Lisa Myers's presentation from SEM Konferansen in Oslo (23 Sept 09). Going through the basics of SEO; technical, on page and off page SEO.

1. Search Engine Optimisation
Lisa Myers
Director, Verve Search

2. About Lisa Myers
• Director & Founder, Verve Search
(Search Consultancy – SEO, PPC & Online PR/Social Media)
• Regular speaker at SES & SMX Search Conferences
• Regular contributor to on and offline publications (UK, US & Europe)
• Heavily involved in the global Search Community, founded
SEO-chicks.com and blogs for European search blog
searchcowboys.com
Awards
• Management Today “35 women under 35” list 2009
• “Best Use of Technology woman under 30”
BlackBerry Woman & Technology Awards (2008)
• “B2B Marketing Newcomer of the Year” (2007)

3. Clients we have worked with

4. How the Search Engine Work

5. Crawls & Reads Content

6. Indexes Content

7. Accesses the index

8. Search Engine Result

9. Search Engine Results Page
PPC
Local
Organic

10. Universal Results
images
videos
news

11. Importance of ranking highly
• 93% of users won’t go past the first page
• Less than 1% goes beyond 2nd page of a search
• The top 3 positions receive 80% of the clicks
• More likely to change the search query than go to
2nd page of the SERPs

12. Google Click Distribution

13. What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is where you adapt and
moderate a website specifically so that it is indexed and
ranks highly within a search engine's organic (free) listings.

14. Technical SEO – the foundation

15. Technical Optimisation
1. Site Architecture & URL structure
2. Canonicalisation and use of redirects
3. Geo targeting & Sitemap
4. Hosting & Domain
5. Webmaster Tools

16. Site Architecture
• Build horizontal rather than vertical!!
• Every page can potentially rank (search engine
ranks pages, not entire websites)
• Typically, the further a page is from the
homepage the harder it is to get ranked.
www.samplesite.com/folder/anotherfolder/onemore

17. URL Structure
• Search engines don’t like LONG dynamic URLs.
URLs with “?” and docIDs can cause indexing
problems. Session IDs are a big no no!
• Beneficial to have keywords in URLs
• Ecommerce sites often creates canonicalisation
issues as several categories has same item

18. Canonicalisation
Canonicalisation is the process of choosing
one URL when there are several choices!
Canonical URL = Preferred URL

19. Canowhatnow?

20. Multiple URLs – Same Content
http://www.vervesearch.com
Looks like exactly the same
page? I’ll have to choose
one for the index
http://vervesearch.com
http://vervesearch.com/index.php

21. Potential Link Dilution
http://www.vervesearch.com
=> 848 links
http://vervesearch.com
=>45 links
http://vervesearch.com/index.php
=>89 links

22. Transferring “Link Juice”
http://vervesearch.com
http://www.vervesearch.com
http://vervesearch.com/index.php

23. Increased Link Authority
Canonical URL
http://www.vervesearch.com
= 982 Links

24. How to fix it
You have two options:
- Use 301 (permanent) redirect
- Canonical meta tag

25. 301 redirects
• This is a permanent redirect that:
- Redirects human visitors
- Redirects search engine spiders
Make sure it’s a 301 (permanent) and NOT a
302 (temporary) redirect
http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/

26. Canonical Meta Tag
• In the HTML of all duplicate URLs insert a
code like this:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.canonicalURLhere.com/” />
• This code tells the search engine spiders
that all link authority should be allocated to
the canonical URL. Does not redirect
VISITORS!

27. Hosting

28. Hosting implications
• The IP address of your server will be associated
with your site
• Search engines could associate “bad
neighbourhood” sites with yours based on
shared hosting environment
• For larger sites dedicated servers ( or virtual
servers with their own IP) is recommended

29. Domain
• Keywords in domain is beneficial
• Age of domain will have an impact
older domains = authority
• Register your domain for as long as
possible
• When targeting different countries country
specific TLDs (Top Level Domains) such
as: .no, .co.uk, .fr etc is imperative!

30. Top Level Domains (TLDs)

31. Geo Targeting
• Content in relevant language
• Relevant country specific TLD (.no .co.uk)
• Preferably hosting in the relevant country
• XML Sitemap submitted to Google
Webmaster Tools

32. Google Webmaster Tools
• Provides you with details of your pages
visibility on Google
• Diagnoses problems (broken links, server
errors, crawling issues)
• Submission of sitemap; tell Google which
pages are more important, how often they
change, how you want the URL to appear
• Specify what country you are targeting

33. Set Geographic targeting

34. If you can’t get the TLDs
• If you have a domain targeting several
languages/countries for example a .com
targeting Norway, UK and Germany.
- Translate versions of each page, under
domain.com/no domain.com/en
- Create separate XML sitemaps for each
language
- Submit and verify each one to GWT and
select country of targeting

35. Content is King

36. On-page Optimisation
• Keyword research and mapping
• Title and Meta description optimisation
• Main content optimisation
• Internal linking
• Keyword in URL
• Images (alt attributes)
• Updated content

37. Keyword Research
• Identify keyword groups:
- Brand keywords
- Descriptive keywords
- Product/service keywords
• Brain storm (with client, colleagues etc)
• PPC Campaign
• Keyword Research Tools

38. Keyword research tools
• Google Keyword Tool
https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal
• Wordtracker Keyword Tool
http://www.wordtracker.com
• Trellian Keyword Discovery Tools
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/

39. Using Google Keyword Tool

40. Keyword Trends
• http://www.google.com/trends

41. Keyword Targeting
• The search engines rank pages NOT
entire websites!
• Ideally no more than 2-3 keywords per
page
• Don’t keyword cannibalise your pages
(target the same keyword on several
pages)

42. Areas to optimise
• Title tag
• H1 tags (the heading of the page)
• The anchor text of internal links (don’t use
click here!)
• In the first 25 words of text on the page
• In the URL www.yourdomain.com/keyword
• Repeated throughout page content

43. Optimising content

44. Title & Meta Description Tags

45. Optimising the Title Tag
• Max 65 characters including spaces
• Keyword first in the tag
• Balance between keywords, descriptive
and appealing for click through

46. Meta Description
• Keep it short! Max 152 characters
(including spaces)
• Make it Relevant! Relevant description to
the page that it links to.
• Although not ranking factor it can make or
break whether people actually CLICK
through to your website!

47. SEO copywriting
• Never spam, you might get the visitors but
they won’t convert!
• You can be optimising a page for a
keyword and still have great content.
• THINK before you start optimising content
for keywords.
• Don’t bother with measuring keyword
density (= rubbish old school)

48. Off Page Optimisation
• Incoming links to a site
• Relevancy of content from site that links to you
• Anchor text of link
• Surrounding text of link
Quality of links rather than quantity of links!!
or ?

49. Link Development Strategies
• Link building (via directories, blogs etc)
• Link baiting
• Online PR & Press Release distribution
• Social Media Marketing

50. Trust and Authority
• Google developed PageRank to measure
importance of pages largely based on incoming
linking structure
• Trust rank was later developed and additional
relevancy metrics now play a major role in the
search engine algorithm. Such as; Age of
domain, brand, content relevancy and content
associations (LSI)

51. Unethical SEO
• Avoid hidden text or hidden links
• Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects
• Don’t send automated queries to Google
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords
• Don’t create multiple pages, sub-domains, or domains
with substantially duplicate content
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines,
or other approaches such as affiliate programs with
little or no original content

52. Unethical SEO
Rule of thumb:
Make pages for users, not for search engines!
If you present different content to the user and the search
engine you are doing something dodgy and the search
engines CAN blacklist you WHEN they find out!

53. My Toolbox (favourite tools)
SEO

54. Top 5 SEO tools/recources
1. http://www.seoquake.com/
2. http://www.linkdiagnosis.com
3. http://www.seomoz.org/tools
4. http://tools.seobook.com/
5. http://getfirebug.com/

55. Thank You!
@lisadmyers
Email: lisa@vervesearch.com
Web: www.vervesearch.com
www.seo-chicks.com
www.searchcowboys.com