An introduction to SEO, as a science, philosophy and function.

1. SEO Primer
Mukesh Ghatiya

2. How Search Works
Made from content on https://www.google.co.in/insidesearch/howsearchworks/thestory/

4. How do search engines work
● On high level, search engines crawl publicly crawlable
websites across the internet following each link.
● They analyse the page to understand their content and
determine which topic are they relevant to.
● They then put it in their database (usually referred to
as index) and mark each page and website as to what
content it is relevant to and how strongly.
● When users search something, they look at their index
and show the search results in the order of relevance
with respect to searched keyword and the user.
Google has very good interactive infographic on how does search work. It can be found here.
Image source: SeoClerks

5. What is SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is set of techniques used to let search engines
discover/understand your website/app’s content and show its content in search
results of the users’ queries.
Google has high level guidelines and few specific details on what works, what
doesn’t, what is given more priority, what is given less, but lot of it is people learning
from experiences and making their own opinions.

6. SEM (Search Engine Marketing)
SEO results
Images SEO results
SEO results

7. Why is it required?
● You need it, unless (and even if) you are Facebook or Linkedin.
● It is almost free marketing for you.
● It is like you teleporting yourself in front of your target customer, right at the
moment when he is looking for what you have on offer.
● You would like to guide search engines as to how to navigate and understand
your website.

8. Not all keywords require SEM
Facebook results of a generic page
with all profiles of my name not in
first fold
My individual facebook page didn’t
come in results as I have advised FB to
do so

9. Factors that affect SEO (sneak peek, not exhaustive list, and many are guesses)
● Content Relevance
● Content Coverage
● User Generated Content
● Duplicate Content
● Relevance to the keywords
Content relevance to the
person
● Content update frequency and
freshness
● Accessibility
● SEO friendly html e.g. no inline
css, proper use of HTML5
elements
Content
● Domain reputation
● Backlinks and domain reputation of
referrer
● Social media
● SEM
● CTR of links in search results
Off Page
● Loading speed
● HTTPS
● Hygiene like robots.txt, htaccess
● Sitemap
● Time to crawl the website
Technical
More on: Moz Survey and SearchEngineLand and SearchEngineJournal
● Site Structure
● URL Structure and content
● Tags : H1,H2,Title …
● Microdata
● Page structure
● Above the fold content
● Title tags of images
● Usability factors (e.g. Content
readability)
● Anchor tags
● Website/Page performance
(e.g. bounce rate)
● Navigability e.g. Breadcrumbs
Product

10. Top factors as per
the experts
around the world
The top factor of course on which all
agree and Google seems to
emphasise most is “If it is good for
users, then it is good for SEO, and
good for Google”

11. Periodic
Table of
SEO
success
factors
Image Source: SearchEngineLand

12. SEO for different content type
Flash
Google can read into content written in flash files
written as content via Actionscript.
Images/Videos
It’s a good idea to put images/videos with Alt,
Title attributes.
Search engines can’t read text written in images
(yet).
Content behind Javascript/Ajax actions
Crawlable, so it’s a good idea to optimise these
However, good to have key page contents that come
because of Javascript actions as dedicated pages with
proper URLs and entry points.
Example:
● Search page and filters
● Different tabs on an entity page e.g. project
page

13. Mobile Web SEO
1. M.x.com sites vs adaptive/responsive websites
2. Separate mobile sitemap (not required, unless serving feature phones)
3. No interstitial blockers
4. Option to go to desktop version
5. Mobile usability/readability

14. Mobile App SEO
1. App Store Optimisation
2. Deep Linking (App Indexing)

15. SEO Categorisation
● Expanding keyword coverage
● Improving rank
● Improving CTR
● Off page SEO
● On page SEO
Tracks of SEO (What) Branches of SEO (How)

16. SEO Techniques
1. Increase content
a. Writing more blogs
b. Increasing catalogue
c. Increasing user engagement and user
generated content
d. Increasing keyword specific pages
2. Making content structured and
understandable
a. Microdata
b. Keyword enrichment
c. Putting links upfront to get new pages
discovered
d. Correcting all tags and such hygiene stuff
e. Improving site structure
3. Technical improvements
a. Crawl rate increment
b. Robots.txt guidance
c. Page performance improvements
4. Improving CTR in searches
a. Adding ratings
b. Adding G+ profiles of users in articles
5. Increasing backlinks from social media and
other sites
a. Directory submissions
6. Increase links
a. Intra site backlinking
7. ...

17. Black Hat
techniques
1. Showing different versions to
Google and user
2. Too small font
3. Text of same colour as background
4. Duplicate content
5. Unnecessary pages with shallow
content
6. Keyword stuffing
a. URL
b. Content (Title, H1,...)
c. Domain name
7. Pirated content
8. Link spam
Penalty for using black hat techniques is
severe. One should avoid them at all costs.
Companies have lost their businesses
overnight when google released anti black
hat algorithms.

18. Keyword research
● Keyword research is very very important duty for the SEO in-charge of the
portal.
● Regular study should be done on how are we ranking on the keywords relevant
to our portal
● Competition analysis on why are they ranking up should be done
● New, but relevant keywords should be discovered and appropriate content and
links should be added to the portal

19. Misc concepts
1. Difficult to recover ground once lost
2. Nofollow
3. Noindex
4. 301, 302, meta redirections
5. iframes and SEO
6. Canonical URLs

20. Debugging and Tools
https://search.google.com/search-console/mobile-friendly
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/
https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/
To check the mobile friendliness and speed
improvement areas of the site/page.
https://validator.w3.org/ To validate HTML coding issues
Google Analytics To track traffic sources, keywords
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets Check the microdata on the site/page
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch See how google sees your website
Incognito mode To get fairer idea of rankings
http://xenus-link-sleuth.en.softonic.com/ Broken links checker
http://ubersuggest.org/, Google Adwords, http://lsigraph.com/ Keyword research
http://www.copyscape.com/ Duplicate content checker
http://sitemapinspector.com/ Sitemap validator
https://www.cheatography.com/colinbancmedia/cheat-sheets/onsite-seo-cheatsheet/ Tech cheat sheet

21. SEO Metrics
1. Pages indexed
2. Crawling rate
3. Average rank along with rank bands for important keywords
4. CTR of links in Google

22. Future of SEO
● Ability to understand personalisation
● More emphasis on vernacular content SEO
● Support for bots as entry points and optimising those
● Entry points would not just be from google’s search screen, hence it might become more important to
be the number one in results
● Image/Video content crawling/indexing would be possible
● Possibly more support on identifying SEO issues
● Less weightage to things like H1, URL, Sitemap. After all, Google’s homepage has a sprite as H1!,
sitemaps and URL don’t matter much to users, and one shouldn’t be forced to create multi page
websites for SEO purposes.
● Actual reward for all white hat technique users for all cases

23. What can product team do to help SEO?
1. Conduct experiments in SEO friendly manners. Revert quickly.
2. Build Frameworks to support experiments, wide release of links, content
3. Build pages/interfaces/content pieces that would help the target users and would be
in line with queries on google.
4. Build tools to check SEO sanity
5. Make sure SEO team is involved in any release that changes/adds pages or their
content pieces e.g. Meta tags, URLs etc. or Website structure
6. All designs should be SEO blessed before going into dev
7. Make sure content is not hidden behind login

24. What can tech team do to help SEO?
1. There should be an SEO QA and SEO Audit of each release
2. Have a strong empathy towards need/importance of SEO. If a bug causes SEO
ground to be lost, it is very difficult (sometimes impossible) and time consuming
to recover it
3. Make sure all pages are implemented in SEO friendly technologies and are W3C
compliant
4. Structure the URLs and website structure in SEO friendly way
5. Check this cheat sheet for each release.

25. Other things that individuals can do to improve SEO
● User your own portal for related discussions e.g. Go to QH/CF for asking whether prices in Sarjapur
Road are saturating, rather than Facebook
● Write blogs on the portal e.g. Your journey of buying property
More content
● Get best quality and unique content on the portal. Don’t blindly copy-paste.
● Don’t upload images with lot of text. Whenever images have text, try to put corresponding text also
alongside.
● Introduce appropriate intra-links in content with appropriate link text. But don’t stuff keywords.
● Aid content with appropriate tagging of map locations, relevant terms.
Better content

26. Other things that individuals can do to improve SEO
● Do lot of social media mentions of the portal
● G+ the pages you like
● Use google to search on our own portal
● Link back via our blogs, websites etc.
More social
Domain reputation
● Make sure all the articles have
appropriate title, sub-title, leading
summary and an image
● Make sure each article has an
appropriate author associated with it
with their profile photo.
Better content snippets

27. Further reading
Beginner Guides:
Google’s own Guide
https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
(or PDF version)
QuickSprout Infographic
Good websites to read/follow:
http://searchengineland.com/
https://moz.com/blog
https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/
https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors

28. Last word
This presentation is aimed at just introducing you to SEO and to gear your thinking
with an SEO empathy going forward. You should read up more and consult SEO
team in each release to be able to get maximum outcome in each release.

29. Thank You