serve it up! your content at the top! · © 2014 adobe systems incorporated. all rights reserved....

© 2014 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.© 2014 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.

Serve it Up! Your content at the top!Vishal Gupta | Senior Content and Community Lead

Ivan David | Senior Content and Community Lead

© 2014 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.

What we’ll cover in our allotted time:

Search Engine Optimization 101 [SEO 101]

A very quick overview of search engines and a walkthrough

Why?

Identifying content to optimize

Where to look

What to look for

Optimization techniques

Off-page

On-page

Measuring SEO efforts

Wrap up!

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© 2014 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.

SEO 101 – A crash course

You write a piece (documentation) and host it on a publically-available network (internet, for example)

Pieces of software (search engines) find your content and store a reference to it

Important words (keywords) from your content are indexed

Users search using important words as clues (keywords)

A search engine analyzes the clues you provided (search query)

If there is information relevant to the search query has been indexed from your site, a collection of relevant references is displayed on a page (Search Engine Results Page)

Relevant and useful content available? Natural/organic search results!

Did you pay for a particular result to show up? Paid search!

References indexed with the Search Engine appear in a specific order – the more popular – the higher!

Searcher clicks on your link! Mission accomplished!

Audience teaser: What do users click on? Ranks 1 – 5? Ranks 6-10? Page 2?

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© 2014 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.

SEO 101 – Why?

If users are reading your content, you’re in the business of :

Assisting users find help

Providing step-by-step instructions

Developing brand value

Building customer loyalty

Driving revenue

What you’ve already been doing:

Writing world-class documentation

Hosting it for users to find online

But are searchers getting to your content? Are they feeling enthused to click your links?

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© 2014 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.

Identifying content

What kinds of content do you have?

In their context, what do your users like to use to learn? Or, perhaps, solve a problem?

Where do you look for data on your content?

Analytics data

Product team feedback

Support team interactions with customers

Product community and ecosystem

Each iteration of fact-finding gets you closer to what exactly your users need

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© 2014 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.

Identifying problem areas

Per-page data

Page ranking and Page views – are people reading what you’ve written?

Impressions Vs. Clicks (CTR) – are people interested enthused to read your page?

Among others: Bounce rates – are people staying engaged with your content?

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So, what can a content creator do?

We’re so glad you asked!

On-page optimization

Off-page optimization

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© 2014 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.

Off-page optimization

Linking to and from related Help and community content (blogs, forums, social media)

Customizing Corporate site search engine to display relevant results

Google indexing (fetch and render),

Data highlighting,

Indexing on Pingomatic & DMOZ

Writing / updating wiki pages

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© 2014 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.

On-page optimization

Content structure (title, headings, anchor text, intro, alt tags, and more)

Enriching the metadata (description, title)

Keyword frequency, density, proximity, prominence, marketing jargon

Rich Snippets (rich data/micro data)

Image optimization

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© 2014 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.

On-page optimization

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The SERP [treat!] may show the right results – Awesome!

However, the snippet or description that appears below the title often:

confuses

lacks insight into underlying content

puts users off

Is not search-friendly

Google snippets

© 2014 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.

On-page optimization

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Title of the Webpage <title>

Snippet from the page <description>

Site links and more (algorithmically picked)

Simple snippet? Is there a complex one?

Anatomy of a Google snippet

© 2014 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.

On-page optimization

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Simple Snippet:

Does description metadata exist?

Does the metadata serve the user query?

Is there better on-page content that serves the query or relevant to the topic?

Single line? Combine multiple lines?

Is there better content in the DMOZ?

Sample: Anchor Point Enhancements

The Google snippet recipe

© 2014 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.

On-page optimization

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If your description sucks, Google decides one for you – but mostly because your description does not match what the user is searching for”

“Google reserves the right to change the snippet and make it as useful for our users”

Google’s stand

© 2014 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.

On-page optimization

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No cheating! o Different descriptions for different pages!

No keyword stuffing!

o You might actually get penalized!

Don’t like the DMOZ entry?

o Search Engines may pick up the page title and description from the DMOZ project. If you do not like that, add this line to your HTML code:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">

o This metadata key‐value pair is an instruction for bots that crawl your page (search engines) to not pick any information from the DMOZ. 

Dos and don’ts

Know what your users are searching for

o Provide matching descriptions.

o Ask yourself: Would you click that Search Result?

Provide a meaningful description

o Your description must represent the page/topic well.

o Use a call to action!

No time? Prioritize! 

o Home page > popular pages > the rest.

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Measuring success

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Before-after comparison of SERP

Analytics data (Google webmaster, Omniture)

Before-after comparison:

Support costs

Product downloads

Customer feedback

© 2014 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.

What’s in it for you?

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Higher click-through rates

Increased natural search traffic

Ever-increasing SERP rankings

Content curation | improvement

© 2014 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.

Questions | Observations | Clarifications | Thoughts

Vishal Gupta | vishgupt@adobe.comIvan David | davidi@adobe.com

© 2014 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.