Introduction to SEO

 SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines.

—  At least half a billion searches are made worldwide on a daily basis

—  If you are ranked at the top of a search engine, you are essentially running a free marketing campaign.

How a search engine works

—  Search engines use programs called spiders to search the internet and document their findings.

—  Spiders firstly go to a webpage and analyse it

—  Goes through the HTML code and categorises the most important words (keywords) in the document.

—  It then moves on to any pages that linked from the current page.

—  This is one way how search engines find new pages.

—  It also visits pages that may not be linked by other pages, but were submitted by search engines.

What a search engine sees

—  Spiders do not see a page like humans do, as it cannot describe an image, or tell you how pretty a site looks

—  Instead, it looks at the HTML code and structures it to make sense.

How search engine delivering the results?

—  Crawling, Indexing and Serving

In short terms

—  Crawl - getting new pages

—  Index - saving in db

—  Serving - producing the result

Types of Search Engines

•       Crawler-Based Search Engines

•       Directories

•       Hybrid Search Engines

•       Meta Search Engines

•       Specialty Search Engines

Main Search Engines

—  Crawler,

—  Directories

—  Meta

Crawler

—  Crawler-based search engines use automated software programs to survey and categorize web pages

—  They are constantly searching the Internet for new web pages and updating their database of information with these new or altered pages

—  Example: Google

Directory

—  A Directory uses human editors who decide what category the site belongs to; they place websites within specific categories in the ‘directories’ database

—  The human editors comprehensively check the website and rank it, based on the information they find, using a pre-defined set of rules.

—  Example: Yahoo Directory, Dmoz (Open Directory)

Hybrid

—  Hybrid search engines use a combination of both crawler-based results and directory results. More and more search engines these days are moving to a hybrid-based model.

—  Examples: Google

Meta

—  Meta search engines take the results from all the other search engines results, and combine them into one large listing.

—  Example: Metacrawler, dogpile.

—  Yahoo was a hydrid search engine but now Bing had a tie-up with yahoo so Yahoo displays the 25 % results of Bing results

—  So now Yahoo coming under the category of Meta search engine too.

SEO gives companies the ability to :

—  Drive high quality customers to their website

—  Increase sales leads from customers looking for their products and services

—  Build their brand online by communicating marketing messages to their target audience

—  Increase their profile against their competitors

—  Target a global audience via international search engines

Top 5 Search Engines

—  Google

—  Yahoo

—  Bing

—  Ask

—  MSN

Types of SEO

—  Off Page Optimization

—  On Page Optimization

Off Page Optimization

Ø  Off page optimization is to improve the search engine page rank and increase the targeted visitor traffic to your website.

Ø  It helps to maximize website performance in search engine for target keywords

Off Page Optimization List

—  Search Engine Submission

—  Directory Submission

—  Social Bookmarking

—  Classified Ads

—  Article Submission

—  Press Release Submission

—  Group Post

—  Blog Commenting

—  Image Promotion

—  Forum Submissions

—  Business Listing

On Page Optimization

Ø  It is to make the website SE friendly, help it rank well in SE results, increasing its overall visibility, readability

Ø   It can be done on the pages of a website to maximize its performance in the SE for target kWs related to the on-page content.

Ø   On-page optimization has an effect on your website listing in natural results

Ø   On-page factors are controlled by coding on website pages

On page optimization list

—  Keyword Research & Analysis

—  Optimizing Meta Tags

—  Keyword Monitoring

—  Site Monitoring

—  Robots File Implementation

—  XML Sitemap Implementation

—  Internal Link Structuring

—  Image Optimization

—  Content Optimization

—  Website Analysis

—  W3 Validation

—  RSS Feed Creation

Choose a domain name that will increase your search engine ranking. How?

—  SEO Starts from selection of the domain name. Choose a keyword that is relevant for the business. That should be simple and short, easy remembrance, no hyphen, no numbers and all

—  When it goes for IT the domain name is something diff and stylish to their theme

—  Not only IT.  All companies they choose with their own company names.

—  In that case we can apply in naming a page with the keyword.

Linking strategies

—  The text in the links (URL) should include keywords

—  The more inbound links the higher the SE ranking
(check through alexa rank tool )

—  Submitting sites should be in high page rank

—  If the site linking to you is already indexed, spiders will also receive your site

How to increase links:

—  Creative content / copywriting

—  Good outbound links

—  Target a list of sites from which you can request inbound links

—  Keywords should be present in submissions

—  GEO target

—  High PR

—  No spam

Keywords Selection & How?

—  Service of the website.

—  Shuffling the keywords

—  Singular and plural

—  Geo target

—  Tool: Google Adwords

Keyword Research and Analysis

—  Keywords are the words on a webpage that best describe that page

—  Keyword selection is the most important step to effective SEO

—  Research what keywords are people searching for using

—  Keywords are words that appear the most in a page

—  The spider chooses the appropriate keywords for each page, then sends them back to its SE

—  Your web site will then be indexed based on your  keywords

—  Can be key phrases or a single keyword

—  Do not use common words e.g. ‘the’ ‘and’ ‘of’: spiders ignore them

—  Write keyword-rich text

—  Balance keyword-rich and readability

—  Always have text in your page: at least 100 words
( tools : Google keyword tools )

Optimizing Meta Tags
Title Tags

—  Important in optimizing rankings

—  The first thing that a search engine displays on a search return

—  Must keywords in title to be ranked no. 1 for SE search

—  Should have the exact keyword you use for the page

—  Every single web page must have its own title tag

—  You can use up to 65 characters

Meta Description

—  Displayed below the title in search results

—  Use dynamic, promotional language

—  Use keywords for cache (ing )

H1, H2, H3

—  These tags are considered by search engines to be a description of your page.

—  Very important to put in some keywords there.

—  It is always a good idea to structure your content so that it contains these tags at beginning of paragraphs, tables, sections, etc.

—  It is quite logical that a search engine gets the overview of a paragraph from a header tag

Image Optimization

Alt tags

—  Include keywords in your alt tags

—  Images are not read by search engines, and so you should avoid using too many images on your site

¢  Many sites use images for fancy fonts, when they contain keywords that are never read by a search engine

Content Optimization
Text and Content

—  Throughout your page you will need to use keywords in order to rank well for that word

—  The most important places of your content to put keywords are in the headers, at the beginning, and the end of paragraphs.

—  It is importance to balance the overuse of keywords for the sake of SEO and keeping the text relevant, readable, and informative

W3 Validation
Code Structure

—  It is important to look at your HTML code and see the structure of it.

—  Some pages have too much code, and too little content

—  Some code makes it so that content is found at the bottom of the page.

—  Make sure that keywords are found at the top of your source code as well as on the actual web page

—  Remember, SEs don’t see pages like we do, they only see our HTML code.

Site Monitoring
Update your site regularly

—  Sites that are updated regularly are spidered and indexed more frequently by Ses

—  Sites that change often are considered by SEs as sites that provide current information, and must provide up to date information

—  News Items are a great way of including a regular changing page.

—  Have to check the site in daily basis and correct if any fault occurs ( Spelling , Alignment , Design )

Sitemap

Two Types

—  HTML sitemap

—  XML sitemap

—  HTML Sitemap - For user and robots. Html site map list out the available pages in the site. it helps to easily find the no of pages in the site.

—  XML Sitemap – Robots alone. Xml sitemap is to be indexed in search engine. it increases the quality of the site. This is helpful when there is more number of pages to be indexed soon

—  Indexing process done only one time. Other process are only crawling and updating by the search engine crawlers. 

XML Sitemap

A list of pages you want the Search Engines to find which is created in XML format and submitted to the Search Engines..

Internal Link Structuring

—  Have to analyze what should be the landing page

—  URL should be user friendly and easy to look.

—  It should be like this :

http://info.com/web-designing/

—  It should not be like this:

http://swidesolution.com/web/loginid48_design/

—  That is an old method using _ now search engine says use hyphens -.

—  Even for URL structure we need to check for keywords. Search engine read the URL first so this method useful to get a rank easily.

robots.txt

—  Block or remove pages using a robots.txt file

—  A robots.txt file restricts access to your site by search engine robots that crawl the web. These bots are automated, and before they access pages of a site, they check to see if a robots.txt file exists that prevents them from accessing certain pages.

—  We can check by www.domain.com/robots.txt

—  We can show a sitemap to crawler by using robots file. Helps to crawl easily and quickly

—  This is the syntax Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

—  User-agent: *

—  Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

—  Disallow code is to tell not to crawl.

—  We no need to use "allow" anywhere

—  User-agent: * // This is to allow all search engine crawlers

—  User-agent: Google // to allow a single Google boot

Keyword Monitoring

—  Done by the SERP

—  Using KW should check in SE and whether it is crawled or cached.

—  Doing Monitor regularly it will increase the SERP too.

Canonicalization

—  Generally the registered domain could display domain.com if we type with www.domainname.com and http://www.domain.com this display the website but the crawler will consider those are different domains. This will create a duplicate content issue and will damage the results

—  This is called canonicalization issue. How to prevent this issue is create a permanent redirection by the code for the domain.

The sample code is

<IfModule mod_php4.c>

   php_value register_globals        1

   php_value magic_quotes_gpc             0

   php_value magic_quotes_runtime    0

   php_value magic_quotes_sybase     0

</IfModule>

AddType application/x-httpd-php .html

AddType text/x-server-parsed-html .htm .html

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} domain.com [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/ [R=301,L]

—  Max of the website accepts from the code Options +FollowSymLinks...... No need to give from the top. The file name should be as .htaccess and to be keeping in the root dir.

—  This code is for apache server website. This may differ for other servers can search from the internet.

404 error page

—  Users may enter into the not exist page, either following a broken link or typing a wrong url.

—  If the website having a customized 404 page with the navigation links will greatly improve a user experience, less chance to go out.

—  Make sure the website doesn’t contain any error page before uploading files in the root.

—  Just create a file named as 404.html or .php. Just parse this code in htaccess file

—  ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

—  This 404.html is the file name that you created for displaying the “Page Not Found. Sorry, the page you are looking is not found on krishnamurthyinfo.com. Please try visiting our HOME page”

301 Redirection

—  If you in a situation to change an indexed page don’t forget to create a 301 redirection by using the code redirect 301 old url/ New full url.

—  301 redirection for main domain only. If you want to create redirection for pages means just use the code

—  redirect 301/page1.html http://www.domainname.com/page1.html in htaccess file

SEO - what is NOT RECOMMENDED?

—  Flash and shockwave - spiders do not pick up these files

—  Image only sites - spiders do not pick up images

—  Image maps - spiders cannot read image maps.

—  Misspellings, JavaScript or HTML errors (validate your code)

Two Types of Search

¢  Organic Search Results

¢  In Organic Search Results

Organic Search Results

—  Organic search results are listings on search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to their being advertisement.

—  Natural Results

—  Through Submissions

In Organic Search Results

—  Inorganic or Sponsored Listings have always been clearly separated from the organic search results at Google.

—  While paid or Inorganic Search Results shown up  at the right side or even at the top of organic results

—  Paid Results

What are paid listings?

—  These are listings that search engines sell to advertisers, usually through paid placement or paid inclusion programs. In contrast, organic listings are not sold.

—  Also Known as PPC

PPC

—  PPC is an Internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, where advertisers pay the publisher (typically a website owner) when the ad is clicked.

—  PPC will give only the temporary result for the period we are implementing

—  PPC advertising called paid search advertising

Effectiveness of PPC?

—  Quick global reach..Cost is high..

SMM

—  Social Media Marketing

—  The process of gaining traffic and attention on a website through a social networks

—  Easy way of reaching peoples

Top Social Networking Sites

—  Facebook

—  Twitter

—  Linkedin

—  Myspace

—  Google +

—  Orkut

—  Tagged

—  Pinterest

Can easily reach people

SEM

—  Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

—  SEM is the act of marketing a website via search engines by purchasing paid listings

SEO Techniques
Inbound Links

—  Links from other sites are very important.

—  Google will no list your site if its not found on an other webpage listed by them

—  Methods to get links on other pages

—  Link Exchange (free)

—  Paid Advertising

—  Google Adwords

—  Overture

—  Specific Websites

Types of Links

—  In Bound Links

—  Out Bound Links

In Bound Links: A Link from a site outside of your site. Inbound links means send visitors to your site, generally this is seen as good think for SEO.

       Outbound Links: A link to a site outside of your site. Outbound links means send visitors away from your site.

SERP

—  Search Engine Result Page

—  A SERP is the page that you see after you perform a search using a search engine.

—  It includes a list of search results that are relevant to the search phrase or keywords you entered

—  Each search result typically includes the title of the page and a brief description of the page.

—  The description may either be taken from the page's description  meta tag keywords from the search phrase.