SEO for CMS Percussion with Guava

search engine optimisation

1Copyright Guava UK Ltd · All material is confidentialEdward Cowell – Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Director. www.Guava.co.uk

An introduction to Search Engine Optimisation

. . . and 5 things you can do.

http://www.Guava.co.uk






Who are Guava ?

Over ten years market leading search engine marketing experience

Global capacity

218 staff (65 in UK)

http://www.confused.com/







Accreditations

Guava are a Google Adwords Qualified Company

Guava are Google Enterprise Partners

Guava are Google Analytics Partners

Guava are Omniture Partners

Guava are members of:– Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) (Search Council)– SEMPO (UK working group)– e-consultancy

http://www.adexcellence.com/adex/start.aspx







- What are search engines, why are they important?

- What search engines do people use?- How do people use search engines?- What is search engine optimisation?- What is pay-per-click advertising?- 5 things you can do…







What are search engines, why are they important?







The School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California-Berkeley calculates

…Five exabytes of new information - roughly five billion gigabytes - was created in 2002 alone. Five exabytesis like half a million libraries as big as the Library of Congress print collections.

Almost 800 MB of recorded information is produced per person, per year: if stored on paper, that would take up about ten metres (30 feet) of books.

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003
























Yahoo! = 20 billion items in 2005

over 19.2 billion web documents1.6 billion images

over 50 million audio and video files

Source: 2005 http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000172.html














Google = 50,000,000,000 items?

and we all expect instantaneousresults ☺

and growing







New website visitors which come from a search engine.

(Forrester)







What search engines do people use?







They did use all of these:







But now they mostly use:







Hitwise.co.uk







“People always make the assumption that we're done with search. That's very far from the case. We're probably only 5 per cent of the way there. We want to create the ultimate search engine that can understand anything ... some people could call that artificial intelligence.”Larry Page, Google







Google's mission is to organize the world's information and

make it universally accessible and useful.

Cue scary music & dim lights







How do people use search engines?







Search experiences

Research/Info (Google, Yahoo, MSN Live)

Commercial (Ebay, Amazon, Rightmove)

News (Google News, Technorati, Digg)

Entertainment (YouTube, IMDB, Pirate Bay)











































What is search engine optimisation?







“Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listings.”en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEO







Search engine optimisation is not considered bad by Google…

…but some search engine optimisation techniques are.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291




















What is pay-per-click advertising?







Pay per click (PPC) is an advertisingmodel…where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an advert to visit the advertiser's website.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_per_click















Pay per click advertising is how Google makes its money

It pays for the services provided by Google for free that we may sometimes take for granted







Pay Per Click Adverts

Organic







What can you do?

1) Understand that search engine optimisation (SEO) is not a magic wand that can be easily waved after the website is launched. Consider SEO as a core part of your development process.







Most common mistakes

URL’s• Unavailability/broken links• Complexity• Inconsistency







Can my pages get into a search engine?Getting into search engines ‘indexed’

• Form based navigation • Frames• Flash• JavaScript

Unavailability







Form based navigation

<form action="browse.php" method="get"><input name="interest" type="text"><select name="topic">

<option>option 1</option><option>option 2</option><option>option 3</option>

</select></form>







Complexity

yourwebsite.com?sessid=8989adh98ah89hd98ahkNLK







yourwebsite.com?var1=value1& var2=value2& var3=value3& var4=value4&var5=value5







Inconsistency

www.domain.com/path1

www.domain.com/path2

301 redirects, canonical tag





http://www.domain.com/path1






















What can you do?

2) Make use of freely available tools to help you understand how search engines view your website













www.google.com/webmasters











What can you do?

3) Describe your content clearly, and at the same time align it with what internet users are searching for.







http://trends.google.com/trends












Can my pages perform better in a search engine?

• Title• Description• Content• Images







Title

<title> is the key display element of your 'listing‘ in news and web results.

It is credited with a high-ranking importance; yet also it needs to be descriptive and eye catching to ensure the potential visitor clicks on your listing within the search engines.







Title

<title>Lipsum Lorem Ipsum</title>







Title

Google shows maximum 72 characters including spaces

Titles should be descriptive and unique

Currently, the Google News crawler only visits each article URL once. If you make updates to the article after Google has crawled it, it won't be reflected on Google news



















Description

Depending on what someone had actually searched for, Google may use the description or select text from within the webpage itself to display in the snippet text.







Headings

Headings – H1/H2

The main heading for each page should aim to include the target keyphrase(s), be clear and concise, and above all, useful to your readers.







Images

Images

An image is worth a thousand words

but not in Google







Images

Some websites get a lot of traffic from Google Image Search.

The alt tag can be applied to an image - its main purpose is for user accessibility.

Inserting appropriate target phrases in alt tags and image file names also improves the overall keyword density and helps search engines understand what the image is about.







What can you do?

4) Encourage users to link to your content, and implement features that help gain links.







Measurement of links as a voterevolutionised search engine technology(PageRank)

Influences good rankings on most search engines

<a href="/page.htm">I love you</a>







Links from Internal and External Pages







What can you do?

Use social media to increase brand awareness, gain traffic and support your SEO.













Online retailers received more traffic from Social networks than webmail services in December 2008.







• Social Networking• Social Bookmarking• RSS• Micro Blogging• Forums

• Usenet (1979)• Internet Relay Chat (IRC) (1988)• Bulletin Boards (1970s)







Social Networking

These sites are not so helpful for SEO and are more used for their immense traffic potential

They are good for branding, communication, making connections and increasing a website's internet “footprint”







Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking

Saving, sharing and sometimes voting on things you find interesting.













Social Bookmarking

Make sure your content is getting bookmarked, your competitors is!!!







What can you do?

5) Manage change. Consider processes and tools to provide an approach for managing increasingly important website updates and migrations.







Website updates and migrations

• Site migration best practice (domains, hosting etc)• Auditing indexed and public pages• Planning redirects and redirection rules• Testing redirections have been set up correctly• Error handling

• Preventing / mitigating against near total loss of organic search traffic







Summary

1. Understand that search engine optimisation (SEO) is not a magic wand - build it into your processes.

2. Use freely available tools

3. Describe your content clearly - let your content market itself.

4. Encourage users to link to your content - it's a sign of relevance.

5. Manage change - consider the impact of website updates and migrations on where your traffic is coming from.







www.guava.co.uk









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SEO for CMS Percussion with Guava