High level view of what SEO is; Keyword optimisation; building websites optimally for search; Social Media search and the Future of Search

1. Search Engine Optimisation
Justin Spratt // twiitter: @justinspratt // justin.spratt@quirk.biz

3. Agenda
1. Intro to SEO
2. Key Concepts: Conversant in SEO
3. Keyword Strategy & Research
4. SEO savvy website design
5. Some Technical SEO considerations
6. White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO
7. Social Media & SEO
8. The Future of SEO

5. 2.7%
11.2%
66.1%
16.7%

7. SERPs

8. Google Innovation

10. Key Concepts
• Crawling (Googlebot)
• Your blog: about once a week
• Media24 sites: many times a day
• Indexing – decoupled from database – relevancy key
• Serving - relevancy paramount
• PageRank algorithm – citation model
• Hilltop algorithm – semantic model for relevance
• LinkJuice – popularity – sites linking to your site
• TrustRank – Stanford model for spam tracking

11. Onsite vs. Offsite SEO
Onsite - what you can do on your site to optimise organise
search
Offsite – links to you; popularity contest; biggest gravitas

12. Google Insights &
Google Trends
• Google Trends is broader – what is hot, regionally, now
• Google Insights more specific, designed for advertiser
research – excellent for keyword determination
….Both valuable for SEO

15. Hiring a SEO
• Show me examples of your previous work and share
some success stories?
• Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
• Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to
complement your organic search business?
• What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what
timeframe? How do you measure your success?
• What's your experience in my industry?
• What are your most important SEO techniques?

16. Universal Search
Pushes textual
searches down
But can offer richer
real estate

17. Personalised Search
The SEO nightmare
Based on…
Search history
Previous SERP
interactions
Location
User selection

18. Local Search
Big opportunity for local specific

19. Some other SEO
considerations
• The age of the domain
• Add regular fresh content
• Text navigation is better than images r
• Rich content creation (video, podcast, eBooks)
• Offer RSS feeds (AND RSS to email)
• Blogger birthdays
• Competitions
…bottom line: be remarkable – make your site a resource!

21. SEO Myths debunked
• Paid search does not help SEO
• Submissions to search engines don’t help
• Meta keyword tag not that useful – spammed to death
• Title and Description Tags on other hand, very useful
for end user experience
• “Keyword Stuffing” is baloney

22. Search Engine Spam
• Used to be big business.
Top ranked Viagra query
once yielded $20,000 in
business… for a single day
• Link farms suck, badly –
organic search will
deprecate

24. Primary goal:
Site must be fully indexable and optimised around a set of well
researched key phrases
Your own site should take the top two positions
Used to be near impossible to get more than two, but Google has
relaxed this recently with Universal Search

26. Keywords & Keyword Strategy
• Keyword based indices – faster crawl
• Keywords also drive search queries, therefore content
needs to match
• Titles, text and meta data
• Example: books vs. War & Peace – competition much
higher the more specific due to less results
• “Keyword Density Myth” – relevancy & quality issues

27. Keyword Strategy
What is important for keywords:
1. Search Volume – “common sense” only right about half
the time. Google Insight and Trends are your friends
2. Competiveness of the keyword
3. Propensity to convert – Google Insights; run trial
campaigns
4. Value of that conversion – “hotel” vs. “bed and breakfast”

28. Keywords & Keyword Strategy
• Keyword optimisation:
• At least once in title (70 characters max)
• Once in H1
• x3 in body, one of which in bold
• Once in the alt attribute of image
• Once in URL
• At least once in Meta data (description in SERPs)
• Not in link anchor text

29. Keyword Research
Popular keywords only make up 30% of searches, the rest is
the “long tail”
seomoz.org

30. Keyword Exercise
• Common sense words and phrases – call to action
• Search for it: are there ads running along top and right?
Then powerful keyword / key phrase
• Buy sample adwords campaign and check the conversions
over 200 clicks
• Make educated guess of value of each visitor
• Example: 100 visitors, 3 converted at total profit of R300,
then each keyword is worth R3
• Click-thru rates for number 1 ranking can be as high as 30%

32. Blogonomies
“Content should be as natural as possible.
Use semantic rich concepts that reinforce
content. Use HTM DOM. Ignore
blogonomies”
Edel Garcia

33. ORM: Automatically route unlinked, low positive mentions to the SEO Team

35. High level considerations
- Indexable content (images, flash, java, CSS)
- Crawlable link structures
- Keywords paramount (obviously)
- Defend against scrappers; verbose URL embeds

36. Content
Roughly speaking, a webpage should have around 250
words of content only, surrounded by your keywords
Remember, no keyword stuffing!
“Keyword Density is a myth” - Garcia

37. URL structures
• Usability key – if user can predict content by URL, good
• Shorter is always better
• Keyword is important (don’t overuse)
• Static URLs, good (rewrites for Apache & IIS)
• Studies: in excess of 15% increase in traffic

38. Canonicalisation
- Process that unique content has only one URL
- Engines don’t like duplicate content generally and will
discount your rank accordingly
- Use 301 re-directs or use the canonical tag

39. Site Maps
They help search engines crawl your site
Examples:
- XML
- RSS
- Text files

40. Robots.txt
Tell search engines what not to index
Indicates sitemap location
Dictates who quickly a crawler can crawl its site (CPU
cycles and bandwidth costs)

42. Reasons Sites are not crawlable

43. Meta Robot Tags
• Index / NoIndex – content crawl instruction
• Follow / NoFollow – links crawl instruction (wikipedia)
• NoArchive – no cached copy

44. Understanding the Search
Conversion Funnel

45. Link Building
• Reciprocal link requests
• Directory/Portal Submissions
• Article writing
• WebPR Submissions
• Blog Comments
• Social Media Sites
• Link buying/renting

46. Link Building
In conclusion:
Valuable websites build links and those links will guard your
online reputation

47. Link Building Case 1:
An example of simplicity earning
6000 links…

50. Often it s just how you package content which makes the difference

51. Link Building Case 2:
Almost 500k downloads

53. More people downloaded this book in the first week, than had
read our articles in the previous year

54. Google Earth layers

55. Link Building Case 3:
Boston Globe Pictures

56. Most news sites have small photos.
These are not…
Run as a side project by one of their web developers...

57. 1,5 Million page views and 1500 comments in the first 20 days!
Bottom line: cheap to run with massive ROI

58. Link Building Case 4:
Links you don’t want

59. 12 million people search for “Ryan Air”

60. A Ryanair employee comments on a random
blog…

61. Followed by the official response…

62. Then the online community got hold of it….

64. Then the newspapers got hold of it…

67. These powerful sites often linked to this site…

69. And we know how important good links are…

72. Black Hat vs. White Hat
• Black Hat = gaming and manipulating, often unethically
the system
• White Hat = confirms to Google’s Policy

73. Black Hat
• Invisible Text – white text; same colour text as
background
• Cloaking – showing one page to Googlebot and another
to the user
• Keyword Stuffing – poor quality, Google dislikes
• Doorway Pages – worthless pages designed
specifically for ranking well and yielding advertising
revenue

75. White Hat – part one
1. Clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be
reachable from at least one static text link
2. Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the
important parts of your site
3. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number
4. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that
clearly and accurately describe your content
5. Think about the words users would type to find your pages,
and make sure that your site includes those words
6. Try to use text instead of images to display important
names, content, or links

76. White Hat – part two
• crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If using
images for textual content, consider use the "ALT”
• Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes
are descriptive and accurate
• Check for broken links and correct HTML
• If you decide to use dynamic pages, keep the parameters
short and the number of them few

78. Real Time
Search brings
Social Web to
forefront

81. Social Media Optimisation
twitter
• Choose good handle (no underscores)
• Twitter uses “nofollow”
• Retweetability
• Select first few characters carefully
• Write keyword rich tweets if possible
• Provide linklove in tweets

82. Social Media for Insights
Put simply, real-time search inclusion can
help SEO immensely
It can show what new keywords and provide
insights

84. The Link
vs.
The Like

85. Search & Mobile Phones
“60% of searches in South Africa done on
weekends are done on mobile phones”
Google Employee

86. Vertical Search
Bing buying travel, flight and health
insurance data companies

87. The Semantic Web
“Web 3.0”
The meaning of language (intention)
No longer need to know “Google Code” to
search effectively
Semantic HTML (XML) – intentions rather
than layout