1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
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? Application Development with SQL Server 2005
and Visual Studio 2005
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. Paid
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: /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

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
Application Development with SQL Server 2005
and Visual Studio 2005
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 --> 302 Moved Temporarily
GET -- > 302 Moved Temporarily
GET tURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bananarepublic.com%2Fbr owse%2Fhome.do&CookieSet=Set --> 302 Moved Temporarily
GET -- > 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

21. Good link text and body copy

22. No link text or body copy

23. 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 ( vs. domain.com)
Duplicate pages: (session IDs, tracking codes, superfluous parameters)
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

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 ( )
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

47. Before SEO

48. After SEO

49. 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