Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Mark Branom Continuing Studies CS 22

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

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

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

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

Paid Natural Paid

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

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

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/

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

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

Part 2: Seven Steps to SEO Application Development with SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 Part 2: Seven Steps to SEO

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

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

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

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

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

Pretty good title

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

Good link text and body copy

Good link text and body copy

No link text or body copy

No link text or body copy

Take a peek under the hood

The “meta tags”

Unnecessarily bloated HTML

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

Google’s Toolbar – with handy PageRank Meter

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”

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 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/

Duplicate pages

Googlebot got caught in a “spider trap”

Search engine spiders turn their noses up at such URLs

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

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

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

Search listings – 1 good, 1 lousy

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

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

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

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)

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

“Sneaky redirect” sent searchers to this page

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

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”?

Before SEO

Before SEO

After SEO

After SEO

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