SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) - Seminar on Web Search

2 December 2005

Seminar on Web Search Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search

Engine Marketing (SEM)

Prof. Beat Signer

Department of Computer Science

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

http://www.beatsigner.com

http://www.beatsigner.com/

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected]

2 September 9, 2011

Search Engine Result Pages (SERP)


3 September 9, 2011

Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) ...


4 September 9, 2011

Vertical Search Result Pages


5 September 9, 2011

Search Engine Result Page

There is a variety of information shown on a search

engine result page (SERP) organic search results

non-organic search results

meta-information about the result (e.g. number of result pages)

vertical navigation

advanced search options

query refinement suggestions

...


6 September 9, 2011

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

For many companies Internet marketing

has become a big business

Search engine marketing (SEM) aims to

increase the visibility of a website search engine optimisation (SEO)

paid search advertising (non-organic search)

social media marketing

SEO should not be decoupled from a website's

content, structure, design and used technologies

SEO has to be seen as an continuous process in a

rapidly changing environment different search engines with regular changes in ranking


7 September 9, 2011

Structural Choices

Keep the website structure as flat a possible minimise link depth

avoid pages with much more than 100 links

Think about your website's internal link structure which pages are directly linked from the homepage?

create many internal links for important pages

be "careful" about where to put outgoing links - PageRank leakage

use keyword-rich anchor texts

dynamically create links between related content

- e.g. "customer who bought this also bought ..." or "visitors who viewed this

also viewed ..."

Increase the number of pages


8 September 9, 2011

Technological Choices

Check whether a potential content management

system (CMS) is SEO friendly

Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs avoid session IDs and parameters in URL

use URL rewriting to get descriptive URLs containing keywords

Think carefully about the use of dynamic

content and links e.g. use of JavaScript or Flash

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) based on AJAX etc.

content hidden behind pull-down menus etc.

Address webpages consistently http://www.vub.ac.be http://www.vub.ac.be/index.php


9 September 9, 2011

Consistent Addressing of Webpages


10 September 9, 2011

Search Engine Optimisations

Different things can be optimised on-page factors

off-page factors

It is assumed that some search engines use more than

200 on-page and off-page factors for their ranking

Difference between optimisation and breaking the

"search engine rules" white hat and black hat optimisations

A bad ranking or removal from index can cost a company

a lot of money or even mark the end of the company e.g. supplemental index ("Google hell")



Positive On-Page Factors

Use of keywords at relevant places in title tag (preferably one of the first words)

in URL

in domain name

in header tags (e.g. <h1>)

multiple times in body text

Provide metadata e.g. <meta name="description"> also used by search engines

to create the text snippets on the SERPs

Quality of HTML code

Uniqueness of content across the website

Page freshness (occasional changes)



Negative On-Page Factors

Links to "bad neighbourhood"

Link selling in 2007 Google announced a campaign against

paid links that transfer PageRank

Over optimisation penalty (keyword stuffing)

Text with same colour as background (hidden content)

Automatic redirect via the refresh meta tag

Cloaking different pages for spider and user

Malware being hosted on the page



Negative On-Page Factors ...

Duplicate or similar content

Duplicate page titles or meta tags

Slow page load time

Any copyright violations

...



Positive Off-Page Factors

Links from pages with a high PageRank

Keywords in anchor text of inbound links

Links from topically relevant sites

High clickthrough rate (CTR) from search engine for a

given keyword

Listed in DMOZ / Open Directory Project (ODP) and

Yahoo directories

High number of shares on social networks e.g. Facebook, Google +1 or Twitter



Positive Off-Page Factors ...

Site age (stability) Google sandbox?

Domain expiration date

High PageRank

...



Negative Off-Page Factors

Site often not accessible to crawlers e.g. server problem

High bounce rate users immediately press the back button

Link buying rapidly increasing number of inbound links

Use of link farms

Participation in link sharing programmes

Links from bad neighbourhood?

Competitor attack (e.g. via duplicate content)?



Black Hat Optimisations (Don'ts)

Link farms

Spamdexing in guestbooks, Wikipedia etc. "solution": <a rel="nofollow" href="...">...</a>

Keyword Stuffing overuse of keywords

- content keyword stuffing

- image keyword stuffing

- kewords in meta tags

- invisible text with keywords

Selling/buying links "big" business until 2007

costs based on the PageRank of the linking site



Black Hat Optimisations (Don'ts) ...

Doorway pages (cloaking) doorway pages are normally just designed for search engines

- user is automatically redirected to the target page

e.g. BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany banned in February 2006



Nofollow Link Example

Nofollow value for hyperlinks introduced by Google in

2005 to avoid spamdexing <a rel="nofollow" href="...">...</a>

Links with a nofollow value were not counted in the

PageRank computation division by number of outgoing links

e.g. page with 9 outgoing links and 3 of them are nofollow links - PageRank divided by 6 and distributed across the 6 "really linked pages"

SEO experts started to use (misuse) the nofollow links

for PageRank sculpting control flow of PageRank within a website



Nofollow Link Example ...

In June 2009 Google decided to treat nofollow links

differently to avoid PageRank sculpting division by total number of outgoing links

e.g. page with 9 outgoing links and 3 of them are nofollow links

- PageRank divided by 9 and distributed across the 6 "really linked pages"

no longer a good solution to prevent Spamdexing since we loose (diffuse) some PageRank

SEO experts start to use alternative techniques to

replace nofollow links e.g. obfuscated JavaScript links



Where to Get SEO Information

Guidelines from search

engine providers

e.g. Google webmaster

guidelines

Various SEO websites http://www.seobook.com/

http://www.seomoz.org/

Blogs

Matt Cutts (GoogleGuy) http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

...



Webpage Validation

Browsers forgive errors in

HTML documents

weakens the standard

HTML pages can be

checked against standard http://validator.w3.org/

Less HTML errors

easier parsing for search

engines

might also be a ranking factor

for search engines

faster rendering



Google Webmaster Tools

Various services and infor-

mation about a website

Site configuration

submission of sitemap

crawler access

URLs of indexed pages

settings

- e.g. preferred domain

Your site on the web

search queries

keywords

internal and external links



Google Webmaster Tools ...

Diagnostics crawl rates and errors

HTML suggestions

Use HTML suggestions for on-page factor optimisation meta description

- duplicate meta descriptions

- too long meta descriptions

title tag

- missing or duplicate title tags

- too long or too short title tags

non-indexable content

Similar tools offered by other search engines e.g. Bing Webmaster Tools



XML Sitemaps

List of URLs that should be crawled and indexed

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.example.com/sitemap/0.9"> <url> <loc>http://www.tenera.ch/zyliss-trommelreibe.html</loc> <lastmod>2011-07-06</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> <priority>0.4</priority> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.tenera.ch/tenera-universalmesser.html</loc> <lastmod>2010-12-05</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> <priority>0.1</priority> </url> ... </urlset>



XML Sitemaps ...

All major search engines support the sitemap format

The URLs of sitemap are not guaranteed to be added to

a search engine's index helps search engine to find pages that are not yet indexed

Additional metadata might be provided to search engines relative page relevance (priority)

date of last modififaction (lastmod)

update frequency (changefreq)



Web Analysis Tools

Logfile analysis tools

Google Analytics

easy to "install" over the Web

website admin has to add a

piece of JavaScript code to

the website

Google gets information

about site visitors

a user can normally choose

to use a free service (e.g.

Gmail) but has no choice

when it comes to being

tracked via Google Analytics



Product Search

Various shopping and

price comparison sites

import product data

some of them are free, for

others one has to pay

Google Product Search

started as Froogle, became

Google Products and now

Google Product Search

product data uploaded to

Google Base

very effective vertical search



Social Networks and Bookmarking

Social networks offer

another great opportunity

to attract new visitors

"word of mouth"

inlinks do often not count

Offer visitors the possi-

bility to easily bookmark

and share a website on

social networks

use sharing services such

as AddThis

- http://www.addthis.com/



Non-Organic Search

In addition to the so-called organic search, websites can

also participate in non-organic web search cost per impression (CPI)

cost- per-click (CPC)

The non-organic web search should be treated

independently from the organic web search

Quality of the landing page can have an impact on the

non-organic web search performance!

The Google AdWords programme is an example of a

commercial non-organic web search service other services include Yahoo! Advertising Solutions,

Facebook Ads, ...



Google AdWords

pay-per-click (PPC) or

cost-per-thousand (CPM)

Campains and ad groups

Two types of advertising

search

content network

- Google Adsense

Highly customisable ads

region

language

daytime

...



Google AdWords ...

Excellent control and monitoring for AdWords users cost per conversion

In 2010 Google's total advertising revenues

were 28 billion USD



Conclusions

SEO is a continous and lengthy process that should be

synchronised with decisions about a website's content,

structure, design and used technologies

Optimisation of on-page and off-page factors leads to

increased ranking and visibility

Non-organic search as a paid alternative to increase the

visibility profits from SEO since the landing pages will be of higher quality

Many opportunities and free services e.g. Google Product Search

Social marketing and social search is rapidly growing!



References

Google Webmaster Tools http://www.google.com/webmasters/

The W3C Markup Validation Service http://validator.w3.org/

Matt Cutts http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

SEO Book http://www.seobook.com

SEOmoz http://www.seomoz.org

2 December 2005

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SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) - Seminar on Web Search

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