange.com A case study investigated the hyphen question, and found that hyphens did actually perform better in serps, but will people remember the site?

36. Subdomains Subdomains are another great place to add keywords; golf.chiangmaiplan.com vs www.chiangmaiplan.com/golf/

37. Meta Tags Meta tags describe the content of a webpage, and some search engines use the information stored in it. The 2 most important tags are; Meta Description Meta Keywords

38. Meta Description Some search engines use the contents as the search result description. Because this unseen tag can be maliciously abused, many search engines have devalued keywords in it, and some simply ignore it. Only the first 135-250 characters are used, so there is no point in writing too much. It should be enticing to visitors.

39. Meta Keywords Most search engines now ignore the keywords meta tag as too many webmasters abused it. Some search engines or results providers (Inktomi?) still use it, so it might be worth adding a few keywords.

40. Robots.txt Add a robots.txt file to a directory to give instructions to spiders about what pages to index. Search engines don’t have to follow the instructions, but most honour them. But, why might you not want a spider to visit a page?

41. Robots.txt Suppose you optimise the same page for different search engines (Google, Altavista, yahoo). If they are all indexed they will be tagged as duplicate content. Perhaps you have some sensitive content, or content that isn’t ready to be published.

42. Robots.txt Contains; User-agent: the name of the spider you want to refer to e.g. googlebot. * indicates all robots. Disallow: specify the directories / files that shouldn’t be crawled. E.g. What would this do? User-agent: * Disallow: / And this? User-agent: * Disallow: /*.gif$

43. Pet Spiders Google: Googlebot Altavista: Scooter AlltheWeb: Fast Inktomi: Slurp Lycos: Lycos

44. robots.txt Find out what people are blocking (or their sensitive files, by looking at their robots.txt: http://www.bbc.co.uk/robots.txt http://www.bbc.co.uk/robots.txt

45. Things to avoid Splash Pages Little content to index Flash applets aren’t indexed What does the flash page do for the site? Frames Just use CSS instead! There is a tag where you can duplicate the content

46. Things to avoid Keywords in comments tags Comments aren’t included in the index Keywords in Hidden CSS layers If the search engines catch you… Keywords in Hidden form fields Considered spam by all search engines Keywords in Style tags Again, not indexed

47. Getting more “Black Hat” Doorways Hallways Cloaking …

48. Doorway pages Doorway pages are pages created simply to gain higher rankings for particular search phrases. The content is aimed towards the search engine spiders rather than human visitors Human visitors are then encouraged to follow links into the site, or often redirected with a meta-refresh

49. Doorway Pages Google, Inktomi have publicly stated that doorway pages are spam. So they might ban you. But it is difficult to tell the difference between doorway pages and regular pages. Often even humans can’t tell the difference.

50. Automatic Doorways There is software available that can automatically generate hundreds of doorway pages, virtually identical. Around 30-40% of the web is spam, with automated doorway pages responsible for much of it. Search engines will remove doorway pages and penalise the responsible sites, if they catch you.

51. Hallway pages While doorway pages are doorways into part of your site, hall way pages contain links to different doorway pages. Similar to a sitemap But because doorway pages are controversial, you don’t want to include them in your sitemap, so use a hallway instead.

52. Dynamically Generated Content We use dynamic content already – PHP. But dynamic content doesn’t exist until someone follows a link, giving certain parameters. Search engines don’t like ?$ken=3&$cosh… How can we get around this?

53. Dynamic Pages One common approach is to use Apache’s mod_rewrite module. This rewrites the URL into something that search engines can index We’ve seen pretty urls in the OS software we’ve played with.

54. Cloaking The practice of serving optimised pages to spiders and unoptimised pages to human visitors. Very controversial, as search engines consider it as spam. Cloaking works by detecting the IP address of the request, and redirecting human visitors to the real content, while spiders index the optimised content.

55. Benefits of Cloaking Optimise pages without compromising your site’s look and feel. Consider adding graphics and multimedia, that otherwise wouldn’t be indexed. Deliver dynamic content as static HTML Deliver local versions of webpages. Hide the source code of optimised pages, so competitors can’t see your hard work.

56. Themed Websites The idea is that search engines give more relevance to webpages within a website, if all pages are based around a single topic or theme. i.e. all the pages are about ‘Chiang Mai’. This sounds logical, but… Search engines rank pages, not sites. Each page is ranked on its own merits, rather than the other pages stored for the same domain.

57. Themed Websites “I think people sometimes mean different things by ‘themes’. The statement that somehow your blue widget site would be ‘weaker’ if it contained a page about Tigers is completely wrong. No search engine would want to do that; having a page on Tigers doesn’t affect your ability to be a resource for blue widgets. We’d miss good blue widget pages if we excluded the sites that also talk about Tigers. However, there is a difference between having a little bit of content about blue widgets and having in-depth content about blue widgets. Clearly we prefer in-depth (more useful) content. That’s not so much a preference for themes as a preference for depth.”

58. Off site SEO So far we’ve considered SEO which is done on the site It’s important to get the site right before focusing on incoming links etc. Next lets look at offsite SEO

59. Finding Links Who links to your competitors? Surely they might be good choices to link to you! You can find out which links have been indexed by doing: link:http://www.chiangmaiplan.com

60. Finding reciprocal links Search for; Links chiang mai Resource chiang mai Info chiang mai Resources chiang mai Information chiang mai Partner chiang mai Partners chiang mai

61. Finding Site Submissions Add url chiang mai Add site Add a site Submit site Add link Submit link Add url Submit url …

62. Reciprocal Linking Have your backlink ready to submit; Chiang Mai Travel Plan : all the information you need to plan your trip to Chiang Mai.http://www.chiangmaiplan.com There are tools to help you find and manage link partnerships… But be careful to avoid link farms.

63. Reciprocal Linking Link to your home page Use the exact keyword phrase in the link text. Make sure the link text also appears on your landing page. Add a description that will encourage click throughs.

64. Minisites As well as exchanging links with other people’s sites, you can create your own minisites to exchange links with To channel traffic towards your monetising site.

65. Submit your site to the search engines Most search engines accept url submissions. This can speed up being indexed, rather than waiting for a spider to find a link from another site. Use a spam email address when doing this!