March 25, 2010 Search Engine Optimization

Start at the beginning

•  What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? •  How important is SEO to you?

What is SEO?

How important is SEO to you?

How important is SEO to you?

•  Your Marketing Plan should drive your SEO efforts.

•  Getting listed by Search Engines is not the same as getting visitors from Search Engines.

Browser Usage (US only, Mar 2010)

•  Google = 80.8% •  Yahoo = 8.9% •  Bing = 8.4% •  AOL = 0.8%

Search Engine Process

•  Robot/Spider •  Search Index

Inbound Links Reciprocal Links Content & Change Frequency

•  Search Algorithm •  Page Rank

Targeting Keywords

Search Engine Friendly: Page Title

<title>Columbia Center</title>

Search Engine Friendly: Page Title

Search Engine Friendly: Heading Tags

<h1>Feeding Infants: Make your own baby food</h1>

Search Engine Friendly: Page Text

Search Engine Friendly: Metatags

•  With very few exceptions, metatags are no longer used by major search engines either to calculate Page Rank, or to display a page in search results.

Inbound links

•  Think of inbound links as “votes” for your website

Acquiring inbound links: Acceptable methods

•  List your website in directories •  Contact websites with a similar theme and

ask for a reciprocal link.

Acquiring inbound links: Unacceptable methods

•  Free-for-all link pages and link farms •  Buying links

Beyond the Basics

•  Content-based SEO •  Content-independent SEO

Content-based SEO

•  All about optimizing your site’s content

Content-independent SEO

•  All about maximizing the impact of non-content factors, such as inbound links and website structure

Fun and Games

•  Google Bombing •  April 1st, Google-style •  Googlewhacking

Google Bombing

Google and April Fools Day

•  Job openings on the moon (2004) •  Launch of Google Gulp drink (2005) •  CADIE (2009)

(Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity)

Googlewhacking

•  Enter just two words in search engine •  No quotation marks allowed •  Get the search engine to return just one

search result (“Results 1 - 1”)

•  Holy Grail = Googlewhackblatt

Questions??

Contact Kevin

•  Kevin A. Barnes, Creativity Engineer •  Email: kevin@creatonomy.com

•  Web: creatonomy.com @Creatonomy (Twitter) kevinabarnes.com @KevinABarnes (Twitter)