Search Engine Optimisation - Have you been crawled over?

Search Engine Optimisation
Have you been crawled over?
Marshal E. Yung, Chief Software Architect
Synapses Systems Sdn Bhd

Overview
● Learning from the Past ● Optimisation through Design
● SEO – The Whole Idea ● Search Engine Submissions
● Getting Indexed ● SEO Tools
● Optimisation through Meta Tags ● Black Hat SEO
● Optimisation through Contents ● In a Nutshell

Learning from the Past
A little History Lesson

Since the mid '90s...
● SEO was introduced in 1997
● ALIWEB
● First search engine
● Site ranking depends solely on meta data
● Failed due to meta data abuse; eventually inaccurate
site ranking
● Larry Page & Sergey Brin introduced PageRank
● Site ranking based on the probability of a site being
discovered by a web user through inbound links
● Later enhanced to tackle content and link spamming

Search Engine Optimisation
The Whole Idea

SEO – The Whole Idea
● Optimise contents:
● Images – search engines can index images too
● Texts – heading tags and SEO copywriters
● Titles, descriptions, contents, and links
● Visibility and ranking: website, web page
● Organic search results
● What about paid results?
● Usually very expensive, may not necessary work
● Does not improve page ranking

On-Page Factors
● <title> tag
● Meta description
● Heading tags
● Content optimisations
● Hyperlinks

Off-Page Factors
● Inbound links!
● Who are linking to your sites?
● Make use of comments in community forums, blogs, etc.
● Competition
● What are you competition doing that may affect your ranking?
● User defined ranking
● Is your website the favourite among all?
● Advertising
● Paid advertising also creates inbound links

Getting Indexed
Spiders, Crawlers, Bots

Spiders, Web-bots, Crawlers, etc.
● Spiders, web-bots, crawlers, bots
● They are all the same thing
● Computer programmes that browses the internet for
website hyperlinks
● Based on complex algorithms for website browsing

Web Crawling Concept
● Visits a list of URLs (seeds)
● Identifies hyperlinks on seeds' page and add
them to the URL queue (crawl frontier)
● URLs from the frontier are visited recursively
according to a set of policies to identify more
hyperlinks
● Create copies of visited pages to be indexed by
the search engine

Web Crawling Concept
● Download only partial part of the web page
● Must oblige to web crawling policies:
● Selection policy: which page to download
● Revisit policy: only visit updated web pages
● Politeness policy: do not overload websites
● Parallelisation policy: coordination of distributed
crawlers

Web Crawler Architecture

Internet

Web pages

Downloader and
Scheduler Parser DB

URL and Indexes
Storage

Queue

Optimisation through Meta Tags
Keywords and Descriptions

Keywords – ABANDONED!
● Since 2002, most (if not all) major search
engines no longer use keywords for site ranking
● Inaccurate
● Misleading
● Keyword stuffing

Descriptions
● Use description attribute in <meta> tag to
summarise page contents
● Place within the <head></head> section
● Description shows up in search results
● Helps users to easily understand page contents
● Use unique description to describe different pages
● Preferably to have less than 150 characters

Optimisation through Contents
Content is King!

The Title Says it All
● Use <title> tags to indicate page titles:
● Place it within the <head></head> section
● Each web page should have a unique title
● Title tags are what is shown in search results
● Meaningful page title attracts and helps users in
finding your website

Content is King!
● All contents should be optimised, including:
● Textual contents; and
● Graphical contents
● Use appropriate heading tags in page contents:
● <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, <h6>
● Search engine loves heading tags
● Use text instead of images as headings
● It works better with search results
● Crawlers do not recognise texts within images

Content is King!
● Body contents are where search engines collect and
index words seen by web crawlers
● Create optimised body contents by:
1.Identifying the gist, objective, and message of your body
content
2.Create a list of keywords representing these gist,
objectives, and messages.
3.Construct sentences and paragraphs with these
keywords
● Or, you may hire professional help from an SEO
copywriter

Optimising Content Keywords
● Good keywords have low competitions and high
probabilities
● Low competition keywords:
● Keywords less likely used on other websites similar to
yours
● High probability keywords:
● Keywords with very high likelihood to be used by
users as the search word
● Use phrases instead of single words as keywords

Optimising Image Contents
● Web crawlers can see images
● Images can be indexed by search engines
● Image file name
● Image description
● Use the alt attributes in <img> tags to describe the image
● <img src=”images/seo_book.png” alt=”SEO in a Nutshell” />
● Use meaningful file names for images
● Image search engine is getting popular and advancing

Optimisation through Design
Code Base Tweaking

Friendly URLs
● Avoid using URL with parameters
● www.example.com/index.php?year=2011&month=1&day=20
● Use friendly URL
● www.example.com/2011/1/20
● More meaningful and easier for users to remember
and understand
● Easier and faster for web crawlers to identify
contents

Site Structure
● Simplify directory structure
● Deep sub-directories slow down web crawling
● Meaningful file names

Make it Easy for Crawlers
● Use external CSS files
● Use external JavaScript files
● Place lengthy JavaScript codes at the end of the document
● Prioritise web pages with rel=”canonical” attribute in <link> tag
● Reduce line of codes
● Simplify HTML coding with <div> tags over <table> tags when possible
● Shorter LOC reduces crawling and page loading time
● NOTE: Reduce LOC but don't disregard good coding standards

Search Engine Submissions
Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Bing

Kick-Start
● Search engine submission
● First step to launching website
● Fastest way to introduce website to search engine
● Speed of indexing and ranking depends on quality of content optimisation
● Free search engine submissions
● Google
● Yahoo!
● Microsoft Bing
● Search engines also accept XML based site-map definition to speed
up website crawling
● code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators
● www.sitemaps.org

Sample XML Sitemap
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=12&desc=vacation_hawaii</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=73&desc=vacation_new_zealand</loc>
<lastmod>2004-12-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>

Sample XML Sitemap
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:image="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"
xmlns:video="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/foo.html</loc>
<image:image>
<image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
<video:player_loc allow_embed="yes" autoplay="ap=1">http://www.example.com/videoplayer.swf?
video=123</video:player_loc>
<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
<video:title>Grilling steaks for summer</video:title>
<video:description>Get perfectly done steaks every time</video:description>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>

SEO Tools
Search Engine's Little Helper

Google
● Site submissions
● www.google.com/addurl/
● Google Webmaster Tools
● Collection of website analysis and SEO tools by
Google
● Website SEO management tools for web masters
● Site and sitemap submissions
● www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Google
● Google Analytics
● Website SEO performance reporting
● www.google.com/analytics
● Google Website Optimizer
● Create experiments to gauge existing SEO strategy
effectiveness
● www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

Yahoo! and Microsoft
● Yahoo! Site Explorer
● Site and feed submissions
● Microsoft Web SEO Toolkit
● Free install base SEO toolkit
● Analyse SEO strategy performance
● www.microsoft.com/web/seo/

Yahoo! and Microsoft
● Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools
● Site and sitemap submissions
● SEO performance analysis
● Requires Microsoft Silverlight
● www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/
● Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance
● Microsoft provides content listings
● Yahoo! improves on search engine capabilities
● Worldwide content transition completes by early 2012

Submit to which search engine?
Google, Yahoo!, or Microsoft Bing

a little foresight...
and disclaimer

Black Hat SEO
Welcome to the dark side of SEO

Overview
● Unethical SEO methods to achieve high page
ranking
● Search engines have policies to identify
websites using Black Hat SEO methods
● Websites using Black Hat SEO methods can be
blacklisted by search engines
● List of blacklisted websites are shared among
search engines

Taboos!
● Spamdexing
● Manipulates search engine indexes with irrelevant
and inconsistent keywords or phrases
● Keyword stuffing
● Overusing keywords in page contents, alt attributes,
and meta tags
● Repetitive keywords
● Sometimes considered as a type of spamdexing
method

Taboos!
● Hidden texts
● Hiding texts behind images
● Transparent font colours
● Setting font colours similar to background colours
● Normally achieved using CSS
● Doorway and cloaked pages
● Spamming search engine indexes with inaccurate information
● Contents presented to the user is different from contents indexed
by search engines
● Redirects the user to another website when the page is visited

Taboos!
● Link farming
● A group of websites created merely to contain hyperlinks
to each other
● Link farming sites normally generate links using a
computer programme
● Affiliate programmes and link exchanges are not
considered as link farming
● Comment spamming
● Posting of irrelevant comments with hyperlinks in blogs
and community forums
● Can be easily prevented by users – Captcha

Guidelines...
● Avoid any Black Hat SEO methods
● Put yourself in the user's shoes
● Consider a wide variety of user experiences
● Perform website optimisation for human rather than
search engines – it's more effective
● Submit your website and sitemap to search engines
● Paid ranking rarely works and normally avoided by users
● Promote your site (URL) in your on-line communities in
an ethical manner – good way to generate inbound links
● Keep website updated and fresh all the time

More Guidelines...
● Search engines cannot index rich media
contents
● Use texts with heading tags – not images
● Meaningful file names – scripts and image files
● Optimise website coding for web crawlers –
shorter LOC
● Always use keywords and phrases in alt
attributes

Thank You and Happy Valentine's Day
Questions?
Slides available at:
SituationalReasoning.net, SlideShare.net, Scribd.com

Search Engine Optimisation - Have you been crawled over?

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