MKT 420 Search Engine Optimization Michael Germano Department of Marketing College of Business and Economics California State University, Los Anglees

1. MKT 420
Week 1

2. Agenda
• Syllabus and Course Requirements Review
• Project Team Signups
• Search Industry Overview
• Search Basics

3. Search
• Revolutionary change in the way we get information
• Search engines represent one of the biggest leaps
forward for humankind.
• Disruptive event that has led to enormous changes
in our lives. What are they?

4. Search Engines’ Mission

5. Searching and satisfying
needs (value!)
• Search Engine Land

6. Searcher Intent
• Navigational
• Informational
• Transactional
• Adaptive search attempts to understand the intent of
the searcher with regards to the type of query
because they have varying degrees of value to
search engine marketers.
• Searcher intent is not always correctly inferred. 22%
of time in fact. Implications?

7. How do people search?
• Multistep
• Most searches that result in conversions (purchase,
call to action, satisfaction of need) feature around an
hour of browsing, 10 different clicks, same day
purchase (50%), entering keywords/search terms
about a half dozen times

8. E-commerce and search

9. Heat maps and eye tracking
• SERPs are
designed with
human factors in
mind
• Yet our attention is
constantly being
altered by SERP
design
• Symbiotic

10. Paid placement compared to
earned/organic

11. Distribution on SERP still
predicts CTR

12. Bringing it together

13. Taking a step back…
• How do search engines work?
• What is going on when you search?

14. All SERPs are sort of the
same…
• Search box
• Vertical search navigation
• Results information
• Paid Advertising
• “Product” results
• Algorithmic results
• Query refinement/related searches

15. Algorithmic search
• Based upon potentially infinite numbers of decisions
• Inferential
• Not precise if we define precise as finding a specific
thing only
• Totally different from keyword databases
• Predictive, contextual and adaptive
• Sometimes they fail. Why?

16. What do search engines
see?
• Reading source code
is important for SEO
but no need to be
overwhelmed
• We’ll cover this later
but here’s a good
primer/overview

17. Crawling and Indexing
• What search engines do with what they see…
• They interpret and rank for trustworthiness, value
and uniqueness of content by indexing and
categorizing content of the page as well as
inbound and outbound links (putting the web in the
world wide web!)
• Not all content is indexed

18. Ranking Factors
• According to Moz:
• Domain level links
• Page level links
• Page level content and keywords
• Brand metrics (social media presence for example;
mentions on other sites)
• Page traffic
• Social traffic (Google denies!)

19. Negative ranking factors
• Malware
• Cloaking (keyword stuffing for example)
• Paid links or purchased links
• Link acquisition timeline
• Speed of time to load a page