SEO Guide: Search Engine Optimization Best Practices PDF

Digital Marketing Instructor: Hyesung Yoo TOPIC 2: SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION 1 What we will do today ◼ Overview of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) ◼ Organic and Paid Search ◼ Best Practices for Organic Search ◼ Improving rank using Search Engine Optim...

Digital Marketing Instructor: Hyesung Yoo TOPIC 2: SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION 1 What we will do today ◼ Overview of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) ◼ Organic and Paid Search ◼ Best Practices for Organic Search ◼ Improving rank using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ◼ White Hat vs Black Hat SEO 2 What is a search engine ◼ A search engine is a software system that is designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query 3 Which search engines have you used? 4 Google dominates search 5 Search engine marketing ◼ Search Engine Marketing (SEM) ◼ A form of internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their ranking in search engine results page (SERPs) ◼ Seeks to generate consideration and ultimately traffic to websites ◼ Type of SEM ◼ Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ◼ Paid Search Advertising (Pay-Per-Click, PPC) ◼ Key Players: 6 Why do people use search engines? “Search is a statement of intent” Susan Athey, Economist Winner of John Bates Clark Medal 7 Two types of search results 1. ”Organic” or “Algorithmic” results ◼ Deriving from an algorithm 2. “Paid” or “Sponsored” results ◼ Deriving from paid placement 8 Search Engine Marketing (SEM) “Paid” or “Sponsored” Results “Organic” Results 9 Organic search responsible for 54% of all site traffic, paid 15% What does this chart tell you? 10 What percent of users will visit the second page of the search results? 50%? 20%? What is your estimate? 11 Consumer’s Gaze (Eye-tracking) 12 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ◼ How can costcotravel.com get a higher position in the “organic” portion of search results? To here Getting from here 13 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ◼ A search engine spider, also known as a web crawler, is an Internet bot that crawls websites and stores information for the search engine to index. ◼ SEO is the process of improving a website in the eyes of both users (e.g. consumers) and the search engine’s spiders to be listed as high as possible within search engine results 14 On-Site and Off-Site SEO ◼ On-Site SEO (or on-page) ◼ Practice of optimizing elements in your website in order to improve search engine ranking and visibility ◼ Three most important practices of a good on-site SEO is to: 1. Maximize Relevance 2. Choose Optimal Target Search Phrases 3. Create High-Quality Webpage ◼ Off-Site SEO (or off-page) ◼ Creation and dissemination of content on a website to build quality backlinks to the site (a backlink is a link on any other website that links back to your website) 15 1. Maximize relevance ◼ Search engines assess the topic relevance of a page ◼ The most basic signal that information is relevant is when a webpage contains the same keywords as your search query. If those keywords appear on the page, or if they appear in the headings of body of the text, the information is more likely to be relevant ◼ Some locations on the webpage matter more than others ◼ Therefore, to maximize a website’s relevance score for a particular search phrase, that search phrase should be placed in the most important locations of the page 16 1. Maximize relevance (cont.) 17 2. Choose optimal target search phrases The choice of target search phrases should be based on the following factors: 1. Relevance: A website that sells watches should not try to rank high for the search phrase “running shoes” 2. Traffic: Keyword relevance has to be balanced with keyword search demand. No point in ranking high for a search phrase that no one searches. (Google’s Keyword Planner, SEMRush, https://keywordtool.io) 3. Competition: A small website is more likely to have success targeting long tail keywords phrases that have lower competition 18 Google’s Keyword Planner 19 Long tail keyword A few highly A very long tail of popular searches “unpopular” searches ◼ Since long tail keywords are more “specific” than generic terms, they are less competitive and allow you to target niche demographics → high conversion rate 20 3. Create High-quality Webpages ◼ Short load times ◼ Low bounce rate from landing page ◼ Bounce rate: percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site. ◼ Original content ◼ Search engines will punish websites that contain duplicate content ◼ Duplicate content from another website ◼ Duplicate content on multiple URLs within a website ◼ Fresh content ◼ Regular updates about important news on company press section to signal that the website belongs to an active, reputable company ◼ Quantity of content ◼ Number of pages in a website ◼ Amount of content within a page 21 Off-site SEO ◼ Backlinks: Links that point back to your website from an external site ◼ Considered ‘online currency’ ◼ A ‘silent’ vote of confidence form the site linking to you ◼ When Google began, this was the most important factor to determine ranking/relevance ◼ Number of backlink sites ◼ Quality of backlink sites ◼ Share of links on backlink sites 22 Three main types of backlinks (defined by how they are earned) ◼ Natural Links are created without any action on the part of a page owner ◼ A food blogger adding a link in a post that points toward their favorite produce farms is a natural link. ◼ Manually Built Links are acquired through deliberate link- building activities ◼ This includes things like getting customers to link to your website or asking influencers to share your content. ◼ Self-Created Links are created by practices such as adding a backlink in an online directory, forum, blog comment signature, etc. ◼ Warning: Some self-created link building tactics tend toward black hat SEO and are frowned upon by search engines! 23  SEO – White Hat vs. Black Hat White Hat SEO Black Hat SEO Legitimate approaches to SEO Techniques used to get higher search rankings using illegitimate ▪ Research and analysis approaches ▪ Rewrite meta tags to be more ▪ Keyword stuffing relevant ▪ Content improvement and ▪ Link farming web redesign ▪ Hidden texts and links ▪ … and other hard work! ▪ Blog comment spam ▪ … and other tricks! 24 Keyword stuffing ◼ Practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in search results. Often these keywords appear in a list or group, or out of context (not as natural prose). 25 Link farming ◼ Any group of websites that all hyperlink to other sites in the group for the purpose of increasing SEO ranking 26 Hidden texts and links ◼ Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, e.g. using white text on a white background 27 Blog comment spam ◼ Leaving a good blog comment with a link to one’s content that contributes to the discussion may end up being very valuable, but usually more for traffic purposes than for SEO (search engines do not give much credit to these links ) ◼ Search engines may penalize sites that leave links in comments in high amount 28 SEO in a nutshell Relevancy Age What works: Authority Content (Link Popularity) Quality ◼ Transparency ◼ Hard work Pyramid of Trust ◼ Ease of use ◼ Usefulness to others ◼ Public reputation What doesn’t work: ◼ Trickiness/Fraud ◼ Misrepresentation ◼ A higher power (Google) will catch you & punish you ◼ Penalties from Google include temporary lower listing or removal — expensive to remedy! 29 Trying to outsmart Google by Black-Hatting? Google updates to combat Black Hat SEO ◼ Panda (2011) ◼ Targeted low quality content sites (too many ads, thin content) ◼ Penguin (2012) ◼ Targeted over-optimization (keyword-staffing, hidden text, etc) ◼ Hummingbird (2013) ◼ Focused on improving contextual search and semantics of search ◼ ……….. ◼ Mobilegeddon (2015) ◼ Favoring mobile-friendly listings ◼ Possum (2016) ◼ Update local search results ◼ ……….. ◼ Snippet length Increase (2017) 30 On-Page content ◼ Content should be written to make sense, feel natural and be relevant for search engines ◼ Make sure content is keyword rich – but not too rich ◼ Use synonyms, avoid keyword stuffing ◼ Rule of thumb: keyword density 2-4% of content 31 Takeaways ◼ Organic Search: SEO’s goal is to be transparent to consumers & search engine, NOT to ‘trick’ the search engine 32