Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Seminar on Web Search, Brussels, Belgium, September 2011

Transcript

1. 2 December 2005 Seminar on Web Search Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Prof. Beat Signer Department of Computer Science Vrije Universiteit Brussel
2. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 2 September 9, 2011 Search Engine Result Pages (SERP)
3. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 3 September 9, 2011 Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) ...
4. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 4 September 9, 2011 Vertical Search Result Pages
5. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 5 September 9, 2011 Search Engine Result Page ▪ There is a variety of information shown on a search engine result page (SERP) ▪ organic search results ▪ non-organic search results ▪ meta-information about the result (e.g. number of result pages) ▪ vertical navigation ▪ advanced search options ▪ query refinement suggestions ▪ ...
6. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 6 September 9, 2011 Search Engine Marketing (SEM) ▪ For many companies Internet marketing has become a big business ▪ Search engine marketing (SEM) aims to increase the visibility of a website ▪ search engine optimisation (SEO) ▪ paid search advertising (non-organic search) ▪ social media marketing ▪ SEO should not be decoupled from a website's content, structure, design and used technologies ▪ SEO has to be seen as an continuous process in a rapidly changing environment ▪ different search engines with regular changes in ranking
7. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 7 September 9, 2011 Structural Choices ▪ Keep the website structure as flat a possible ▪ minimise link depth ▪ avoid pages with much more than 100 links ▪ Think about your website's internal link structure ▪ which pages are directly linked from the homepage? ▪ create many internal links for important pages ▪ be "careful" about where to put outgoing links - PageRank leakage ▪ use keyword-rich anchor texts ▪ dynamically create links between related content - e.g. "customer who bought this also bought ..." or "visitors who viewed this also viewed ..." ▪ Increase the number of pages
8. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 8 September 9, 2011 Technological Choices ▪ Check whether a potential content management system (CMS) is SEO friendly ▪ Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs ▪ avoid session IDs and parameters in URL ▪ use URL rewriting to get descriptive URLs containing keywords ▪ Think carefully about the use of dynamic content and links ▪ e.g. use of JavaScript or Flash ▪ Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) based on AJAX etc. ▪ content hidden behind pull-down menus etc. ▪ Address webpages consistently ▪ http://www.vub.ac.be  http://www.vub.ac.be/index.php
9. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 9 September 9, 2011 Consistent Addressing of Webpages
10. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 10 September 9, 2011 Search Engine Optimisations ▪ Different things can be optimised ▪ on-page factors ▪ off-page factors ▪ It is assumed that some search engines use more than 200 on-page and off-page factors for their ranking ▪ Difference between optimisation and breaking the "search engine rules" ▪ white hat and black hat optimisations ▪ A bad ranking or removal from index can cost a company a lot of money or even mark the end of the company ▪ e.g. supplemental index ("Google hell")
11. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 11 September 9, 2011 Positive On-Page Factors ▪ Use of keywords at relevant places ▪ in title tag (preferably one of the first words) ▪ in URL ▪ in domain name ▪ in header tags (e.g. <h1>) ▪ multiple times in body text ▪ Provide metadata ▪ e.g. <meta name="description"> also used by search engines to create the text snippets on the SERPs ▪ Quality of HTML code ▪ Uniqueness of content across the website ▪ Page freshness (occasional changes)
12. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 12 September 9, 2011 Negative On-Page Factors ▪ Links to "bad neighbourhood" ▪ Link selling ▪ in 2007 Google announced a campaign against paid links that transfer PageRank ▪ Over optimisation penalty (keyword stuffing) ▪ Text with same colour as background (hidden content) ▪ Automatic redirect via the refresh meta tag ▪ Cloaking ▪ different pages for spider and user ▪ Malware being hosted on the page
13. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 13 September 9, 2011 Negative On-Page Factors ... ▪ Duplicate or similar content ▪ Duplicate page titles or meta tags ▪ Slow page load time ▪ Any copyright violations ▪ ...
14. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 14 September 9, 2011 Positive Off-Page Factors ▪ Links from pages with a high PageRank ▪ Keywords in anchor text of inbound links ▪ Links from topically relevant sites ▪ High clickthrough rate (CTR) from search engine for a given keyword ▪ Listed in DMOZ / Open Directory Project (ODP) and Yahoo directories ▪ High number of shares on social networks ▪ e.g. Facebook, Google +1 or Twitter
15. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 15 September 9, 2011 Positive Off-Page Factors ... ▪ Site age (stability) ▪ Google sandbox? ▪ Domain expiration date ▪ High PageRank ▪ ...
16. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 16 September 9, 2011 Negative Off-Page Factors ▪ Site often not accessible to crawlers ▪ e.g. server problem ▪ High bounce rate ▪ users immediately press the back button ▪ Link buying ▪ rapidly increasing number of inbound links ▪ Use of link farms ▪ Participation in link sharing programmes ▪ Links from bad neighbourhood? ▪ Competitor attack (e.g. via duplicate content)?
17. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 17 September 9, 2011 Black Hat Optimisations (Don'ts) ▪ Link farms ▪ Spamdexing in guestbooks, Wikipedia etc. ▪ "solution": <a rel="nofollow" href="...">...</a> ▪ Keyword Stuffing ▪ overuse of keywords - content keyword stuffing - image keyword stuffing - kewords in meta tags - invisible text with keywords ▪ Selling/buying links ▪ "big" business until 2007 ▪ costs based on the PageRank of the linking site
18. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 18 September 9, 2011 Black Hat Optimisations (Don'ts) ... ▪ Doorway pages (cloaking) ▪ doorway pages are normally just designed for search engines - user is automatically redirected to the target page ▪ e.g. BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany banned in February 2006
19. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 19 September 9, 2011 Nofollow Link Example ▪ Nofollow value for hyperlinks introduced by Google in 2005 to avoid spamdexing ▪ <a rel="nofollow" href="...">...</a> ▪ Links with a nofollow value were not counted in the PageRank computation ▪ division by number of outgoing links ▪ e.g. page with 9 outgoing links and 3 of them are nofollow links - PageRank divided by 6 and distributed across the 6 "really linked pages" ▪ SEO experts started to use (misuse) the nofollow links for PageRank sculpting ▪ control flow of PageRank within a website
20. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 20 September 9, 2011 Nofollow Link Example ... ▪ In June 2009 Google decided to treat nofollow links differently to avoid PageRank sculpting ▪ division by total number of outgoing links ▪ e.g. page with 9 outgoing links and 3 of them are nofollow links - PageRank divided by 9 and distributed across the 6 "really linked pages" ▪ no longer a good solution to prevent Spamdexing since we loose (diffuse) some PageRank ▪ SEO experts start to use alternative techniques to replace nofollow links ▪ e.g. obfuscated JavaScript links
21. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 21 September 9, 2011 Where to Get SEO Information ▪ Guidelines from search engine providers ▪ e.g. Google webmaster guidelines ▪ Various SEO websites ▪ http://www.seobook.com/ ▪ http://www.seomoz.org/ ▪ Blogs ▪ Matt Cutts (GoogleGuy) http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ ▪ ...
22. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 22 September 9, 2011 Webpage Validation ▪ Browsers forgive errors in HTML documents ▪ weakens the standard ▪ HTML pages can be checked against standard ▪ http://validator.w3.org/ ▪ Less HTML errors ▪ easier parsing for search engines ▪ might also be a ranking factor for search engines ▪ faster rendering
23. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 23 September 9, 2011 Google Webmaster Tools ▪ Various services and infor- mation about a website ▪ Site configuration ▪ submission of sitemap ▪ crawler access ▪ URLs of indexed pages ▪ settings - e.g. preferred domain ▪ Your site on the web ▪ search queries ▪ keywords ▪ internal and external links
24. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 24 September 9, 2011 Google Webmaster Tools ... ▪ Diagnostics ▪ crawl rates and errors ▪ HTML suggestions ▪ Use HTML suggestions for on-page factor optimisation ▪ meta description - duplicate meta descriptions - too long meta descriptions ▪ title tag - missing or duplicate title tags - too long or too short title tags ▪ non-indexable content ▪ Similar tools offered by other search engines ▪ e.g. Bing Webmaster Tools
25. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 25 September 9, 2011 XML Sitemaps ▪ List of URLs that should be crawled and indexed <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.example.com/sitemap/0.9"> <url> <loc>http://www.tenera.ch/zyliss-trommelreibe.html</loc> <lastmod>2011-07-06</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> <priority>0.4</priority> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.tenera.ch/tenera-universalmesser.html</loc> <lastmod>2010-12-05</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> <priority>0.1</priority> </url> ... </urlset>
26. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 26 September 9, 2011 XML Sitemaps ... ▪ All major search engines support the sitemap format ▪ The URLs of sitemap are not guaranteed to be added to a search engine's index ▪ helps search engine to find pages that are not yet indexed ▪ Additional metadata might be provided to search engines ▪ relative page relevance (priority) ▪ date of last modififaction (lastmod) ▪ update frequency (changefreq)
27. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 27 September 9, 2011 Web Analysis Tools ▪ Logfile analysis tools ▪ Google Analytics ▪ easy to "install" over the Web ▪ website admin has to add a piece of JavaScript code to the website ▪ Google gets information about site visitors ▪ a user can normally choose to use a free service (e.g. Gmail) but has no choice when it comes to being tracked via Google Analytics
28. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 28 September 9, 2011 Product Search ▪ Various shopping and price comparison sites import product data ▪ some of them are free, for others one has to pay ▪ Google Product Search ▪ started as Froogle, became Google Products and now Google Product Search ▪ product data uploaded to Google Base ▪ very effective vertical search
29. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 29 September 9, 2011 Social Networks and Bookmarking ▪ Social networks offer another great opportunity to attract new visitors ▪ "word of mouth" ▪ inlinks do often not count ▪ Offer visitors the possi- bility to easily bookmark and share a website on social networks ▪ use sharing services such as AddThis - http://www.addthis.com/
30. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 30 September 9, 2011 Non-Organic Search ▪ In addition to the so-called organic search, websites can also participate in non-organic web search ▪ cost per impression (CPI) ▪ cost- per-click (CPC) ▪ The non-organic web search should be treated independently from the organic web search ▪ Quality of the landing page can have an impact on the non-organic web search performance! ▪ The Google AdWords programme is an example of a commercial non-organic web search service ▪ other services include Yahoo! Advertising Solutions, Facebook Ads, ...
31. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 31 September 9, 2011 Google AdWords ▪ pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-thousand (CPM) ▪ Campains and ad groups ▪ Two types of advertising ▪ search ▪ content network - Google Adsense ▪ Highly customisable ads ▪ region ▪ language ▪ daytime ▪ ...
32. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 32 September 9, 2011 Google AdWords ... ▪ Excellent control and monitoring for AdWords users ▪ cost per conversion ▪ In 2010 Google's total advertising revenues were 28 billion USD
33. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 33 September 9, 2011 Conclusions ▪ SEO is a continous and lengthy process that should be synchronised with decisions about a website's content, structure, design and used technologies ▪ Optimisation of on-page and off-page factors leads to increased ranking and visibility ▪ Non-organic search as a paid alternative to increase the visibility ▪ profits from SEO since the landing pages will be of higher quality ▪ Many opportunities and free services ▪ e.g. Google Product Search ▪ Social marketing and social search is rapidly growing!
34. Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 34 September 9, 2011 References ▪ Google Webmaster Tools ▪ http://www.google.com/webmasters/ ▪ The W3C Markup Validation Service ▪ http://validator.w3.org/ ▪ Matt Cutts ▪ http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ ▪ SEO Book ▪ http://www.seobook.com ▪ SEOmoz ▪ http://www.seomoz.org
35. 2 December 2005 Next Lecture Current and Future Trends in Web Search