2. Overview
SEO Concepts
Future of Search
Linking Strategies
Best Practices
3.
4. How Do Search Engines ImpactYour
Business?
Top 3 results is the new Page 1
If you’re not in top 5-15 results,
you are non-existent
100+ times more sites are
optimized
18+ times more sites per keyword
Queries are longer and thus more
targeted
5. 3 Major Items ImpactYour Search Engine
Rankings
1. The Search Engines
Not your Friend!
Vague answers
The Search
Google speak Engines
Constantly Changing
450 algorithm
changes/year
SERP presentation
The The Site
changes
Competition Constraints
6. 3 Major Items ImpactYour Search Engine
Rankings
2. The Competition
Not your Friend!
Wants your space
The Search
Constantly changing Engines
The The Site
Competition Constraints
7. 3 Major Items ImpactYour Search Engine
Rankings
3. The Site Constraints
Production Schedules
Server technology
The Search
Conversion vs. traffic vs. Engines
ranking
Which is most important?
Content Management
Systems (CMS)
New Features The The Site
Engagement Objects Competition Constraints
8. The Top Ranking…
Goes to the site that’s “Least Imperfect”es
Nobody knows the search algorithms
Perfection is impossible
Natural Behavior
Different for each search engine
Every keyword is a separate target
Behavior, intent and local influences
9. Behavioral Keyword Research
This is critical
Disjoint consecutive searches form a “long tail” filter for subsequent
searches
Based upon persona and community
You will get different results based on users behavior
Web History changed the SERP
10. Associated Words
Targeted Searching = Higher Conversion
Surrounding words help keyword “clarification”
Proximity: Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) concepts apply
Synonyms
~Google
Use words your competition uses and SE’s will reward you
11. Organic Information
Site offering “free information” versus “just e-commerce” will get
higher rankings
“Query intent” supporting words help with rankings
More people will link to you if you provide free information
12. Intent
Standard, Research, Shopping
Research sites are longer, fewer images and fewer links
Shopping sites are shorter, more smaller images and more links
Standard search depends on users intent
13.
14. Future of Search
Now: Means:
Behavioral search Ranking alone is not SEO
Intent-based search KW Research is more complex
than anything done before
Localized search
Personas
Engagement Objects
Behavioral community
Personalized search
Anticipate consecutive
searches
Social matters
Analytics is necessary for
measuring traffic/ROI
15. Website Persona
Does your website match your visitors?
They must match or you lose!
Website Persona Visitor Persona
16. Ambiguous Queries
Does your website match your visitors?
Search for “New York Pizza Chicago”
Pizza in New York, restaurant name Chicago
New York style pizza in Chicago
The place called New York Pizza in the city of Chicago
Define by type:
[New York Pizza] / food [Chicago] / location
[New York Pizza] / business [Chicago] / location
[New York] / location [pizza] / food [Chicago] / location
17. Google Instant
Type keywords one at a time
Type last word letter by letter
Look at top word following your target phrase
Add all of these to your keyword list
19. Trigger a Search
Ads stimulate a query
Articles stimulate a query
Appearances stimulate a query
When you are ranked #1 it is time to stimulate a query
When you are not ranked you would send traffic to competition
Engagement Objects can attract visitors, or hold them
31. Local Search
According to Google, 20% of all searches and one-third of mobile
searches have local intent as of first quarter of 2010.
When blended search results are displayed, local results are
included about one-third of the time
Claim your business listing in local search directories and listing
services, including Google, Yahoo!, Bing and online yellow pages.
32.
33. “Bow Tie” Effect
If an expert links to you, then you become an expert –
but you are expected to link to other experts
Reference sites
Penalized if you only have inbound links
34. Hubs and Authorities
A Hub is a resource list or high quality guide that directs users
via links to recommended subject authorities on the Web
An Authority is a primary source of high quality content on a
particular subject
Hub link to Authorities much more often than the other way
around
35. Outbound Linking Considerations
Never sell links for PageRank because you WILL be
penalized if detected
Use Google “related sites” to see which hubs you are in
If spammers you must change fast
If authorities they may be link targets
If not well ranked they may still have significant PageRank and
value for outbound/inbound targeting
Same for competition
What are their “related sites” ?
36. Inbound Linking Considerations
Given “Editorial” credit from other sites linking to you
Increases (or lowers) the worthiness of your site and
adds PageRank
What sites to consider?
We recommend you focus on link quality, not quality
Law on Natural Linking:
IP numbers – different is good
PageRank – natural structure is good
Anchor text – different is good
Whois Name – different is good
37. Inbound Linking Considerations
Forms Links
Search Engines will not follow “Follow Buttons”
You need static links to crawl and pass PageRank
FYI – Google
Will index dynamic URLs up to 2 parameters, sometimes 3,
where the value should not exceed 10 characters
“Compaction”
Drops unnecessary parameters to determine best result
Canonical Link Tag
38. How To Develop Links
Link Begging
Sponsored Pages/Memberships
News Letters
Press releases
Articles
News
Social Media
39. How To Develop Links
Buying Links – THIS IS SPAM!
Google is aggressively penalizing participants in purchased PageRank schemes
Ads are exempted if no followed
Link Pruning
Sometimes removing links that have a low trust score helps more than adding
links
40.
41. Search Engine Classify Spam As….
“Anything Deceptive”
Ethics
Ethics are not laws, but are guidelines to behavior
What is your URL worth?
If all rankings were lost
Who would lose their jobs?
What is the impact on your company?
42. Approaches
“Blackhat vs.Whitehat”
Blackhat
Deceive the search engines by taking advantage of holes in the
SE protection mechanisms
This is considered “spam”
The trick is to do more things exploiting holes
Whitehat
The goal is to do more things right without exploiting any holes
than the competition
If the top sites do 40 things right, out of 200+ algorithm variables
then if you do more variables right than them you should rank
better than hem
43. Hidden Text/Links
This is a “hiding technique”
Using similar color for text and background
Placing keywords inside a <noframes> or <noscript> tag
Using hidden layers in style sheets
Using a transparent image for a link, using hidden links
This is considered spam
44. Cloaking
This is a “hiding technique”
You can give the search engines pages that are different from
users.
Cloaking will usually get you blacklisted if deceptive
Cloaking is OKAY if, and only if, it is defendable
Web Optimizer is a Cloaking tool
45. Link Farms
This is a “boosting technique”
The one way to increase link popularity is to create multiple
websites linking to each other – wrong!
Link farms are low trust
Link popularity depends on the quality of links not just quantity
Using link farms does not provide quality links to boost your link
popularity
46. Duplicate Content
This is a “boosting technique”
It does not work and generally dilutes Trust
Duplicate content = Duplicate links (ignored)
There is NO penalty for duplicate (nearly exact) content
SE chooses which page to index and suppresses all others
International – ccTLD/Zone rules
Multiple Sites 0 dynamic filters
Authority sites get more credit
That may not be you!