This document provides an overview of search engine optimization (SEO), including how search engines work, how to optimize a website for search engines, and potential pitfalls to avoid. It discusses how search engines index websites, use keyword relevance to determine search rankings, and evaluate over 200 factors. The document also outlines techniques to optimize on-page elements like titles, descriptions and internal links, as well as off-page elements like external links, and warns against black hat SEO tactics that try to artificially manipulate rankings.

2. At the end of this presentation you will know
• Why is search important?
• What is search engine, and how does it work?
• How to optimize website for the search engines?
• What is Black Hat SEO and why should we avoid it?

3. Search Engine Marketing

4. What’s in it for marketers
• They give website owners a prime opportunity to put their offerings
in front of a vast number of prospective customers exactly when
they are looking for it
• 80% of internet users find new websites is by typing a query into one
of the major search engines ~ Jupiter Research

5. How do search engines work?
• Putting users first makes SE richer
• Objective: deliver timely, relevant, high quality search results
• Rationale: better search experience  better reputation of the SE
 more users it will attract  more ad revenues
• Sourcing the web: SEs need to gather detailed information about
billions of pages from the web, using automated programs called
Bots or Spiders
• The internet is a like a book with millions of pages. SEs’ goal is to
index these pages

6. Crawling & Indexing
How do search engines work?

7. How do search engines work?
• The list of result is run through a ranking algorithm
• The output is then sorted in order of relevance and presented to the
users in the SERPs
• There are some 200 criteria to pick out the most relevant results
from millions of others
• Each year Google introduces over 500 improvements into its search
algorithm

8. Google has one over-riding criteria in determining
search rank: Relevance!

9. How to determine Relevance?
• Content (relevance and quality)
• Link popularity and relevance ( includes social media)
• Tech Factors and Usability
• Trust Rank (Site age and credibility)
• Geo-targeting (Domain, hosting, etc.)

10. Optimizing your Website
• Follow SE’s own guidelines, tips and resources
Eg: Webmaster Central by Google at www.google.com/webmasters
• Make your site easy to crawl: more text, less graphics, animation
and flash
• Words are the key: know what people, looking for your product are
typing into that little box
• Keywords form the foundation of your SEO efforts
• Choosing effective keywords: Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes
Keywords

11. Optimizing your Website
• Examine the sites that are ranking highly for your chosen keywords
• Additionally there are wide range of automated keyword suggestion
tools like, the free tool provided by Google AdWords or Wordtracker
• These tools provide insight into search traffic volumes for the most
popular phrases relating to keyword phrases you provide
• Analyze the competition: there are tools that can provide you with
insight into how your leading competitors are doing in terms of traffic
for a particular keyword Eg: Toolset and compete

12. Finding the right keywords
Google Keyword tool

13. Optimizing your Website
• Start small: optimize a few pages for your main keywords and
monitor the results on ranking, traffic and conversions
• Eliminate words or phrases that are much too general
• Find elusive balance between keywords search volume and
keywords specificity that drives the maximum volume of targeted
traffic
• Your target keywords should be more than two, three or more words
long
• Find right mixture of short -tail keywords and long-tail keywords
• Focus on one page at a time
• Each page in your website will have different target keywords that
reflect the page’s content
• The more individual pages you have the more opportunities you
have to get your business in front of your prospects

14. Optimizing your Website
• Choose your page title (clickable blue link) carefully
• Weaving your primary keywords into the title tag whenever possible
• Give each page a unique meta description tag: it can help you to
boost your CTR
• Remember you are writing content for human audience first and
then for SE spiders
• Keywords in content: your chosen keywords are contained in the
title tag and URL and make sure your content is on topic
• Links: quantity and quality of references or links to a page from other
web pages

15. Optimizing your Website
• Generate truly valuable content that other sites will want to link to
• Let people know your site is out there
• Create your own blog
• Use your network
• Ask the people who link to your competitors to link to you
• Encourage links within content and with descriptive anchor text
• Submit your site to high quality directories
• Use link bait
• Offer to swap links with a select few relevant high quality sites
Link-building tips

16. SEO myths
• You should submit your URLs to search engines
• You need a Google sitemap
• You need to update your site frequently
• PPC ads will help/hurt you rankings
• Your site will be banned if you buy links

17. Black Hat SEO
Less ethical practitioners attempt to exploit every trick and loophole
they can find to game the engines, increase their rankings and drive
traffic to their sites

18. Some common Black Hat SEO techniques
• Keyword stuffing: Repeating keywords over and over again on a
given web page
• Cloacking: Technique that uses code to show one search-engine-
friendly page to the spider and a completely different page to a
human visitor
• Invisible text: Text that is the same colour as the background of the
page
• Interlinking: Setting up multiple website on a given topic and linking
backwards and forwards between them
• Selling links to help ranking: If you have high ranking website, you
sell links from your site to another
Thumb Rule
If what you are doing to your website adds genuine value to the end
users you generally have nothing to worry about

19. Negative SEO
Damaging the ranking of competitors or even get them banned
Types
• DOS and 404 errors: The attacker initiates a denial-of service attack
(DOS) to swamp the target domain
• Redirection: The attacker redirects to the targeted pages from the
bad websites

20. Universal Search
Integrates search results from other specialized search engines

21. The impact of Universal Search
• Google organic - can have multiple placements
• Google places (maps) - use when relevant
• Google Ad words - will increase exposure for targeted keywords
• Google News, shopping, etc.
Be as visible as possible!