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Search Engine Optimization Basics

• Bob Keating
• Search Program Manager
• FirstGov Technologies, GSA

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SEO Topics

• Search Visibility Factors
• Basics of Search Friendly Design
• Site Maintenance
• Resources

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Search Visibility Factors
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Basic Page Components

• Text (Keyword) Component
• Words and phrases that match what your target
  audience types into search engines
• Link Component
• Site navigation and URL structure that search
  crawlers can easily follow
• Popularity Component
• Are sites link to you?

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Text Keyword Density

• Choose one or two keywords or phases to optimize
  for each page
• Do not over use - avoid keyword stuffing
• Over use of keywords can result in being
  penalized or ignored
• Incorporate other complimentary words and phrases
• Check Keyword Density
• http//www.webjectives.com/keyword.htm
• http//www.keyworddensity.com/

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Text Keyword Prominence

• Search engines place weight on terms according
  to where they are used
• Place Keywords in
• Title tags
• Headings and emphasized text
• Visible body text
• Description meta tags
• Alt text in images
• Title and body tags are most important
• Keyword in the URL is helpful, but not a
  significant factor in ranking

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The Metadata Myth
Quote Metadata improves search
relevancy False. Except for title and
description tags, Web search engines ignore other
metadata. However, Metadata does matter to
enterprise search. Quote Using standard
metadata is a best practice. False. It is only a
best practice if the metadata is used by your
agency for specific applications (e.g. enterprise
search or content syndication). It is not a best
practice among professional web designers.
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The Metadata Myth

• Quote If more agencies were diligent about
  adding metadata, Google would pay attention
• False. Industry is focused on developing
  algorithms that determine relevancy based on
  content rather than what an author or metadata
  creator says about the content
• Key points
• Metadata is not the key to high rankings
• Only use metadata if it is important to your
  agencys mission
• Paying more attention to keyword usage in other
  areas will have a greater impact on relevancy

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Link Component

• Pages will not rank well if your site does not
  have a navigation scheme
• Navigation scheme must please users and search
  engines
• Create a site map, but also plan how pages link
  to each other
• Avoid dangling pages

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Problem Navigation Schemes

• Poor HTML coding
• Image maps
• Frames
• JavaScript
• Dynamic Pages
• Flash

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Creating Links

• Keywords in links tell crawlers about the pages
  to which you are linking
• Keywords in links influence relevancy of the page
  to which you are linking
• Avoid click here links, instead create links
  like
• Bad Click here for more info on famous admirals.
• Good Visit our naval history site for more info
  on famous admirals.

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Popularity Component

• Based on the number pages that link to you
• The more popular pages that link to you, the
  higher your popularity
• All search engines have different popularity
  algorithms
• Googles algorithm is called Page Rank
• Every page on the Web is given a calculation of
  it is popularity based on inbound links

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Popularity Factors

• Number and Popularity of Inbound Links
• Get listed in Yahoo!, DMOZ
• Network with other agency and industry sites
• Make your site a link magnet
• Anchor Text
• Others use of keywords in a link to your site
• Popularity is assigned per page, not for the
  entire site
• Popularity is not inherited
• Need to deliberately link internal pages to pass
  on PR

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Outbound Links

• Your popularity is not determined by the sites
  you link to
• Your outbound links affect the popularity of the
  sites youre linking to
• Internal links and inbound links have the most
  impact on your popularity
• Outbound links help identify you with a hub

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Robots Exclusion

• Meta-Tag Robots Exclusion
• nofollow
• Robots.txt File
• Place in servers root directory
• Two elements User-agent, Disallow
• Example
• User-agent
• Disallow /cgi-bin/
• Disallow /scripts/
• Disallow /images/

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Robots Exclusion

• Not all search engines pay attention to
  robots.txt instructions
• MSN and Yahoo! obey robots exclusion more often
  than Google
• Never exclude msnbot you wont have site search
• Blocking bots is contrary to OMBs guidance

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Case Study NOAA Fisheries

• Term Fisheries
• 1 on FirstGov
• 1 on MSN
• 2 on Google
• 3 on Yahoo

• Term Fish
• Doesnt show up on the first page or subsequent
  pages

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Case Study NOAA Fisheries

• Text Component page is well-optimized for
  fisheries but not fish
• Link Component Fly-out navigation may be a
  problem for some crawlers. Add search friendly
  navigation (e.g., site map)
• Popularity Component Lots of inbound links using
  fisheries (not fish) in anchor text

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Basics of Search Friendly Design
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Basic Concepts

• Page Content using content and text that target
  your audiences and attract search engines and
  links from other sites
• Navigation giving users and crawlers easy access
  to content
• Design Considerations make sure bells and
  whistles dont undermine SEM efforts
• Page Rank link popularity

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Managing Page Content
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Types of Pages

• Home Page
• About
• Contact
• Site Map
• News
• Forms

• Galleries
• FAQs
• Catalogs
• Product pages
• Shopping cart
• Search Results

How you write, design and optimize a page depends
on the type of page
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Text to Include

• Keywords
• Use language of your audience
• Use keyword selection tools
• Yahoo!/Overture http//inventory.overture.com/
• Google https//adwords.google.com/select/KeywordS
  andbox
• Page Content
• Make content appear focused
• Title tag, headings, contextual links,
  cross-links
• Body text should be visible, i.e., should not
  have to do any action to view main page text

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Primary vs. Secondary Text

• Primary Text
• Title tag
• Body text
• Text near the top of the page
• Text in and around links (e.g. anchor text)

• Secondary Text
• Alt text
• Description tag
• Domain name and URL elements

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What Kind of Content to Include?

• Write your own
• Pros Original, unique content
• Cons Time consuming, bureaucratic process
• Use someone elses
• Pros Easy way to bulk up content
• Cons Still need to worry about how to add value
  in order to attract links

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Use Syndicated Content

• Tends to update frequently
• Crawlers visit frequently-updated pages more
  often
• Combine syndicated content to create a unique
  resource
• Syndicate your own content (e.g. RSS)
• Increase site visibility and attracts traffic
• Another opportunity for inbound links

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Managing Site Architecture
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Site Navigation Scheme

• Text Links
• Very search engine friendly
• Use for primary or secondary navigation
• Problems with Text Links
• Can negatively skew keyword density
• Crawlers tend to read text links first

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Site Navigation Scheme

• Navigation buttons
• Okay as long as you include alt text
• Avoid JavaScript, unless you can provide
  navigation crawlers can follow
• Recommendation use alt text and text navigation
  at the bottom of the page allows you put
  keywords in multiple places

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Site Navigation Scheme

• Image Maps
• Crawlers ignore links inside image maps
• User text links or navigation buttons elsewhere
• Pull Down Menus
• Generally not crawler friendly because they need
  JavaScript or a CGI program
• Always provide two forms of navigation one for
  your users, and one for your crawlers

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Help Crawlers Navigate

• Create a site map
• Subscribe to Google Site Maps
• A crawler enabling tool to assist the Google
  crawler
• Analyzes information about your sites
  architecture to improve crawling

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Design Considerations
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Design Considerations

• Bells and whistles (Flash, JavaScript, animation)
  enhance user experience but can hurt search
  visibility
• Implement features carefully in order to keep
  search engine ranking
• Ensure design team understands SEM concepts

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Use External JavaScript and CSS

• Using JavaScript on site navigation can greatly
  decrease site crawlability
• Crawlers do not follow links embedded inside
  JavaScript code or they limit the types of
  embedded links crawled
• JavaScript in can decrease page load time
• Long download times may indicate the site is
  spam, and crawlers could ignore

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Use External JavaScript and CSS

• External files decrease page load time for
  visitors
• External files decrease download time for
  crawlers
• Remember to disallow crawling scripts in the
  robots.txt
• External scripts are easier to re-use

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Frames

• Do not design in frames
• Crawlers have trouble getting from the frameset
  page to the actual web page
• Frameset does not provide crawler with keyword
  rich text and links
• Each page is indexed separately, so pages that
  only make sense as a frameset will be indexed
  individually in search engines
• tag is ignored due to spam

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Frames Workarounds

• Add Navigation
• Give all pages unique title and description tags
• Put navigation links on your pages
• Add Java Script in your tag
• if (top self) self.location.href
  index.html
• // ?
• This will force the browser to always load the
  frameset
• However, browser will always load the home page,
  not the indexed page
• Back button will be disabled

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Flash

• Few search engines crawl links embedded inside a
  Flash navigation scheme
• Flash sites contain little text
• If you include Flash
• Include a Skip link so both the user and
  crawler can go to the real homepage
• Include title and description meta tags

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Dynamic Pages

• Database-driven, created on the fly by asp, cfm,
  php, jsp or cgi scripts
• Dynamic sites are comprised of templates, but
  usually without original content
• When a page is viewed, the template loads the
  content from the database
• Parameters are added to the URL, which tells the
  template to load specific content

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Dynamic Pages

• Example http//smithsonianstore.com/catalog/produ
  ct.jsp?productId14273parentCategoryId3151categ
  oryId3152
• URLs such as this are difficult for search
  engines to index because they do not know the
  parameters that define a unique page
• The more parameters, the less likely pages will
  be indexed
• A database may continually feed data, crashing
  your server and scaring off the crawler

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Search Friendly Dynamic Pages

• Create static HTML pages
• Modify URLs so they dont look like dynamic
  pages, fewer parameters
• Use URL re-write trick using mod_rewrite

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Session IDs

• The kiss of death if left unmanaged
• Same content is delivered to the crawler but as
  unique URLs
• Crawlers will ignore web pages with session IDs
• Omit session IDs if the requestor is a crawler
  but no cloaking!

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Optimizing PDFs

• Make sure PDFs contain actual text, not images of
  text
• Same rules for use of keywords and phrases apply
• Put the most important text in the title,
  headlines
• Minimize document size ( 100K)
• Create optimized HTML pages for PDFs

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Managing Page Rank
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Understanding Page Rank

• All search engines assign a value to your site
  based on inbound links
• Google calls this relevancy factor Page Rank
  (PR) - synonymous with popularity ranking
• An inbound link is a vote for your page
• An outbound link is a vote for the page youre
  linking to

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Understanding Page Rank

• A page is assigned PR as soon as its indexed
• Make sure all your pages have at least one link
  back into your site
• The page receiving the most inbound links gets
  the highest page rank
• You can pass PR around to pages on your site

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Can You Leak Page Rank?

• Controversial topic among SEOs
• Supporting View PR leaks in the sense that a
  pages outbound links will decrease that pages
  available PR for redistribution throughout the
  site
• Opposing View Search engines analyze inbound and
  outbound links to determine your authority as
  hub. No site is an island

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Outbound Link Strategy

• Do not create pages with mostly outbound links
• Link to quality, related sites helps to
  establish you as an authority or hub
• If a page contains several outgoing links, also
  include links to other pages on your site
• Dont be afraid to link to sites with low page
  rank, but quality content

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Getting Links to Your Site

• Links from Yahoo! and DMOZ
• Impact on popularity may vary
• Helps to get noticed by crawlers
• Establish reciprocal link arrangements with
  agencies covering similar topics
• Reach out to state and local agencies
• Syndicate your content
• Reach out to professional communities of interest

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Links that Arent Links

• Link has been created in a manner that search
  engines cant understand
• Link actually points elsewhere, and not directly
  to your site
• Example FirstGov.gov
• http//www.firstgov.gov/external/external.jsp?url
  http//www.noaa.gov/
• Link passes through a JSP program that logs the
  click and re-directs the browser to noaa.gov
• Search engines read this as an internal link to
  FirstGov, not an outbound link to NOAA
• A listing on FirstGov.gov will not help boost
  your search ranking

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Site Maintenance
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Re-Designing Your Site

• Plan BEFORE you embark on a re-design
• Will the site architecture change?
• Static to Dynamic?
• How is the content changing?
• Add SEO review as an activity to your project
  plan
• Make sure your contractor has SEO skills
• Poor planning and execution can kill your search
  rankings
• Do not wait until after you re-designed!
• Do not ask the FirstGov Search Team to re-crawl
  your site!

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Changes to Site Architecture

• Try to keep the same filenames and directory
  structure when redesigning
• Follow MSNs What to do when your site moves
  http//search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?tSEARCH
  _WEBMASTER_REF_Redirectcode.htm
• Recommended Set up HTTP 301 redirects that point
  to the new site or pages
• Not Recommended Add a meta-refresh tag to your
  page header. This wont remove your original
  page from the MSN index, and thus your sites
  search engine.

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Removing Content

• Avoid using default 404 pages
• Custom 404 pages are more user-friendly
• Submit all 404 URLs to the search engines using
  their Add URL form quickest way to get the 404
  pages out of the index
• Remember to change the HTTP status code on custom
  error pages from 200 to 404
• Do not ask the FirstGov Search Team to re-crawl
  your site!

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Resources and Recommendations
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Recommendations

• Read Industry Forums
• Webmaster World http//www.webmasterworld.com/
• Search Engine Watch http//www.searchenginewatch.
  com/
• Digital Point Forums http//forums.digitalpoint.c
  om/
• High Rankings http//www.highrankings.com/forum/
• Go to Industry Events
• Search Engine Strategies http//www.searchengines
  trategies.com/

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Recommended Reading

• Battelle, John. The Search How Google and Its
  Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and
  Transformed our Culture. New York. Penguin, 2005.
• Kent, Peter. Search Engine Optimization for
  Dummies. Hoboken, NJ. Wiley, 2004.
• Moran, Mike, Hunt, Bill. Search Engine Marketing,
  Inc. Upper Saddle River, NJ. IBM Press, 2006.
• Thurow, Shari. Search Engine Visibility.
  Indianapolis, IN New Riders, 2003.

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Contact InformationBob KeatingSearch Program
Managerrobert.keating_at_gsa.gov(202)
208-1047Susan FarissSearch Analystsusan.fariss
_at_gsa.gov(202) 219-1437