ICT 426 SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION I

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1 ICT 426 SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION I

2 E M PAT H Y! Once you grasp what the average searcher, or better, your target audience, is looking for you can more effectively reach and keep those users. Remember Google: Build for users, not search engines user = unhappy search engine performance quite likely sucks user = happy search engine performance quite likely rocks

3 WHAT ARE USERS LOOKING FOR? Types of queries: Do - Transactional Queries Know - Informational Queries Go - Navigational Queries Remember iterative IR? ;-) If!= happy?? query Return to Results Scan for solution or link Search New Search Click Result Browse Results

4 WHY DO WE HAVE TO KNOW? Money spent for Online Marketing: $77 billion in % of all advertising budgets combined

5 WHY DO WE CARE? A #1 Position in Google s Search Results (SERPs) receives 18.2% of all click-through traffic #2: 10.1, #3: 7.2, #4: 4.8, rest: < 2% #1 in Bing: 9.66% CTR Total CTR for top ten in Google: 52.32% Total CTR for top ten in Bing: 26.32%

6 EYES ON SERPS Resource: /01/26/eye-tracking-bing-vs-google-second-look

7 SO WHAT? 1.Search is very, very popular. Growing strong at nearly 20% a year, it reaches nearly every online American, and billions of people around the world. 2.Search drives an incredible amount of both online and offline economic activity. 3.Higher rankings in the first few results are critical to visibility. 4.Being listed at the top of the results not only provides the greatest amount of traffic, but instills trust in consumers as to the worthiness and relative importance of the company/website.

8 SPIDERING & INDEXING

9 CONTENT TO QUERY MATCHING Text not written in common terms. E.g. food cooling units instead of refrigerators. Language and international subtleties. E.g. color vs. colour. Location targeting. E.g. targeting content in German when majority of website visitors is from Thailand. Mixed contextual signals. E.g. title of your blogpost is Mexico s Best Coffee but the post is about a vacation resort in Canada which happens to serve great coffee. Irritates Search Engines.

10 don t forget: in the end you still need TREE FALLS IN A FOREST SEO = technical details of search-engine friendly web development relevance importance &Marketing

11 Indexable Content alt-attributes transcripts! Flash Gordon is the hero of a science fiction adventure comic strip originally drawn by Alex Raymond. First published January 7, 1934, the strip was inspired by and created to compete with the already established Buck Rogers adventure strip. Also inspired by these series were comics such as Dash Dixon (1935 to 1939) by H.T. Elmo and Larry Antoinette and Don Dixon and the Hidden Empire (1935 to 1941) by Carl Pfeufer and Bob Moore The Flash Gordon comic strip has been translated into a wide variety of media, including motion pictures, television and animated series. The latest version, a Flash Gordon TV series, appeared on the US Sci Fi Channel in and then on the United Kingdom Sci Fi Channel. A print comic book series by Brendan Deneen and Paul Green and published by Ardden Entertainment debuted in 2008, with the first arc entitled "The Mercy Wars", and is also available on itunes for the ipod andiphone. These were followed by further storylines.

12 WHAT SEARCH ENGINES SEE Tools help... many more!

13 CRAWLABLE LINK STRUCTURE no content ;-( no links ;-( A B E C Orphan D Orphan

14 ANATOMY OF A LINK <a href= >Flash Gordon Super Shoes</a> start of link tag link referral location visible anchor text of link closure of link

15 avoid those pitfalls: spiderable HTML links will guide spiders to your content WHAT CAN GO WRONG Robots don t use Search Forms! Submission required forms Frames or i-frames Links in un-parseable Javascript Links pointing to blocked pages Links in Java, Flash or other TO MANY LINKS plug-ins

16 editorial vote REL= NOFOLLOW <a href= rel= nofollow >Bad Teacher!</a> Link Attribute 1 Attribute 2 Attribute n nofollow

17 KEYWORDS Keywords are important. Most of us still search via keywords and not real question or queries. Again: relevance Flying pigs vs. pigs flying *image: seomoz.org Where to use Keywords Title Text Meta Data specific > general

18 KEYWORD ABUSE Keyword Density Hidden Keywords Keyword Stuffing DON T DO IT

19 A FEW IMPORTANT POINTERS - BY FAR NOT EVERYTHING ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION 1. Use the keyword in the title tag at least once. Try to keep the keyword as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible. More detail on title tags follows later! 2. Once prominently near the top of the page. 3. At least 2-3 times, including variations, in the body copy on the page - sometimes a few more if there's a lot of text content. You may find additional value in using the keyword or variations more than this, but in our experience, adding more instances of a term or phrase tends to have little to no impact on rankings. 4. At least once in the alt attribute of an image on the page. This not only helps with web search, but also image search, which can occasionally bring valuable traffic. 5. Once in the URL. Additional rules for URLs and keywords are discussed later! 6. At least once in the meta description tag. Note that the meta description tag does NOT get used by the engines for rankings, but rather helps to attract clicks by searchers from the results page, as it is the "snippet" of text used by the search engines. 7. Generally not in link anchor text on the page itself that points to other pages on your site or different domains (this is a bit complex - we will hit that later!).

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21 TITLE TAGS Critical Part! For user experience and search engines Mind the length! Important Keywords close to the front Leverage Branding Readability & Emotional Impact >>>KEYWORD MEGA SUPER WOAH<<<

22 META ROBOTS 1. index/noindex tells the engines whether the page should be crawled and kept in the engines' index for retrieval. If you opt to use "noindex", the page will be excluded from the engines. By default, search engines assume they can index all pages, so using the "index" value is generally unnecessary. 2. follow/nofollow tells the engines whether links on the page should be crawled. If you elect to employ "nofollow," the engines will disregard the links on the page both for discovery and ranking purposes. By default, all pages are assumed to have the "follow" attribute. Example: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> 3. noarchive is used to restrict search engines from saving a cached copy of the page. By default, the engines will maintain visible copies of all pages they indexed, accessible to searchers through the "cached" link in the search results. 4. nosnippet informs the engines that they should refrain from displaying a descriptive block of text next to the page's title and URL in the search results. 5. noodp/noydir are specialized tags telling the engines not to grab a descriptive snippet about a page from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) or the Yahoo! Directory for display in the search results.

23 META Meta Description Meta Description is a short description of a page s content. It s not important for Search Engines in terms of keyword retrieval. However meta descriptions appear in SERPs. It s the text that appears beneath a listing in the search results. Meta Keywords Meta Keywords had value back in time (altavista, etc.) but don t hold this value anymore! Meta refresh, meta revisit-after, meta content type, etc A lot of those are scam and used by dubious agencies to fool their clients. Others just don t hold any value and there is no reason why they should bother one.

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