Seo 4 Fundamentals

4 SEO Fundamentals to Boost Natural Search Traffic

SEO Whitepaper for RETAIL

Table of Contents

EXECUTIVESUMMARY 2

SEO:TRUSTED,EFFECTIVE,LOW-COST 2High Rankings, High Trust Growth OpportunityHigh ROI

1 COMPELLINGWEBCONTENT–THINKOFYOURAUDIENCE 4Relate to Your AudienceDon’t Let Product Content Stand AloneAdd the Voice of Your CustomersSkip the Tricks

2 METADATAANDURLSTRUCTURE–FIRSTIMPRESSIONSCOUNT 5Title TagsMeta Description TagsURL Structure

3 TARGETEDLANDINGPAGES–GIVEAWARMWELCOME 8 Break Out Your Product Attributes

Drop Some Breadcrumbs

4 SITEMAPS–PREVENTSPIDERSFROMOFF-ROADING 9 Find a Good Automatic SitemapGenerator

Don’t Forget to Index Dynamic PagesRedirect Users to Newer Pages

ROIFORSEO–HOWMUCHBANGFORYOURBUCK 10Number of Pages Indexed by Web Search EnginesChanges in Traffic and Conversion from Natural Search Changes in Keyword Rankings

CONCLUSION 11

ENDECAANDSEO 11

FOOTNOTES&RECOMMENDEDREADING 12

ENDECA TECHNOLOGIES | 4 SEO Fundamentals to Boost Natural Search Traffic 2

As the cost of paid search campaigns steadily rises, natural search programs provide lower cost-per-click than paid search programs, affording them the second highest returns of any marketing strategy.

Number of Search Results Users Review Before Clicking One U.S. search engine users, percent (%) of respondents

2002 2004 2006 2008

Only a few 16% 24% 23% 27%

The first Page 32 36 39 41

The first 2 pages 23 20 19 17

The first 3 pages 10 8 9 7

More than 3 pages 19 12 10 8

Source: iProspect “iProspect Blended Search Results Study” conducted by JupiterResearch and NPD as cited in press release – 4/2008

EXECUTIVESUMMARYSpend on search engine optimization (SEO) will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 15% over the next 3 years to $5.1 billion by the end of 2014, according to Forrester Research1. Why? Having mastered paid search initiatives, online marketers are strategically increasing their SEO budgets, sharpening their focus on optimizing traffic from natural search to generate more targeted clicks at a much lower cost. This SEO whitepaper covers four fundamentals for optimizing your site for web search engines, along with several techniques for measuring the ROI of your efforts, so that you too can start taking your natural Website traffic to a new level.

SEO:TRUSTED,EFFECTIVE,LOW-COSTOptimizing your Website’s content and architecture for the major web search engines, such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, is no longer optional for operating a successful web property. Although driving traffic and more qualified customers from natural search is mission critical – impacting up to half or more of a Website’s total traffic – many companies have not yet implemented what are known to be the fundamentals of search engine optimization (SEO).

Why should SEO matter to your online business strategy – and your customers? The compelling statistics below make the case.

HIGH RANKINGS, HIGH TRUST With more than 100 billion searches each month2, people have come to rely on web search engines as trusted sources of information. Experience has taught them that the highest ranking links provide the most relevant results for their needs, increasing the number of searchers who never look beyond the first one or two results3.


Most Effective Online Marketing Tactic for Generating Conversions According to Senior-Level Marketing Execs*, by budget size, percent (%) of respondents, Feb - March 2009

$1million+ Allrespondents (n=49) (n=112)

SEO 53% 48%

E-mail and e-newsletter 39 46

Pay-per-click / search 43 32

Behavioral targeting 27 21

Site or page sponsorship 14 20

Viral marketing 12 15

Ad networks 10 12

Pay-per-impression ads on digital publications 14 10

Video ads 10 6

Other 2 3

* Respondents primarily based in U.S. Source: Forbes, “2009 Ad Effectiveness Survey“ – 6/2009

GROWTH OPPORTUNITY The opportunity for businesses to grow online revenues increases as marketers see the effectiveness of SEO in driving online conversions outpace all other marketing tactics4.

HIGH ROI

As the cost of paid search campaigns steadily rises, natural search programs provide lower cost-per-click than paid search programs, affording them the second highest returns of any marketing strategy5. Optimizing each natural click provides an exponential – not just additive – opportunity to engage and convert online window shoppers into buyers. The four SEO fundamentals discussed in this whitepaper will help you make simple, yet critical, investments for an immediate and lasting impact on your online business.

1. Compelling Web Content

2. Meaningful Metadata and URL Structure

3. Targeted Landing Pages

4. Comprehensive Site Maps

In addition, this whitepaper also outlines techniques for measuring the ROI of your SEO initiatives so that you can use your initial success to take your efforts even farther.


WHOYOURCUSTOMERSTRUST

TheEdelmanTrustBarometerfoundthatamong35-to-64year-olds,websearchenginesarethemosttrustedofalldigitalchannelsofinformation.

EDELMANDIGITALSEARCH ENGINE VISIBILITY, MAY 2009

How useful were each of the following resources for researching or completing a purchase in the past 12 months?

Store/retailer Websites 89%

Search engines 86%

Manufacturer Website 78%

User ratings & review of products 77%

Recommendations (people who bought) 66%

Recommendations (recently viewed) 65%

Recommendation e-mails 61%

Recommendations (people who viewed) 61%

Recommendations (best sellers) 59%

Question & answer sites 49%

Source: JupiterResearch richrelevance / Bazaar Voice Retail Consumer Survey n=547– 11/2008

content discovery tools

1. COMPELLINGWEBCONTENT–THINKOFYOURAUDIENCEAs with any online user experience, it is important to target your audience and keep your message customized to their needs. Whether they are shopping for products, reading articles or blogs, or watching online video, your customers expect content that is relevant to them at that moment. And, believe it or not, web search engines have done us all a favor by recognizing and rewarding sites that help Internet searchers quickly find the most relevant information they desire.

Not surprisingly then, some of the most important practices that can improve your SEO performance are key activities around content creation and presentation.

RELATE TO YOUR AUDIENCEWhile it is important to have keyword-rich pages, it is more important that your copy makes sense and relates to the needs of target customers. Otherwise, these coveted visitors will leave when the webpage content is not what they expected.

DON’T LET PRODUCT CONTENT STAND ALONEWeb spiders love finding content-rich pages – user guides, videos, user recommendations, and reviews – because they represent a comprehensive and robust experience for human searchers. Get even more bang for your buck and make sure all this valuable content is indexed and seen by spiders.

ADD THE VOICE OF YOUR CUSTOMERSExpanding on the point above, not only do search engines like user-generated content (such as reviews, recommendations, and customer ratings) for its depth and freshness, but consumers like this content too, because they tend to trust the opinions of other people like them6.


Dedicating time and resources to constructing meaningful title tags for each page of your Website is one of the most important SEO practices you can implement.

Title Tags: Construct Meaningful and Accurate Descriptions

Bon appétit! A search on Google for “lemon cake” displays a link to Foodnetwork.com as the first result. The page content doesn’t disappoint when you click through to a targeted landing page with not only a lemon cake recipe, but also related recipes, user comments, videos, and links to purchase just the right type of cake pan.

SKIP THE TRICKS

Web search engines are sophisticated enough to detect “black hat” schemes. One such unsavory trick is “cloaking,” which involves making spider-centric text invisible to humans by using a white font on a white background.

By writing more readable, succinct, and persuasive copy, and surrounding site visitors with relevant and meaningful content, you will soon find not only higher natural rankings coming your way, but also you will convert more browsers to paying customers.

2. METADATAANDURLSTRUCTURE–FIRSTIMPRESSIONSCOUNTIt seems simple enough – if you make a good first impression on web searchers, more of them will click through to your Website.

Within the architecture of your Website, you get three chances to immediately connect with searchers and spiders and give them insight into what they can expect to see when they click through on your search result. The better you prepare these three “signals,” the greater your search credibility will be.

TITLE TAGSSearch engines recognize that page titles, or metadata title tags, are what people see first, so they put more weight on them in their ranking algorithms. And the more human-readable your titles are in natural search results, the more you increase the likelihood of click-through. Dedicating time and resources to constructing meaningful title tags for each page of your Website is one of the most important SEO practices you can implement.


Meta Description Tags: Tell People What to Expect

WYSIWYG What you see is what you get when you click through to the lemon cake landing page on Foodnetwork.com. The brief yet welcoming meta description invites me to give the recipe a try.

When developing your title tags, follow these guidelines that are known to help SEO rankings: >Assign a unique title to each Webpage (URL) on your site.

>Make sure the title gives an accurate description of page content and contains your targeted keywords.

>Be brief. Most web search engines will cut your titles off after 80 characters, so try to keep them four to five words.

META DESCRIPTION TAGSThese tags do not appear on your actual Webpage. Instead, they are short, 155-character descriptions that display on the search results page (SERP). Description tags are critical for enticing visitors because they tell people what to expect when they click through to your Website. However, keep in mind that they do not impact your SERP rankings for particular keywords.

When developing meta description tags, follow these guidelines: >Each Webpage should have a unique and different description. Don’t just copy and

paste descriptions that generalize your Website’s content.

>Re-use keywords from your title tags; this reinforces those words as relevant terms.

>Keep it short. Search engines such as Google cut off descriptions that are longer than two sentences (typically 25-30 words).

URL STRUCTURELike site content, title tags, and meta description tags, how you construct your URLs is important to both the search engines and your customers.

When choosing a format for your dynamic URLs, follow these simple guidelines:


URL Structure: One-to-One Correspondence

/Exactly what you need, right here/ Armstrong Commercial Flooring helps tell customers searching for a very particular tile – blue biobased tile, to be exact – by signaling to them what they’ve find when they click with a clean URL structure: /biobased-tile/blue.

>Ensure that each Webpage corresponds to exactly one URL; multiple URLs pointing to the same page may be interpreted by search engines as an attempt to artificially increase the size of your Website. This issue is of particular concern for dynamic sites, which provide an excellent end-user experience but may result in separate URLs for every possible navigation path (such as “Blue Sweater + Cashmere + $100-$200” and “Cashmere + $100-$200 + Blue Sweater”). Consolidate duplicate dynamic URLs into a single, canonical URL that corresponds to the Webpage.

>Use no more than three dynamic parameters. Search engines can interpret these highly parameterized URLs, but they are hard for humans to read and remember.

>Include keywords that are consistent with the content, title tag, and meta description tag of the Webpage.

A final word on metadata: Content, URLs, and description tags should be optimized for three or four keywords or keyword pairs (preferably three; four only on pages deep in the hierarchy) in order to achieve optimal rankings. Be aware that search engines do not process information like humans so if they see the same keyword in multiple places it tells them “this site must be about <insert keyword>.”

Tuning metadata tags and URL structure is critical to building strong SEO, but can be extremely time-consuming if done manually. Use automated utilities wherever possible to save time and get consistent results.


The Value of the Long Tail

Source: Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More

Number of Occurences

Dol

lars

per

Sal

e Side doors to your Website Dynamic pages that produce content relevant to long-tail searches, where two to four descriptive keywords are used, address customers looking for unique products – and deliver highly targeted traffic to your Website.

3. TARGETEDLANDINGPAGES–GIVEAWARMWELCOMEWith more natural site traffic, you have an opportunity to offer a personal welcome to visitors as they arrive on your site. The challenge is that many traditional Websites are built on a taxonomy that drills into category/sub-category pages, but does not go further. On these sites, few pages are built from the intersection of product attributes that people are searching for on the web, limiting the entry points on a site for visitors. For example, you might have a page that displays products at the intersection of “Brand” and “Category” but not necessarily for the complete criteria of a visitor’s search, which would be at the intersection of “Gucci-Shirts-Blue-Formal-Button-Down-Collar.”

These “long-tail” queries7, usually about 2-4 words long, are particularly high value because they contain more information about exactly what the visitor is looking for. Think of these targeted landing pages as “side doors” to your Website – pages within your site that search engines (as well as other links such as blog entries and Twitter posts) will find, bypassing the home page of your Website for more relevant content. The faster these side doors can make visitors feel like they are at the right place for their information needs, the more likely it is that the visitor will convert. And not only do these keywords contain more specific information about the intent of the searcher, but they are also not as heavily contested by pay-per-click efforts, so you have a better chance of grabbing a top ranking. Below are some tips for creating these side doors.

BREAK OUT YOUR PRODUCT ATTRIBUTES It’s not enough to have product attributes buried in your product details pages. Wherever you can, break out product attributes as metadata and create unique pages at all the intersections of these attributes in order to highlight the numerous products that share those attributes. As a result, your pages will rank highly for the very specific, long-tail searches that include these attributes. While a tedious manual process, this can be done in an automated way with some search engine technologies.


Know your top 100 to 500 keywords and measure how your results-page rankings change over the course of your initiative. If you’ve implemented targeted landing pages, make sure to track how much traffic comes through long-tail “side doors.”

ABOVETHECRAWLOFDUTY

Sitemapsare99%efficientinhelpingspidersdiscovernewlypublishedURLs,versusonly63%ifspiderswerejusttofollowthelinksonyoursite.

GOOGLEWEBMASTERCENTRALBLOGSITEMAPS: ABOVE AND BEYOND THE CRAWL OF DUTY, APRIL 2009

DROP SOME BREADCRUMBS As outlined in the previous section, title tags are crucial to making a good first impression on new visitors from natural search. By adding breadcrumbs that show the product attributes represented on all of your pages, you can use these to automatically populate page headers and title tags throughout your site, ensuring that even long-tail pages are keyword-rich.

Targeted landing pages improve engagement and conversion because they provide more relevant content specific for any given search, whether from a web or on-site search engine.

4. SITEMAPS–PREVENTSPIDERSFROMOFF-ROADINGNow that you’ve done the essential on-site work, it’s time to put your site “on the map” for even greater visibility. It is important to know that search engine spiders take their time recognizing pages – particularly when encountering new content. And, they may initially only crawl one or two levels deep for fear of getting “lost,” indexing only part of your site and leaving thousands of pages out of search engine results pages.

A sitemap acts as a guide that leads spiders to important content within your Website, encouraging them to crawl deeper, index more pages, and expose more of your content to searchers. When optimized properly, a sitemap can also help search engines by including important metadata about each URL, such as when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is relative to other URLs in the site.

FIND A GOOD AUTOMATIC SITEMAP GENERATOR Sitemap generators can simplify the task of ensuring that the right pages on your site are found and indexed properly. Look for tools that can automatically create sitemaps containing every relevant navigation page and product on your site, including dynamic landing pages. A good sitemap generator should eliminate any duplicate URLs too, which otherwise will dilute your rankings.

DON’T FORGET TO INDEX DYNAMIC PAGESIf you have billions of dynamic pages created by an on-site search engine, you need to indicate to spiders which intersections of product attributes are the most valuable so they can prioritize their indexing. You probably have a map for your static pages – don’t forget about the dynamic ones.

REDIRECT USERS TO NEWER PAGES As you update products and content on your Website, preserve rankings and inbound links by implementing 301 redirects from old pages to new pages. These redirects help spiders log changes of address, signaling that there has been a permanent move and that all visitors should be forwarded to the new URL.

While search engines will (eventually) find your sitemap on their own, it is a good idea to push an XML and HTML sitemap to the major web search engines on a regular basis, ensuring accurate and more frequent indexing as your site is updated.


CALCULATINGROI

ROIismorethantotalrevenuedividedbycost.UseJamesLenskold’smethodfromMarketingROI:

YouwillgetaclearerviewintothetruelifefromyourSEOeffortsusingthismethod.

GROSS MARGIN — MARKETING INVESTMENT

MARKETING INVESTMENT

ROIFORSEO–HOWMUCHBANGFORYOURBUCKJust by getting started with the four SEO fundamentals outlined above, you will see an automatic increase in the amount of natural search traffic that comes to your site. But, if you own the SEO strategy at your company, it’s important to understand what it took to climb higher on the search results page and how to find ways to climb even higher.

Business owners who contributed budget to optimize your Website for natural search will want to know that they are getting a good return on their investment. Thankfully, there are many ways to demonstrate that your SEO efforts are working. Below here are some key metrics and techniques you can use to prove the effectiveness of your initiatives and help justify continued investment in SEO.8

NUMBER OF PAGES INDEXED BY WEB SEARCH ENGINES Use this metric to show how much your Website’s footprint has grown. Make sure to take a snapshot before you begin your optimization efforts, and then take another snapshot once your changes are in place. A Google search using the “site:<insert URL>” operator is a quick and easy way to get this number. For example, a search for “site:nbi-sems.com” reveals how NBI, a Website selling educational content and materials to the legal community, has hundreds of thousands of rich product pages indexed by Google.

CHANGES IN TRAFFIC AND CONVERSION FROM NATURAL SEARCH These metrics will help you show the impact of SEO on revenue. Look at what percentage of total traffic is a result of natural search traffic, versus traffic from paid search campaigns. Once you begin to see more traffic from natural search, you may be able to optimize paid search spend by targeting more high-traffic keywords.

CHANGES IN KEYWORD RANKINGSKnow your top 100 to 500 keywords and measure how your results-page rankings change over the course of your initiative. If you’ve implemented targeted landing pages, make sure to track how much traffic comes through long-tail “side doors.” You can even determine the conversion rate and average order size for that specific segment of Website traffic.

As you start out with your SEO efforts, plan to succeed. Do some research on your industry and get a clear picture of what others are doing for SEO. How much budget are your competitors allocating to SEO versus paid search? What benchmarks are they setting? What kind of return are they seeing or expecting?

Your research will initially help you get a sense of the kind of goals you should set for your SEO initiatives and what kind of returns you can expect for your budget dollars. It never hurts to place statistics like these in front of your management to help set expectations and to illustrate how to stay competitive.


CONCLUSIONWhether or not you act on the advice in this whitepaper, the core message is to keep a good balance between site content and site architecture. By following this simple tenet, you will keep your customers’ objectives at the heart of your SEO strategy, from writing web content and making a good impression at the point of search, to helping spiders understand your site so they can guide your customers to you. And when you do that, your online business will thrive.

ENDECAANDSEOEndeca search technology not only helps you enhance the user experience on your site – it can also play a pivotal role in your SEO strategy by helping your site draw more visitors in the first place. By taking advantage of the close relationship between the search and navigation on your site and your SEO initiatives, you likely will find an opportunity to increase site traffic in dramatic ways.

Combined with core capabilities of the Endeca Platform, Endeca’s SEO Module helps you outpace the competition and generate more targeted clicks at a much lower cost.

First, Endeca’s Guided Navigation® experience, when integrated with your site taxonomy and search, can create a dynamic site with millions of different paths to products of interest. The opportunity grows as you add more data and content to support your visitors as they explore your site. Endeca can help you incorporate user-reviews, video, and product guides into the site experience, expanding the attributes available for visitors to explore and increasing the number of places your valuable content is exposed to users. Endeca’s Commerce Suite also provides online merchandisers with the tools they need to easily create and publish dynamic landing pages triggered for top search queries or facets.

Next, Endeca’s SEO Module amplifies these core capabilities of the Endeca Platform with the ability to automatically public dynamic site maps, remove duplicate links, and transform URLs into formats that are preferred by web search engines.

IfyouwouldliketolearnmoreaboutwhatEndecacandoforyourSEOinitiatives,pleasecontactusat617.674.6300.

Checkoutourcustomers’SEOsuccessstoriesonline.VisitEndeca.com/SEO.


FOOTNOTES&RECOMMENDEDREADING

1 U.S. Interactive Marketing Forecast, Forrester Research, July 6, 2009 – updated January 11, 2010.

For more information on marketing trends and spending on SEO, see “Search Engine Optimization Starts With Good Site Design”, Forrester Research, January 2008 and, Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2009, MarketingSherpa.

2 comScore, “Global Search Market Draws More than 100 Billion Searches Per Month,” Worldwide Search Market Overview, July 2009. “The total worldwide search market boasted more than 131 billion searches conducted by people age 15 or older from home and work locations in December 2009, representing a 46-percent increase in the past year. This number represents more than 4 billion searches per day, 175 million per hour, and 2.9 million per minute. The U.S. represented the largest individual search market in the world with 22.7 billion searches, or approximately 17 percent of searches conducted globally. China ranked second with 13.3 billion searches, followed by Japan with 9.2 billion and the U.K. with 6.2 billion. Among the top ten global search markets, Russia posted the highest gains in 2009, growing 92 percent to 3.3 billion, followed by France (up 61 percent to 5.4 billion) and Brazil (up 53 percent to 3.8 billion).” Here’s the link to that data: http://comscore.com/index.php//Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/1/Global_Search_Market_Grows_46_Percent_in_2009

3 See the iProspect-sponsored “Blended Search Results Study,” conducted by JupiterResearch and The NPD Group. Their findings showed that nearly seven out of 10 respondents said they clicked a search result within the first page of results, and 92% clicked a result within the first three pages of search results. More search engine users surveyed clicked the first page in 2008 (68%) than did so in 2006 (62%). At the same time, fewer search engine users surveyed were willing to click results past the third page in 2008 (8%) compared with 2002 (19%).

4 A frequently cited metric shows that natural versus paid search clicks lead to significantly more conversions via US Search Engines (% of converted first clicks): 55.4% versus 44.6% respectively. Data is from the August 2006 360i and SearchIgnite white paper “Giving Clicks Credit Where They’re Due, Part Two: The Value of Assists for Natural and Paid Search Conversions.”

5 Based on advertising or marketing tactics search engine advertisers worldwide believe yield the best return on investment (ROI), paid placement ranked 54% and SEO ranked 50%. Data is from the June 2008 Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) report “The State of Search Engine Marketing 2007.” 341 search engine advertisers and 541 search engine marketing (SEM) agencies from the US (63%), Canada (11%), the UK (5%) and other (21%) were polled online by Radar Research via IntelliSurvey Inc. during December 2007 - January 2008.

6 A recent study of online purchasing behavior showed that 51% of consumers (between the ages of 14-75) purchased a product based on an online recommendation. Data is from the December 2009 Deloitte report titled “State of the Media Democracy Fourth Edition: Select U.S. Highlights.” 2,046 consumers ages 14-75 were surveyed online during September 11 - October 13, 2009.

Another study showed that of online resources that US Online Shoppers consider useful for researching or purchasing products, user ratings and reviews 73% and search engines ranked 86%. Data is from the February 2009 richrelevance and Bazaarvoice report titled “Online Retail: Driving Relevant Experiences” for which JupiterResearch surveyed over 800 US consumers in November and December 2008.

7 The Longtail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, Chris Anderson, New York: Hyperion, 2006.

Although the Long Tail theory has come under fire in the past few years, when it comes to web search queries the theory holds strong. Below are a few sources pointing to statistics that long tail traffic regularly produces over half of search traffic to large sites: Wired Blog Network, “Google’s Long Tail”, Feb 12, 2005, Read Write Web, “Google’s Udi Manber”, June 21, 2007, Hitwise Intelligence, “Sizing Up the Long Tail of Search”, Nov 2008.

Making balanced recommendations on how to invest in the long tail, Anita Elberse in her article entitled “Should You Invest in the Long Tail” (Harvard Business Review, July-August 2008, page 98) advises online retailers to not put all their eggs in the “long tail” basket, and to still acquire and manage customer by using their most popular products. However, “if the goal is to cater to your heavy customers, broaden your assortment with more niche products. [Her] research shoes that even when online assortments of [products] are enormous, and thus even the most frequent customers could easily satisfy their appetites with products in the top decile, those customer are disproportionately active in the tail. They want a wide assortment, so offering one helps attract and retain them.”

8 In the October 2009 article entitled, “How Interactive Marketers Can Secure Budget From Their CMOs”, Forrester Research outlines a three-step process to gather marketing budget intelligence and make the case for your campaign spend, technology purchase, and additional headcount. They also provide a tool to help you estimate total cost and return.

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Seo 4 Fundamentals