1. What is a Search Engine?
Definition: An internet-based tool that searches an index of documents for a particular term, phrase or text specified by the user. Commonly used to refer to large web-based search engines that search through billions of pages on the internet.
Different than a Directory
Common Characteristics:
Spider, Indexer, Database, Algorithm
Find matching documents and display them according to relevance
Frequent updates to documents searched and ranking algorithm
Strive to produce “better”, more relevant results than competitors
Directory are listing of static information that are usually inputted manually and not CRAWLED.
Some of the common characteristics of today’s search engines are as follows:
* A search engine component usually contain the following components… I would like you to take a mental note of the Spider … since this will be a important topic we will discuss later on today.
In early day’s for you who remember this WebCrawler was one of the many crawler based directory search engines …. another common one that still exists today is AltaVista search engine.

2. Examples popular Search Engines
Today the undisputed leader in search engine usage is Google.
Yahoo Claims to have the largest index of all search engines ranking over 5 Billion pages.
MSN is the leading third, they have done a tremendous job at catching up to Google and yahoo but they still have a long time to catch up…. This a true example of the first mover advantage 
I don’t usually talk about Ask Jeeves but I have been seeing an increased level of traffic from Ask.com and according to recent statistics, Ask is now representative of approximately 7-8% of all searches.
Every search engine has a different algorithm and ranking…. Our main focus today will be to look at the common and basic elements that every search engine company uses to rank and index pages.

3. How Do Search Engines Work?
Spider “crawls” the web to find new documents (web pages, other documents) typically by following hyperlinks from websites already in their database
Search engines indexes the content (text, code) in these documents by adding it to their databases and then periodically updates this content
Search engines search their own databases when a user enters in a search to find related documents (not searching web pages in real-time)
Search engines rank the resulting documents using an algorithm (mathematical formula) by assigning various weights and ranking factors
If you were not take anything away from this session today… and only understand how Spider or crawlers work you would have understood 40% of Search engines.

4. Search Engines statistics
Google – 41.6%
Yahoo – 31.5%
MSN – 27.4%
AOL – 13.6%
Ask Jeeves – 7.0%
According to Nielsen/Net rating
% bases on usage

5. Why is Search Engine Marketing important?
85% of all traffic on the internet is referred to by search engines
90% of all users don’t look past the first 30 results (most only view top 10)
Search engine traffic is low and websites aren’t indexed because they are generally poorly optimized
Cost-effective advertising
Clear and measurable ROI
Operates under this assumption:
More (relevant) traffic + Good Conversions Rate = More Sales/Leads

6. What is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO = Search Engine Optimization
Refers to the process of “optimizing” both the on-page and off-page ranking factors in order to achieve high search engine rankings for targeted search terms.
Refers to the “industry” that has been created regarding using keyword searching a a means of increasing relevant traffic to a website

7. What is a SEO Algorithm?
Top Secret! Only select employees of a search engines company know for certain
Reverse engineering, research and experiments gives SEOs (search engine optimization professionals) a “pretty good” idea of the major factors and approximate weight assignments
The SEO algorithm is constantly changed, tweaked & updated
Websites and documents being searched are also constantly changing
Varies by Search Engine – some give more weight to on-page factors, some to link popularity

8. Steps to developing a good SEO strategy:
Research desirable keywords and search phrases (WordTracker, Overture, Google AdWords)
Identify search phrases to target (should be relevant to business/market, obtainable and profitable)
“Clean” and optimize a website’s HTML code for appropriate keyword density, title tag optimization, internal linking structure, headings and subheadings, etc.
Help in writing copy to appeal to both search engines and actual website visitors
Study competitors (competing websites) and search engines
Implement a quality link building campaign
Add Quality content
Constant monitoring of rankings for targeted search terms

9. Ranking factors On-Page Factors (Code & Content) Off-Page Factors
Title tags <title> #3
Header tags <h1> #5
ALT image tags #4
Content, Content, Content (Body text) <body> #1
Hyperlink text #6
Keyword frequency & density #2
Off-Page Factors
Link Popularity (“votes” for your site) – adds credibility #2
Anchor text #1
Anchor text is the visible hyperlinked text on the page.
anchor text is usually used to indicate the subject matter of the page that it links to. For example, the text “7th world congress ebusiness" indicates to visitors that they can expect to see content about conference pertaining to ebusiness if they visit the link.
This pattern of usage has been applied in search engine algorithms to enhance the relevance of the "target" or the "landing page" URL for the keywords appearing within the anchor text.

10. Introduction to SEO What a search engine sees
Spiders do not see a page like humans do, as it cannot describe an image, or tell you how pretty a site looks
Instead, it looks at the HTML code and structures it to make sense.
Using a text browser, or disabling images and CSS are a good way of seeing your site through a search engines eyes.

11. What a Search Engine Sees
View > Source (HTML code)

12. Crash Course in HTML/CSS
(X)HTML is used to describe the data that is on your page
CSS is used to format HTML and make it look more presentable.
Web standards are continuously trying to separate content from presentation
Previously, HTML was used for both content and presentation.
Latest Versions of the languages
XHTML 1.1
CSS 3

13. Crash Course in HTML/CSS HTML Basics
HTML uses <tags> to describe data
Data is usually enclosed in these tags
<tag>Data</tag>
<tag attribute=“data” />
Tags can be images, paragraphs, titles, tables, and more
Browsers render these tags differently on your screen.
There is a tendency to depend on these tags also for formatting, e.g. using tables to keep non-tabular data
Not Good!

14. Crash Course in HTML/CSS HTML Basics (cont.)
Every HTML document has some mandatory elements :
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C ... ml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="
<head>
<meta … /> Extra information about the document
<title>Document Title</title>
</head>
<body>
Page Content
</body>
</html>

15. Crash Course in HTML/CSS HTML Basics (cont.)
Here are some basic tags important to SEO
<h1></h1> , <h2></h2> , <h3></h3> , …
Header tags – Makes text large and bold
<img src=“location of pic” alt=“alternate text”>
Image tags – note the alternate text for SEs
<a href=“link URL” title=“link title”>link</a>
Link tags - Browsers makes the text inside a link
<b>Bold Text</b>
Not recommended, but is said to help in SEO

16. SEO Techniques Keywords
Keywords are the words on a webpage that best describe that page
Keyword selection is the most important step to effective SEO
The keywords you use will be the phrases where you want to be highly ranked on SEs
Time and research should go into selecting the appropriate keywords before doing any SEO
What are the words one would use to find your site?

17. SEO Techniques Keywords (cont.)
Continuation on how search engines work…
When a spider goes through a webpage, it determines the weight of frequently used words in the document, and considers them the most important in the document.
The more you use a word in important places, the more search engines give importance to it.
The words with highest weight are more likely to bring up your web page when used as a search term.

18. SEO Techniques Keywords (cont.)
You must decide whether to focus on less frequently used keywords (niche) or compete for the commonly used ones.
Here are some tools you can use to see which keywords are searched for frequently
Google Suggest (beta) (free)
Google adwords
Offers a free keyword tool with its adwords services
WordTracker (paid)

19. SEO Techniques Meta Tags
Meta tags are used to provide a description of the page, and a list of main keywords it uses.
There is a debate over whether to cram loads of keywords into these tags, or just select the most important ones.
Search engines are getting smarter everyday, so they may penalise you for cramming
Some search engines reportedly don’t even look at the meta tags (e.g. Google)

20. SEO Techniques Title Tag
The text in this tag shows up on the top of your browser window.
Quite important to include keywords here, as the title will give a general summary for what your page is about.
Most search engines see this tag as an important tag for categorising what type of site you have.

21. SEO Techniques Anchor Tags
One of the most important tags you must use for SEO.
Spiders use these to crawl your site, so you must have links to pages throughout your site.
Other sites that link to yours will send spiders your way also.
Google (and others) use anchor tags to rank your site in many ways:
Firstly, text in anchor tags are given a lot of importance.
If other sites link to you, this must mean your site is popular, and so you increase in rankings.
The most popular sites would, in theory, be linked to by many websites throughout the internet.

22. SEO Techniques Anchor Tags (cont.)
Since anchor tags are so important, it is vital that you include keywords in these tags
SEs think the words to describe a link should give a good indication of what that page is about.
This is one reason why it is good to have a navigation bar that uses links to all your sites.
Better that you use words, not images
Try and use <a> tags, and not image maps, flash, etc.
A sitemap is also an effective way of tying your site up if you link all your pages to this site map.

23. SEO Techniques Anchor Tags (cont.)
Here is an example of why a sitemap is effective
This is a website with a site map.
Sitemap
This is a website without a site map.
Page 4
Page 1
Page 1 and 2 can now reach page 3 in many ways
Page 1 and 2 can only reach page 3 via page 4
Page 2
Page 3

24. SEO Techniques Text and Content
Throughout your page you will need to use keywords in order to rank well for that word
The most important places of your content to put keywords are in the headers, at the beginning, and the end of paragraphs.
It is importance to balance the overuse of keywords for the sake of SEO and keeping the text relevant, readable, and informative
There is no point in having a highly ranked page if it provides no information to a user, as they will leave your site immediately

25. SEO Techniques H1, H2, H3, etc. Tags
These tags are considered by search engines to be a description of your page.
Very important to put in some keywords there.
It is always a good idea to structure your content so that it contains these tags at beginning of paragraphs, tables, sections, etc.
It is quite logical that a search engine gets the overview of a paragraph from a header tag
We know what this slide is about by looking at the title of the slide

26. SEO Techniques Images
Images are not read by search engines, and so you should avoid using too many images on your site
Many sites use images for fancy fonts, when they contain keywords that are never read by a search engine
Always use an alt attribute when including an image
This gives a spider a description of the image, and also doubles as making your site accessible to blind people.

27. SEO Techniques Code Structure
It is important to look at your HTML code and see the structure of it.
Some pages have too much code, and too little content
Some code makes it so that content is found at the bottom of the page.
Pages that use tables for layout are notorious for doing this.
Make sure that keywords are found at the top of your source code as well as on the actual web page
Remember, SEs don’t see pages like we do, they only see our HTML code.

28. SEO Techniques Update your site regularly
Sites that are updated regularly are spidered and indexed more frequently by SEs
Sites that change often are considered by SEs as sites that provide current information, and must therefore (although not always) provide up to date information
This would provide a more relevant set of results than providing a user with pages that were made 10 years ago
News Items are a great way of including a regular changing page.

29. SEO Techniques Dynamic Code
Dynamic code can make updating your site very easy
Also useful for creating pages on the fly
E.g. A shopping cart with items you want to buy
SEs do not always look favourably on pages with dynamic data
These pages usually have a ? after the page name and are followed by data
You have to regularly update your site if you want to do well with dynamic pages
E.g. Forums

30. SEO Techniques Inbound Links
As said before, links from other sites are very important.
Google will no list your site if its not found on an other webpage listed by them
Methods to get links on other pages
Link Exchange (free)
Paid Advertising
Google Adwords
Overture
Specific Websites

31. Measuring Results
Once you have started your SEO campaign, you need to measure your results and make sure you are improving on SE Rankings
When you first make changes, SEs may take up to about four weeks to scan your site for changes.
There are millions of web pages for them to crawl, and so it takes time for them to get to you.

32. Measuring Results Reasons for no improvements
Sometimes, you may not notice an improvement in your rankings
This can be due to many reasons as many factors affect your SE rankings
Competition may be doing better
Marketing
More linking from other sites
Better SEO
Bad choice of keywords
Too much competition
Etc.

33. Measuring Results Statistics Monitoring
You can view statistics of visitors to your site.
Onestat (paid)
Google Analytics (free)
StatCounter (free)
You can see what engines are used more to find your site
You can also see which keywords are used to find your site, which helps with keyword research
This can help you target particular search engines and accommodate their searching methods.

34. Measuring Results SEO software
SEO software can be used to scan many SEs for phrases of your choice and produce visual results of how your website is doing.
Much faster than doing this manually
You can run regular searches and monitor your positioning easily and efficiently
Some SEO software can also help you scan you pages and make suggestions for improvements.

35. Measuring Results SEO software (cont.)
SEO tools :
WebPosition Gold(paid)
Advanced Web Ranking (free)

36. Resources Links to further SEO resources

37. Limitations of SEO

38. Searching is an evolving process from the point of view of providers (the search engines), users and website owners. What worked yesterday may not work today and be counter-productive or harmful tomorrow. In the result, monitoring or regular checks of the key search engines and directories is required to maintain a high ranking once it is achieved.

39. The cost of SEO is rising
The cost of SEO is rising. More expertise is required than before and this trend will continue. The techniques employed are more sophisticated, complex and time consuming. There are fewer worthwhile search engines and directories that offer free listings. Paid placement costs are rising and the best key words expensive.

40. The search lottery. Search engines collect only a fraction of the billions of sites' pages for various technological reasons which change over time but nonetheless will mean for the foreseeable future that searching is akin to a lottery. SEO improves the odds but cannot remove the uncertainty altogether

41. SEO is a marketing exercise and, accordingly, the same old business rules apply.