Enhanced User Experience Through Search Engine Optimization Mudit Mittal & Chaitr Hiremath November 28, 2008

Where are my keys?

User Content users search to browse 70% site traffic comes through search engine Source: Worldwide Search by Region, 2007 Search Engine

search engine Crawls the World Wide Web Creates an index of the pages found Enables search by keywords

Which of the following would be the best choice of URL structure (for both search engines and humans)? www.wildlifeonline.com/563 www.wildlifeonline.com/animals/crocodile www.wildlifeonline.com/O0665?id=563&cat=227 www.wildlifeonline.com/category/277/article/crocodile take your guess… www.wildlifeonline.com/animals/crocodile

SEO is the process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers The process focuses on creating reachable content and getting right users to right content search engine optimization

Understand needs of search engine, and make search engine understand what is to be delivered Make the search engine believe that the site is genuine, and provide relevant & quality content two aspects

current scenario Insights Launch Create Develop Optimize Design Web development life cycle

suggested model Insights Launch Create Optimize Develop Design Optimize Develop Design UX On-Page Optimization On-Site Optimization Off-Site Optimization

On-Page Optimization Areas (Designers)

content is king Fresh, Unique and Quality content on each page Use text for important content

links are queen Source: yahoo.com Love text links Make navigation easy Mix phrases & words Linkbaiting is good

optimize website title Using ‘|’ symbol = More keyword phrases in page title Keep it under 66 characters and relevant to content of the page

image rocks, but be cautious They attract user attention Surround with alternate text Nomenclature for filenames is fundamental

On-Site Optimization Areas (Developers)

light pages reward heavy Follow W3C standards Avoid table deeper than 3 levels < 150kb without image Test with Lynx browser

know your tags They define content Focus one tag at a time Evolve tags with time

ordering of meta tags robots – permit spiders to crawl content-type – tells spider of the type of page title – most important tag description – keep it under 150 characters and not repeat keywords more than 3 times keywords – upto maximum of 800 characters

robots – permit spiders to crawl

content-type – tells spider of the type of page

title – most important tag

description – keep it under 150 characters and not repeat keywords more than 3 times

keywords – upto maximum of 800 characters

Off-Site Optimization Areas (Optimization Analysts)

analysis is key Learn to read web logs Know your competition

get keywords right Think words that user thinks Analytics helps Prefer phrases over single words

give link love, get link love Have more and more relevant sites link to yours, think quality not quantity Backlinks determine popularity

robots can help Include robots.txt Sitemap is essential

update – go online SEO landscape changes every 6-12 months Today’s techniques won’t work tomorrow

key areas page structure robots.txt, sitemap.xml quality content keyword research simple text links back links updated techniques tags – titles & headers images & image text networking web analytic & research

thank you