1. IS 360 Web Promotion

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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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!!!

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

7. 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.

8. 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

9. 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

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

11. 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

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

13. 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!

14. 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

15. 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.

16. Social Media Optimization
Your social links matter

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