dan cohen, hands on seo from internet world 2009
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Hands-on SEO
Dan CohenGlobal SEO Engineering Lead
dan.cohen@microsoft.com
What is Search Engine Optimization?
2
Organic
Paid
Why should you care?
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
% of websites that receive more than half of their traffic from search
Large Sites>2M
Visitors/ month
Medium
Sites2M - 100k
Visitors/ month
Small Sites>100k
Visitors/ month
MSN: We Are Our Audience
Statistics:465M People
42 Countries
21 Languages
MSN: Complete Online Experience
APPLICATIONS
CONTENT
SEARCH
Programmed Content Providers
Make it easy for me.
I know exactly what I want.
I can do it myself.
What's going on in the world today?
MSN and Windows Live: A Dual Portal Strategy
* Source: 1. NetCraft Monthly User Survey ( October 2007 ) 2. comScore q Search 2.0 Monthly Tracking ( September 2007 ) 3. ZenithOptimedia Report reflecting SearchAdvertising Revenue from 2005 to 2007 ( December 2006 )
Search Explosion
142M Websites
95% of web Users Search
61B Queries
+$13B Revenue
18,000 websiteshas grown to
142 million websites *1
95% of internet users search the web*2
30 billion queriesper month has
grown to 61 billion queries per month *2
Search revenue increased from
$7.6 billion to $13 billion *3
MICROSOFT CONFIDENTIAL
Evolution Of SearchPhase
1
Directories
Browse
Immature
CPM/Paid Inclusion
Reach
Passive
Market
Search
Consumer
Publishers
Economics
Advertisers
Evolution Of Search
Evolution Of Search
Phase
2
Evolution Of SearchPhase
1
Directories
Browse
Keyword
Queries
Immature
CPM/Paid Inclusion
Reach
Passive
Closed
CPC
ROI
Reactive
Market
Search
Consumer
Publishers
Economics
Advertisers
Search Perception
MICROSOFT CONFIDENTIAL
Search Reality
MICROSOFT CONFIDENTIAL
Search Fatigue
People can’t find what they are looking for…..
* Source: Internal Microsoft Research
50% of queries need refinement
40% of queries go unanswered
MICROSOFT CONFIDENTIAL
What Consumers Want
* Source: Sterling Market Intelligence Report (June 2007) / Internal Microsoft Research
Relevant results
In-depth & authoritative content
Convenience
MICROSOFT CONFIDENTIAL
Rich Semantics &
User Experience
Evolution Of Search
Search Directories
Browse
Keyword
QueriesConsumer
Trends
Trends
Trends
The Next Phase
TaskAccomplishment
Unknown
CPM/Paid Inclusion
Reach
Passive
Closed
CPC
ROI
Reactive
Open
CPA/Paid Engagement
E2E Visibility
Proactive
Phase 2
Phase 1
Market
Publishers
Economics
Advertisers
• Index the world’s information• Decipher the intent of question• Simultaneously across geographies• Within milliseconds, and• Present the information for discovery
The Computer Science Challenge
Search Engine Results Page
Title of a page
Content Description of a page
Number of relevant Webpages
Unique URL
Additional SEO Information
Relevance User vs. Machine• Goal of Users and Search Engines
– Find relevant results related to the search query. – Rank related Webpages in a order of Relevance.
• How to decide what is most or more relevant?– How would you decide, which Webpage matches best with
your search query?
Relevance User vs. Machine
Subjectively Objectively
Webpage
Reads visual headlines and Scans the Text
Understands images and other media like video and sound
Considers other criteria (e.g. trusting the provider, Information up to date,
knows the author etc.)
Follows a recommendation
Identifies technical headlines and calculates keyword use
Reads descriptions of images, videos and sounds
Calculates other criteria (e.g. trust of domain, Frequency of up dates, general
publicity of the author etc.)
Considers all existing web recommendation (links)
Rating the content of the page
SEO Matrix
En
gin
eeri
ng E
dito
rial
Internal Link Building
Content Strategy
On-page Editorial
External Link Building
On-page Technical
Crawlability
Content Strategy
SEO Content Strategy
Content Strategy
MSN Editors
3rd party contributo
rs
Content partners
Bloggers
VideoImage
galleries
Newsfeeds
RSS
Search intelligenc
e
Hub Site
Video
Images
News
3rd party content
Core Content
Link strategy
On-page Editorial
URL Consistency
URL Consistency
• Search engines assign value to URLs– A single URL is given a score from 1 to 10 called PageRank (Google)
or StaticRank (Live) based on many factors– Each URL is assumed to be an individual “page”– When a site has multiple versions of a page under the “same” URL,
this score is divided between them
http://travel.msn.com/ http://travel.msn.com/default.aspx
URL Consistencyhttp://www.example.com/http://example.com/http://Example.com http://Example.com/http://www.Example.com/http://www.example.com/index.htmlhttp://www.Example.com/index.htmlhttp://www.example.com/Index.htmlhttp://www.Example.com/index.htmlwww.example.comExample.com example.com/ Example.com/index.htmlExample.com/Index.html
Image content and ALT text
• Images are content too!– An ALT property on an <IMG> tag
is supposed to describe the content of this image
– Meant for accessibility, also used by Search Engines to discern meaning of an image, especially one that’s also a link
– Content images should describe what’s in the image and then list any copyright information required
– Navigation images should describe the destination page’s content
– ALT text treated similarly to Anchor Text
– Filenames matter!
• How not to do it
On-page Technical
Flash and Silverlight
• MYTH: Search Engines can’t read Flash• Search Engines are starting to have the capability to extract
links and text from simple .SWF files• This does not apply to all sites or all Flash movies• This does not apply to Silverlight movies
• MYTH: Silverlight and Flash are BAD for SEO· Flash and Silverlight should be used correctly and never for
navigation – do you NEED that Flash movie?
· Can you offer a downlevel version of the movie to lower-spec browsers and crawlers?
· Downlevel version must contain exactly the same content to survive manual review if one should occur
· No sniffing for capability should take place
· Page-load order and DIV substitution to achieve downlevel experience
Flash and Silverlight
1.Separate content of Flash movie from presentation layer. Externalize in XML.
2.Render XML as XHTML in your content <DIV>
3.Use JavaScript to overwrite the content <DIV> innerHTML property with the Flash or Silverlight movie
4.Flash or Silverlight movie should reference the same XML for its content
Flash and Silverlight
<DIV> XMLXML
<DIV>
(XHTML)
<DIV>
(SWF)
URL Structure
• Some links are more equal than others– Javascript links and anchor links won’t get crawled– The closer a page is to the root, the better– A URL should include keywords if possible– Always use absolute URL not relative– Always use lower case
• Here’s how not to do it<A HREF=“javascript:goToPage(“1”)”>Bad link</A><A HREF=“#section1”>Another Bad Link</A><A HREF=“/my-folder/danspage.html”>Not another bad link!</A><A
HREF="http://msn.com/my-folder/another-folder/yetanotherfolder/page.html">You're kidding. ANOTHER bad link?</A>
<HEAD> tag
• The <HEAD> tag should follow this order
<head> <title>A unique title that describes what a user can find on this page</title> <meta name="description" content="This is a unique description of the content of
this page, different to the TITLE tag." /> <meta name="keywords" content="one, two, three, four, five" /> <meta HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" content="EN-GB" /> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html" /> <!-- anything else you need --></head>
Crawlability
404 pages
• Is this Page Not Found? Are you sure?– The 404 page should return a 404 (Not Found) or 410 (Gone) Status Code– Some 404 pages return a 200 (OK) Status Code, this is a “soft” 404– These soft 404 pages can make it into the index as valid pages
XML Sitemaps and Robots.txt
• The Search Engines need a helping hand to find your pages– By submitting an XML Sitemap (http://sitemaps.org) you can inform
the search engines which pages you would like them to crawl
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><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></urlset>
• Tell the crawler what not to crawl
– By adding a robots.txt file to the root of a domain, you can exclude pages or sections of a site from being crawled
– Useful for transactional pages or “print version” pages and the like
Server Optimization
• HTTP Compression– Having a large website and
millions of pages or URLs means a crawler takes a long time to crawl and index your entire site
– XML Sitemaps and proper link strategy aren’t always enough
– HTTP Compression works like a .zip file
– Reduces download time for users and crawlers
• Conditional GET– Do your pages change often? – Why waste time having
crawlers re-spider your site?– Tell browsers and crawlers
that your pages haven’t changed
– Improves index coverage quickly
Case StudySEO for MSN Video
Case Study: MSN Videohttp://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-gb
Case Study: MSN Videohttp://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-gb
Flash
AJAX and
Flash
Video in Flash
AJAX
Case Study: MSN Videohttp://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-gb
Case Study: MSN Videohttp://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-gb
Case Study: MSN Video
• Real URLs – One page per video– http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-gb&vid=b098ff42-994c-4ebd-8741-1c347373
18b7&playlist=search:q:plane:mk:en-gb:sf:ActiveStartDate:vs:1:cs:ENGB_Stupid%20Videos&tab=s1204718424896&from=video_module
– ...becomes http://uk.video.msn.com/videos/woman-in-airport-strop/ • Build links to the Video pages
– Empower users to share via Social Media and blogging with a single click– Achieve scale by using the inline player on MSN content pages– Show related videos
• Make the pages Crawlable– Get rid of the AJAX– Correct down-level experience
• Build topic relevance– Expose user generated content such as ratings, comments, submitted videos– Display relevant content from around the network in an automated fashion
• Full index coverage– Geo-target individual countries’ Video destination site with Webmaster Tools
validation, META tagging and domain– XML Sitemaps and Robots.txt for each market
Thank you
Questions?
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