SEO 101: Tips and Tricks for Search

SEO 101: TIPS AND TRICKS FOR SEARCH Dennis Goedegebuure, Natural Search Marketing Specialist

AGENDA

What is SEO?

Search Trends

How Search Engines Work

Ranking Factors

Free Tools

WHAT IS SEO?

Free traffic

More visitors

More downloads

More transactions

More successful

S earch E ngine O ptimization

WHAT IS SEO? (CONT’D)

All major search engines have documentation

Webmaster Guidelines Bing: help.live.com/help.aspx?mkt= en-us&project=wl_webmasters Google: www.google.com/support/webmasters Yahoo: help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/basics-18.html

AGENDA

What is SEO?

Search Trends

Ranking Factors

Free Tools

UNIVERSAL SEARCH

Search engines are blending different results

Less real estate for text results on first page

SNIPLETS PRESENTATION

Enhance your site presentation through structured metadata

Yahoo Search Monkey

Google Rich Sniplets

Y! Search Monkey: developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/ Google Rich Sniplets: microformats.org/wiki/google-search

AGENDA

What is SEO?

Search Trends

Ranking Factors

Free Tools

SITE CRAWLING

Search engine robots crawl the web to discover new content.

Crawlers follow extractable links .

Sitemaps can help pages get discovered.

XML sitemap

HTML sitemap

SITE INDEXING

Search engines download and store HTML content.

Only extractable

content is indexed.

SITE RANKING

Search engines rank websites according to relevance factors.

Important ranking factors:

Keyword in anchor tag to the page

Links to the page and site

Page title

H1 tag

Quality of the content

AGENDA

What is SEO?

Search Trends

Ranking Factors

Free Tools

Ranking Factors

Links

URL structure

Meta content

Page content and elements

Sitemap

$lumps = array ( ‘L’ => ‘Links’ , ‘ U’ => ‘URL’ , ‘ M’ => ‘Meta Tags’ , ‘ P’ => ‘Page content’ , ‘ S’ => ‘Sitemaps’ ) ;

Discovery

LINKS

Relevance

CORRECT : Find great deals on computers !

INCORRECT: Find great deals on computers!

mysite.com

LINKS (CONT’D)

Quality of links to a page

Quantity of links to a page

Keyword used in the anchor tag

External links: majority to home page

Internal links: through site structure

About page rank: www.google.com/corporate/tech.html

URL STRUCTURE

Keyword rich domain

Considerations for URL Avoid big number of parameters Keywords in URL

URL STRUCTURE

Avoid canonical URL problems

www.mysite.com/index.php

www.mysite.com/

mysite.com/index.php

mysite.com/

Canonical tag is a band aid to solve this problem:

META TAGS

Meta tags are HTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page

<head> <title>eBay Daily Deal: Great items, deep discounts, and free shipping</title> <meta name=“description” content=“Attention dealhunters: Save money on eBay with the Daily Deal. Check back every day for great items, deep discounts, and free shipping.”> <meta name=“keywords” content=“deal, deals”> </head>

TITLE TAG FORMULAS

Keep SERP listings consistent across site

Reinforces branding

Informational Action Words: Learn, Discover, Find, Read, See

Transactional Action Words: Buy, Try, Get, Download

Informative Page Tag: [Primary Keyword] – [Action Words] [Secondary Keyword or Keyword Variation] [Brand or Company Name] Product Page Tag: [Product Name] – [Action Words] [Secondary Keywords or Keyword Variation] [Brand or Company Name] Example: Nintendo Wii – Buy Wii Game Console on eBay

META TAGS Does the result inspire a click?

PAGE CONTENT & ELEMENTS

Build pages for two user agents:

Users

Crawlers

Content in HTML

Prevent usage of flash or other rich media

PAGE CONTENT & ELEMENTS (CONT’D) Use semantic HTML <h1>My Article Title</h1> <p>Scientist reported Wednesday…</p> <span class=“heading1”>My Article Title</span> <p>Scientist reported Wednesday…</p>

SITEMAPS

Submit a XML sitemap to all major search engines for easy discovery of your pages.

Add sitemap location to Robots.txt file.

XML Sitemap <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> - <sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> - <sitemap> <loc>http://listing-index.ebay.com/sitemap_google_auction_intl_AU_2009060315_672001_1001.xml.gz</loc> </sitemap> </sitemapindex>

SITEMAPS (CONT’D)

HTML sitemap

Build an HTML sitemap with all links on your site

For users and for search engines

No more than 50 links

AGENDA

What is SEO?

Search Trends

Ranking Factors

Free Tools

Free Tools Search engine web tools Google webmaster Tools: www.google.com/webmasters/ Yahoo Site Explorer: siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com Bing Webmaster Center: www.bing.com/webmaster

FREE TOOLS (CONT’D)

Free Firefox plug-in toolbar

Web developer toolbar Web developer toolbar: chrispederick.com/work/web-developer

Free Tools (CONT’D) Keyword research tools Google Search Insights: www.google.com/insights/search/

FREE TOOLS (CONT’D) Keyword research tools

FREE TOOLS (CONT’D) Microsoft excel ad intelligence plug-in Microsoft Ad Intelligence: advertising.microsoft.com/search-advertising/advertising-intelligence

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS