Getting found among the big fish: SEO and SEM [e-book]
Table of Contents I. Definitions of SEO and SEM II. Search Engines III. SEO Techniques IV. SEM V. Conclusion We appreciate your interest in the E-Book for our webinar Getting Found in an Online Jungle. I m Michele Bates, director of marketing at the Daily Herald, and my team and I have put together a simple E-Book with the information from the webinar along with some additional tips and market information. I m always happy to answer any questions, especially those that relate to market information, branding, target audience, and the digital landscape. Feel free to contact me at mbates@heraldextra.com with any questions. 1
What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the natural or un-paid (Wikipedia.org) SEO for a business is an attempt to increase ones search results rankings so that a business will be selected when a person wants a service What is SEM? Search Engine Marketing is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion (Wikipedia.org) SEM for a business allows a business to be a featured result when someone searches SEM Featured Results Often seen in the right side of the screen or above the rest of the search results but highlighted in a different color. 2
How does a Search Engine Work? They use spiders to crawl the web Spider agents search pages and all the links on them. They look at content, tags, external links, incoming linking, code of the page, number of visitors, the time visitors spend on a page, Rank pages based on complex mathematical formulas which are proprietary and currently unknown to prevent people from trying to inflate their sites ranking. The things in this e-book are all white hat techniques or techniques that are approved and will naturally increase your rankings. Application of black hat techniques may result in your page being given a worse ranking when you are caught Results when a user searches may be based on users location, keywords, mathematical rankings, Google uses location, user search history, and their ranking matrix to serve results Learn more: computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/search-engine.htm 3
How does a Search Engine Work? In the US, Google has about an 80% market share with Bing and Yahoo each having about 8.5%. Bing recently purchased Yahoo search so Bing is powering their results. All of the other search engines in the US make up around 3% of traffic. Worldwide, Google has about a 90% market share with Bing and Yahoo making up the bulk of the remainder. If you have to focus your energy, Google rankings first, Bing/Yahoo second and the rest are probably not worth your time. Source: http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-us-monthly-201005-201105 4
Options include: Omniture, Google Analytics, Yahoo Web Analytics, and many more. SEO: Techniques These will not result in instant top rankings but will help to improve your rankings. SEO is not a one time event but an ongoing process. 1. Web Analytics Web Analytics allow you to track how many people use your site, how they use your site, what they click on, etc. This can help you to know where to focus your energy. Web Analytics may cost money (Google is free, Omniture is paid ) but you should pick one based on the information that you believe you could use. If one offers you information that you believe would help you to improve you online presence, it is probably worth it (if it costs anything). Remember: web analytics only offer knowledge. It is up to you to use this tool. There will be a webinar with an e-book on web analytics later this summer which you can register for at www.heraldextra.com/getfound/ Screenshot from Omniture of page views on our domain Showing us which pages have the most visitors 5 On this list, our homepage is 1st and 5th, Savvyshopperdeals.com is 2nd and 4th and our obituaries page is 3rd. Because of this information, we redid our obituaries page and got a lot of great reviews and increased traffic to it.
SEO: Techniques (continued) 2. Build a great website While the content of the two sites is the same, studies have shown that people don t like the one on the right. They think it looks cheap while the one of the left looks clean and professional. Given the choice to hire a 12 year old to code your site and end up with the right one or hire an experienced coder or company to do it for you, choose the one where you will end up looking professional. Design your site for a great user experience. General principles include: Have a simple, easy to use, navigation Name things intuitively ( Location instead of Geographic Localization ). People expect a Contact Us, etc. Assume the user will look at your page for 3 seconds and decide to they like or don t like you and navigate elsewhere The less time a user has to spend on your site, the more time they will want to spend on your site. Clean code is also essential for a great website. While most browsers are smart enough to fix code errors in your page to still make it render correctly, search engine spiders don t. Instead, they see your code as problematic and it hurts your rankings. It pays to have good programming and to test in multiple browsers to make sure it works, looks good, and is clean code. http://www.squidoo.com/time-spent-on-lens has some great information on where users look, what drives users away from a site and what keeps them there. More users = more customers 6
SEO: Techniques (continued) 3. Site Map Can help both users* and the spiders to find things You can also submit your sitemap to help have your site found and navigated correctly to various search engines. Search engine spiders don t just know your site is there and they can t follow flash based navigation systems so if your navigation is flash, they may never make it off your homepage without a sitemap to follow *if you have simple navigation on your site, this is not as important to a user as they no longer look for one if your simple navigation is found on all of your pages Places to submit site maps (free) (each have their own format so you have to check what they want): http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/ http://www.google.com/webmasters https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites For a list of other search engines, see: http://www.thesearchenginelist.com/ though many of them use one of the 3 above to power their results. Visual site map of google.com courtesy of wikipedia.org 7
SEO: Techniques (continued) 4. Keywords <meta name = keywords helps the spiders as they index pages and some of the search engines show those same keywords in the results. Be careful though as you have 45 words as a limit and some search engines rank you lower if you load up on keywords* You can have different keywords on different sub-pages though. Choose carefully! <meta name = description helps feed the description users see in search results. Limit 150-250 characters It is called keyword stuffing and if you have too many, they lower your rankings. The * is to an article by Google on the subject. Try to limit yourself to less then 15 keywords per page. You can have unique keywords for every distinct page. Google s Adwords has a keyword explorer which can help in selecting appropriate keywords for your site. There is a learning curve on this so don t get frustrated but it can really help you to pick good keywords for you pages 8
SEO: Techniques (continued) 5. Build Relationships Where: Chamber of Commerce, Local Press, other reputable businesses in the local area, etc Place a link to them on your site and get some from them going into your site as you being linked to reputable sites raises you reputation (both to search engines and users) and links back to your site from theirs also raises you reputation. Links back to your site 9
SEO: Techniques (continued) 6. Social Media Build good pages that link back to your site and link to them on you site For more information about successful use of social media: www.heraldextra.com/getfound and get the Social Media e-book. It has information on which social media can help reach which types of audiences as well as information on how to best use the different types of social media. Important: Don t just set up a social media account and ignore it. Make it worth it for people to check out your social media site! 10
SEO: Techniques (continued) 7. Manage Search Results Look on Google, Yahoo, etc and see how you come up in the local search results (check maps, web, etc.) and see what you can edit / correct. Make sure that hours of business, contact information, logos, etc are correct. Review feedback on the site to make sure you have positive feedback as people pay attention to that when the feedback says. 11
SEM: Overview Most common is Pay per click (PPC) Business pays per person who clicks on ad Either flat-rate (ex. $0.03/click) or bid-based (highest is at top of list most common in high-demand keywords) systems are used The Big 3 and then there were 2 Google AdWords (adwords.google.com) Yahoo Advertising (Now managed through Microsoft) Microsoft AdCenter (https://adcenter.microsoft.com/) You can either try to register with them on your own or you can go through an SEM agency (in which case you also pay agency fees for them to handle the technical stuff for you) Does SEM work? Survey in Dec 2010 showed that about 20% ignored search engine ad. Users are so accustomed to ads that they tuned out the ads and looked where they expected to see what they wanted. Sites gone to: 12
Does SEM work? SEM blocking is becoming more common as add-ons are created for browsers to block the Featured Search Result Same search as previous slide with a browser add-on Clicks Clients SEM ads may be placed on a third party site and the third part makes a percentage of the PPC. Just because someone clicks on the link doesn t mean they will become a client for you but you do have to pay for it! There are programs and people that are paid to click on them. It is called click fraud but still happens a lot as people/business see it as a way to make money that the search engines will pay them and then pass on the bill to you. 13
Does SEM work? SEM is becoming less popular overall as people are turning to other options to get found. Social Media QR Codes Apps/mobile Online Video 14