SEO

(Why bother?)

Why?
Consider these: The Internet is largest media channel ever The WWW is a huge archive the indexed Web contains at least 12.71 billion pages (as of 27 September 2011) and growing

Why?
Consider these: Search is becoming an entrenched human behavior Search is fastest growing market segment of Internet

Why?
We want to be found.
The most important information object in the world is useless - unless it is found - unless it is relevant

How does search work?

You are querying the search engines index, not the Internet SE matches search term with Web page(s) most likely to match words in query

How does search work?

SEs have crawlers (or spiders or bots) that crawl the Web Crawlers crawl texts and links (words and phrases) Crawlers visit and revisit, refreshing and updating SE index If a page has not changed, it is not refreshed in the index

How does search work?

Crawlers may - crawl entire Web page - crawl just the title - crawl just the top part of the page - bail out when they hit a roadblock Bottomline:

We want to make it easy for the crawlers to make the rounds!

How has search evolved?

Then: to find answers Now: to find answers to navigate the Web

How has search evolved?

Now: Search is deeper, more specific, more customized, vertical
(e.g., Googles universal search, localized search, search by media type)

All media, all marketing, and all communicationall drive people to search

How has search evolved?

Now: Apart from Yahoo, MSN, AOL, these are now also SEs: - YouTube - Flickr - Scribd - Amazon/Google Books - your Web site

Search engine optimization

Definition:

Art and science of getting your Web site to appear high up in organic search results
IOW stand out from the crowd Without SEO, we are a needle in a haystack.

Search engine optimization

If you have a Web presence, not being findable by SEs is like not being listed in the Yellow Pages, or having a phone and being out of range. Or worse.

Search engine optimization

Subtruth #1 Organic SE traffic can be so valuable, it can sustain an entire business. (SEO is PR.) Subtruth #2 Organic search rankings you can influence, but not control. (Thats the call of SEs algorithms.)

Search engine optimization

Advertising vs. editorial Paid search ads guarantee placement in search results, but, vast majority of users click on and and trust organic search results better.

Search engine optimization

We will never find the Rosetta stone to Google search. But SEs reward sites that have - relevant, frequently updated content - good site architecture - intelligent link structure with strong organic rankings.

Search engine optimization

We want not just traffic, but qualified traffic. We want to get traffic from users who type rice and mean the plant or crop, not Condoleeza or the university.

Metadata
Data that describes other data Used by SEs when adding pages to their search index. In Web pages, include metatagsdescription and keywords that describe pages content. Terms that searchers use Key to getting qualified traffic

Metadata
Examples: In text document:
length, author, date written, gist or summary

In image:
size, resolution, color depth, when created composition, elements, objects

MetaMeta-tags
Metadata information Description - matters most - brief ad or call to action - Google displays 160 characters of it Keywords - contains most important keywords or key phrases (but) Robots
(when you dont want to be found)

And of course, your Title.

MetaMeta-tags
Important especially for non-text media (image, audio, video, PDF)
golden + rice
- GM rice variety? - field of grains ready for harvest?

pacquiao + greatest hits rice + flooded

Keywords
Must be user-centric (forget about language used inside your organization) Must be niche-descriptive (rice what? irri what?) Use terms that are: - relevant - commonly-used by people - low-competition

Keywords
4-5 per page Should appear in first 100-200 words in the page Use in:
- title - (meta) description - (meta) keywords - navigational links

5-8% keyword density in page

Tags
Tool we use to - make connections among objects on our site - make these connections make sense - make a sensible info structure and help organize info/objects - help optimize search on our site

SEO never ends

The Web is a moving target. Users info needs change. Users search patterns change. The competition changes. Even the search engines change!