Promoting your Site: Search Engine Optimisation and Web Analytics

Transcription

1 E-Commerce Applications Promoting your Site: Search Engine Optimisation and Web Analytics Session 6 1 Next steps Promoting your Business Having developed website/e-shop next step is to promote the business Marketing items: Business cards, flyers, URL on stationery, car, pens, etc Web Promotion: Search Engine Optimisation (ho-12) and Web Analytics (ho-13) Target potential customers: HTML , promotion(s), membership Develop web links social networking sites, other sites/web rings Session 6 2 SEO and Web Analytics SEO is the process of trying to improve a site s ranking in web search engine results for specific search queries. Basic premise is that improving the SEO of your website will: o improve the page's search engine rankings o increase the overall number of visitors to your web page o increase the number of site visitors who are genuinely interested in the products or services you're selling. Search Engine Optimization: Session 6 3 Web Analytics and SEO Web Analytics is the process of collecting data about the activities of visitors to website: how they found you, where they are located, when they visited, what pages they looked at, what they bought or downloaded, etc AND analysing that data for information that can be used to improve/optimise your website. Web Analytics: Session 6 4 1

2 Searching the Web How it Works Search engines, such as yahoo, bing, google, etc, are all constantly crawling the web: o indexing content: analysing each page, the tags and keywords associated with the content, etc o recording which sites are linked to other sites Aim is to determine Relevance, i.e. how relevant a given page is to a given query. References: o How Internet Search Engines Work: o The SEO Business Guide, K. Holden and M. Hudson, Sitepoint, 2010, See the following link to download sample chapters: Session 6 5 Searching the Web How it Works The indexing process starts with the search spider: o A search engine spider or bot (robot) refers to one or more dedicated computers that have been programmed to search the Web and collect all the information they can find, and store how that information is related to various search terms. Search engine spiders have two distinct tasks: o Crawling from one site to another, and from page to page, discovering content and links. o Indexing of keywords and phrases, the sites and pages that are relevant to them, and the links between those sites in order to build a database (or index) of relevant sites. Session 6 6 Search Engine Spiders A search engine spider works by crawling within each site, following internal links from the top-level index page down through all of the site s pages. Once the spider has trawled a site, information about the pages are stored in the search engine s database (index), including: o the content and structure of each page o a record of all other pages, both internal and external to the site, that are linked to/from the page o a record of all the pages that link to the page o key HTML tags such as the page title, headings, and images. Search Engine Algorithms Once information about a website has been collected and stored in the search engines database (index), special algorithms (unique to each search engine) are used to calculate the relevance of a site s content to a particular search term. Key factors in this process are: o the number and authority of related websites that link to the page. o the relevance of the content on the page to the query. o the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Session 6 7 Session 6 8 2

3 Search Engine Optimization - Issues External factors, outside your control, play a major part in any SEO campaign. External factors often have bigger impact on determining relevance than your content does. You can build the best site in the world, but it will be pointless unless you pay attention to external ranking factors. As noted above the two key issues you need to focus on in building your website are: o the relevance of the page content (and its structure) o The number of related websites that link to your pages. Formulating a SEO Strategy As you formulate a best practice SEO strategy, the methods you use should follow the guidelines set out by the search engines themselves. Focus should be on relevance, frequency and links Involves: o conducting thorough keyword research and targeting o creating high-quality, unique content o improving internal linking and site structure o building links from relevant, quality sites Note: SEO is a long term activity Session 6 9 Session 6 10 Formulating a SEO strategy Main aspects of a SEO Strategy: Search Engine Optimisation i (HO-12) Web Analytics (HO-13) Google Adwords Campaign Developing Site Links: social networking sites, promotional s (HTML ), other relevant sites Session 6 11 Implementing your SEO Strategy Domain name can play an important part in the search rank your site achieves for particular keywords. Try to choose a domain name that includes a few of the keywords from your chosen topic. Domain name examples for the Yum Juices include: o YumJuices.co.uk o YumFruitJuices.co.uk o YumNaturalJuices.co.uk All of these include keywords that relate directly to the sites content. Should go with the shortest available domain that matches your requirements. Session

4 Implementing your SEO Strategy Setting Up Your Website - critical step, and one often overlooked, is how and where your website is hosted. Most small businesses start off by having their site hosted as part of a larger shared system. This can result in limitations over the technical aspects of your site; for example, controlling search engine access, or managing how your URLs are constructed, e.g. with our.atspace sub-domains. Long-term need to look to use a customised domain hosting service (as discussed in earlier sessions). Implementing your SEO Strategy Main elements in an effective SEO strategy: 1. Keyword research 2. Web content and structure 3. Link building Session 6 13 Session 6 14 SEO Keyword Research Conducting keyword research is the first step to getting things right: o need to identify the right keywords and phrases for your site based on objective evidence. o Shouldn t be based on guesses of what you think are the most popular words and phrases. Keyword research allows you to see which keywords users actually employ to find products and services within the market (and also those used by your competitors to try and reach the market). HO-12: Yum Juices Keywords First task in developing an online business is to identify the main keywords and phrases Second task is to build on these phrases ensuring they are properly included within the content of your site (page title, header and meta tags). Need to ask yourself a simple question: What are the three most distinctive keywords you d use to describe this site if you were explaining it to a friend or colleague? HO-12: SEO, uses Yum Juices and fruit juices as a key phrase to highlight the process involved. Session 6 15 Session

5 Follow the instructions in ho-12 o Identify Keywords o Add <meta> and <title> tags for: Page Title Keywords Description o Optimise header tags <h1>, <h2>, etc o Update your pages and republish HO-12: SEO Session 6 17 Web Analytics Web Analytics is a key part of SEO Involves collecting data about the activities of visitors to your website: how they found you, where they are located, when they visited, what pages they looked at, what they bought or downloaded, etc AND analysing that data for information that can be used to improve/optimise your website. Number of tools available: Session 6 18 HO-13: Web Analytics Using Web Analytics for SEO Follow the instructions in ho-13 o Complete the exercises to add web analytics to your website (StatCounter) o Share your website URL with class and analyse the statistics o Consider how web analytics can be used to monitor web traffic and develop your SEO and business strategies Two schools of thought when it comes to SEO: o Optimize for the Most Searched Terms o Get to Number 1 For a Smaller Term Session 6 19 Session

6 SEO: Optimize for the Most Searched Terms Trying to get a small slice of the pie. Based on idea that t if the pie is really big (i.e. there are lots of searches for the term) even if you only get a small percentage of the page views, you're still going to get a lot of hits (and hopefully a lot of business). Keywords/phrases with large number of searches are very competitive, i.e. if you plan to optimize on that term, then so are 100s or 1,000s of other businesses. Session 6 21 SEO: Get to Number 1 For a Smaller Term This is where you work on getting your site to the number 1 slot for a keyword/phrase that has a smaller number of searches. Aim would be to get at least to the top 10 of search engines for the keyword/phrase you have chosen to optimise on. Based on the idea that you get a large slice of a small pie. Not as competitive, because there isn't as much to get (i.e. a smaller pie or niche) Session 6 22 SEO: Google AdWords SEO: Google AdWords With Google AdWords, you can create and run ads for your business, quickly and simply. AdWords ads are displayed (as sponsored links ) along with search results when someone searches Google using one of your keywords. You can choose from a variety of ad formats, including text, image, and video ads, and easily track your ad performance using the reports available in your account You only pay when people click your ads, see: (+ activation fee). Session 6 23 Session

7 SEO: Google AdWords Google AdWords Pay per Click Session 6 25 Session 6 26 SEO: Google AdWords Google has a short, online course, which provides step-by-step instructions on how to create an AdWords account: See also: d / t/ /bi / t ti id ge=guide.cs SEO: Developing Web Links Link building is one of the most important aspects of SEO because quality links create a positive link popularity for your website. Increasing the link popularity of your website helps increase your page rank resulting in higher ranks in the search engines for your targeted keywords. Ref: See also: Session 6 27 Session

8 SEO: Developing Web Links Top Ten SEO Link Building Strategies: 1. Write quality articles that other websites will want to post on their websites and link to. 2. Start a WordPress blog and post articles to it once per week. 3. Syndicate your articles to online directories, such as Ezine Articles, so other businesses can post them on their websites. 4. Submit your website to free online, SEO friendly website directories. Provide a quick way to start building one-way links to your website. 5. Submit your blog to directories. Ref: Session 6 29 SEO: Developing Web Links Top Ten SEO Link Building Strategies: 6. Exchange links with high quality, relevant websites in your field. But be selective! 7. Use social bookmarking: submit your blog posts and other high value content to social bookmarking sites. 8. Syndicate press releases: write newsworthy press releases and syndicate them online at syndication sites such as PRWeb. 9. Post comments on industry blogs post high value comments on other blogs in your industry to spark discussion (i.e. Internet Marketing). 10. Link between your web pages. Ref: Session 6 30 References: How Search Engines Work References - SEO How Search Engines Work: neswork.asp Keyword Links: Session Promoting_Web_Pages.htm p g _ p Session

9 References: Developing Web Links Developing Web Links: HTML create send html / Meta Tag Generator: Session