Search Engines

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Search Engines

• Friend or Foe?

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What is your site there for?

• What is its purpose?
• What do you want visitors to do?
• Is there a goal?
• Download information/samples ?
• Join a mailing list?
• Buy a product?
• Respond to a poll?
• Who are your visitors?
• Demographics?
• What are they looking for?

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Understand your Visitors

• See the site through their eyes
• What do they look for on your site ?
• How do they refer to your content ?
• styli vs record player needle
• focus on the laymans terms
• How will they search for your content at a search
  engine?

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Anatomy of a SE Optimisation Project

• 1. Determine Key Words
• 2. Submit to Directories
• 3. Get Links
• 4. Optimise Web Pages
• 5. Submit to Spider Engines

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What Search-terms bring the most (relevant)
traffic?

• This is a Critical First Step.
• Get this wrong and you will waste many hours and
  s
• Take the time and do the research.
• Ask interested lay people
• Brainstorm
• Use web tools (www.wordtracker.com, site logs)
• Use phrases not single words.

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Keyword Exercise
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1. Determine Keywords

• What are people actually searching for?
• Dont just focus on Business Name
• Research using objective tools e.g. Wordtracker
  (www.wordtracker.com)
• Choose popular, relevant, non-competitive
  keywords that will bring you the best traffic.
• Identify existing pages with content that is
  related to the keywords.
• Dont have any? Build some!

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Word Tracker exercise
1. Determine Keywords ...
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Choose your Keywords
1. Determine Keywords What are people Searching
for?

• Theme Related
• Popular
• Low Competition (use wordtracker or observe
  number of results when you search)

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Put your keywords in...
1. Determine Keywords What are people Searching
for?
Content Write your content using the words and
phrases your target audience will type into a
search query. By giving your target audience
exactly what they are searching for via a search
engine query, you are not only giving your target
audience what they are searching for, you are
also adding value to the search engines.
Think TEXT not IMAGES (more on where to put your
keywords later)
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Are all search engine created equal?

• All used for finding information on the Internet
• Ranked by relevance
• search term (key words)
• weighted by appearance and placement of key
  words.
• Ranked by Popularity
• Google, Direct Hit
• Ranked by
• Overture, Looksmart (Looklistings)
• Directories and Spiders

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Who are they?

• There are NOT 300,000 search engines!
• The TOP 8
• 1. Yahoo
• 2. Google
• 3. MSN
• 4. AOL
• 5. Altavista
• 6. Fast
• 7. Lycos
• 8. Excite
• represent 88.86 of all search engines.
• What SE do you use?

Get a flood of traffic to your website ! Submit
your site to 300,000 search engines only 58 !!!!
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Who matters for Australians?

• Google
• Yahoo!
• ninemsn
• Anzwers
• Looksmart
• ODP
• Alta Vista Australia (?)
• Web Wombat (?)
• Go Eureka (?)

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Spider v Directory and why should I care?

• Spider Engine
• travels the web
• follows links
• reads content of your pages
• determines ranking based on what it finds on your
  pages
• will list ALL your pages in its engine
• fully automated
• Eg. Google, Altavista, Inktomi

• Directory
• takes listings that are submitted directly
• placed by categories e.g.
• personalgt healthgt public health
• usually home page only represented (more for )
• does not read content of your pages
• determines ranking based on keywords found in
  category, description and title.
• Controlled by humans!
• Eg. Yahoo, ODP, Looksmart

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Directory example...
Category Title Description
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Submit to Directories

• 1. ODP (open directory project www.dmoz.org)
• 2. Looksmart via ZEAL (non commercial)
• 3. Yahoo!
• 4. Relevant industry portals/directories

Of themselves directories bring low traffic, so
why bother?
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Directories - Why bother?

• 1. Sites that are listed in ODP and Yahoo get a
  rankings boost from Google
• 2. Looksmart listings come first in ninemsn.com
  (before Inktomi results)
• 3. Yahoo! Australia still lists directory results
  first with web results from Google an option only
  (reversed in Yahoo! US)
• 4. Incoming links from relevant industry
  directories will improve link popularity in
  Google

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Put your keywords in...
1. Determine Keywords What are people Searching
for?

• For Directories
• Category
• Title
• Description
• Domain name
• Craft your Title and Description carefully.
• Review existing listings in your category to
  understand best style of writing
• Hype is not acceptable.

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Directory example...
Category Title Description
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Submitting your site to Directories ...
1. Determine Keywords What are people Searching
for?

• Locate an appropriate category(where are your
  competitors?)
• Look for submit a site link within that
  category
• Click through and follow instructions on the page
• Pay money if you have to!

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Submitting to Spiders

• Who are they?
• 1. Google (feeds Yahoo!, AOL, Anzwers, Netscape)
• 2. Inktomi (provides results to ninemsn after
  Looksmart listings)
• 3. Alta Vista
• 4. Web Wombat

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How does a spider index your site?

• 1. Body Text
• 2. Headings lth1gtlth2gt
• 3. Title tag lttitlegtweb page titlelt/titlegt
• 4. Link text
• 5. Meta Description (ignored by Google)
• 6. ALT tags (minor)
• 7. Meta Keywords (almost obsolete)

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What does a spider see?

• Exercise

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Submit to the Spider Engines

• Submit base domain only to
• Google
• Web Wombat
• A site-map helps the spider to find all your
  pages.
• Submit individual pages to
• Alta Vista (www.altavista.com.au, free or
  express service)
• Inktomi (www.positiontech.com US39 25/page
  pa)
• The Spider may even index you before you submit!

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Understanding Google...

• Google ranks your site based on
• 1. Number and quality of incoming links (link
  popularity)
• 2. Internal linking structure (more links to one
  page implies importance)
• 3. Contents of Link text (Internal and external)
• 4. Body text

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Get Links
Q Why? A Link Popularity and referred traffic

• Q How?
• 1. Freely distribute articles with in-built links
  to your website.
• 2. Use keywords in the link text rather than
  organisation name or domain name or logo.
• 3. Ask to be linked in their links/resources page
• 4. Offer reciprocal links
• 5. Submit link pages to Google

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Link Text
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Find out who links to you?

• Use Google command linkwww.mydomain.com
• (but not all links are shown)
• Useful Web tools
• Marketleap www.marketleap.com (free)
• Professional Tools
• Optilink from www.optitext.com (US149)

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SEs love standard HTML but stumble over.

• Frames (use the ltnoframesgt tag to insert content)
• Flash (Create html alternative pages)
• Lots of Javascript
• Dynamic pages (generated from a database)
  particularly containing special characters like ?
  
• Images containing text (the S.E cant read the
  text in the image)
• Redirected pages

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Can a spider follow your links to index your site?

• Problems...
• Javascript links and drop down menus
• HTML errors (spiders not as accepting as
  browsers)
• Pages 4 levels deep in the site structure
  (particularly on dynamic sites)
• Pages accessible only by searching facility

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How to fix your linking structure

• Use descriptive text links in a footer
  (reconsider what you call home!)
• Use a site map - with ALL your pages (put it in
  the footer or link from home)
• Interlink all related pages - no orphans
• Check for robots.txt file - is it excluding
  sections of the site?

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Extra Tips

• Keep text as close to the top of the page as
  possible
• Put Javascript and styles in an external file
• Keep keyword phrases together in the text -
  Proximity counts
• Watch sequence of words - the order counts eg.
  Melbourne accommodation is not the same as
  accommodation Melbourne
• Plural and singular are not the same

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A word about Doorway Pages

• The Good, the Bad and the downright Ugly
• Examples..

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Monitor your position

• Review website statistics
• Many hosting companies provide, or
• Free stats from www.sitemeter.com
• Look for referrals
• Throw away your hit counter
• Check your rankings
• Top Dog (www.topdogsoftware.biz US199)
• Web Position Gold (www.web-position-gold.biz
  US149), mostly US engines

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