Search Engine Optimization

Google this…

• In real estate, the key is location, location,location…

• In the web-space, the key is content, content,content…

What is a Search Engine?

• Software that lets users search the Internet using keywords.

What is Search?

• Query Box– Where you type your keywords– 4-6 keywords now the norm instead of 1-2– Search Results are listed on the left-hand side

of the page– Paid Ad Results are listed on the right-hand

side of the page

Major Search Engines

• Google feeds AOL, Netscape, Earthlink & others

• Yahoo owns Overture, AltaVista, AlltheWeb,FAST & others

• Google, Yahoo & MSN results account for 80-90% of all search traffic (rough estimate)

Search Engine Relationship Chart

Google Search Results

Yahoo Search Results

10MSN Search Results

Who are the players

• Market Share according to www.Businessweek.com– Google reached 52% in June of US– Yahoo reached 25%– MSN reached 10%– Everyone else 13%

• • Ask Jeeves• • Dogpile• • AOL et al

Share of Searches: July 2005

A Search Engine’s Goals & Objectives

• Accumulate large index (database) of web documents to search

• Provide highly-relevant results to users (better than competitors)

• Generate revenue via paid advertising andrelated business ventures that typically leverage large amount of traffic

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 realtime)

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

What is a Algorithm?

• A set of rules that a search engine uses to rank the listings contained within its index, in response to a search.

• Uses an algorithm to identify preferred links

• Algorithms may involve– Usage of keywords– “Popularity” (number of links pointing inward)– Other criteria—often proprietary

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

So What is the Algorithm?

• 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 onpage factors, some to link popularity

What a Search Engine Sees

• View > Source (HTML code) http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html

• (HTML text, no images and little formatting) http://cgi.w3.org/cgi-bin/html2txt

What is Search Engine Optimization?

• The act of designing (or re-designing) your site to be more search engine friendly.

Why Search Engine Optimization?

• 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

Basic Search Engine Optimization

• Create usable, readable pages for people because search engine algorithms calculate relevance from a human perspective.

• Ensure navigation allows crawlers to reach all parts of your site.

• Include title, description, and keywords meta tags in the HTML header.

• Use keywords in meaningful headings.• Use keywords at the beginning of the page in text.• Use keywords in the URL or filename, and don’t change

either unnecessarily

Basic Search Engine Optimization

• Create alt tags for graphics containing keywords.• Don’t try to spam a search engine by overuse or hidden

use of keywords.• Validate all HTML to ensure it can be ‘seen’ by the

search engine.• Use robots.txt and robots meta tags to keep search

engines from indexing what they shouldn’t.• Avoid using frames.• Avoid putting content and links within script code.

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

Meta Tags

• Self-describing text at the beginning of a web page that is not visible to the user but can be read by the search engine

• Title• Key-words• Description

• Appear not to be significant for most search engines today

Search Engine Optimization: Text

• Credible repetition of key words– Frequently greater credit for

• Bolded words• Words early in the document

• Identification of desirable key words– Analysis of competing sites– Customer interviews

• Misspellings

Anti-Spam Detection Algorithms

• Excessive repetition of key words in meta tags

• Use of “redirection”

• Use of “hidden text”

• Excessive use of keywords or bolding may be detected

Search Engine Optimization: Reciprocal Linking

• Linking from highly rated web sites greatly increases the ranking of a site

• Linking from low rated sites does not appear to help much

• The weight of a link may be determined by the number of links at that page—one link among many is worth less

• Linking to “spamming” sites may be penalized

Visibility (link popularity)

• Some search engines rank your site higher if many other sites link to yours

• Your goal is to get as many sites as possible to link to you

• Make a list of every Web site that’s in your space but not a direct competitor

• Find their email address and write a brief, friendly letter suggesting a link exchange

• Get your partners, vendors, friends and relatives to link to your site

• Submit those pages that link to you to Google

Search Engine Optimization: Other

• Domain names– If the domain name features the keyword,

more weight is given– Google considers the underscore a space—

e.g.,Marketing_Tips.com .

• Listing in the Open Directory Project (http://www.DMOZ.org) .

Use Robots.txt Files Wisely

• Create and maintain a robots.txt Robots.txt Tutorial,

• http://www.searchengineworld.com/robots/robots_tutorial.htm

Let Spiders In

• Have HTML links on your home page for each major page within your site– Most SE’s, like Google, cannot follow image map links– Search engines can follow <a href> JavaScript

mouseover links,but not all

• Have a site map that contains links to all of your pages; link with <a href> link from home page

• Search engines follow links to more resources - so make sure you do not have broken links

Using your keywords:html title

• The html title of the page is what you see at the top of your browser when you are on that page.

• It’s what displays as the link for your listing on a search engine.

• Keep it under 75 characters.• Make each title relevant to the page it’s on.• Spend the most time writing the title for your home

page.• Write a title for the starting page of each major section

of your site.• For all other pages, either use the same title as the

major section, or use breadcrumbs.

Using your keywords:meta description

• The meta description tag describes in a little more detail what’s on your page

• It’s what displays below the title in your search engine listing

• Keep it under 150 characters to be sure it doesn’t get cut off

• Make each description relevant to the page it’s on

• Try to entice potential visitors with clever copy, so they’ll click

Using your keywords:meta description

• It’s not really about ranking, it’s about describing your page to potential visitors

• Not all search engines use it, but if they do, it’s what shows up on the search results page below the title of the page

Using your keywords:meta keywords

• The meta keywords tag can be the same for all the pages on your site

• Not all search engines use this tag when ranking sites – but it can’t hurt to include it

• Use a list of words and phrases with no commas in between (search engine spiders are programmed to read only a certain number of characters in the keyword tag if they read it at all – commas just take up space)

Using your keywords:ALT tags

• every image on your Web site should have a carefully written ALT tag

• the ALT text is what visitors see if they move their mouse over an image

Using your keywords:file names

don’t use abbrv.

Using your keywords:on your home page!

• Work your keywords into the copy of your home page (and on other pages, if you can) as many times as you can without making it sound ridiculous.

• This may seem obvious but it ain’t necessarily so.

• Focusing on your keywords when writing the copy for your pages also helps reduce jargon.

an example…

Create Quality Page Content

• Relevant, authoritative content• Current content - will be visited more often by

crawlers• Create keyword rich titles, descriptions, <H1>• Best to have at least 200 words of visible text• Mark content through use of metatags, RDF,

and XML to allow search tools to understand the context,meaning, and relationship of words

• Create content people want (and that other sites like yours will link to)

What NOT to do

• Don’t load your meta tags with irrelevant keywords just because they get searched for a lot (like “sex”).

• Don’t repeat your keywords several times in a row.• Don’t hide text on your pages by making it the same

colour as the background.• Don’t use a string of keywords for the title of your page.• Don’t submit exact copies of pages with different file

names.• Don’t use re-directs or other technology that will confuse

the search engine’s spider

Get Listed in the Directories

• Get Listed in DMOZ, the Open Directory

• How to add a site to the Open Directory http://dmoz.org/add.html

• Get Listed in the Yahoo Directory

• http://add.yahoo.com/fast/add?17051064 ; How To Suggest Your Site on Yahoo

• http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/

Submitting your site to Google(this is the easy part)

• Go to http://www.google.com/addurl.html• Open a second browser window and go to your

home page• Highlight the URL of your home page, press

CTRL/C, then go to Google’s submission page and paste in your URL.

• If your site is small enough, submit all your pages this way. If your site is large, submit the first pages of the main sections of your site — the pages with titles and descriptions.

Wait…(this is also the hard part)• it can take from two weeks to four months

for your site to be included in the database

• it can take weeks after that before you see your site appear in the search results

• every time the database is re-indexed, your ranking will change

• re-submit every month and monitor your results

Design Issues

• Search engines prefer big, dumb ugly pages

• Design issues that can impact ranking (or just indexing) especially include

• Splash pages, frames & dynamic delivery…

• Consider these issues when building a site, though don’t change everything just for search engines.

Summary

• Don’t design for search engines

• Design for your audience

• Know your message / know your keywords

• Change your content often

• Quality is most important