seo 101 presented by chris silver smith, lead strategist, netconcepts
TRANSCRIPT
SEO 101
presented by Chris Silver Smith,
Lead Strategist, Netconcepts
Today’s Agenda
What is SEO? The Seven Steps to Higher Rankings
– Get Your Site Fully Indexed
– Get Your Pages Visible
– Build Links & PageRank
– Leverage Your PageRank
– Encourage Clickthrough
– Track the Right Metrics
– Avoid Worst Practices
Part 1: What Is SEO?
Everything Revolves Around Search
Search Engine Optimization
6 times more effective than a banner ad Delivers qualified leads 80% of Internet user sessions begin at the
search engines (Source: Internetstats.com)
55% of online purchases are made on sites found through search engine listings (Source: Internetstats.com)
SEO is NOT Paid Advertising
SEO – “Search Engine Optimization” – seeks to influence rankings in the “natural” (a.k.a. “organic”, a.k.a. “algorithmic”) search results
PPC – paid search advertising on a pay-per-click basis. The more you pay, the higher your placement. Stop paying = stop receiving traffic.
SEM – encompasses both SEO and PPC
Natural
Paid
Paid
Google Listings – Your Virtual Sales Force
Savvy retailers making 6-7 figures a month from natural listings
Savvy MFA (Made for AdSense) site owners making 5-6 figures per month
Most sites are not SE-friendly Google friendliness = friendly to other engines First calculate your missed opportunities
Not doing SEO? You’re Leaving Money on the Table
Calculate the missed opportunity cost of not ranking well for products and services that you offer?
# of people searching for your keywords
x
engine share (Google = 60%)
xexpected click-through rate
average conversion rate
average transaction amount
x x
E.g.10,000/day x 60% x 10% x 5% x $100 = $3,000/day
Most Important Search Engines
Google (also powers AOL Search, Netscape.com, iWon, etc.) – 60.29% market share (Source: Hitwise)
Yahoo! (also powers Alltheweb, AltaVista, Hotbot, Lycos, CNN, A9) – 22.58%
Live Search (formerly MSN Search) – 11.56% Ask – 3.63%
People Are Googling… Are You There?
What Are Searchers Looking For?
Keyword Research– “Target the wrong keywords and all your efforts
will be in vain.”
The “right” keywords are…– relevant to your business– popular with searchers
Keyword Research
Tools to check popularity of keyword searches– WordTracker.com– Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery.com– Google’s Keyword Tool– Google Trends– Google Suggest
WordTracker.com Pros
– Based on last 60 days worth of searches– Singular vs plural, misspellings, verb tenses all separated out– Advanced functionality: keyword “projects”, import data into Excel,
synonyms, … Cons
– Requires subscription fee ($260/year)– Data is from a small sample of Internet searches (from the minor
search engines Dogpile and MetaCrawler)– Contains bogus data from automated searches– No historical archives
Keyword Popularity –According to WordTracker
Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery.com Pros
– Full year of historical archives– Data is from a large sample of Internet searches (9 billion searches
compiled from 37 engines)– Singular vs plural, misspellings, verb tenses all separated out– Can segment by country– Advanced functionality: keyword “projects”, import data into Excel,
synonyms, … Cons
– Access to the historical data requires subscription fee (~$30/month)– Contains bogus data from automated searches
Keyword Popularity –According to KeywordDiscovery
Google AdWords Keyword Tool Pros
– Free! (Must have an AdWords account though)– Data is from a large sample of Internet searches (from Google)– Singular vs plural, misspellings, verb tenses all separated out– Can segment by country– Synonyms
Cons– No hard numbers
Augment this tool with other free Google tools: – Google Suggest (labs.google.com/suggest) – Google Trends (www.google.com/trends)
Keyword Popularity –According to
Google AdWords
Keyword Tool
Keyword Popularity –According to
Google AdWords
Keyword Tool
Keyword Popularity –According to
Google Trends
Keyword Popularity –According to Google Suggest
Keyword Research
Competition for that keyword should also be considered– Calculate KEI Score (Keyword Effectiveness
Indicator) = ratio of searches over number of pages in search results
– The higher the KEI Score, the more attractive the keyword is to target (assuming it’s relevant to your business)
SEO. A Moving Target. A lot is changing…
– Personalization & customization– Vertical search services (Images, Video, News, Maps, etc.)– “Blended Search” – aka “Universal Search”
Fortunately, the tried-and-true tactics still work…– Topically relevant links from important sites– Anchor text– Keyword-rich title tags– Keyword-rich content– Internal hierarchical linking structure– The whole is greater than the sum of the parts
The Search Engines Are Your Friend Sitemaps.org Webmaster tools (e.g. Google Webmaster Central,
Live Search Webmaster Center, Yahoo Site Explorer) Rel=“nofollow” tag Meta NOODP tag Speaking at search engine conferences Publishing blogs dedicated to helping webmasters Participating on SEO forums “Weather reports”
SEO Can Dramatically Improve Traffic/Sales
Non-optimal site with few pages indexed
Optimized site with many pages indexed
Few visits/sales per day Many visits/sales per day!
$=
Part 2: Seven Steps to High Rankings
Begin The 7 Steps
1) Get Your Site Fully Indexed
2) Get Your Pages Visible
3) Build Links & PageRank
4) Leverage Your PageRank
4) Encourage Clickthrough
6) Track the Right Metrics
7) Avoid Worst Practices
1) Get Your Site Fully Indexed Search engines are wary of “dynamic” pages - they fear “spider
traps”
Avoid stop characters (?, &, =) ‘cgi-bin’, session IDs and unnecessary variables in your URLs; frames; redirects; pop-ups; navigation in Flash/Java/Javascript/pulldown boxes – If not feasible due to platform constraints, can be easily
handled through proxy technology (e.g. GravityStream)
The better your PageRank, the deeper and more often your site will be spidered
Lack of links down into all content pages;
Common Barriers to Spidering:
!Non-textlink sitewide navigation;• Search-form-only;
• Javascript/Java-only (ie: dynamic menus);
• Flash apps / Splash pages;
Non-optimal URL formats of pages;
http://www.example.com/app.jsp?sid=abc123xyz
URL Framed Content
1) Get Your Site Fully Indexed (cont’d) Page # estimates are wildly inaccurate, and include non-
indexed pages (e.g. ones with no title or snippet) Misconfigurations (in robots.txt, in the type of redirects used,
requiring cookies, etc.) can kill indexation Keep your error pages out of the index by returning 404 status
code Keep duplicate pages out of the index by standardizing your
URLs, eliminating unnecessary variables, using 301 redirects when needed
Results in “Supplemental Hell”
Example of Non-Optimal Site Design:
PR 8 site has META refresh redirect on homepage – spiders not redirected to destination page:
Also, indexed “shell” page doesn’t contain any text content!
Not Spider-Friendly
GET http://www.bananarepublic.com --> 302 Moved Temporarily
GET http://www.bananarepublic.com/browse/home.do --> 302 Moved Temporarily
GET http://www.bananarepublic.com/browse/home.do?targetURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bananarepublic.com%2Fbrowse%2Fhome.do&CookieSet=Set --> 302 Moved Temporarily
GET http://www.bananarepublic.com/cookieFailure.do --> 200 OK
2) Get Your Pages Visible 100+ “signals” that influence ranking “Title tag” is the most important copy on the page Home page is the most important page of a site Every page of your site has a “song” (keyword theme) Incorporate keywords into title tags, hyperlink text,
headings (H1 & H2 tags), alt tags, and high up in the page (where they’re given more “weight”)
Eliminate extraneous HTML code “Meta tags” are not a magic bullet Have text for navigation, not graphics
Pretty good title
Not so good title – where’s the phrase “credit card”?
Dynamic Site Leaves Session IDs in URLs:
Titles not specific to page (“jewelry”)
Main text on page just nav labels –Little text/keyword content
Good link text and body copy
Good link text and body copy
No link text or body copy
No link text or body copy
Take a peek under the hood
The “meta tags”
Unnecessarily bloated HTML
3) Build Links and PageRank “Link popularity” affects search engine rankings PageRank™ - Links from “important” sites have more impact
on your Google rankings (weighted link popularity) Google offers a window into your PageRank
– PageRank meter in the Google Toolbar (toolbar.google.com)– Google Directory (directory.google.com) category pages– 3rd party tools like SEOChat.com’s “PageRank Lookup” & “PageRank
Search”
Scores range from 0-10 on a logarithmic scale Live Search and Yahoo have similar measures to
PageRank™
Google’s Toolbar – with handy PageRank Meter
Google Directory – listings are organized by PageRank
Conduct any Google query and get results organized by PageRank
4) Leverage Your PageRank
Your home page’s PageRank gets distributed to your deep pages by virtue of your hierarchical internal linking structure (e.g. breadcrumb nav)
Pay attention to the text used within the hyperlink (“Google bombing”)
Don’t hoard your PageRank Don’t link to “bad neighborhoods”
Ideal internal site linking hierarchies:
Homepages often will be highest-ranking site pages since they typically have
most inbound links.
Good link trees inform search engines about which
site pages are most important.
*Sitemaps can also be used to tell SEs about pages, & to define relative priority.
4) Leverage Your PageRank
Avoid PageRank dilution– Canonicalization (www.domain.com vs. domain.com)– Duplicate pages: (session IDs, tracking codes,
superfluous parameters)– In general, search engines are cautious of dynamic
URLs (with ?, &, and = characters) because of “spider traps”
• Rewrite your URLs (using a server module/plug-in) or use a hosted proxy service (e.g. GravityStream)
• See http://catalogagemag.com/mag/marketing_right_page_web/
Duplicate pages
Googlebot got caught in a “spider trap”
Search engine spiders turn their noses up at such URLs
Thus, important content doesn’t make it into the search engine indices
Zipf’s Law applies - you need to be at the top of page 1 of the search results. It’s an implied endorsement.
Synergistic effect of being at the top of the natural results & paid results
Entice the user with a compelling call-to-action and value proposition in your descriptions
Your title tag is critical Snippet gets built automatically, but you CAN influence
what’s displayed here
5) Encourage Clickthrough
Where do searchers look? (Enquiro, Did-it, Eyetools Study)
Search listings – 1 good,1 lousy
6) Track the Right Metrics
Indexation: # of pages indexed, % of site indexed, % of product inventory indexed, # of “fresh pages”
Link popularity: # of links, PageRank score (0 - 10)
Rankings: by keyword, “filtered” (penalized) rankings
Keyword popularity: # of searches, competition, KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Indicator) scores
Cost/ROI: sales by keyword & by engine, cost per lead
Indexation tool –www.netconcepts.com/urlcheck
Link popularity tool –www.netconcepts.com/linkcheck
Avoid Worst Practices Target relevant keywords Don’t stuff keywords or replicate pages Create deep, useful content Don't conceal, manipulate, or over-optimize
content Links should be relevant (no scheming!) Observe copyright/trademark law & Google’s
guidelines
Spamming in Its Many Forms… Hidden or small text Keyword stuffing Targeted to obviously irrelevant keywords Automated submitting, resubmitting, deep
submitting Competitor names in meta tags Duplicate pages with minimal or no changes Spamglish Machine generated content
Spamming in Its Many Forms…
Pagejacking Doorway pages Cloaking Submitting to FFA (“Free For All”) sites & link farms Buying up expired domains with high PageRanks Scraping Splogging (spam blogging)
BMW.de hosted many
“doorway pages” like
this one
“Sneaky redirect” sent searchers to
this page
Not Spam, But Bad for Rankings Splash pages, content-less home page, Flash intros Title tags the same across the site Error pages in the search results (eg “Session expired”) "Click here" links Superfluous text like “Welcome to” at beginning of titles Spreading site across multiple domains (usually for load
balancing) Content too many levels deep
What Next? Conduct an SEO Audit!
Is your site fully indexed? Are your pages fully optimized? Could you be acquiring more PageRank? Are you spending your PageRank wisely? Are you maximizing your clickthrough rates? Are you measuring the right things? Are you applying “best practices” in SEO and
avoiding all the “worst practices”?
Review Errors/Messages in Webmaster Tools
Content Opt Opportunities via Webmaster Tools
Check Robots.txt Exclusions in Webmaster Tools
Case Study: Homestead.com
What worked– Comprehensive SEO & usability audit – Intensive on-site training sessions with their IT and
marketing teams– 6 months of support
What didn’t work– No significant changes to the look of the home
page were allowed for political reasons, significantly reducing the options available
Case Study: Homestead.com
Results– Within 8 weeks of launch of some preliminary
optimization work, on page 1 for “website hosting” in Google
– With our audit as a blueprint, later that year launched an internally built site redesign which landed them the #1 Google position for “website hosting”
– Consistently held #1 position for 2 years
In Summary Focus on the right keywords Have great keyword-rich content Build links, and thus your PageRank™ Spend that PageRank™ wisely within your site Measure the right things Continually monitor and benchmark
Further Reading blogs.cnet.com/seosearchlight google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 www.google.com/webmasters/ www.mattcutts.com/blog googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com blog.outer-court.com www.searchengineland.com www.seroundtable.com www.naturalsearchblog.com www.stephanspencer.com
Q&A!
Special White Papers Available:
Image Search Optimization
Local Search Optimization Tactics
New Link Building Paradigms
Online Marketing Tips for Universities
Tips & Tricks for Local Search Ads
Email: [email protected]
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Agenda
• What is a Search Engine?
• Examples of popular Search Engines
• Search Engines statistics
• Why is Search Engine marketing important?
• What is a SEO Algorithm?
• Steps to developing a good SEO strategy
• Ranking factors
• Basic tips for optimization
Examples popular Search Engines
How Do Search Engines Work?
Mechanics of a typical search
Results & ads returned ranked
Category of first result
Result for phrase query
How Do Search Engines Work?
Spider “crawls” the web to find new documents (web pages, other documents) typically by following hyperlinks from websites already in their database
Search engines indexes the content (text, code) in these documents by adding it to their databases and then periodically updates this content
Search engines search their own databases when a user enters in a search to find related documents (not searching web pages in real-time)
Search engines rank the resulting documents using an algorithm (mathematical formula) by assigning various weights and ranking factors
Search on the Web Corpus: The publicly accessible Web: static + dynamic
Goal: Retrieve high quality results relevant to the user’s need– (not docs!)
Need– Informational – want to learn about something
– Navigational – want to go to that page
– Transactional – want to do something (web-mediated) • Access a service
• Downloads
• Shop– Gray areas
• Find a good hub• Exploratory search “see what’s there”
Low hemoglobin
United Airlines
Tampere weatherMars surface images
Nikon CoolPix
Car rental Finland
Abortion morality
Search Engines as Info Gatekeepers
Search engines are becoming the primary entry point for discovering web
pages. Ranking of web pages
influences which pages users will view. Exclusion of a site from search engines
will cut off the site from its intended audience.
The privacy policy of a search engine is important.
100+ Billion Searches / Month
Search Engine Wars
The battle for domination of the web search space
is heating up! The competition is good news for users! Crucial:
advertising is combined with search results! What if one of the search engines
will manage to dominate the space?
Yahoo!
Synonymous with the dot-com boom, probably the best known brand on the web.
Started off as a web directory service in 1994,acquired leading search engine technology in 2003.
Has very strong advertising and e-commerce partners
Lycos! One of the pioneers of the field
Introduced innovations that inspired the creation of Google
Verb “google” has become synonymous with searching for information on the web.
Has raised the bar on search quality
Has been the most popular search engine in the last few years.
Had a very successful IPO in August 2004.
Is innovative and dynamic.
Google.com is registered as a domain on September 15, 1997. The name—a play on the word "googol," a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros—reflects Larry and Sergey's mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.
Live Search (was: MSN Search)
Synonymous with PC software.
Remember its victory in the browser wars with Netscape.
Developed its own search engine technology only recently, officially launched in Feb. 2005.
May link web search into its next version of Windows.
Important?
80% of consumers find your website by first writing a query into a box on a search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing)
90% choose a site listed on the first page
85% of all traffic on the internet is referred to by search engines
The top three organic positions receive 59% percent of user clicks.
Cost-effective advertising
Clear and measurable ROI
Operates under this assumption:More (relevant) traffic + Good Conversions Rate = More Sales/Leads
Experiment with query syntax
Default is AND, e.g. “computer chess” normally interpreted as “computer AND chess”, i.e. both keywords must be present in all hits.
“+chess” in a query means the user insists that “chess” be present in all hits.
“computer OR chess” means either keywords must be present in all hits.
“”computer chess”” means that the phrase “computer chess” must be present in all hits.
The most popular search keywords
AltaVista (1998) AlltheWeb (2002) Excite (2001)
sex free free
applet sex sex
porno download pictures
mp3 software new
chat uk nude
Free Keyword Research Tools
–https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__c=1000000000&__u=1000000000&__o=te&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS#search.none
–Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator to identify competitive phrases and search frequencies
–http://www.google.com/insights/search
–Compare search patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties
Web search Users
Ill-defined queries– Short length– Imprecise terms– Sub-optimal syntax
(80% queries without operator)– Low effort in defining queries
Wide variance in– Needs– Expectations– Knowledge– Bandwidth
Specific behavior– 85% look over
one result screen only – mostly above the fold– 78% of queries are not
modified • 1 query/session
– Follow links – “the scent of information” ...
How far do people look for results?
Architecture of a Search Engine
The Web
Ad indexes
Web Results 1 - 10 of about 7,310,000 for miele. (0.12 seconds)
Miele, Inc -- Anything else is a compromise At the heart of your home, Appliances by Miele. ... USA. to miele.com. Residential Appliances. Vacuum Cleaners. Dishwashers. Cooking Appliances. Steam Oven. Coffee System ... www.miele.com/ - 20k - Cached - Similar pages
Miele Welcome to Miele, the home of the very best appliances and kitchens in the world. www.miele.co.uk/ - 3k - Cached - Similar pages
Miele - Deutscher Hersteller von Einbaugeräten, Hausgeräten ... - [ Translate this page ] Das Portal zum Thema Essen & Geniessen online unter www.zu-tisch.de. Miele weltweit ...ein Leben lang. ... Wählen Sie die Miele Vertretung Ihres Landes. www.miele.de/ - 10k - Cached - Similar pages
Herzlich willkommen bei Miele Österreich - [ Translate this page ] Herzlich willkommen bei Miele Österreich Wenn Sie nicht automatisch weitergeleitet werden, klicken Sie bitte hier! HAUSHALTSGERÄTE ... www.miele.at/ - 3k - Cached - Similar pages
Sponsored Links
CG Appliance Express Discount Appliances (650) 756-3931 Same Day Certified Installation www.cgappliance.com San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, CA Miele Vacuum Cleaners Miele Vacuums- Complete Selection Free Shipping! www.vacuums.com Miele Vacuum Cleaners Miele-Free Air shipping! All models. Helpful advice. www.best-vacuum.com
Web spider
Indexer
Indexes
Search
User
Web Crawling
108
Q: How does a search engine know that all these pages
contain the query terms?
A: Because all of those pages have
been crawled 109
Crawling picture
Web
URLs frontier
Unseen Web
Seedpages
URLs crawledand parsed
Sec. 20.2
110
Motivation for crawlers
Support universal search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN/Windows Live, Ask, etc.)
Vertical (specialized) search engines, e.g. news, shopping, papers, recipes, reviews, etc.
Business intelligence: keep track of potential competitors, partners
Monitor Web sites of interest Evil: harvest emails for spamming, phishing… … Can you think of some others?…
111
A crawler within a search engine
112
Web
Text index PageRank
Page repository
googlebot
Text & link analysisQuery
hits
Ranker
One taxonomy of crawlers
Many other criteria could be used:– Incremental, Interactive, Concurrent, Etc.
113
Universal crawlers
Focused crawlers
Evolutionary crawlers Reinforcement learning crawlers
etc...
Adaptive topical crawlers
Best-first PageRank
etc...
Static crawlers
Topical crawlers
Preferential crawlers
Crawlers
Basic crawlers
This is a sequential crawler Seeds can be any list of starting
URLs Order of page visits is determined
by frontier data structure Stop criterion can be anything
Graph traversal (BFS or DFS?)
Breadth First Search– Implemented with QUEUE (FIFO)
– Finds pages along shortest paths
– If we start with “good” pages, this keeps us close; maybe other good stuff…
Depth First Search– Implemented with STACK (LIFO)
– Wander away (“lost in cyberspace”)
115
Universal crawlers
Support universal search engines Large-scale Huge cost (network bandwidth) of crawl is
amortized over many queries from users Incremental updates to existing index and
other data repositories
116
Large-scale universal crawlers
Two major issues:
1. Performance• Need to scale up to billions of pages
2. Policy• Need to trade-off coverage, freshness, and bias
(e.g. toward “important” pages)
117
Large-scale crawlers: scalability
Need to minimize overhead of DNS lookups Need to optimize utilization of network bandwidth and disk
throughput (I/O is bottleneck) Use asynchronous sockets
– Multi-processing or multi-threading do not scale up to billions of pages– Non-blocking: hundreds of network connections open simultaneously– Polling socket to monitor completion of network transfers
118
Universal crawlers: Policy
Coverage– New pages get added all the time– Can the crawler find every page?
Freshness– Pages change over time, get removed, etc.– How frequently can a crawler revisit ?
Trade-off!– Focus on most “important” pages (crawler bias)?– “Importance” is subjective
119
Web coverage by search engine crawlers
35% 34%
16%
50%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
1997 1998 1999 2000
This assumes we know the size of the entire the Web. Do we? Can you define “the size of the
Web”?
Maintaining a “fresh” collection
Universal crawlers are never “done” High variance in rate and amount of page changes HTTP headers are notoriously unreliable
– Last-modified– Expires
Solution– Estimate the probability that a previously visited page has
changed in the meanwhile– Prioritize by this probability estimate
121
Do we need to crawl the entire Web?
If we cover too much, it will get stale There is an abundance of pages in the Web For PageRank, pages with very low prestige are largely
useless What is the goal?
– General search engines: pages with high prestige – News portals: pages that change often– Vertical portals: pages on some topic
What are appropriate priority measures in these cases? Approximations?
122
Complications
Web crawling isn’t feasible with one machine– All of the above steps distributed
Malicious pages– Spam pages – Spider traps – incl dynamically generated
Even non-malicious pages pose challenges– Latency/bandwidth to remote servers vary– Webmasters’ stipulations
• How “deep” should you crawl a site’s URL hierarchy?
– Site mirrors and duplicate pages Politeness – don’t hit a server too often
Sec. 20.1.1
123
ROBOT.TXT
124
your guide for the search engines
What is robots.txt?
It’s a file in the root of your website that can either allow or restrict search engine robots from crawling pages on your website.
How does it work?
Before a search engine robot crawls your website, it will first look for your robots.txt file to find out where you want them to go.
There are 3 things you should keep in mind:Robots can ignore your robots.txt. Malware robots scanning the web for security vulnerabilities, or email address harvesters used by spammers, will not care about your instructions.The robots.txt file is public. Anyone can see what areas of your website you don’t want robots to see.Search engines can still index (but not crawl) a page you’ve disallowed, if it’s linked to from another website. In the search results it’ll then only show the url, but usually no title or information snippet. Instead, make use of the robots meta tag for that page.
What to put in your robots.txt file
User-agent:
This is the line where you define which robot you’re talking to. It’s like saying hello to the robot: User-agent: * (Googlebot - Google, Slurp – Yahoo)
Disallow:
This tells the robots what you don’t want them to crawl on your site: Disallow: / (do not crawl anything on my site) /images/
Allow
This tells the robots what you want them to crawl on your site.
Allow: /
What to put in your robots.txt file
(Asterisk / wildcard *)
With the * symbol, you tell the robots to match any number of any characters. Very useful for example when you don’t want your internal search result pages to be indexed.
Disallow: *contact* (do not crawl any urls containing the word contact)
$ (Dollar sign / ends with)
The dollar sign tells the robots that it is the end of the url.
Disallow: *.pdf$
# (Hash / comme
You can add comments after the “#” symbol, either at the start of a line or after a directive.
What to put in your robots.txt file
Crawl-Delay
This directive asks the robot to wait a certain amount of seconds after each time it’s crawled a page on your website..
Crawl-delay: 5
Request-rate:
Here you tell the robot how many pages you want it to crawl within a certain amount of seconds. The first number is pages, and the second number is seconds.
Request-rate: 1/5 # load 1 page per 5 seconds
Visit-time:
It’s like opening hours, i.e. when you want the robots to visit your website. This can be useful if you don’t want the robots to visit your website during busy hours (when you have lots of human visitors).
Visit-time: 2100-0500 # only visit between 21:00 (9PM) and 05:00 (5AM) UTC (GMT)
Test your page
https://www.google.com/webmasters/
SEO
131
Search engine optimization
What is SEO?
SEO = Search Engine Optimization
– Refers to the process of “optimizing” both the on-page and off-page ranking factors in order to achieve high search engine rankings for targeted search terms.
– Refers to the “industry” that has been created regarding using keyword searching a a means of increasing relevant traffic to a website
What is a SEO Algorithm?
Top Secret! Only select employees of a search engines company know for certain
Reverse engineering, research and experiments gives SEOs (search engine optimization professionals) a “pretty good” idea of the major factors and approximate weight assignments
The SEO algorithm is constantly changed, tweaked & updated
Websites and documents being searched are also constantly changing
Varies by Search Engine – some give more weight to on-page factors, some to link popularity
http://seositecheckup.com/
A good SEO strategy:
Research desirable keywords and search phrases (WordTracker, Overture, Google AdWords)
Identify search phrases to target (should be relevant to business/market, obtainable and profitable)
“Clean” and optimize a website’s HTML code for appropriate keyword density, title tag optimization, internal linking structure, headings and subheadings, etc.
Help in writing copy to appeal to both search engines and actual website visitors
Study competitors (competing websites) and search engines
Implement a quality link building campaign
Add Quality content
Constant monitoring of rankings for targeted search terms
Ranking factors
On-Page Factors (Code & Content)#3 - Title tags <title>
#5 - Header tags <h1>
#4 - ALT image tags
#1 - Content, Content, Content (Body text) <body>
#6 - Hyperlink text
#2 - Keyword frequency & density
Off-Page Factors#1 Anchor text
#2 - Link Popularity (“votes” for your site) – adds credibility
What a Search Engine Sees
View > Source (HTML code)
Pay Per Click
PPC ads appear as “sponsored listings”Companies bid on price they are willing to pay “per click”Typically have very good tracking tools and statisticsAbility to control ad textCan set budgets and spending limitsGoogle AdWords and Overture are the two leaders
PPC vs. “Organic” SEO
Pay-Per-Click “Organic” SEO
• results in 1-2 days• easier for a novice or one little knowledge of SEO• ability to turn on and off at any moment• generally more costly per visitor and per conversion• fewer impressions and exposure• easier to compete in highly competitive market space (but it will cost you)• Ability to generate exposure on related sites (AdSense)• ability to target “local” markets• better for short-term and high-margin campaigns
• results take 2 weeks to 4 months• requires ongoing learning and experience to achieve results• very difficult to control flow of traffic• generally more cost-effective, does not penalize for more traffic• SERPs are more popular than sponsored ads• very difficult to compete in highly competitive market space• ability to generate exposure on related websites and directories• more difficult to target local markets• better for long-term and lower margin campaigns
Keys to Successful SEO Strategy
Keyword Selection
Marketing/Brand Relevance
Search Frequency
CompetitionOptimizationOpportunity
How closely does the keyword match your product/service offering, messaging, goals and objectives?
How much competition (large, authority sites) is there for the particular keyword?
Is there already a logical place on the site to optimize for the particular keyword?
How many people are searching on the particular keyword?