An introduction to Search Engine Optimization and different techniques applicable. The presentation also goes into the history of web, and how things changed from time to time.

1. Search Engine
Optimization Primer
Presented by:
Nadeem Khan
http://www.arkhitech.com

2. History of Internet

3. Web 1.0
• When internet was only used for “as information source”
• Static pages

10. Web 2.0 (2004 onwards)
• Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve
information
• Web now used as “a participation platform”
• Rich User Experience
• User as a Contributor

17. Web 3.0 – The Future
• When “computers will be generating new information”
• Semantic Web (common/structured data formats)

18. Search Engine Marketing /
Search Engine Optimization

19. How Do Search Engines Work?
• Spider “crawls” the web to find new documents (web pages, other documents) typically
by following hyperlinks from websites already in their database
• Search engines indexes the content (text, code) in these documents by adding it to their
databases and then periodically updates this content
• Search engines search their own databases when a user enters in a search to find
related documents (not searching web pages in real-time)
• Search engines rank the resulting documents using an algorithm (mathematical
formula) by assigning various weights and ranking factors

20. How Do Search Engines Work
(Continued)?

21. Search Engine Marketing
(SEM)
• the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility
in search engine results pages (SERPs) through SEO as well as
through advertising (paid placements, contextual advertising,
and paid inclusions).

23. SEO - Search Engine
Optimization
• The process of improving web pages so they rank higher
(naturally) in search engines for your targeted keywords.
• SEOer considers how search engines work, what people
search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into
search engines.

24. Why SEO should be Done?
• 81% of Internet consumers find web sites via
search engines.
• 85%* of all Website traffic and 70%* of all online
purchases originate from a search engine.
(*Jupiter Research)
• “4/5 Internet users say they use a Search Engine
daily”
• The top three organic positions receive 58.4% of
all clicks from users
• 90% of all users don’t look past the first 30
results (most only view top 10)

25. Popular Search Engines 2012

26. Popular Search Engines 2013
(no major change in years – Google’s Monopoly)

28. Types of SEO
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On-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO
Site-wide SEO
Negative SEO
(Note: Site-wide SEO is usually considered to be a part of on-Page SEO by most SEOers.)

29. On Page SEO
Activities done on the pages of the website itself that can
involve:
• editing content and HTML of a page to increase its relevance
to specific keywords
• removing barriers to the indexing activities of search engine
spiders
Note: Humans and bots view sites differently
See Yourself: http://www.seo-browser.com/

30. On Page SEO (Continued)
• What is the point in having a website that looks great if it can’t
be found?
• Is there any point of being easy to find if the website isn’t
engaging?

31. Off Page SEO
• Revolves around increasing the number of backlinks for a particular
keyword to rank higher naturally for that particular keyword in
SERPs

32. Site Wide SEO
• Tweaking linking and navigation structure that is deployed across an
entire website
• Most SEOers consider it a part of On-page SEO

33. Negative SEO
• Evil backlinks, content scraping, evil crawlers
• Google denied its existence for 14 years, then finally released Link
Disavow tool on October 16, 2012 to help webmasters get rid of evil
backlinks
• Still works against newbie webmasters

34. SEO Tactics
• White Hat SEO Tactics
Techniques that search engines recommend - produces results that last a
long time but are extremely slow
• Black Hat SEO Tactics
Techniques that improve rankings in ways that are disapproved by the search
engines or involve deception – should be avoided
• Grey Hat SEO Tactics
Something in between both white hat and black hat techniques – what
everyone actually does

35. Keyword Analysis – The Real Thing
• Techniques used by webmasters to get more visibility and traffic for
their sites in search engine results pages
• Extremely versatile (defers from person to person)

36. How Google Works

37. How Google Search Used to
Work
• It started out with ‘PageRank’ algorithm
• In simple words, Google’s spider crawls a URL and its content
and saves it in its index. When users write a search on Google
Search, it checks its index and compiles a list of relevant
pages. After that it ranks pages according to their link
authority (PageRank) and displays the result to a user.

38. How Google Search Works Now
• More than 200 separate coded equations – that power Google's
endless trawl for answers through pretty much all of history's
recorded knowledge!
• No one except people at Google know the exact recipe of ranking in
Google Search
• Google Search is constantly
changing at a rapid pace
Matt Cutts (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/)
(Head of Google’s Webspam Team)

39. How Google Search Works Now
(Continued)
• Google Dances (2000-2002)
• Boston (1st to be officially named – index refresher) and Florida (keyword
stuffing) (2003)
• Austin (deceptive on-page tactics) and Brandy (LSI) Updates (2004)
• Allegra (LSI 2.0), Bourbon (www vs non-www, duplicate content) and
Jagger (reciprocal links, link farms) Updates + nofollow and Local Maps
introduced (2005)

40. How Google Search Works Now
(Continued)
• Universal Search introduced (News, Video, Images, Local, and other
verticals)(2007)
• Vince (big brands friendly) and Caffeine (realtime indexation) Updates +
rel=canonical and Real time search introduced (2009)
• May Day (long tail low quality) and Brand (same domain to appear multiple
times) Updates + Google Instant and Social signals (data from Twitter
and Facebook) introduced (2010)

41. How Google Search Works Now
(Continued)
• Panda (revolutionary) and Freshness (time sensitivity) updates along
with Google+, +1 & structured data introduced (2011)
• Search + Your World (personalized results), Penguin (poor link profiles),
EMD, Venice (integrate local search data), Ads Above Fold and DMCA
Penalty, 7-Result SERPs updates … Link Warnings and Knowledge
Graph introduced (2012)
• Phantom (unknown), Payday Loan (Porn, Payday), Hummingbird (major
core algorithm update), In-depth Articles(new type of news), and
Authorship Shake-up Updates (2013)
Under the Hood: ‘Author Rank’ , Co-citation algorithm

42. Google Panda Update
• Human quality testers rated thousands of websites based on
‘User Experience’
• PageRank got automatically downgraded in importance as
new factors got into picture
• Technically a new factor not an algo update

43. Google Penguin Update
• An algo update that targeted the link profiles of websites
• Main target: exact match anchor texts in link profiles

44. Exact Match Domain Update
(EMD)
• Main target: low quality exactly matching websites built
around exactly matching keywords

46. Hummingbird Update (2013)
• The biggest overhaul to Google since 2009’s 'Caffeine’ update
(which focused on speed and integrating social network
results into search).
• It affects 'around 90% of searches.’

47. Author Rank
• In August of 2005, Google filed a patent for “Agent Rank”
• Google+ is the future, do you have a Google+ profile?
• Google Authorship Mark Up already being widely adapted

49. SEO Changing Rapidly

50. Co Citation Algorithm
• Anchor text to be replaced entirely (o.O)

52. What Does Google Actually
Want?
• Content should add ‘Unique Value’ to web (Google’s index)
• Content designed for users not for Google Bot
• Implement a search engine friendly design that makes it easy
for Google Bot to crawl and understand your site
• Focus on improving user experience and how to best answer a
user’s query
Note: At the end of the day its “500+ Engineers Vs Tricksters”,
whose going to win in the long run?

53. Counter Tactic by
Webmasters
Link Pyramids

54. Increased Focus on Premium SEO
Tools/Plugins
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Single tool to perform many tasks
Built-in diagnostics to uncover macro and micro issues
The ability to stay up-to-date with the search engines
Automated and highly customized reporting
Competitive edge
Better ROI
Effective KPIs

55. 200+ Equations/Factors at Work
Domain: 13 factors
• Domain age;
• Length of domain registration;
• Domain registration information hidden/anonymous;
• Site top level domain (geographical focus, e.g. com versus co.uk);
• Site top level domain (e.g. .com versus .info);
• Sub domain or root domain?
• Domain past records (how often it changed IP);
• Domain past owners (how often the owner was changed)
• Keywords in the domain;
• Domain IP;
• Domain IP neighbors;
• Domain external mentions (non-linked)
• Geo-targeting settings in Google Webmaster Tools

56. Server-side: 2 factors
• Server geographical location;
• Server reliability / uptime
Architecture: 8 factors
• URL structure;
• HTML structure;
• Semantic structure;
• Use of external CSS / JS files;
• Website structure accessibility (use of inaccessible navigation,
JavaScript, etc);
• Use of canonical URLs;
• “Correct” HTML code (?);
• Cookies usage;

57. Content: 14 factors
• Content language
• Content uniqueness;
• Amount of content (text versus HTML);
• Unlinked content density (links versus text);
• Pure text content ratio (without links, images, code, etc)
• Content topicality / timeliness (for seasonal searches for example);
• Semantic information (phrase-based indexing and co-occurring phrase
indicators)
• Content flag for general category (transactional, informational,
navigational)
• Content / market niche
• Flagged keywords usage (gambling, dating vocabulary)
• Text in images (?)
• Malicious content (possibly added by hackers);
• Rampant mis-spelling of words, bad grammar, and 10,000 word screeds
without punctuation;
• Use of absolutely unique /new phrases.

58. Internal Cross Linking: 5 factors
• # of internal links to page;
• # of internal links to page with identical / targeted anchor text;
• # of internal links to page from content (instead of navigation bar,
breadcrumbs, etc);
• # of links using “nofollow” attribute;
• Internal link density,
Website factors: 7 factors
• Website Robots.txt file content
• Overall site update frequency;
• Overall site size (number of pages);
• Age of the site since it was first discovered by Google
• XML Sitemap;
• On-page trust flags (Contact info ( for local search even more
important), Privacy policy, TOS, and similar);
• Website type (e.g. blog instead of informational sites in top 10)

59. Page-specific factors: 9 factors
• Page meta Robots tags;
• Page age;
• Page freshness (Frequency of edits and
% of page effected (changed) by page edits);
• Content duplication with other pages of the site (internal duplicate
content);
• Page content reading level;
• Page load time (many factors in here);
• Page type (About-us page versus main content page);
• Page internal popularity (how many internal links it has);
• Page external popularity (how many external links it has relevant to
other pages of this site);

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Keywords usage and keyword prominence: 13 factors
Keywords in the title of a page;
Keywords in the beginning of page title;
Keywords in Alt tags;
Keywords in anchor text of internal links (internal anchor text);
Keywords in anchor text of outbound links;
Keywords in bold and italic text ;
Keywords in the beginning of the body text;
Keywords in body text;
Keyword synonyms relating to theme of page/site;
Keywords in filenames;
Keywords in URL;
No “Randomness on purpose” (placing “keyword” in the domain,
“keyword” in the filename, “keyword” starting the first word of the title,
“keyword” in the first word of the first line of the description and keyword
tag…)
• The use (abuse) of keywords utilized in HTML comment tags

61. Outbound links: 8 factors
• Number of outbound links (per domain);
• Number of outbound links (per page);
• Quality of pages the site links in;
• Links to bad neighborhoods;
• Relevancy of outbound links;
• Links to 404 and other error pages.
• Links to SEO agencies from clients site
• Hot-linked images

62. Backlink profile: 21 factors
• Relevancy of sites linking in;
• Relevancy of pages linking in;
• Quality of sites linking in;
• Quality of web page linking in;
• Backlinks within network of sites;
• Co-citations (which sites have similar backlink sources);
• Link profile diversity:
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Anchor text diversity;
Different IP addresses of linking sites,
Geographical diversity,
Different TLDs,
Topical diversity,
Different types of linking sites (logs, directories, etc);
Diversity of link placements
Authority Link (CNN, BBC, etc) Per Inbound Link
Backlinks from bad neighborhoods (absence / presence of backlinks from flagged sites)
Reciprocal links ratio (relevant to the overall backlink profile);
Social media links ratio (links from social media sites versus overall backlink profile);
Backlinks trends and patterns (like sudden spikes or drops of backlink number)
Citations in Wikipedia and Dmoz;
Backlink profile historical records (ever caught for link buying/selling, etc);
Backlinks from social bookmarking sites.

63. Each Separate Backlink: 6 factors
• Authority of TLD (.com versus .gov)
• Authority of a domain linking in
• Authority of a page linking in
• Location of a link (footer, navigation, body text)
• Anchor text of a link (and Alt tag of images linking)
• Title attribute of a link
Visitor Profile and Behavior: 6 factors
• Number of visits;
• Visitors’ demographics;
• Bounce rate;
• Visitors’ browsing habits (which other sites they tend to visit)
• Visiting trends and patterns (like sudden spiked in incoming traffic)
• How often the listing is clicked within the SERPs (relevant to other
listings)

64. Penalties, Filters and Manipulation: 12 factors
• Keyword over usage / Keyword stuffing;
• Link buying flag
• Link selling flag;
• Spamming records (comment, forums, other link spam);
• Cloaking;
• Hidden Text;
• Duplicate Content (external duplication)
• History of past penalties for this domain
• History of past penalties for this owner
• History of past penalties for other properties of this owner
• Past hackers’ attacks records
• 301 flags: double re-directs/re-direct loops, or re-directs ending in 404 error
More Factors (6):
• Domain registration with Google Webmaster Tools;
• Domain presence in Google News;
• Domain presence in Google Blog Search;
• Use of the domain in Google AdWords;
• Use of the domain in Google Analytics;
• Business name / brand name external mentions.
Courtesy: Search Engine Journal

65. SEO Periodic Table (From SEL)

66. SEO is Really Complex and
Unpredictable Now