IS 360 Web Promotion

Question Are Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Houzz, Zillow, HONEST?

Search Engines (Introduction) They contain a robot / spider that traverses the Web to find pages And it uses links to do this They contain a database to store ranked index results based on the content they find What does this link point to? They contain a form in which to enter the search and get results That’s Google as we know it

Search Engine (Results) Results are of two types: Both are based on a “quality score” based on relevance Paid (sponsored) results Here is 90% of Google’s revenue stream AdWords – You compete based on pay-per-click The more you pay, the better chance your ad will appear Organic results And this is why we need SEO

The Search Ecosystem Google’s search algorithms are proprietary We try and reverse engineer them to “beat Google” But Google is constantly updating it’s algorithms too A big cat and mouse game but it should not be Be honest and be real!!!

Best Practices I’ll go thorough a list of things to do (and not to do) to improve search results

Relevancy Search engines are answer machines It’s in their best interest to provide you the best answer possible And relevance is determined by many factors Your content The user’s location The user’s search history We will likely never know for sure.

Relevancy (Best Practices) Headers Keep them short (under 55 characters) Use URLs Your URL name should match the header Do use permalinks Titles Use a short title (2 – 4 words) meta descriptions They appear under the URL in search results Search engines don’t necessarily look a them

Relevancy (Best Practices) Determine a good list of keywords Don’t overuse them though (Some search engines will detect spamming) Use keywords in page titles and heading tags Use descriptive terms in links Use CSS instead of nested tables Search engines don’t always look inside of tables

Relevancy (Best Practices) Make sure to tag all images (the alt attribute) Google can’t see images

Domain Names Use “restful names” Don’t use hyphens in URL’s directories (unr.edu/business/InformationSystems) Instead of subdomains (InformationSystems.business.unr.edu Don’t use hyphens in URL’s Avoid domains like .biz, .info They are considered spammy

PDFs and Things Google does not read PDF content Flash Images Video Use both PDF and HTML content Flash Images Video

Designing the Page For Search Search engines do better if the XHTML is “valid” While obvious, have meaningful content Manually add your site to the search engines Pay them!

Site Maps It’s a Web page that maps your site It has a well-defined format There are several tools to create these for you http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Don’t’s Don’t “stuff” keywords Don’t buy links Don’t try to duplicate content Don’t create mobile interstitial sites Don’t try and be clever and create hidden text and links to improve your odds.

Social Media Optimization Your social links matter

Meta Tags Not all search engines use them They might help a bit