Guava Percussion CMS SEO

An introduction to
Search Engine Optimisation

. . . and 5 things you can do.

Edward Cowell – Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Director. Guava.co.uk Copyright Guava UK Ltd · All material 1 confidential
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Who are Guava ?

Over ten years market leading
search engine marketing
experience

Global capacity

218 staff (65 in UK)

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Accreditations

Guava are a Google Adwords Qualified Company

Guava are Google Enterprise Partners

Guava are Google Analytics Partners

Guava are Omniture Partners

Guava are members of:
– Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) (Search Council)
– SEMPO (UK working group)
– e-consultancy

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- What are search engines, why are they
important?
- What search engines do people use?
- How do people use search engines?
- What is search engine optimisation?
- What is pay-per-click advertising?
- 5 things you can do…

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What are search engines, why
are they important?

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The School of Information Management and Systems
at the University of California-Berkeley calculates

…Five exabytes of new information - roughly five billion
gigabytes - was created in 2002 alone. Five exabytes
is like half a million libraries as big as the Library of
Congress print collections.

Almost 800 MB of recorded information is produced per
person, per year: if stored on paper, that would take up
about ten metres (30 feet) of books.

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003

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Yahoo! = 20 billion items in 2005

over 19.2 billion web documents
1.6 billion images
over 50 million audio and video files

Source: 2005 http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000172.html

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Google = 50,000,000,000 items?

and growing

and we all expect instantaneous
results ☺

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73%
New website visitors which come from a search engine.

(Forrester)

Edward Cowell – Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Director. Guava.co.uk Copyright Guava UK Ltd · All material is confidential
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What search engines do
people use?

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They did use all of these:

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But now they mostly use:

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Hitwise.co.uk

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“People always make the
assumption that we're done with
search. That's very far from the
case. We're probably only 5 per
cent of the way there. We want to
create the ultimate search engine
that can understand anything ...
some people could call that
artificial intelligence.”
Larry Page, Google

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Cue scary music & dim lights

Google's mission is to organize
the world's information and
make it universally accessible
and useful.

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How do people use
search engines?

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Search experiences

Research/Info (Google, Yahoo, MSN Live)
Commercial (Ebay, Amazon, Rightmove)
News (Google News, Technorati, Digg)
Entertainment (YouTube, IMDB, Pirate Bay)

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What is
search engine optimisation?

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“Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of
methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of
a website in search engine listings.”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEO

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Search engine optimisation is not
considered bad by Google…

…but some search engine
optimisation techniques are.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291

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What is
pay-per-click advertising?

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Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising
model…where advertisers only pay when a
user actually clicks on an advert to visit the
advertiser's website.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_per_click

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Pay per click advertising is how Google
makes its money

It pays for the services provided by Google
for free that we may sometimes take for
granted

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Pay Per Click Adverts

Organic

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What can you do?

1) Understand that search engine
optimisation (SEO) is not a magic wand
that can be easily waved after the
website is launched. Consider SEO as a
core part of your development process.

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Most common mistakes

URL’s
• Unavailability/broken links
• Complexity
• Inconsistency

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Unavailability

Can my pages get into a search engine?
Getting into search engines ‘indexed’

• Form based navigation
• Frames
• Flash
• JavaScript

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Form based navigation

<form action="browse.php" method="get">
<input name="interest" type="text">
<select name="topic">
<option>option 1</option>
</select>
</form>

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Complexity

yourwebsite.com?sessid=8989adh98ah89hd98ahkNLK

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yourwebsite.com?var1=value1& var2=value2& var3=value3&
var4=value4&var5=value5

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Inconsistency

www.domain.com/path1

www.domain.com/path2

301 redirects, canonical tag

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What can you do?

2) Make use of freely available tools to
help you understand how search
engines view your website

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www.google.com/webmasters

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What can you do?

3) Describe your content clearly, and at
the same time align it with what
internet users are searching for.

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http://trends.google.com/trends

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Can my pages perform better in a search engine?

• Title
• Description
• Content
• Images

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Title

<title> is the key display element of your
'listing‘ in news and web results.

It is credited with a high-ranking
importance; yet also it needs to be
descriptive and eye catching to ensure
the potential visitor clicks on your listing
within the search engines.

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Title

<title>Lipsum Lorem Ipsum</title>

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Title

Google shows maximum 72 characters including
spaces

Titles should be descriptive and unique

Currently, the Google News crawler only visits
each article URL once. If you make updates to
the article after Google has crawled it, it won't
be reflected on Google news

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Description

Depending on what someone had actually searched for,
Google may use the description or select text from within
the webpage itself to display in the snippet text.

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Headings

Headings – H1/H2

The main heading for each page should
aim to include the target keyphrase(s),
be clear and concise, and above all,
useful to your readers.

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Images

Images

An image is worth a thousand words

but not in Google

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Images

Some websites get a lot of traffic from Google
Image Search.

The alt tag can be applied to an image - its main
purpose is for user accessibility.

Inserting appropriate target phrases in alt tags
and image file names also improves the overall
keyword density and helps search engines
understand what the image is about.

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What can you do?

4) Encourage users to link to your content,
and implement features that help gain
links.

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Measurement of links as a vote
revolutionised search engine technology
(PageRank)

Influences good rankings on most search
engines

<a href="/page.htm">I love you
I you</a>

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Links from Internal and External Pages

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What can you do?

Use social media to increase brand
awareness, gain traffic and support
your SEO.

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Online retailers received more traffic from Social
networks than webmail services in December
2008.

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• Social Networking
• Social Bookmarking
• RSS
• Micro Blogging
• Forums

• Usenet (1979)
• Internet Relay Chat (IRC) (1988)
• Bulletin Boards (1970s)

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Social Networking

These sites are not so helpful for SEO and
are more used for their immense traffic
potential

They are good for branding,
communication, making connections and
increasing a website's internet
“footprint”

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Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking

Saving, sharing and sometimes voting on
things you find interesting.

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Social Bookmarking

Make sure your content is getting
bookmarked, your competitors is!!!

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What can you do?

5) Manage change. Consider processes
and tools to provide an approach for
managing increasingly important
website updates and migrations.

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Website updates and migrations

• Site migration best practice (domains, hosting etc)
• Auditing indexed and public pages
• Planning redirects and redirection rules
• Testing redirections have been set up correctly
• Error handling

• Preventing / mitigating against near total loss of
organic search traffic

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Summary

1. Understand that search engine optimisation (SEO) is
not a magic wand - build it into your processes.

2. Use freely available tools

3. Describe your content clearly - let your content
market itself.

4. Encourage users to link to your content - it's a sign of
relevance.

5. Manage change - consider the impact of website
updates and migrations on where your traffic is
coming from.
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www.guava.co.uk
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