MIT ITPartners:

S.E.O. and Y-O-U

Best Practices for Search Engine Optimization

Dave Conlon & Lisa MayerWeb & Database Consultants

Departmental Consulting & Application Development (DCAD)Information Services & Technology (IS&T)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

What is SEO and why is it important?

• Internet searching has entered our lexicon

Google (v) - To use the Google search engine to find information on the Internet. (OED)

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a strategy for increasing the volume and quality of traffic to a website

What is SEO and why is it important?

• Need to use Web Analytics—not just interested in number of hits

– Length of time on site/number of bounces

– User Feedback

– Success Criteria: the end user finds what they were looking for (may or may not be a “conversion”

• Usability Testing

• Accessibility Testing

Planning for your users.

• Two types of internet users:

– Time Rich: The Curious Explorer

– Time Poor: The Task Master

• A well planned, designed, and implemented site can satisfy both users

• Beyond Google: Bing, Yahoo, Internal CMS Searches (Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, etc), and many many others

How Search Engines Work

• Five Different Types of Search Engines:

– Crawler (e.g. Google)

– Vertical (e.g. CMS search)

– Directory (e.g. Open Directory Project)

– Sponsored (e.g. Kanoodle)

– Hybrid (e.g. Yahoo)

How Search Engine Crawlers Work

• Crawlers like Google “crawl” the web, moving from page to page via links, indexing web pages and their content.

• Essentially toned-down web browsers that are not concerned with display but with only content

• Crawlers page-ranking algorithms are proprietary and change frequently

How Vertical Search Engines Work

• Vertical Search engines are search engines that you, the site maintainer, have more control over (if you have them)

• CMS like Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, contain their own database and search engine

• If you have control over the engine, you can adjust your page ranking search results

SEO: What do I need to think about?

• Site Organization

• Content

• Code

Site Organization

• Sitemaps

• Site Flow

Site Organization: Sitemaps

• Sitemaps are html pages that list all the pages in your site

• Can be cumbersome to create/maintain but worth it

• Most Content Management Systems can provide one

Site Organization: Site Flow

• Organize your content

• Make the site intuitive for the user AND the crawler!

• Categorize and name appropriately

• Avoid buzz words

Content

• Site & Page Generals

• Keyword use

• Links

• Freshness

• Metadata

• Tags

Site & Page Generals

• Site Age: older the better

• Age of page vs. age of site

– Newer pages on an older site will get faster recognition

– The newer the better, either pages or copy

– Try creating your own RSS newsfeeds

• Pages should contain at least 300 words

Keyword Use

• Lean on keyword research BEFORE writing content and page titles.

– Google Search Based Keyword Tool

– Google Adwords

– Keyword Difficulty (SEOMoz)

Keyword Use: Start watching your site

• Figure out the keywords that are driving traffic.

• Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer, Bing Webmaster Center

• Monitor your rankings:

• Google Analytics• RockinSEO.com• Free Monitor for Google• ZoomRank.com• WebPosition.com

Keyword Use

• Keywords, Keywords, Keywords

– In URL

– In content

– In domain name

– In page title

Keyword Use

• Have you used a keyword suggestion tool?

– Google Keyword Tool

– WordStream Free Keyword Tool

• A thesaurus?

Keyword Use

• Keyword proximity (for 2+ keywords)

– Directly adjacent is best

• Keyword phrase order

– In URL, first word is best, second is second best, etc.

– Does word order in the page match word order in the query?

– Try to anticipate query, and match word order

Keyword Use

• Keyword prominence (how early in page/tag)

– Can be important at top of page, in bold, in large font

• Keyword font size:

– "Strong is treated the same as bold, italic is treated the same as emphasis" . . . Matt Cutts July 2006

• The keyword is present in a link, bold or bullet list

Links

• URL Length

– No more than 3-5 words in your URL

• Dashes, not underscores

– Engines “sees” each hyphened word as an individual

– Keep it to one or two (4 or more looks like spam)

Links

• Use lower case for URLs

– Others will most likely link to the standard lower case, don’t lose

link juice by complicating the url.

Link Juice: the number of people that provide links to your pages.

The more links you have, especially from well-linked places, the

greater your visibility and web page rankings become.

Links

• Focus on the names of your in-content links (anchor text)

– Use keywords in links to site pages or other sites

– If you use "click here" as the words people are going to click on, you're telling people the page is about the subject "click here".

– Should be on topic, descriptive

Avoid Duplicate Content

• Similar content at more than one or URL

– No guarantee as to which version of a page will show in results

and which versions won’t.

– Engines don’t want to show the same pages in their search

results.

Metadata

• Title metadata• Keyword close to beginning• [ keyword, modifier, brand statement or website

name ]• 10 - 60 characters, no special characters

• Description metadata– Google no longer "relies" upon keywords in this

tag, but will often use it.– Should be 150 chars or less.

Robots.txt

• Search engines use them to index the site content

• Provides a map for what they can, and cannot index

– Draft pages

– Private directories

Metadata

• Keyword density in body text – 5 - 20% - (all keywords/ total words)– keyword spamming threshold ( “keyword stuffing”)

• % varies with the topic

• Keyword stemming

– Taking a basic & popular keyword and add a prefix, suffix, or pluralize

– avoids keyword stuffing and repetitions that might get the website blacklisted by search engines.

Quick Quiz: Which page has better SEO?

Both of these pages have the same content, but have been coded differently. Can you tell which one will provide better Search Results?

What a Search Engine Sees

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>Norwell High School Class of 1995 Reunion Website</title><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <meta name="description" content="Reunion Website for Norwell High School Class of 1995, Norwell, MA"/> <meta name="keywords" content="Norwell High School,Norwell,High,School,Massachusetts,MA,02061,Class of 95,Class of 1995,Reunion,Conlon,Dave,Dave Conlon,David Conlon"/><link href="styles/main.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /><link href="styles/index.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /></head><body><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" id="thepage"><tr valign="top"><td width="175" background="images/navigation-slice.jpg" id="nav”><div id="nav1”><div class="navelement"> <a href="index.html" id="index">Home</a> <a href="reunion.html" id="reunion">Reunion Info</a> <a href="classlist.html" id="classlist">Class List</a> <a href="memories.html" id="memories">Memories</a> <a href="photos.html" id="photos">Photos</a> <a href="http://www.norwellschools.org/hs/index.html"> Norwell High School</a> <a href="http://www.quia.com/pages/norwellalumni.html">Alumni Association</a> <a href="messageboard.html" id="messageboard">Message Board</a> <a href="slideshow.html" id="slideshow">Senior Slide Show</a> <a href="contact.html" id="contact">Contact</a> </div> </div></td><td><div id="maincontent”><img src="images/reunion_header.jpg" id="imageheader" alt="10th Year Reunion"/><script src="js/image1.js"></script><script src="js/image2.js"></script><script src="js/image3.js"></script> <div id="content"> <h1>&gt; Welcome</h1> <div align="center"><a href="images/classphoto_large.jpg"><img src="images/class_photo_outside.jpg" alt="Norwell High School Class of 1995 class photo" border="0" /></a> </div><h2 align="center">Norwell High School class of 1995 </h2> <p>Thank you all who joined us for such a fantastic 10th reunion. It was wonderful seeing so many people come to the reunion, and we're looking forward to planning the 15th! Please stay in touch and continue to help us find our <a href="classlist.html">missing classmates</a>! </p><hr/> </div></div></td><td width="155" background="images/filmstrip.gif”><div id="filmstrip”><table width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0”><tr><td><script src="js/filmstrip1.js"></script></td></tr><tr><td><script src="js/filmstrip2.js"></script></td></tr><tr><td><script src="js/filmstrip3.js"></script></td></tr>/table></div></td></tr></table></body>

</html>

How does code influence SEO?

• Search engines read the code so the cleaner the code, the easier it is for the engine to catalog the site

• Crawlers parse your page for all relevant content—bad code may make some of that content invisible

How can I improve my code?

• Search engines only index text

• Organize your code – important content first or use skiplinks

• Hierarchical use of tags (<h1><h2><h3> etc)

• Metatags

• Alt tags

• W3C Code Compliance

• Cross-browser compatibility

Where do I start?

• Create a game plan:

– Web Analytics-get your baseline– Goals– Usability & Accessibility Testing

• Monitor your rankings:

– RockinSEO.com– Free Monitor for Google– ZoomRank.com– WebPosition.com

Where do I start?

• Start watching your site:

– Continue using analytics to monitor progress

– Figure out the keywords that are driving traffic.

– Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer, Bing Webmaster Center

What else should I do?

• Backlinks

– Especially from high ranking sites

• Create fresh content and update existing content

• List your site– Yahoo Directory, LookSmart Directory

• Social Media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter etc)

• Blog Commenting & Trackbacks

• Sponsor events

Where can I get help?

• W3C guidelines

• Usability Reviews

• ATIC Reviews

• MIT Web Reference Guide

• WebPub Presentations on SEO and Web Analytics

• And, of course, DCAD

– (shameless plug)

Questions?