SEARCH ENGINE

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WHAT IS SEO?

• Methods to improve the ranking of a website on search engine results pages.

• Pages that are authoritative and relevant rank higher up in the search results.

• Relevance measured by page content.

• Authority measured by number and quality of links.

• Top 3 listings on the search engine results page attract 60% of click-through.

(Source: http://seoroi.com/latest-news/google-click-through-rate-blended-serps-seo-strategy/)

3 CORNERSTONES OF SEO

Technical

ContentTrust

TECHNICAL• Originally, search engines relied on

webmasters’ submissions and keywords.

• Technical issues may prevent the website from being indexed or result in lower search ranking.

• Media-rich files (images, movies etc) cannot be read by search engines.

• Keywords should be in plain text within the content.

• Crawlers can tell the difference between relevant content and keyword stuffing.

CONTENT• Content is king when it comes to search

rankings.

• Search engines are geared towards providing the end-user with what they want.

• Should be well written (spelling, grammar) and provide value to the end-user.

• Relevant content keeps users coming back.

• Fresh/updated content will improve search rankings and give people a reason to visit regularly.

• Blog posts are a good way to keep content fresh.

TRUST

• Search engines use links to assess trustworthiness.

• Links to your website from other trusted websites will increase your search ranking.

• Links can also work against you if they are from untrustworthy sources.

THE FIVE R’S OF SEO

Relevant

• Content needs to be relevant to what people are looking for.

Reputation

• Develop a reputation for good content.

Remarkable

• Stand out from the crowd. Provide something unique.

Readability

• Make it easy to digest the content (for customers and crawlers).

Reach

• Explore niches, but don’t exclude potential customers.

GOOGLE PANDA UPDATE

• Released February 24th, 2011

• Penalised low quality websites.

• Uses machine learning to assess which websites are low quality.

• Websites that had thin content or were copied from other websites.

• Site-wide penalty.

• Has gone through 15 versions so far.

GOOGLE PENGUIN UPDATE

• Released April 24, 2012.

• Targeting “webspam” used to influence SEO results.

• Keyword stuffing, exact match anchor text etc.

• Black-hat SEO techniques being penalised.

• Currently version 1.1

USEFUL READING

SEOmoz - http://www.seomoz.org/blog

Search Engine Land - http://searchengineland.com/

SEOBook - http://www.seobook.com/blog

Search Engine Watch - http://searchenginewatch.com/