SEO TRAINING SESSION 4Bruce Clay SEO Concepts…

Overview

SEO Concepts

Future of Search

Linking Strategies

Best Practices

SEO CONCEPTS

How Do Search Engines Impact Your Business? Top 3 results is the new Page 1

If you’re not in top 5-15 results, you are non-existent

100+ times more sites are optimized

18+ times more sites per keyword

Queries are longer and thus more targeted

3 Major Items Impact Your Search Engine Rankings1. The Search Engines

Not your Friend! Vague answers

Google speak Constantly Changing

450 algorithm changes/year

SERP presentation changes

The Search Engines

The Site Constraint

s

The Competiti

on

3 Major Items Impact Your Search Engine Rankings2. The Competition

Not your Friend! Wants your space Constantly changing

The Search Engines

The Site Constraint

s

The Competiti

on

3 Major Items Impact Your Search Engine Rankings3. The Site Constraints

Production Schedules

Server technology Conversion vs.

traffic vs. ranking Which is most

important?

Content Management Systems (CMS)

New Features Engagement Objects

The Search Engines

The Site Constraint

s

The Competiti

on

Goes to the site that’s “Least Imperfect”es Nobody knows the search algorithms Perfection is impossible Natural Behavior

Different for each search engine

Every keyword is a separate target Behavior, intent and local influences

The Top Ranking…

This is critical Disjoint consecutive searches form a “long tail” filter

for subsequent searches Based upon persona and community You will get different results based on users behavior Web History changed the SERP

Behavioral Keyword Research

Targeted Searching = Higher Conversion Surrounding words help keyword “clarification” Proximity: Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) concepts

apply Synonyms

~Google

Use words your competition uses and SE’s will reward you

Associated Words

Site offering “free information” versus “just e-commerce” will get higher rankings

“Query intent” supporting words help with rankings More people will link to you if you provide free

information

Organic Information

Standard, Research, Shopping Research sites are longer, fewer images and fewer links Shopping sites are shorter, more smaller images and

more links Standard search depends on users intent

Intent

FUTURE OF SEARCH

Future of Search

Means: Ranking alone is not SEO

KW Research is more complex than anything done before

Personas Behavioral community Anticipate consecutive

searches Social matters

Analytics is necessary for measuring traffic/ROI

Now: Behavioral search

Intent-based search

Localized search

Engagement Objects

Personalized search

Does your website match your visitors? They must match or you lose!

Website Persona

Website Persona Visitor Persona

Does your website match your visitors? Search for “New York Pizza Chicago”

Pizza in New York, restaurant name Chicago New York style pizza in Chicago The place called New York Pizza in the city of Chicago

Define by type: [New York Pizza] / food [Chicago] / location [New York Pizza] / business [Chicago] / location [New York] / location [pizza] / food [Chicago] / location

Ambiguous Queries

Type keywords one at a time Type last word letter by letter Look at top word following your target phrase Add all of these to your keyword list

Google Instant

Google Preview

Ads stimulate a query Articles stimulate a query Appearances stimulate a query

When you are ranked #1 it is time to stimulate a query When you are not ranked you would send traffic to

competition

Engagement Objects can attract visitors, or hold them

Trigger a Search

Images Videos/MP3 Shopping Places News Knowledge Graph

Engagement Objects

Images

Video

Shopping

Places

News

Knowledge Graph

Index Imaging

Notice – This shows that words in an image are now recognized by Google!

Audio Indexing

Captions

Audio Indexing

Transcript

Audio IndexingVideo is Content

Local Search

According to Google, 20% of all searches and one-third of mobile searches have local intent as of first quarter of 2010.

When blended search results are displayed, local results are included about one-third of the time

Claim your business listing in local search directories and listing services, including Google, Yahoo!, Bing and online yellow pages.

LINKING STRATEGIES

“Bow Tie” Effect If an expert links to you, then you become an

expert – but you are expected to link to other experts

Reference sites

Penalized if you only have inbound links

Hubs and Authorities

A Hub is a resource list or high quality guide that directs users via links to recommended subject authorities on the Web

An Authority is a primary source of high quality content on a particular subject

Hub link to Authorities much more often than the other way around

Outbound Linking Considerations

Never sell links for PageRank because you WILL be penalized if detected

Use Google “related sites” to see which hubs you are in

If spammers you must change fast If authorities they may be link targets If not well ranked they may still have significant

PageRank and value for outbound/inbound targeting

Same for competition What are their “related sites” ?

Inbound Linking Considerations

Given “Editorial” credit from other sites linking to you

Increases (or lowers) the worthiness of your site and adds PageRank

What sites to consider? We recommend you focus on link quality, not quality

Law on Natural Linking: IP numbers – different is good PageRank – natural structure is good Anchor text – different is good

Whois Name – different is good

Inbound Linking Considerations

Forms Links Search Engines will not follow “Follow Buttons” You need static links to crawl and pass PageRank

FYI – Google Will index dynamic URLs up to 2 parameters,

sometimes 3, where the value should not exceed 10 characters

“Compaction” Drops unnecessary parameters to determine best result

Canonical Link Tag

How To Develop Links

Link Begging Sponsored Pages/Memberships News Letters Press releases Articles News Social Media

How To Develop Links

Buying Links – THIS IS SPAM! Google is aggressively penalizing participants in purchased

PageRank schemes Ads are exempted if no followed

Link Pruning Sometimes removing links that have a low trust score helps more

than adding links

BEST PRACTICES

Search Engine Classify Spam As….

“Anything Deceptive” Ethics

Ethics are not laws, but are guidelines to behavior What is your URL worth? If all rankings were lost

Who would lose their jobs? What is the impact on your company?

Approaches

“Blackhat vs.Whitehat” Blackhat

Deceive the search engines by taking advantage of holes in the SE protection mechanisms

This is considered “spam” The trick is to do more things exploiting holes

Whitehat The goal is to do more things right without exploiting

any holes than the competition If the top sites do 40 things right, out of 200+

algorithm variables then if you do more variables right than them you should rank better than hem

Hidden Text/Links This is a “hiding technique”

Using similar color for text and background Placing keywords inside a <noframes> or

<noscript> tag Using hidden layers in style sheets Using a transparent image for a link, using hidden

links

This is considered spam

Cloaking This is a “hiding technique”

You can give the search engines pages that are different from users.

Cloaking will usually get you blacklisted if deceptive Cloaking is OKAY if, and only if, it is defendable

Web Optimizer is a Cloaking tool

Link Farms This is a “boosting technique”

The one way to increase link popularity is to create multiple websites linking to each other – wrong!

Link farms are low trust Link popularity depends on the quality of links not

just quantity Using link farms does not provide quality links to

boost your link popularity

Duplicate Content This is a “boosting technique”

It does not work and generally dilutes Trust Duplicate content = Duplicate links (ignored) There is NO penalty for duplicate (nearly exact)

content SE chooses which page to index and suppresses all

others

International – ccTLD/Zone rules Multiple Sites 0 dynamic filters

Authority sites get more credit That may not be you!

Thank You!