THE EVOLUTION OF SEO & HOW IT CAN BENEFIT YOUR BUSINESS. A valuable resource on how to improve your Google rankings TODAY

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1 THE EVOLUTION OF SEO & HOW IT CAN BENEFIT YOUR BUSINESS A valuable resource on how to improve your Google rankings TODAY

2 The Evolution of SEO & How it Can Benefit Your Business // 1 WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO)? Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice of improving and promoting a website in order to increase its visibility on search engine results pages. This in turn will increase the number of relevant visitors to your site. HOW SEO CAN ENHANCE YOUR BUSINESS By investing in SEO you increase your chances of appearing in the top positions of search engine results pages, this in turn will increase the amount of targeted traffic coming to your site people looking for what you offer. Investing in SEO can have an outstanding ROI compared to other types of marketing and promotion. OUR SEO SOLUTIONS Full Website Technical Audit An in-depth report with recommendations SEO Campaign Subscription Ongoing SEO activity for maximum results WHY USE RED ANT SOLUTIONS FOR YOUR SEO? Red Ant Solutions has a proven track record in being able to identify and deliver exactly what our clients need whatever their industry. We are continuously revising our SEO techniques as Google and other search engines evolve. We are a successful Surrey based full marketing agency full of creative designers, strategic marketers, web developers, search engine optimisers, copywriters, brand strategists, social media experts and user experienced specialists. Our marketing savvy means we can develop and deploy quicker than other service providers.

3 THE EVOLUTION OF SEARCH ENGINES & SEO The Evolution of SEO & How it Can Benefit Your Business // 2 Over the past 10 years search engines have rapidly advanced the way in which they find and display information, the most notable being Google. Below we have outlined the 5 main evolutions of Google to date and how our approach to SEO is evolving with it. On-Page: The early search results. In 1994 the first search engine crawler that indexed entire pages was WebCrawler, at this time Google were not the leading search engine. Search engines would rank websites purely on the amount of keywords they had on their page. To optimise for this Search Engine Optimiser s had to cram as many keywords as possible into their web pages, e.g. a wedding planner website that had the words wedding planner appearing 50 times on their page would rank higher than another wedding planner website which had wedding planner appearing 10 times. This meant that low quality sites appearing on the top results pages were aplenty. Off-Site: Search gets serious, hello Google. In 1998 Google launched and came into its own by progressing link analysis as a way of determining how sites ranked on their search results pages. Links pointing to a site were used as votes, this was further developed to analyse the quality of inbound links to conclude the sites authority. To optimise for this Search Engine Optimiser s carried out link building to get as many links as possible coming to their site, this included paying for links and submitting links to spammy link farms. In 2012 Google put a stop to these black hat (unethical) link building tactics by penalising sites with their Penguin algorithm. Links now have to be from relevant and quality sites. Universal Search: Google gives more. In 2007 Google launched universal search which featured many types of verticals in search results. Verticals included images, video, news, books, maps and products. We can search specifically within one of these types of verticals; for example, if we wanted to search for news articles about Somerset flooding, we could search within the news section of Google to bring up only news articles instead of multiple types of information. To optimise for vertical search SEO s use a variety of tactics depending on the type of vertical you are optimising for, e.g. to optimise for news search we would recommend creating quality, original content daily with an RSS feed and sharing mechanisms. In addition to this, using structured data such as microformats can be used to mark up a page to ensure Google knows what the page is about, for example, marking up news items with NewsArticle.

4 The Evolution of SEO & How it Can Benefit Your Business // 3 Personalised Search: Google, how do you know me so well? In 2009 Google developed its search results further by looking at the searcher s history. It uses this to give relevant sites a bump up on search result pages. For example, if you were searching for flights to Spain and searching for attractions in Spain, Google will connect the two and understand that you are looking to travel to Spain for a holiday and will give results for this topic a boost. Then in 2012 Google started using the searcher s location to provide local results, e.g. if you were searching for pets for sale it would bring back pets for sale in your town as well as national results. To optimise for local search it s important that the location of where you are based is included in your site, this normally happens naturally on the contact page. If your business has multiple locations that it serves or sells in, a great way to optimise for this is to create individual town pages for the towns where your business exists with unique and quality content. To build authority of these pages they can be submitted to local directories. Conversational Search: Chit-chatting with Google saw the most recent stage of the SEO evolution which was heavily influenced by the rise of smart phone use. Google is able to understand a question spoken into a microphone and will verbally answer using its data from the knowledge graph. For example someone could ask who is David Cameron?, how old is he? Google will understand that David Cameron is an entity and that he is related to that entity. Not only is Google able to store facts about people and places, it stores other data such as football scores and currency conversions. As people are increasingly looking to get their answers directly from Google instead of going through search results, it becomes even more important that your site provides the information that Google doesn't have. To ensure Google can understand what your web pages are about it is important to focus each web page on a topic using a variety of keywords. Marking up your pages with structured data will also help Google understand what is on your page. Where does Search go from here? Google +1 s were one of the biggest ranking factors of 2013 showing that already social signals are making a large impact on how Google is ranking web pages. However, as of yet Google are not using signals from Facebook and Twitter as confirmed by Matt Cutts in January It makes sense that soon Google will evolutionise the way they look at link authority by using these social signals. For example, looking at whether the link is being socially shared and how much traffic the link is bringing to the linked site whilst also looking at metrics such as bounce rate and average time spent on site. It seems probable that at some point Google will look at social metrics, such as the amount of Facebook likes a company has, and use this as a votes system in a similar way that it currently looks at links.

5 RANKING FACTORS The Evolution of SEO & How it Can Benefit Your Business // 4 Google look at hundreds of factors to determine how to rank information, but it s these 5 stages of search traffic evolution that are the backbone to Google s search engine results that we see today. Here is a visual representation of the 2013 ranking factors. Domain Link Authority Link Metrics Link metrics for the overall site including domains and sub-domains quality and range of links Page-Level Link Metrics Link metrics for the individual ranking pages Page-Level Keyword & Content-Based Placing keywords in key places of the page. Page-Level, Keyword-Agnostic Features Features of the page such as page speed (not having too many images or videos), number of internal links and the length of the page. Domain Level Brand Metrics Elements of the root domain that signifies branding or brand qualities. User Usage & Traffic/Query Data Amount of clicks, time spent on site and bounce rate. Page-Level Social Metrics Social media activity on ranking pages such as Google+, Facebook and Twitter. Domain Level Keyword Usage Keyword usage in the domain name. Domain-Level, Keyword-Agnostic Features Elements in the domain such as the length or number of hyphens/ numbers