Maximising Online Resource Effectiveness Workshop Session 2/8 Conventional SEO overview

SEO—SCAMORE 2/8
competing against the millions?

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/great_northern_running/2950700489/

Conventional SEO overview
Session 2/8

The challenge

‣ You have (or will have) an online resource (web site)
‣ To which you want to attract visitors
‣ The right kind of visitors
‣ Who will find all that's relevant to them on your site
‣ And get real value from what they find
‣ Then tell others, who will do the same
‣ And you will obtain evidence of this
‣ So that you can secure funding to keep things going
‣ And improve the site
‣ And maybe make it something more important
‣ By being the definitive source of something
‣ In a bigger picture

The real challenge

Convergence is everywhere. It’s easier than
ever to reach a large audience, but harder
than ever to really connect with it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8

Search engines—signposts or advertising billboards?

Advertising?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8

Search engine use

February US search engine market share
numbers are in, more of the same
Andrew Munchbach, 10 March 2010

‣ Google and Bing both gained a little ground: Google’s market share rose from
65.4% to 65.5% while Bing’s share rose from 11.3% to 11.5%.
‣ Yahoo and Ask both gave up a little bit of the search pie: Yahoo declined from 17%
to 16.8% and Ask fell slightly from 3.8% to 3.7% market share.
‣ AOL’s slice of search remained unchanged at around 2.5%.

http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/03/10/

Search engine use

Global search engine market, Q1 2010

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx?qprid=4

Google search engine operation overview

http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dc5x7mrn_245gf8kjwfx

Google search results—basics


Title


Title

Description

<head>
<title>Strategic Content Alliance MORE: About us</title>
<meta name="Description" content="The aim of this web site to create a useful
resource for all participants of the SCA MORE 2010 workshops." />

Appropriate content management system

Getting started with Google

Google's webmaster guidelines
When your site is ready
‣ Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
‣ Submit a sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your sitemap to
learn about the structure of your site and to increase coverage of your web pages.
‣ Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is
online.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?&answer=35769

XML sitemaps

Confirming what should be indexed
‣ sitemaps are an easy way to inform search engines about pages to be indexed,
submitted to Google when a site is added via Webmaster Tools
‣ a sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata
about each URL—when last updated, how often it is likely to change, how important
it is compared to all others
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/section.html</loc>
<lastmod>2007-10-08T10:28:56+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.64</priority>
</url>
‣ sitemaps can link discrete sections of a site together that may not have any direct
links between them
‣ sitemaps can be “hand written” or generated using a “tool” (and edited as
appropriate)
‣ search engines can index the site more intelligently using a sitemap
‣ the sitemap 0.90 protocol is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike
Creative Commons License and has wide adoption, including support from Google
and Microsoft

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php


Design and content guidelines
‣ Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links.
‣ Offer a sitemap to your users.
‣ Create a useful, information-rich site, with accurate pages.
‣ Think about keywords and make sure that your site actually includes them.
‣ Use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links.
‣ Make sure that <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive.
‣ Check for broken links and correct HTML.
‣ Be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages.
‣ Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
‣ Review image guidelines for best practices on publishing images.



Technical guidelines
‣ Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site and check that JavaScript,
cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash don't prevent access to essential
content.
‣ Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track
their path through the site. Otherwise possible incomplete indexing, as bots may
not eliminate URLs that look different but point to the same page.
‣ Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This
feature allows your web server to tell Google when content last changed.
‣ Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server.
‣ If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system
creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.
‣ Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of pages that don't add much value.
‣ Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.


Preventing search engine indexing

Common use of robots exclusion protocol
Most web sites have a file in the document root called robots.txt
‣ informs all “robot” software (spiders, crawlers, indexers) what files or directories
should not be indexed
‣ very unhelpful if configured wrongly
‣ easily checked by viewing http://website/robots.txt

The same objective can be achieved using a <META> tag
‣ applies to only the single web page containing the tag in document head
‣ <META name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOINDEX”>
Useful for preventing inappropriate indexing of parts of a site
‣ e.g. files relating to administration of the site or similar
Can also be used to identify where a sitemap.xml is located
‣ include line as follows
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

http://www.robotstxt.org/ http://scamore.eforum.org/robots.txt


Quality guidelines—basic principles
‣ Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or
present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is
commonly referred to as “cloaking”.
‣ Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is
whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that
competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I
do this if search engines didn't exist?”
‣ Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking. In
particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighbourhoods” on the web, as
your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
‣ Don't use unauthorised computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc.
Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service.
Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold that
send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.



Specific quality guidelines
‣ Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
‣ Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
‣ Don't send automated queries to Google.
‣ Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
‣ Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate
content.
‣ Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses,
trojans, or other “badware”.
‣ Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter"
approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
‣ If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value.
Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site
first.


Practical exercise—SEO actions for a specific web site

This exercise should be done as individuals, with group consultation

Consider your web site
‣ identify any actions that you believe you should take to ensure that all basic SEO
guidelines are satisfied
‣ for each action identify how urgently it should be addressed
‣ for each action identify anyone you need to discuss the matter with in order to have
it resolved properly
‣ estimate when each action is likely to be completed

Practical exercise—SEO actions

Others who need to be Target date for
Action Urgency
involved completion

Google analytics

Getting started with Google Analytics
‣ Create a Google account
‣ Identify your unique web ID
‣ Insert unique ID into Javascript tracking code and add this code to all pages (which
links to JavaScript library on the Google servers)
‣ After logging in to your account you may select reports of interest from your Google
Analytics dashboard

http://services.google.com/analytics/tour/index_en-GB.html

Google analytics

http://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/analytics/tour.html

Google analytics

How Google Analytics works
‣ when a page is accessed the “track page view” script referred to in the tracking
code runs
‣ this collects HTTP and browser data, reads and writes a cookie on the user's
machine, and sends an update to a Google secure server (via parameters on an
ordinary web request)
‣ all parameters relating to the page access are then stored in the logs of the Google
secure server and from there used to compile reports on the Google servers

Implications
‣ requires Javascript on client machine
‣ must use cookie
‣ results not available immediately
‣ records use of cached and reloaded pages

Avoiding SEO mistakes

Nine common SEO campaign mistakes
Jaamit Durrani, 25 March 2010

1. Obsessing over onsite SEO
2. Forgetting about the foundations
3. Worshipping the false idol: the homepage
4. Fawning over 'BigHead' keywords
5. Ignoring conversion and analytics
6. Obsessing over analytics
7. Tweakophobia
8. The Premier League chairman factor
9. Reading too many SEO blogs!

http://econsultancy.com/blog/5530-nine-common-seo-campaign-mistakes

Maximising online resource effectiveness


increasing
significance
improvement
sustainability

evidence
of success
measurement
of activity
visitor
satisfaction
impression
of value
total discovery
visitor
numbers
online resource


increasing
significance
improvement
sustainability

evidence
of success
measurement
of activity
visitor
satisfaction
impression
of value
total discovery
visitor
numbers Structure
online resource


increasing
significance
improvement
sustainability

evidence
of success
measurement
of activity
visitor
satisfaction
Accessibility impression
of value
total discovery
visitor
numbers Structure
online resource


increasing
significance
improvement
sustainability

evidence
of success
measurement Integrity
of activity
visitor
satisfaction
of value
total discovery
visitor
numbers Structure
online resource


increasing
significance
improvement
Metadata
sustainability

evidence
of success
of activity
visitor
satisfaction
of value
total discovery
visitor
numbers Structure
online resource


Richer semantics
increasing
significance
improvement
Metadata
sustainability

evidence
of success
of activity
visitor
satisfaction
of value
total discovery
visitor
numbers Structure
online resource


Richer semantics Social media
increasing
significance
improvement
Metadata
sustainability

evidence
of success
of activity
visitor
satisfaction
of value
total discovery
visitor
numbers Structure
online resource

Practical exercise—why do people visit web sites

1. Individually, for 5 minutes, write down the
five web sites you visit most
2. Rank these in order of importance
3. Briefly note the reasons for using each
4. Then, appoint a group notetaker and
spokesperson and compile a merged list
from all the single lists
5. If a web site features more than once,
indicate the frequency

Practical exercise—why do people visit web sites

Web site address Importance Reasons for using

Maximising Online Resource Effectiveness Workshop Session 2/8 Conventional SEO overview

Maximising Online Resource Effectiveness Workshop Session 2/8 Conventional SEO overview

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