Getting Started with SEO

March 2014

Search Engine OptimisationGetting started with SEORob Hurst, Tom Kelly

A search engine’s primary responsibility is to serve relevant results to its users.

When a visitor types a query into a search box and lands on a site, will they be satisfied with what they find?

This is the primary question search engines try to answer. Billions of times a day.

First things first – the language…

There is an almost infinite number of terms relating to search.

The following are the 10 most important.

algorithm:The technology that a search engine uses to deliver results to a query.Search engines utilise several algorithms in tandem to deliver a page of search results or keyword-targeted search ads.

authority:The amount of trust that a site is credited with for a particular search query. Authority/trust is derived from related incoming links from other trusted sites.See also: link juice, Google juice

bounce rate:The percentage of users who enter a site and then leave it without viewing any other pages.

content:The text/copy part of a web page that is intended to have value for and be of interest to the user. Advertising, navigation, branding and boilerplate are not usually considered to be content.

HTML | Hyper Text Markup Language:Directives or “markup” which are used to add formatting and web functionality to plain text for use on the internet. HTML is the mother tongue of the search engines, and should generally be strictly and exclusively adhered to on web pages.See also: META tags

inbound link:An inbound link is an hyperlink to a particular Web page from an outside site, bringing traffic to that Web page. Inbound links are an important element that most search engine algorithms use to measure the popularity of a Web page.See also: backlink

keyword:The word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine.See also: keyword cannibalisation, keyword density

META tags:Statements within the HEAD section of an HTML page which furnishes information about the page. META information may be in the SERPs but is not visible on the page. It is very important to have unique and accurate META title and description tags, because they may be the information that the search engines rely upon the most to determine what the page is about. Also, they are the first impression that users get about your page within the SERPs.See also: HTML

organic search:The search engine results which are not sponsored, or paid for in any way.See also: paid search

PageRank:The Google algorithm which quantifies link popularity and trust among other (proprietary) factors.

SERP | Search Engine Results Page:The landing page for a particular search, showing all relevant results, broken down by category. Google has multiple SERPs, with some elements that may only appear if your search is deemed especially local, shopping-oriented or perhaps if Google thinks it has a direct answer.

There are (lots) more.

But to keep things (relatively) simple, you can read them later in the resources section at the end of this deck.

The days of a search resulting in 10 blue links are well and truly over!

Google has multiple SERPs, with some elements that may only appear if your search is deemed especially local, shopping-oriented or perhaps if Google thinks it has a direct answer.

Increasingly Google is working to provide answers on the SERP, rather than directing users on to third party content.

Understanding the SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

Mega-SERP: A Visual Guide to Google

The evolution of SERPS

How search works

What matters most?

In organic search, you cannot buy visibility with cash. Instead, the working currencies are authority and relevance. (Google’s most important principles)

• Relevance refers to how well a documents content match a search query. At its most basic level this is matching of keywords to pages, contextually.

• Authority (trust) is ranking strength. At its most basic level this is the influence of Links to the page.

Before Google, most search engines could find relevant documents, but they struggled with ranking them in an order that surfaced the best matches.

Google recognized the conundrum so it separated relevance from authority by counting links. Every link became a vote. Off-site links brought authority onto your site while on-site links flowed that authority through your website. Links signalled popularity and trust. PageRank was born.

The birth of PageRank

Context – Understanding your audience

Google's New Multi Screen World Study

Long-tail search queries typically have less search volume than head terms, but they are also less competitive. Its harder to rank for "lawyers" than it is to rank for “Corporate lawyers in London”.

There are very few interactions online that show a user’s intent quite like a long-tail search query,  because they're more specific in nature, the traffic you're driving by ranking for them is more targeted.

Pick your battles - Long-tail search queries

Search engine ranking factors (2013)

http://moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization

• Links are still believed to be the most important part of the algorithm (approximately 40%).

• Keyword usage on the page is still fundamental, and—other than links—is thought to be the most important type of factor. (approximately 15%

• SEO professionals feel social factors are growing in importance and will continue into 2014http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/survey

An SEO copywriter walks into a bar, pub, tavern, drinks beer, wine, cocktails…

The importance of keywords. (And phrases).

KeywordsKey phrases

(And content)

• The majority of searches are made of phrases not keywords (long-tail queries)

• Searchers often add more words the initial search phrase when unsuccessful (refining search query

• Search engines results are based on search phrase not words (semantic search)

Why ‘key phrases’?

In English, please…

• Consider language used by your target market. Not your office!

• Consider non-UK usage e.g. car leasing, auto leasing• Consider non-UK spelling e.g. optimisation,

optimization• Consider Synonyms e.g. car parts, car spares• Consider homonyms, homophone, homographs and

heteronyms e.g. bike, cereals (where searches for one meaning of word yield results for the alternative meaning)

• Consider key phrase variations including plurals and reverse order

• Consider apostrophes • Key phrase stemming e.g. “low fat diet”, “lower fat

dieting” (take a basic but popular keyword and add a prefix and/or suffix to make the keyword into a new word.

• Strategic positioning e.g. “cheap”, “luxury” if your products are neither don’t use these phrases.

On-Page• Ensuring the website is “search engine friendly” (setup

correctly to allow pages in the website to be indexed by search engines) and contains relevant key phrases.

• Meta data• Title tags• Page content• Search engine friendly URL’s• Search friendly images

Off-page optimisation (link building & increasing site authority)• Build links from sites search engines consider “authoritative”.• Other Factors include:

• Age of domain and location it is hosted• Inbound links• Social media indicators (increasingly)• Regularly updated

On & Off-Page Optimisation

Ensure keywords are used prominently where Google places prominence on them, namely ‘Headings’.

Heading Tags- Use <H> tags in CSS to define heading

styles- <h1>Main Heading<h1>- <h2>Sub Heading Style</h2>

Google’s Hummingbird update allows semantic search, so the engine will understand synonyms and words relating to the subject matter.

There is no need to ‘keyword stuff’. The suggestion used to be to aim for 5% keyword density. Ignore this and focus on creating good, relevant content.

On-page optimisation

http://moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization

Meta data - Title tags

<Title>** (It’s truncated at ~70 chars, recommended: ~65 chars)

Meta data – Description tags

<meta name=”description” content=”…””/>** (The description is truncated after ~160 chars (recommended: ~ 140 chars))

This is all about building your website authority. Earning links from trustworthysites is the key way to do this.

Links should be a by-product of great content and should not be obtained ‘unnaturally’ - the emphasis is on quality over quantity.

Steer clear of:• Paid advertorials• Link exchange networks• Over-using exact match anchor text for generic • Keywords e.g. in online PR and guest blogging sites• Poor quality outreach campaigns• Social mentions are also thought to be gaining increased

influence, as are brand mentions in the media/new/press.

Off-Page Optimisation

• Trial key phrases - If you are ever concerned about targeting specific key phrases consider using PPC to trial these phrases, identify which one are converting and which ones aren't.

• Instant feedback - PPC can provide you with instant feedback unlike SEO which is generally accepted takes a much longer period of time to settle in and stabilise.

• PPC key phrase performance/search term reports - If you already are running PPC campaign use the data gathered from these to identify keywords. That are performing well, consider improving your organic result for these. Use AdWords “search term reports” to discover keywords.

• PPC & SEO - Its been found that running PPC ads alongside your organic listing increase the overall click through rate.

Keyword research – Learn from PPC…

1.Google Keyword Planner

2.Google Trends

3.Rank Checker

In summary – Three tools to get ahead

© Copyright 2014 Omobono Ltd.All ideas, concepts, brand-related names, strap line, phrases, copy/text and creative concepts developed and contained in this document remain the intellectual property of Omobono Ltd until such time as they are procured by a third party.

Anyone viewing this document may not use, adapt or modify the contents without our prior consent.

Resources

Today Google’s algorithms rely on more than 200 unique signals, some of which you’d expect, like how often the search terms occur on the webpage, if they appear in the title or whether synonyms of the search terms occur on the page.

There are plenty of others we can’t begin to explain in detail. Here's how Google puts it...

According to Google…

Checklist - The elements of an optimised page

http://moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization

authority site A website which has many incoming links from other related expert/hub sites. Because of this simultaneous citation from trusted hubs an authority site usually has high trust, pagerank, and search results positiont. Wikipedia, is an example of an authority site.

back link/ inbound link (inlink, incoming link) Any link into a page or site from any other page or site.

click through rate (CTR): The rate (expressed in a percentage) at which users click on an ad. This is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks by the total number of ad impressions. CTR is an important metric for Internet marketers to measure the performance of an ad campaign.

inbound link / backlink: An inbound link is an hyperlink to a particular Web page from an outside site, bringing traffic to that Web page. Inbound links are an important element that most search engine algorithms use to measure the popularity of a Web page.

googlebot (Spiders): Google uses several user-agents to crawl and index content in the search engine. All Google bots begin with "Googlebot"; for example, Googlebot-Mobile: crawls pages for Google’s mobile index; Googlebot-Image: crawls pages for Google’s image index.

algorithm: The technology that a search engine uses to deliver results to a query. Search engines utilize several algorithms in tandem to deliver a page of search results or keyword-targeted search ads.

alt text A description of a graphic, which usually isn’t displayed to the end user, unless the graphic is undeliverable, 

analytics A program which assists in gathering and analyzing data about website usage. Google analytics is a feature rich, popular, free analytics program.

anchor text: The clickable text part of a hyperlink. The text usually gives visitors or search engines important information on what the page being linked to is about.

authority (trust, link juice, Google juice) The amount of trust that a site is credited with for a particular search query. Authority/trust is derived from related incoming links from other trusted sites.

Glossary

frames a web page design where two or more documents appear on the same screen, each within it’s own frame. Frames are bad for SEO because spiders sometimes fail to correctly navigate them.

Google juice (trust, authority, pagerank) trust / authority from Google, which flows through outgoing links to other pages.

Googlebot Google’s spider program

HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) directives or “markup” which are used to add formatting and web functionality to plain text for use on the internet. HTML is the mother tongue of the search engines, and should generally be strictly and exclusively adhered to on web pages.

index Noun - a database of WebPages and their content used by the search engines

black hat Search engine optimization tactics that are counter to best practices such as the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

bounce rate The percentage of users who enter a site and then leave it without viewing any other pages

content (text, copy) The part of a web page that is intended to have value for and be of interest to the user. Advertising, navigation, branding and boilerplate are not usually considered to be content.

conversion (goal) Achievement of a quantifiable goal on a website. Add clicks, sign ups, and sales are examples of conversions.

conversion rate Percentage of users who convert - see conversion.

crawler / Googlebot / spider (bot, spider) A program which moves through the worldwide web or a website by way of the link structure to gather data.

duplicate content Obviously content which is similar or identical to that found on another website or page.

Glossary

latent semantic indexing (LSI) / semantic search This mouthful just means that the search engines index commonly associated groups of words in a document.

link An element on a web page that can be clicked on to cause the browser to jump to another page or another part of the current page.

link bait A webpage with the designed purpose of attracting incoming links, often mostly via social media.

link building actively cultivating incoming links to a site.

link juice (trust, authority, pagerank)

long tail longer more specific search queries that are often less targeted than shorter broad queries.

keyword - key phrase The word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine.

keyword cannibalization The excessive reuse of the same keyword on too many web pages within the same site. This practice makes it difficult for the users and the search engines to determine which page is most relevant for the keyword.

keyword density The percentage of words on a web page which are a particular keyword. If this value is unnaturally high the page may be penalized.

keyword research The hard work of determining which keywords are appropriate for targeting.

keyword stuffing (keyword spam) Inappropriately high keyword density.

landing page the page that a user lands on when they click on a link in a SERP

Glossary

pagerank Google algorithm, which quantifies link popularity and trust among other (proprietary) factors.

PPC (Pay Per Click) a contextual advertisement scheme where advertisers pay add agencies (such as Google) whenever a user clicks on their add. Adwords is an example of PPC advertising.

redirect Any of several methods used to change the address of a landing page such as when a site is moved to a new domain, or in the case of a doorway.

Schema.org is an initiative launched on 2 June 2011 by Bing, Google and Yahoo! to “create and support a common set of schemas for structured data mark-up on web pages

search engine (SE) a program, which searches a document or group of documents for relevant matches of a users keyword phrase and returns a list of the most relevant matches. Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo search the entire internet for relevant matches.

META tags Statements within the HEAD section of an HTML page which furnishes information about the page. META information may be in the SERPs but is not visible on the page. It is very important to have unique and accurate META title and description tags, because they may be the information that the search engines rely upon the most to determine what the page is about. Also, they are the first impression that users get about your page within the SERPs.

natural search results The search engine results which are not sponsored, or paid for in any way.

nofollow A command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, which instructs robots to not follow either any links on the page or the specific link.

noindex A command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, which instructs robots to not index the page or the specific link.

organic link organic links are those that are published only because the webmaster considers them to add value for users.

Glossary

SERP Search Engine Results Page

spider (bot, crawler) A specialized bot used by search engines to find and add web pages to their indexes.

Snippet - Google's generation of page titles and descriptions (or "snippets") on the SERP . It is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web. The goal of the snippet and title is to best represent and describe each result and explain how it relates to the user's query.

text link A plain HTML link that does not involve graphic or special code such as flash or java script.

time on page The amount of time that a user spends on one page before clicking off. An indication of quality and relevance.

URL Uniform Resource Locator - AKA Web Address

white hat SEO techniques, which conform to best practice guidelines, and do not attempt to unscrupulously “game” or manipulate SERPs.

Glossary

There are more.

Lots more.

The following sites offer more complete glossaries.

• SEO Book• MOZ• Search Engine Watch

Glossary

Copyright 2014 Omobono Ltd.All ideas, concepts, brand-related names, strap line, phrases, copy/text and creative concepts developed and contained in this document remain the intellectual property of Omobono Ltd until such time as they are procured by a third party.

Anyone viewing this document may not use, adapt or modify the contents without our prior consent.

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