Affiliates
LONDON | NEW YORK
Display
International
Leadgeneration
Mobile
PPC
SEO
Socialmedia
Web search
Lunch and learn
Web search
• Interesting digital statistics
• Background to web search
– What is web search?
– Search engine market share
– Origin of search engines
• An introduction to SEO
– What is SEO?
– How do sites rank?
Fascinating statistics
2010
30 hours
2013
50 hours
Population
~7 billion
Internet users
Active SM users
Active mobile subscriptions
~2.5 billion
~1.8 billion
~6.5 billion
February 2014
Europe internet penetration: 68%
UK internet penetration: 87%
Google statistics
8.64 billion
16.4% -
25%
163
searches
What is web search?
• Utility tool used to locate web sites on the web
• Most popular method of finding information
• A searcher driven program offering unique features to build and find information
Public domain dedication license (no copyright)
Search engine market share
Google
72%
Baidu
15%
Yahoo
6% Bing
6%
AOL
0%
ASK
0%
Excite
0%
Other
1%
1945
1950s
1990
Information retrieval
Automation
Archie
History of web search
Why use search engines?
• Resolve some problem
– E.g. [London weather]
• Achieve some goal, which is usually linked to expanding knowledge
– E.g. Download a map
SEO
Natural ranking / organic search
SEO: what and why?
• Makes web sites rank high on search engines
– This increases web visibility
– Gets more visitors…
How does SEO work?
WEB INFORMATION
RETRIEVAL
Query dependent
Query independent
Term frequency
Term proximity
• Terms at the beginning of a document are more important than terms at the end
• Exact phrases are preferred
Search term order
Is Bing better
than Google?
Is Google better
than Bing?
Term location
H1
First line,
first paragraph
Logo
www.7thingsmedia.com
Meta data
• “Data about data”
Emphasis
• Bold
• Italics
Inverse document frequency
• Rare terms are preferred
What is emotional design?
Anchor text
• 7thingsmedia
Language
• Same language as user is preferred
Geo targeting
• Geographically closer websites have better rankings
[English workshop]
EnglishWorkshop.eu
does not rank well in UK
WEB INFORMATION
RETRIEVAL
Query dependent
Query independent
Directory hierarchy
Number of incoming links
• More links, higher ranking
– Today it is all about quality as supposed to quantity
Link popularity
Up to date
• Current sites preferred
Document length
• Varies depending upon goal
• For blog posts it is a good idea to have, minimum, 300 words
File format
• HTML preferred, PDF and .doc not so much
Site size
• Documents from large sites preferred, small not so much
SEO in 2014
Content marketing
Ranking factors Social media
PR
Digital marketing
Marketing
fin.
gerald.murphy@7thingsmedia.com
@GeraldSearch
www.7thingsmedia.com
@7thingsmedia
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All information contained herein will be treated as confidential material with no less care than afforded by your own company’s confidential material.
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Copyright © 2014 7thingsmedia LTD.

An introduction to web information retrieval