training materials from Certificate in Online Course 2010 run by Donegal County Enterprise Board

1. (SEO)
Sarah Diffley
Sarah.Diffley@lyit.ie

2. SEO
 Optimising website pages
 Keyword research
 Link building
 Directories

3. Why SEO?
80% of people will click top organic sites.
Organic V Paid searches.
Chances likely to fall to 0% of click-through if not
on first page of search results.

4. What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) involves the
process of altering or “optimising” a website so
that it does well in the organic, crawler-based
listings of search engines.
Landing pages should be highly optimised.

5. What is SEO?
Search Engine Marketing (SEM):
SEM is the process of marketing a website via search
engines, both organic listings, paid listings or both.
SEO and SEM are interlinked.
Goal: high ranking of website pages in search engines.
SEO takes time – remember 80% click on organic sites.

6. What is SEO?
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
http://www.webmasterworld.com/
http://www.highrankings.com
http://www.bruceclay.com
http://www.hubspot.com/
http://searchenginewatch.com/
http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-

7. Why SEO?
Search Engines
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/search-engine
Web spiders look for links, go through pages
and build a list of words and notes where they
were found.
Index built on own system of weighting.
Web spiders encode date to save space,
compressing the information. Data is then
stored for users to access.

8. Why SEO?
Spiders take Web pages content and create key
search words that enable online users to find
the pages they are looking for.
Ranking involves comparison of your web
pages to others and looks for keywords. After
this comparison, they are ranked.
Links are also important to a site.
Spiders cannot get into flash and so a website
needs spider friendly pages too.

9. Why SEO?
Ranking involves comparison of your web pages to
others and looks for keywords. After this comparison,
they are ranked.................................but how do we
compare ourselves to others.
Always keep you competition in mind!
Browser search tool bars:
E.G: google search bar. Page rank.
SEO is a continuous process.

10. Why SEO?

11. Optimising Website Pages
Website code:
HTML/XHTML
Spiders cannot get into flash and Javascript and
so a website needs spider friendly pages too.
Search-friendly domain names:
www.aplus.net – available domain names
Using keywords in URL will help it stand out.
Consider company name and what it does in
the URL

12. Optimising Website Pages
Search-friendly page titles:
This is where search engines put the most
weight.
Important to have a distinct title.
Beginning of title most important.
Search-friendly meta keywords and
descriptions:
Keep meta-tags by title.
Search engine will read beginning first in
description. Keywords must reflect description.
Search engines can create snippets of
description. May also take a combination of
meta-description tag and combine it with body
text.
Meta-data important for ranking.

13. Optimising Website Pages
Search-friendly body text:
Use keywords in the body of the text.
The closer search term phrases are in the text,
the more searchable they are.
Most keywords should be earlier in the text.
Headings and specialised text:
Use bold statements
Bold text for important words

14. Optimising Website Pages
Market Leap tools: (www.marketleap.com)
Free and paid search engine marketing tools
 Search engine saturation
Web Site CEO (
http://www.websiteceo.com/web_site_ranking.
):
Page optimisation
Site promotion
Site analysis
Site maintenance

15. Optimising Website Pages
We build pages (
www.webuildpages.com/tools):
Header checker tool
Spider viewer
Search friendly website:
E.g: Contact us – Contact LYIT
About us – About LYIT
Think about keywords constantly in set-up

16. Keyword Research
Control : We have control over our website, we
do not have control over what people type in to
search engines – KEYWORDS.
How people search:
Broad to narrow
Broad search – more competition
Narrow search – fewer search results
(importance of choosing correct keywords).

17. Keyword Research
See your site through the searchers eyes:
http://www.enquiroresearch.com/
How do you know what words are throwaway
words??
allintitle:(Word) – words in title of browser.
Know your customers – what are the search terms
they would use?

18. Keyword Research
SEO tools:
Google suggest – suggests what you may be
looking for.
Google Adwords Keyword tool.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExt
(Different to Adwords - paid, this is free).
Search based keyword tool:
http://www.google.com/sktool/
Google Adwords (paid)
Google Analytics

19. Keyword Research
Keyword Research:
Dictionary, for example, www.reference.com
Encyclopaedia, www.wikipedia.org
Thesaurus, http://thesaurus.reference.com/
Market Leap tools: (www.marketleap.com)
Free and paid search engine marketing tools
 Keyword verification
We build pages (
www.webuildpages.com/tools):
Search combination tool
Keyword density analysis

20. Keyword Research
Website analytics tools: google analytics
Measures traffic and hits.
Competitor keywords:
Domain names
Page titles
Meta description and keywords
Body text
allintitle: (word)
allinurl: (word)

21. Keyword Research
Keyword research:
Keyword is used by a web search, search engine
and SEO to match most relevant information.
Use tools to determine keywords, for example,
we build pages search combination tool.
Keyword type:
Company and brand name
Generic names
NB: use generic as well as brand to improve rank.
Keywords and descriptions should reflect one
another – if you are saying something in your
description, it should be reflected in keywords

22. Keyword Research
Stop words:
Search engine may not record extremely
common words to save space and speed up
search.
http://www.lextek.com/manuals/onix/stopwords1.h
Landing pages:
Do not dilute the homepage with too many
keywords.
Different pages will have specific keywords.
Traffic does not have to go to homepage all the
time.
Long tail principle:
Do not go too broad – if we optimise for a niche
we will have more keywords for more pages, e.g:

23. Keyword Research
Keep in mind –
“Choosing the right keywords is often the
difference between getting found in search and
not getting found. As a result, keyword research is
the foundation of an effective online marketing
strategy.”

24. Keyword Research
The first phase of creating the initial
Keyword Opportunity List involves
brainstorming as many keyword ideas as
possible.
a. Listing root brands and product/service names
(e.g. lawyer)
b. Brainstorming variations of product and brand
related keywords
c. Talking to clients to determine what terms they
use in search
d. Studying competitors’ sites

25. Keyword Research

26. Link Building
• Backward links – shows the inbound links to
the website. Inbound links represent those links
that you think are relevant.
Market leap – link popularity check.
Also looks at competitors
Aim to get links from sites with a high page rank
Text inbound to you is important as spiders
put page rank energy on inbound links to
you.
www.webuildpages.com
Google, e.g.: link:www.lyit.ie

27. Link Building
It is important to know what people are saying
about you. Can also use backlinks on google
toolbar.
Market Leap tools: (www.marketleap.com)
Free and paid search engine marketing tools
Link popularity check
Researching competitor links can also be
valuable, particularly in identifying link
opportunities or niches that could also be useful
to your link building campaign.

28. Link Building
Link building tactics can be divided into
those that are:
 Completely manual
A combination of manual input and editorial
decisions
Completely editorial

29. Link Building
Completely manual tactics
Comments sections in other websites
Links on social networking sites
Online press releases – adding links to website
A combination of manual input and
editorial decisions tactics
Relationship building with sites and others that
may link to your website
Contacting site editors to tell them about your
website content

30. Link Building
• Completely editorial tactics
― Unprompted Links to your website due to the
quality of content onsite

31. Link Building
Techniques
Ensure quality content.
 Content that others want to link to.
 Create a blog as a means of continually adding quality content
to your website.
Directories – general and niche
Make contact with those who can link to you
 Website owners
 Bloggers
 Companies

32. Link Building
 Magazines
 Press Releases
Contact satisfied customers

33. Directories
This involves people indexing websites. It is
edited by people and not bought or paid for.
Directories do not supply as much information
about a website. They supply a link to the site and
a small description.
Company should attempt to get in all directories.
Google, Yahoo and MSN are main directories – all
related to one another.
http://www.google.com/addurl/?
continue=/addurl
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

34. Directories
About.com lists numerous search engines:
http://websearch.about.com/library/tableofcon
tents/blsearchenginetableofcontents.htm
This includes niche search engines.
Company’s can also be added to local search
results, such as:
www.superpages.com
www.yellowpages.com
http://yp.yahoo.com/
www.truelocal.com

35. Monitoring Progress
Excel or word can be used to track keywords and
log submissions.
Track changes over time and make notes.
Check for indexing of pages.
Type in site in search engine & references will
show.
Submitting to search engines:
Yahoo, MSN, Google – all connected, main are
enough.

36. Monitoring Progress
Submitting to directories:
www.dmoz.org – feeds most directories.
Monitor pages:
Use tools, market leap, search engine
saturation.
Continually monitor your website against that of
competitors
Hubspot free website grader too – also takes
social media into account – Remember that
social media also impacts SEO.
http://websitegrader.com/