PBA Front-End Programming

Search Engine Optimisation - Summary

Overall goals

• Gaining more exposure in search engine results, thereby having more users visit your website

• Ultimate, the user should not just visit your website, but perform the actions you wish them to perform (buy items, sign up,…)

• Therefore, your website should show up in relevant search engine results

Overall goals

• You can attract users that are stating their current intentions through their search query

• You can then create/show relevant content that meets the needs of the user at exactly the right moment

• This is much more focused and effective than traditional one-way marketing

Relevance and Authority

• Search engines evaluate a website in relation to a query with regards to– Relevance; does the website appear to contain

content which is semantically related to the search query

– Authority; do other websites link to the website, and how authoritative are these websites themselves (weighted democracy…)

SEO vs paid advertisements

• A Search Engine Result Page (SERP) will not only contain ”organic” search results, but also paid advertisements

• These do not appear as the result of SEO, but because companies have paid to have listings shown which are associated with certain keywords (through a bidding process)

Search result appearance

• A typical search result will appear on the SERP with– A headline– A description– A URL

• However, modern search engines can also return pictures, videos, maps, etc. (blended search results).

SEO expectations

• SEO is a long-term effort, and requires constant attention and tuning

• Search engines also change internally; a process that we have no control over…

• Optimisation is for two parties– The search engines themselves– The real human users

Keywords

• Keywords: the words and phrases that users type into a search engine

• First step in SEO; which keywords do we wish to optimise our pages for?

• Keywords can be evaluated in terms of– Volume– Relevance– Competition

Keywords

• Ideally, you would like to go for:– High volume: users type in this keyword a lot– High relevance: the keyword fits the content of

your page– Low competition: Only few other pages try to rank

for this keyword• …But realistically, you can only get at most two

of these

Keywords

• Long-tail keywords• Keywords that have high relevance and low

competition, but also low volume• If you have a lot of such long-tail keywords,

they may have a significant total volume, while being fairly easy to rank for individually, due to low competition

Keywords

• Several tools exist for helping with keyword research, for instance Google Keyword Planner, and similar for Bing

• However, they work in similar ways; type in suggestions for keywords, and get data back for those keywords, suggestions for other relevant keywords etc..

Keywords

• Finally, even if our research gives us promising keywords, we still need an ongoing evaluation of them

• Essentially: Do these keywords lead users to our website AND make them perform the actions we wish for, like buy an item, etc..

Content Optimisation – human perspective

• Even if we can make users go to our website from the SERP, that is seldom the ultimate goal

• We wish the users to perform some action on the website (buy, sign up, download,…)

• The content must therefore also be optimised with regards to the actual human users

Content Optimisation – human perspective

• Clarity and Quality• Users will think about– Is it clear what this website is about?– Can I trust the content of this website?– Will I want to come back to the website?– Will I recommend the website to others?

Content Optimisation – human perspective

• Things to consider for the website creator– Does my website have a logical structure that

makes it easy for the user to navigate to the relevant content?

– Are the navigation tools (links) easy to understand and use? Are any links broken?

– Are titles, headings, etc relevant and descriptive?– Am I using the right content types (text vs images,

videos, games, etc)?

Content Optimisation – search engine perspective

• All the search engine sees is the actual HTML code ”behind” the pages

• The HTML code often contains elements that do not show up on the visual page, but can still be optimised for SEO

• General principles for optimisation: Add as much (relevant) information as possible to the elements in the HTML code

Content Optimisation – search engine perspective

• Examples:– If a piece of text is intended to be a heading, then

make sure to actually mark it so (using e.g. <h1>)– Put relevant text into the alternative text field for

an image– Put relevant keywords into URLs, filenames, link

anchor texts, etc.

Content Optimisation – search engine perspective

• A first criterion for a search engine to discover your content is (of course) that a link to the content actually exists…

• You can also generate and submit XML sitemaps directly to search engines

• An XML sitemap is a structured description of the website content that a search engine can easily interpret

Content Optimisation – search engine perspective

• Server-side issues like response time may also matter in a search engines evaluation

• A cheap hosting solution geographically far away from your users may hurt response time

• There are options to enable users to get content from closer servers (CDN)

• Also consider issues like caching and server stability (avoid excessive downtime)

Microformats

• A piece of content will often have a semantic meaning (like e.g. a food recipe), that cannot be expressed with standard HTML

• Microformats enables you to add metadata to such content, to express its semantic meaning

• A lot of these microformat definitions can be found at schema.org

Link building

• Links is probably the most important part of SEO; what matters is:– The number of links pointing to a page– The quality of those links

• Link quality is primarily defined as– Relevance– Authority of linking site

Link building

• Internal links – which you have control over – are also important– Help search engines in navigating the website– Help search engines understand the topics and

themes of the content• Internal links are divided into– Navigational links (e.g. top or side menus)– Contextual links (inside the content itself)

Link building

• Obtaining external links is challenging and a long-term effort

• Possible external links– Certain link directories (reviewed)– Industry-specific directories and listings– Establish contact with institutions that could be

interested in linking to your content• Don’t try to cheat the system!

Link building

• Back-link analysis:• If a website is ranking high for keywords you

wish to rank for as well, then it must have high-quality links pointing to it

• It would be interesting to know these links, since they would be relevant for your website as well

• Tools can help you with this

Measuring SEO performance

• Again, the ultimate purpose of SEO is usually not to make users visit your website, but to make them perform a certain action (buy an item, sign up for something, etc.)

• In order to measure if your SEO efforts are successful, some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) must be defined and measured

Measuring SEO performance

• Examples of KPIs– Signing up for a newsletter– Submitting a contact form– Make a purchase– Time spent on website

• These KPIs can be broken down into e.g. keywords – which keyword searches produce the best KPI values

Measuring SEO performance

• There are several tools (e.g. Google Web Analytics) that allow you to define and track KPIs, and to analyse them according to keywords, search engine source, etc..

• You can even assign a monetary value to a KPI, if it makes sense for that particular KPI

Measuring SEO performance

• You should also continuously analyse the links to your website (back-link analysis)

• There could e.g. be sites that use an improper anchor text to link to you

• There might also be websites that you don’t want linking to you!

• This will change dynamically, so it is an ongoing effort

SEO and Social Media

• Social media fits quite well with SEO, since they reflect actual peoples opinions

• Sharing a page link on a social media will thus positively affect the ranking of the linked-to page

• Make it as easy as possible for users to share links to your content on social media

SEO and Social Media

• Several tools can help you analyse how your content is shared, for instance www.socialcrawlytics.com

• The data obtained hereby can also help you with improving sharability of your content, and defining your own strategy for presence on social media

wow

such SEO

many links

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KPI