A talk I gave at ALA Midwinter 2016 to help librarians understand SEO so they could understand the language and to start the process of either farming it out, or do it themselves.

1. SEO BASICS
Foundations and Best Practices for
Search Engine Optimization

2. Experience Architect for ITHAKA
10 + years of practice
Design software, websites, services and multi-devices
Waterfall and Agile working environments
Government, Health Care, ECommerce, Higher Education
Former Digital Librarian
@atomaton

5. Data Centers

10. SEARCH RESULT
Title
The first blue line of any search
result is the title of the webpage.
Click the title to go to the site.
<title>
Title of Page | include keyword
or phrase close to the beginning
</title>
<meta name=“description”
content=“this is snippet text”>
Snippet
Below the URL is text that helps
show how the page relates to your
query. The words you search for will
show in bold to make it easier for
you to decide if the page has what
you're looking for.
URL
In green, you'll see the web
address of the site.
http://school.edu/use-hyphens

11. SEO DEFINITION
Achieving a high rank in the
search results of a search
engine organically

12. SEARCH EVOLUTION
1900s
Crawled once a month
end of month indexed
2010
introduced distributed indexing
2011
Machine learning
200 factors for signal boosting
2014
Synonym engine
2015
Mobile friendliness favored
600 updates a year

13. “Make pages primarily for users,
not for search engines. Don't
deceive your users or present
different content to search
engines than you display to users,
a practice commonly referred to
as "cloaking.”
UX

14. “Make a site with a clear
hierarchy and text links.”
“Every page should be
reachable from at least one
static text link.”
IA

15. “Create a useful,
information-rich site, and
write pages that clearly
and accurately describe
your content”
Content
Strategy

16. “Make sure that your <title>
elements and ALT attributes
are descriptive and
accurate.”
“Use keywords to create
descriptive, human-friendly
URLs. Provide one version of
a URL to reach a document,
using 301 redirects or the
rel="canonical" attribute to
address duplicate content.”
HTML

17. “Ensure a clean, keyword rich
URL structure is in place.”
“Create keyword-rich content
and match keywords to what
users are searching for.”
“Produce fresh content
regularly.”
Content
Strategy

18. “Make sure content is not buried inside
rich media (Adobe Flash Player, JavaScript,
Ajax) and verify that rich media doesn't
hide links from crawlers.”
“Don’t put the text that you want indexed
inside images. For example, if you want
your company name or address to be
indexed, make sure it is not displayed
inside a company logo.”
Limitations

19. NON-TEXT CONTENT
Animations
Flash files
Photos/Images
Video
Audio
Plug-in content
content in rich media
format is still difficult for
search engines to parse.
<img src="smiley.gif" alt="Smiley face">

20. BLOCKED CODE
Errors in a website's crawling directives may lead to blocking
search engines entirely.
ROBOT.TXT
a file at the root of your site that indicates
those parts of your site you don’t want
accessed by search engine crawlers.
User-agent: *
Disallow:

21. FORMS
Search engines cannot see
content beyond protected pages
Examples
login or survey barriers
FORMS/FRAMES
FRAMES
Present structural issues for the
engines in terms of organization
and following.
Bad for accessibility and printing

22. VOLUMINUS LINKS
Pages with hundreds of links on
them are at risk of not getting all of
those links crawled and indexed.
Search engines will only crawl so
many links on a given page

23. BAD LINK STRUCTURE
Bad link structure will inhibit a bot from
crawling all your pages. if it is crawled, the
minimally-exposed content may be deemed
unimportant by the engine's index.
Orphaned content
Lack of Hierarchy
Links not in HTML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<urlset>
<url>
<loc>http://example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2006-11-18</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
XML SITEMAP

24. MIXED SIGNALS/JARGON
MIXED MESSAGE
Title of page and content of
that page are not in harmony
Mixed messages send
confusing signals to search
engines.
JARGON
Text that is not written in the
common terms that people use
to search. For example, writing
about "food cooling units"
when people actually search
for "refrigerators."

25. DUPLICATE CONTENT
Websites using a CMS (Content Management System)
often create duplicate versions of the same page
Major problem for search engines looking for
completely original content.
<link rel="canonical" href=“http://www.school.edu>

26. Link Exchanges
Link Farms
Paid Links
Cloaking
Keyword Stuffing

27. FARMS
Fake or low-value websites are built or
maintained purely as link sources to
artificially inflate popularity.
EXCHANGES
Sites create link pages that point back and
forth to one another in an attempt to inflate
link popularity.
LINK FARMS/EXCHANGES

28. Links bought from sites
and pages willing to
place a link in exchange
for money.
PAID LINKS

29. Serving different content to
BOTS than to regular users.
Pages appear in search
results even though their
content is actually unrelated
to what users see/want
Google takes cloaking very
seriously.
CLOAKING

30. Keyword stuffing is a search
engine optimization (SEO)
technique, in which a web page is
loaded with keywords in the meta
tags or in content of a web page.
Keyword stuffing may lead to a
website being banned or
penalized in search ranking on
major search engines either
temporarily or permanently.
Google takes stuffing very
seriously.
KEYWORD STUFFING

31. BEST PRACTICES
• URL structure
• Anchor Text
• HTML Tags
• Meta Tags
• Canonical Tags
• Redirects
• Link Building
• Mobile Friendliness

32. TITLE TAG
Descriptive and readable for humans and bots
Begin with keyword or phrase
End with brand, school, or department name
75 Characters or less
Unique titles for each page
Do not stuff it with keywords (SPAM ALERT)
<head>
<title>
An accurate concise
description of a page's
content.
</title>
</head>

33. URL
Descriptive
Short
Include keyword
Use hyphens (-)
The best URLs are human-readable and
without lots of parameters, numbers, and
symbols.
http://www.sr.ithaka.org/blog/competency-based-creducation/
Transform dynamic URLs
mod_rewrite for Apache
ISAPI_rewrite for Microsoft

34. META DESCRIPTION
Use action-oriented language
Provide a solution or benefit
Make it specific and relevant
Keep it under 160 characters
Avoid keyword stuffing
Primary source for the snippet
of text displayed beneath a
listing in the results.
<meta name="Description"
content=“This content will show
up as the snippet” />

35. META KEYWORD
Include for internal search engines
Spammed to death, and
dropped by all the major
engines as an important ranking
signal.
<meta name=”keywords"
content=“This content will show
up as the snippet” />

36. ALT TAG
<img src=“bookCVR.gif” alt=”Title Author book cover">
Provide alt text for images
Web search
Image search
Accessibility

37. ANCHOR TEXT
<a href="http://www.example.com">Example Anchor Text</a>
SEO speak for hyperlink
Search engines use this text to help determine
the subject matter of the linked-to document.
Link relevancy is determined by both the
content of the source page and the content of
the anchor text.
Most basic format of a link, and it is eminently
understandable to the search engines
One of the strongest signals
8 words maximum
Succinct and relevant to the target page
Include Keyword

38. <a class="link-button" href="/educational-
transformation/">Verb Noun Keyword</a>
ANCHOR TEXT: BUTTON

39. META ROBOT TAG
used to control search engine
crawler activity on a per-page level.
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOSNIPPET">
index/noindex
crawled and kept in the engines' index
for retrieval.
follow/nofollow
To crawled or not
noarchive
used to restrict search engines from
saving a cached copy of the page.
nosnippet
No descriptive block of text next to the
page's title and URL in the search
results.

40. NO FOLLOW
When to use it
Paid Links
Comments
User Generated Content
Search engines consider links to be votes that
pass credit to other pages.
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

41. DUPLICATE CONTENT
To search engines, these appear as separate pages. Because the
content is identical on each page, this can cause the search engines
to devalue the content and its potential rankings.
https://news.example.com/Information -Literacy/155672.html (syndicated post)
https://blog.example.com/library/Information -Literacy/ (original post)
https://blog.example.com/library/Information -Literacy/
https://blog.example.com/faculty/Information -Literacy/
Different Sections
Syndication

42. CANONICAL TAG
The canonical tag so tells search
robots which page is the singular,
authoritative version that should
count in web results.
link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/"/>
Use the canonical tag within the page that
contains duplicate content.
The target of the canonical tag points to the
master URL that you want to rank for.

43. 301 REDIRECTS
Allows you to provide one version
of a URL to reach a document
A 301 redirect is a permanent
redirect which passes between 90-
99% of link juice (ranking power) to
the redirected page
https://example.com/home
https://home.example.com
https://www.example.com

44. ROBOT.TXT
Robots Exclusion Standard
Robots.txt is a plain-text file
Placed at the root of a domain
http://www.google.com/robots.tx
t
User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /search

45. XML SITEMAP
An XML Sitemap is a file on your
server with which you can help
Google easily crawl & index all the
pages on your site.
http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.
html
<urlset
xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap
/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=12&am
p;desc=vacation_hawaii</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>

46. Create great, unique, usable content
Convince a professor to include in public syllabus
Submit to TRUSTWORTHY directories
Email bloggers about topic
Comment on relevant blogs
LINK BUILDING

47. MOBILE “Friendliness”
Google recommends responsive design
it’s easier to maintain and tends to have
fewer implementation issues.
PROS
Easier /cheaper to maintain.
One URL for all devices.
No complicated device detection/redirection.
CONS
Large pages, fine for desktop, slow on mobile.
Not a total mobile-centric user experience.
Responsive

48. MOBILE “Friendliness”
Google recommends that you provide
them with a hint that you’re altering the
content based on user agent.
Send Vary HTTP header to let them know
that Googlebot for smartphones should
pay a visit to crawl the mobile-optimized
version of the URL.
Dynamic
PROS
One URL
Mobile-centric user experience.
CONS
Complex technical implementation.
Higher cost of maintenance.

49. MOBILE “Friendliness”
PROS
Differentiation of mobile content
optimize for mobile-specific search intent
Tailor a fully mobile-centric user experience
CONS
Higher cost of maintenance
More complicated SEO requirements
Prone to error
Separate Mobile Site

50. KEYWORD CHECKLIST
 Keyword at the beginning of the title element
 Keyword appears in the URL
 Keyword is in the headline
 Keyword included in meta description
 Content includes keyword (2+) and related terms
 Images include keyword alt attributes
 Anchor text includes keyword point to page.

51. CONTENT STRATEGY CHECKLIST
 Unique
 Authentic
 High quality
 Fresh
 Value to visitor
 Audit Content to ID ROT: redundent, outdated, and trivial
 Establish an editorial workflow and content governance

52. IA CHECKLIST
 Navigation is easily consumed/understood by users and bots
 Layout of information is scannable/readable
 All pages are linked at least once (no orphans)
 Sitemaps present and up to date
 Search result and page content consistent

53. BOT CHECKLIST
 URL is static
 Content is unique to URL
 Content and Links are in HTML
 Robot.txt does not block crawler
 Meta robot tag allows crawling and indexing
 Title is 75 characters or less
 URL is 90 characters or less
 Meta description is 160 characters or less
 URL is included in XML sitemap

54. PERFORMANCE CHECKLIST
 Page load .5 second
 Content loads in under 4 seconds
 Renders in all browsers
 Mobile friendly: Optimized for all devices (Responsive)

55. TOOLS / LINKS
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html
http://searchengineland.com/
https://moz.com/