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SEO TRAINING SESSION 4Bruce Clay SEO Concepts…
Overview
SEO Concepts
Future of Search
Linking Strategies
Best Practices
SEO CONCEPTS
How Do Search Engines Impact Your Business? Top 3 results is the new Page 1
If you’re not in top 5-15 results, you are non-existent
100+ times more sites are optimized
18+ times more sites per keyword
Queries are longer and thus more targeted
3 Major Items Impact Your Search Engine Rankings1. The Search Engines
Not your Friend! Vague answers
Google speak Constantly Changing
450 algorithm changes/year
SERP presentation changes
The Search Engines
The Site Constraint
s
The Competiti
on
3 Major Items Impact Your Search Engine Rankings2. The Competition
Not your Friend! Wants your space Constantly changing
The Search Engines
The Site Constraint
s
The Competiti
on
3 Major Items Impact Your Search Engine Rankings3. The Site Constraints
Production Schedules
Server technology Conversion vs.
traffic vs. ranking Which is most
important?
Content Management Systems (CMS)
New Features Engagement Objects
The Search Engines
The Site Constraint
s
The Competiti
on
Goes to the site that’s “Least Imperfect”es Nobody knows the search algorithms Perfection is impossible Natural Behavior
Different for each search engine
Every keyword is a separate target Behavior, intent and local influences
The Top Ranking…
This is critical Disjoint consecutive searches form a “long tail” filter
for subsequent searches Based upon persona and community You will get different results based on users behavior Web History changed the SERP
Behavioral Keyword Research
Targeted Searching = Higher Conversion Surrounding words help keyword “clarification” Proximity: Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) concepts
apply Synonyms
Use words your competition uses and SE’s will reward you
Associated Words
Site offering “free information” versus “just e-commerce” will get higher rankings
“Query intent” supporting words help with rankings More people will link to you if you provide free
information
Organic Information
Standard, Research, Shopping Research sites are longer, fewer images and fewer links Shopping sites are shorter, more smaller images and
more links Standard search depends on users intent
Intent
FUTURE OF SEARCH
Future of Search
Means: Ranking alone is not SEO
KW Research is more complex than anything done before
Personas Behavioral community Anticipate consecutive
searches Social matters
Analytics is necessary for measuring traffic/ROI
Now: Behavioral search
Intent-based search
Localized search
Engagement Objects
Personalized search
Does your website match your visitors? They must match or you lose!
Website Persona
Website Persona Visitor Persona
Does your website match your visitors? Search for “New York Pizza Chicago”
Pizza in New York, restaurant name Chicago New York style pizza in Chicago The place called New York Pizza in the city of Chicago
Define by type: [New York Pizza] / food [Chicago] / location [New York Pizza] / business [Chicago] / location [New York] / location [pizza] / food [Chicago] / location
Ambiguous Queries
Type keywords one at a time Type last word letter by letter Look at top word following your target phrase Add all of these to your keyword list
Google Instant
Google Preview
Ads stimulate a query Articles stimulate a query Appearances stimulate a query
When you are ranked #1 it is time to stimulate a query When you are not ranked you would send traffic to
competition
Engagement Objects can attract visitors, or hold them
Trigger a Search
Images Videos/MP3 Shopping Places News Knowledge Graph
Engagement Objects
Images
Video
Shopping
Places
News
Knowledge Graph
Index Imaging
Notice – This shows that words in an image are now recognized by Google!
Audio Indexing
Captions
Audio Indexing
Transcript
Audio IndexingVideo is Content
Local Search
According to Google, 20% of all searches and one-third of mobile searches have local intent as of first quarter of 2010.
When blended search results are displayed, local results are included about one-third of the time
Claim your business listing in local search directories and listing services, including Google, Yahoo!, Bing and online yellow pages.
LINKING STRATEGIES
“Bow Tie” Effect If an expert links to you, then you become an
expert – but you are expected to link to other experts
Reference sites
Penalized if you only have inbound links
Hubs and Authorities
A Hub is a resource list or high quality guide that directs users via links to recommended subject authorities on the Web
An Authority is a primary source of high quality content on a particular subject
Hub link to Authorities much more often than the other way around
Outbound Linking Considerations
Never sell links for PageRank because you WILL be penalized if detected
Use Google “related sites” to see which hubs you are in
If spammers you must change fast If authorities they may be link targets If not well ranked they may still have significant
PageRank and value for outbound/inbound targeting
Same for competition What are their “related sites” ?
Inbound Linking Considerations
Given “Editorial” credit from other sites linking to you
Increases (or lowers) the worthiness of your site and adds PageRank
What sites to consider? We recommend you focus on link quality, not quality
Law on Natural Linking: IP numbers – different is good PageRank – natural structure is good Anchor text – different is good
Whois Name – different is good
Inbound Linking Considerations
Forms Links Search Engines will not follow “Follow Buttons” You need static links to crawl and pass PageRank
FYI – Google Will index dynamic URLs up to 2 parameters,
sometimes 3, where the value should not exceed 10 characters
“Compaction” Drops unnecessary parameters to determine best result
Canonical Link Tag
How To Develop Links
Link Begging Sponsored Pages/Memberships News Letters Press releases Articles News Social Media
How To Develop Links
Buying Links – THIS IS SPAM! Google is aggressively penalizing participants in purchased
PageRank schemes Ads are exempted if no followed
Link Pruning Sometimes removing links that have a low trust score helps more
than adding links
BEST PRACTICES
Search Engine Classify Spam As….
“Anything Deceptive” Ethics
Ethics are not laws, but are guidelines to behavior What is your URL worth? If all rankings were lost
Who would lose their jobs? What is the impact on your company?
Approaches
“Blackhat vs.Whitehat” Blackhat
Deceive the search engines by taking advantage of holes in the SE protection mechanisms
This is considered “spam” The trick is to do more things exploiting holes
Whitehat The goal is to do more things right without exploiting
any holes than the competition If the top sites do 40 things right, out of 200+
algorithm variables then if you do more variables right than them you should rank better than hem
Hidden Text/Links This is a “hiding technique”
Using similar color for text and background Placing keywords inside a <noframes> or
<noscript> tag Using hidden layers in style sheets Using a transparent image for a link, using hidden
links
This is considered spam
Cloaking This is a “hiding technique”
You can give the search engines pages that are different from users.
Cloaking will usually get you blacklisted if deceptive Cloaking is OKAY if, and only if, it is defendable
Web Optimizer is a Cloaking tool
Link Farms This is a “boosting technique”
The one way to increase link popularity is to create multiple websites linking to each other – wrong!
Link farms are low trust Link popularity depends on the quality of links not
just quantity Using link farms does not provide quality links to
boost your link popularity
Duplicate Content This is a “boosting technique”
It does not work and generally dilutes Trust Duplicate content = Duplicate links (ignored) There is NO penalty for duplicate (nearly exact)
content SE chooses which page to index and suppresses all
others
International – ccTLD/Zone rules Multiple Sites 0 dynamic filters
Authority sites get more credit That may not be you!
Thank You!
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