Free Traffic Seo Smo 101 (Search Engine Social Media Optimization) Presentation 2

© 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com [email protected]

SEO 101

presented by Stephan Spencer,Founder & President, Netconcepts


Today’s Agenda

What is SEO? The Seven Steps to Higher Rankings

– Get Your Site Fully Indexed – Get Your Pages Visible – Build Links & PageRank– Leverage Your PageRank– Encourage Clickthrough– Track the Right Metrics– Avoid Worst Practices


Part 1: What Is SEO?


Everything Evolves Around Search


Search Engine Optimization

6 times more effective than a banner ad Delivers qualified leads 80% of Internet user sessions begin at the search

engines (Source: Internetstats.com)

55% of online purchases are made on sites found through search engine listings (Source: Internetstats.com)


SEO is NOT Paid Advertising

SEO – influence rankings in the “natural” (a.k.a. “organic”, a.k.a. “algorithmic”) search results

PPC – paid search advertising on a pay-per-click basis. The more you pay, the higher your placement. Stop paying = stop receiving traffic.

SEM – encompasses both SEO and PPC


Natural

Paid

Paid


Google Listings – Your Virtual Sales Force Savvy retailers making 6-7 figures a month from natural

listings Savvy MFA (Made for AdSense) site owners making 5-6

figures per month Most sites are not SE-friendly Google friendliness = friendly to other engines First calculate your missed opportunities


Not doing SEO? You’re Leaving Money on the Table

Calculate the missed opportunity cost of not ranking well for products and services that you offer?

# of people searching for your keywords

x

engine share (Google = 60%)

xexpected click-through rate

average conversion rate

average transaction amount

x x

E.g.10,000/day x 60% x 10% x 5% x $100 = $3,000/day


Most Important Search Engines

Google (also powers AOL Search, Netscape.com, iWon, etc.) – 60.29% market share (Source: Hitwise)

Yahoo! (also powers Alltheweb, AltaVista, Hotbot, Lycos, CNN, A9) – 22.58%

Live Search (formerly MSN Search) – 11.56% Ask – 3.63%


People Are Googling… Are You There?


What Are Searchers Looking For?

Keyword Research– “Target the wrong keywords and all your efforts will be in

vain.” The “right” keywords are…

– relevant to your business– popular with searchers


Keyword Research

Tools to check popularity of keyword searches– Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool

(http://inventory.overture.com)– WordTracker.com– Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery.com– Google’s Keyword Tool– Google Trends– Google Suggest


Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool Pros

– Free!– Data is from a large sample of Internet searches (including all searches on

Yahoo!) Cons

– Variations of keywords are aggregated (e.g. verb tenses, plural & singular, misspellings)

– Rife with bogus data from automated searches– Only a month’s data. No historical archives.


Keyword Popularity –According to Yahoo!


WordTracker.com Pros

– Based on last 60 days worth of searches– Singular vs plural, misspellings, verb tenses all separated out– Advanced functionality: keyword “projects”, import data into Excel, synonyms, …

Cons– Requires subscription fee ($260/year)– Data is from a small sample of Internet searches (from the minor search engines

Dogpile and MetaCrawler)– Contains bogus data from automated searches– No historical archives


Keyword Popularity –According to WordTracker


Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery.com Pros

– Full year of historical archives– Data is from a large sample of Internet searches (9 billion searches compiled from

37 engines)– Singular vs plural, misspellings, verb tenses all separated out– Can segment by country– Advanced functionality: keyword “projects”, import data into Excel, synonyms, …

Cons– Access to the historical data requires subscription fee (~$30/month)– Contains bogus data from automated searches


Keyword Popularity –According to KeywordDiscovery


Google AdWords Keyword Tool Pros

– Free! (Must have an AdWords account though)– Data is from a large sample of Internet searches (from Google)– Singular vs plural, misspellings, verb tenses all separated out– Can segment by country– Synonyms

Cons– No hard numbers

Augment this tool with other free Google tools: – Google Suggest (labs.google.com/suggest) – Google Trends (www.google.com/trends)


Keyword Popularity –According to

Google AdWords

Keyword Tool



Google AdWords

Keyword Tool



Google Trends


Keyword Popularity –According to Google Suggest


Keyword Research

Competition for that keyword should also be considered– Calculate KEI Score (Keyword Effectiveness Indicator) = ratio

of searches over number of pages in search results– The higher the KEI Score, the more attractive the keyword is

to target (assuming it’s relevant to your business)


SEO. A Moving Target. Lots is changing…

– Personalization & customization– Vertical search services (Images, Video, News, Maps, etc.)– “Universal Search”

Fortunately, the tried-and-true tactics still work…– Topically relevant links from important sites– Anchor text– Keyword-rich title tags– Keyword-rich content– Internal hierarchical linking structure– The whole is greater than the sum of the parts


The Search Engines Are Your Friend Sitemaps.org Webmaster tools (e.g. Google Webmaster Central, Live Search

Webmaster Center, Yahoo Site Explorer) Rel=“nofollow” tag Meta NOODP tag Speaking at search engine conferences Publishing blogs dedicated to helping webmasters Participating on SEO forums “Weather reports”


My daughter,SEO-in-training.She makes$1000 / monthpassive income

SEO –Easy Enough a Child Could Do It!


Part 2: Seven Steps to High Rankings


Begin The 7 Steps

1) Get Your Site Fully Indexed 2) Get Your Pages Visible 3) Build Links & PageRank4) Leverage Your PageRank4) Encourage Clickthrough6) Track the Right Metrics7) Avoid Worst Practices


1) Get Your Site Fully Indexed

Search engines are wary of “dynamic” pages - they fear “spider traps” Avoid stop characters (?, &, =) ‘cgi-bin’, session IDs and unnecessary variables in your

URLs; frames; redirects; pop-ups; navigation in Flash/Java/Javascript/pulldown boxes – If not feasible due to platform constraints, can be easily handled through proxy technology (e.g.

GravityStream) The better your PageRank, the deeper and more often your site will be spidered


1) Get Your Site Fully Indexed Page # estimates are wildly inaccurate, and include non-indexed pages (e.g. ones with

no title or snippet) Misconfigurations (in robots.txt, in the type of redirects used, requiring cookies, etc.)

can kill indexation Keep your error pages out of the index by returning 404 status code Keep duplicate pages out of the index by standardizing your URLs, eliminating

unnecessary variables, using 301 redirects when needed


Results in “Supplemental Hell”


Not Spider-Friendly GET http://www.bananarepublic.com --> 302 Moved Temporarily GET http://www.bananarepublic.com/browse/home.do --> 302

Moved Temporarily GET http://www.bananarepublic.com/browse/home.do?

targetURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bananarepublic.com%2Fbrowse%2Fhome.do&CookieSet=Set --> 302 Moved Temporarily

GET http://www.bananarepublic.com/cookieFailure.do --> 200 OK


2) Get Your Pages Visible 100+ “signals” that influence ranking “Title tag” is the most important copy on the page Home page is the most important page of a site Every page of your site has a “song” (keyword theme) Incorporate keywords into title tags, hyperlink text, headings (H1 &

H2 tags), alt tags, and high up in the page (where they’re given more “weight”)

Eliminate extraneous HTML code “Meta tags” are not a magic bullet Have text for navigation, not graphics


Pretty good title


Not so good title – where’s the phrase “credit card”?


Good link text and body copy


Good link text and body copy


No link text or body copy


No link text or body copy


Take a peek under the hood


The “meta tags”


Unnecessarily bloated HTML


3) Build Links and PageRank “Link popularity” affects search engine rankings PageRank™ - Links from “important” sites have more impact on your

Google rankings (weighted link popularity) Google offers a window into your PageRank

– PageRank meter in the Google Toolbar (toolbar.google.com)– Google Directory (directory.google.com) category pages– 3rd party tools like SEOChat.com’s “PageRank Lookup” & “PageRank Search”

Scores range from 0-10 on a logarithmic scale Live Search and Yahoo have similar measures to PageRank™


Google’s Toolbar – with handy PageRank Meter


Google Directory – listings are organized by PageRank


Conduct any Google query and get results organized by PageRank


4) Leverage Your PageRank

Your home page’s PageRank gets distributed to your deep pages by virtue of your hierarchical internal linking structure (e.g. breadcrumb nav)

Pay attention to the text used within the hyperlink (“Google bombing”)

Don’t hoard your PageRank Don’t link to “bad neighborhoods”


4) Leverage Your PageRank

Avoid PageRank dilution– Canonicalization (www.domain.com vs. domain.com)– Duplicate pages: (session IDs, tracking codes, superfluous

parameters)– In general, search engines are cautious of dynamic URLs

(with ?, &, and = characters) because of “spider traps”• Rewrite your URLs (using a server module/plug-in) or use a hosted

proxy service (e.g. GravityStream)• See http://catalogagemag.com/mag/marketing_right_page_web/


Duplicate pages


Googlebot got caught in a “spider trap”


Search engine spiders turn their noses up at such URLs


Thus, important content doesn’t make it into the search engine indices


5) Encourage Clickthrough Zipf’s Law applies - you need to be at the top of page 1 of the

search results. It’s an implied endorsement. Synergistic effect of being at the top of the natural results & paid

results Entice the user with a compelling call-to-action and value

proposition in your descriptions Your title tag is critical Snippet gets built automatically, but you CAN influence what’s

displayed here


Where do searchers look? (Enquiro, Did-it, Eyetools Study)


Search listings – 1 good,1 lousy


6) Track the Right Metrics

Indexation: # of pages indexed, % of site indexed, % of product inventory indexed, # of “fresh pages”

Link popularity: # of links, PageRank score (0 - 10) Rankings: by keyword, “filtered” (penalized) rankings Keyword popularity: # of searches, competition, KEI

(Keyword Effectiveness Indicator) scores Cost/ROI: sales by keyword & by engine, cost per lead


Indexation tool –www.netconcepts.com/urlcheck



Link popularity tool –www.netconcepts.com/linkcheck



ROI – Sales by keyword


ROI – Sales by referrer


Avoid Worst Practices Target relevant keywords Don’t stuff keywords or replicate pages Create deep, useful content Don't conceal, manipulate, or over-optimize content Links should be relevant (no scheming!) Observe copyright/trademark law & Google’s guidelines


Spamming in Its Many Forms… Hidden or small text Keyword stuffing Targeted to obviously irrelevant keywords Automated submitting, resubmitting, deep submitting Competitor names in meta tags Duplicate pages with minimal or no changes Spamglish Machine generated content


Spamming in Its Many Forms…

Pagejacking Doorway pages Cloaking Submitting to FFA (“Free For All”) sites & link farms Buying up expired domains with high PageRanks Scraping Splogging (spam blogging)


BMW.de hosted many

“doorway pages” like

this one


“Sneaky redirect” sent searchers to

this page


Not Spam, But Bad for Rankings Splash pages, content-less home page, Flash intros Title tags the same across the site Error pages in the search results (eg “Session expired”) "Click here" links Superfluous text like “Welcome to” at beginning of titles Spreading site across multiple domains (usually for load

balancing) Content too many levels deep


What Next? Conduct an SEO Audit!

Is your site fully indexed? Are your pages fully optimized? Could you be acquiring more PageRank? Are you spending your PageRank wisely? Are you maximizing your clickthrough rates? Are you measuring the right things? Are you applying “best practices” in SEO and avoiding

all the “worst practices”?


Case Study: Homestead.com

What worked– Comprehensive SEO & usability audit – Intensive on-site training sessions with their IT and marketing

teams– 6 months of support

What didn’t work– No significant changes to the look of the home page were

allowed for political reasons, significantly reducing the options available


Case Study: Homestead.com

Results– Within 8 weeks of launch of some preliminary optimization

work, on page 1 for “website hosting” in Google – With our audit as a blueprint, later that year launched an

internally built site redesign which landed them the #1 Google position for “website hosting”

– Consistently held #1 position for 2 years






In Summary Focus on the right keywords Have great keyword-rich content Build links, and thus your PageRank™ Spend that PageRank™ wisely within your site Measure the right things Continually monitor and benchmark


Further Reading blogs.cnet.com/seosearchlight google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 www.google.com/webmasters/ www.mattcutts.com/blog googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com blog.outer-court.com www.searchengineland.com www.seroundtable.com www.naturalsearchblog.com


Q&A!

For an ebook on Google power searching, SEO checklists & worksheets, and audio recording, executive summary & transcript of an SEO thought leaders teleconference, e-mail your request to [email protected]

To contact me: [email protected]

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Free Traffic Seo Smo 101 (Search Engine Social Media Optimization) Presentation 2