1. Bruce Clay SEO Concepts…

2. Overview
SEO Concepts
Future of Search
Linking Strategies
Best Practices

4. How Do Search Engines ImpactYour
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

5. 3 Major Items ImpactYour Search Engine
Rankings
1. The Search Engines
 Not your Friend!
 Vague answers
The Search
 Google speak Engines
 Constantly Changing
 450 algorithm
changes/year
 SERP presentation
The The Site
changes
Competition Constraints

6. 3 Major Items ImpactYour Search Engine
Rankings
2. The Competition
 Not your Friend!
 Wants your space
The Search
 Constantly changing Engines
The The Site
Competition Constraints

7. 3 Major Items ImpactYour Search Engine
Rankings
3. The Site Constraints
 Production Schedules
 Server technology
The Search
 Conversion vs. traffic vs. Engines
ranking
 Which is most important?
 Content Management
Systems (CMS)
 New Features The The Site
 Engagement Objects Competition Constraints

8. The Top Ranking…
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

9. Behavioral Keyword Research
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

10. Associated Words
Targeted Searching = Higher Conversion
 Surrounding words help keyword “clarification”
 Proximity: Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) concepts apply
 Synonyms
 ~Google
 Use words your competition uses and SE’s will reward you

11. Organic Information
 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

12. Intent
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

14. Future of Search
Now: Means:
 Behavioral search  Ranking alone is not SEO
 Intent-based search  KW Research is more complex
than anything done before
 Localized search
 Personas
 Engagement Objects
 Behavioral community
 Personalized search
 Anticipate consecutive
searches
 Social matters
 Analytics is necessary for
measuring traffic/ROI

15. Website Persona
Does your website match your visitors?
 They must match or you lose!
Website Persona Visitor Persona

16. Ambiguous Queries
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

17. Google Instant
 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

18. Google Preview

19. Trigger a Search
 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

20. Engagement Objects
 Images
 Videos/MP3
 Shopping
 Places
 News
 Knowledge Graph

21. Images

22. Video

23. Shopping

24. Places

25. News

26. Knowledge Graph

27. Index Imaging
Notice – This shows that words in an
image are now recognized by Google!

28. Audio Indexing
Captions

29. Audio Indexing
Transcript

30. Audio Indexing
Video is Content

31. 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.

33. “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

34. 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

35. 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” ?

36. 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

37. 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

38. How To Develop Links
 Link Begging
 Sponsored Pages/Memberships
 News Letters
 Press releases
 Articles
 News
 Social Media

39. 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

41. 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?

42. 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

43. 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

44. 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

45. 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

46. 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!

47. ThankYou!