SEO

Search Engine Optimization

Contents

• What is a Search Engine?• How Do Search Engines Work?• Why Search Engine Marketing?• What is Search Engine Optimization?• SEO Process? What to watch out for?• Role of Social Bookmarking in SEO• PPC vis a vis SEO

What is a Search Engine?

• Def: An internet-based tool that searches an index of documents for a particular term, phrase or text specified by the user. Commonly used to refer to large web-based search engines that search through billions of pages on the internet.

• Different than a Directory• Common Characteristics:

– Spider, Indexer, Database, Algorithm– Find matching documents and display them according to relevance– Frequent updates to documents searched and ranking algorithm– Strive to produce “better”, more relevant results than competitors

Popular Search Engines

• Google – 85.4%• Yahoo – 6.62%• Bing – 4.73%• AOL – 2.55%• Ask – 0.53%• Live – 0.16%• Others – 0.01%Source: statowl.com

How Do Search Engines Work?

• Spider “crawls” the web to find new documents (web pages, other documents) typically by following hyperlinks from websites already in the database

• Search engine indexes the content (text, code) in these documents by adding it to their huge databases and periodically updates this content

• Search engine searches its own database when user enters in a search to find related documents (not searching web pages in real-time)

• Search engine ranks resulting documents using an algorithm (mathematical formula) that assigns various weights to various ranking factors

Why Search Engine Marketing?

• 85% of all traffic on the internet is referred from a search engine• 90% of all users don't look past the first 30 results (most only view top 10)• Many websites aren't even indexed, most are poorly optimized and get

very little traffic from the search engines• Cost-effective advertising• Clear and measurable ROI• Operates under this assumption:

– More (relevant) traffic + Good Conv. Rate = More Sales/Leads

Ranking Factors

• On-Page Factors (Code & Content)– Title tags <title>– Header tags <h1>– ALT image tags– Content, Content, Content (Body text) <body>– Hyperlink text– Keyword frequency & density

• Off-Page Factors– Link Popularity (“votes” for your site) – adds credibility– Anchor text

And Something else too….

So What is the Algorithm?

• Top Secret! Only select employees of the actual search engines know for certain

• Reverse engineering, research and experiments gives SEOs (search engine optimization professionals) a “pretty good” idea of major factors and approximate weight assignments

• Constantly changing, tweaking, updating is done to the algorithm

• Websites and documents being searched are also constantly changing

• Varies by Search Engine – some give more weight to on-page factors, some to link popularity

What is Search Engine Optimization?

• Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via search results. SEO aims to improve rankings for relevant keywords in search results

• Why are search engines so important?

– Search engines are the biggest source of a website traffic

– Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine

– More visitors means more customers and higher profit

What SEO is NOT

• Search Engine Submission only• “Submit your website to 5,000 search engines”• An overnight process (typically takes 3-4 months to showsignificant

results)• Restricted to a finite number of keywords• A one-time process (in many cases requires a continual, long-term focus

for best results)• Guaranteed first page rankings (only Sergey Brin and Larry Paige can

ensure that)• A INR 50K one-time fee!

Search Engine Optimization Process

Website Evaluation

• Search Engine Accessibility: Recommending modifications on website with W3C standards that will allow better accessibility to various search engines.

• Link Validity Check: Checking inbound and outbound links on your website.

• Link Popularity Check: Checking relevant linking to various websites.

• Meta Check: Unique meta tags for web pages of website.

• Checking Download Time: Check download time with different browsers and internet connection speed.

Keywords Research• The purpose of Keyword Research is helping you to define

keywords/phrases, bringing to your website as many quality visitors as possible.The aim of keyword research is to find keywords/phrases that:

• Are relevant to your products or services.• Frequently used by potential users in search engines

One KeywordPhrase

Two KeywordPhrase

Three KeywordPhrase

Even though it‟s important to target higher position on one keyword phase, long tail of keywords will come from three phase keywords.

Meta Tags Development

• Meta Tags are the first to be read by search engines. Each of the inner pages should be targeted for the keywords that it is promoting. The title tag for all the pages of website needs to optimized for the related content of particular webpage. The page title is displayed in the search engine listings as a visible link to the website, thus making it extremely important to have relevant keywords. The page titles should be unique on each page, matching the most frequently appearing keywords.

• Few Important Meta Tags are: Title, Description, Keyword, Comment, ALT Tag

Content Consulting

• Each portal needs to write content / title of stories in a particular format. Writers need to be educated on „How‟ to write effective stories / titles for every story and article. For Eg: if someone is writing a story on Tendulkar hitting a century. Two ways of doing same would be:

• Little Master Did It Again! (Not recommended: Does Not have Tendulkar in Title)

• Tendulkar hit yet another century. (Recommended: Has Tendulkar in Title)

Linking Strategy Development

Various Search Engines base part of their ranking algorithms on how many their websites link to yours. We visit websites/ directories/ portals in similar market sectors to yours and either email the website owner direct and ask for a link or fill out any necessary on-line form to have a link placed.– Link Placement– Link Exchange– Directory Submission

Manual Search Engine / Directory Submission– Manual submission to Auto-Submit Tools because Manual Submission

is “more effective” and submit only "when necessary.“– Choosing most relevant directory for your website is important.

Few SEO Tools

Black Hats• Black hat SEO refers to those practices generally thought of as cheating

the system

– Duplicate Content – copy pasting same content in multiple pages or– Copying content from other websites on your own– Keyword Stuffing– Linking to bad neighborhood– Hidden Text– Title Stacking – as bad as keyword stuffing. Keep it to one title per

page

Role of Social Bookmarking in SEO

• Social Bookmarking is becoming an alternate to search engine, they are updated by the real user who would like to refer some of the best sites over the web along with its title and comments.

• It attracts people and gets a large number of visitors to your website/blog. E.g. if you use the keyword: "lcd laptops" and bookmark your news. When a user searches the site using the same keyword i.e. "lcd laptops" then your bookmarked article will be displayed.

• Second thing is that these sites have high Page rank so search engines visits these sites quite often. So when you bookmark something then it increases the chance of your site being crawled.

• These bookmarking sites increases your page rank

• Definitely social bookmarking is an important technique which must be implemented to boost the traffic/sales.

PPC vis a‟ vis “Organic” SEOPay-Per-Click “Organic” SEO

results in 1-2 days results take 2 weeks to 4 months

easier for a novice or one without muchknowledge of SEO

requires ongoing learning and experience to reap results

ability to turn on and off at any moment very difficult to control flow of traffic

generally more costly per visitor and perconversion

generally more cost-effective, doesn’tpenalize for more traffic

fewer impressions and exposure SERPs are more popular than sponsored ads

easy to compete in highly competitive market space (but it will cost you)

very difficult to compete in highly competitive market space

can generate exposure on related sites(AdSense)

can generate exposure on related websites and directories

ability to target “local” markets more difficult to target local markets

better for short-term and high-margincampaigns

better for long-term and lower margincampaigns

SEO

Technology

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