Seminar talk about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

1. Seminar on Web Search
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search
Engine Marketing (SEM)
Prof. Beat Signer
Department of Computer Science
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
http://www.beatsigner.com
2 December 2005

2. Search Engine Result Pages (SERP)
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 2

3. Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) ...
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4. Vertical Search Result Pages
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5. Search Engine Result Page
 There is a variety of information shown on a search
engine result page (SERP)
 organic search results
 non-organic search results
 meta-information about the result (e.g. number of result pages)
 vertical navigation
 advanced search options
 query refinement suggestions
 ...
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 5

6. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
 For many companies Internet marketing
has become a big business
 Search engine marketing (SEM) aims to
increase the visibility of a website
 search engine optimisation (SEO)
 paid search advertising (non-organic search)
 social media marketing
 SEO should not be decoupled from a website's
content, structure, design and used technologies
 SEO has to be seen as an continuous process in a
rapidly changing environment
 different search engines with regular changes in ranking
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 6

7. Structural Choices
 Keep the website structure as flat a possible
 minimise link depth
 avoid pages with much more than 100 links
 Think about your website's internal link structure
 which pages are directly linked from the homepage?
 create many internal links for important pages
 be "careful" about where to put outgoing links
- PageRank leakage
 use keyword-rich anchor texts
 dynamically create links between related content
- e.g. "customer who bought this also bought ..." or "visitors who viewed this
also viewed ..."
 Increase the number of pages
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 7

8. Technological Choices
 Check whether a potential content management
system (CMS) is SEO friendly
 Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs
 avoid session IDs and parameters in URL
 use URL rewriting to get descriptive URLs containing keywords
 Think carefully about the use of dynamic
content and links
 e.g. use of JavaScript or Flash
 Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) based on AJAX etc.
 content hidden behind pull-down menus etc.
 Address webpages consistently
 http://www.vub.ac.be  http://www.vub.ac.be/index.php
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 8

9. Consistent Addressing of Webpages
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 9

10. Search Engine Optimisations
 Different things can be optimised
 on-page factors
 off-page factors
 It is assumed that some search engines use more than
200 on-page and off-page factors for their ranking
 Difference between optimisation and breaking the
"search engine rules"
 white hat and black hat optimisations
 A bad ranking or removal from index can cost a company
a lot of money or even mark the end of the company
 e.g. supplemental index ("Google hell")
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 10

11. Positive On-Page Factors
 Use of keywords at relevant places
 in title tag (preferably one of the first words)
 in URL
 in domain name
 in header tags (e.g. <h1>)
 multiple times in body text
 Provide metadata
 e.g. <meta name="description"> also used by search engines
to create the text snippets on the SERPs
 Quality of HTML code
 Uniqueness of content across the website
 Page freshness (occasional changes)
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 11

12. Negative On-Page Factors
 Links to "bad neighbourhood"
 Link selling
 in 2007 Google announced a campaign against
paid links that transfer PageRank
 Over optimisation penalty (keyword stuffing)
 Text with same colour as background (hidden content)
 Automatic redirect via the refresh meta tag
 Cloaking
 different pages for spider and user
 Malware being hosted on the page
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 12

13. Negative On-Page Factors ...
 Duplicate or similar content
 Duplicate page titles or meta tags
 Slow page load time
 Any copyright violations
 ...
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 13

14. Positive Off-Page Factors
 Links from pages with a high PageRank
 Keywords in anchor text of inbound links
 Links from topically relevant sites
 High clickthrough rate (CTR) from search engine for a
given keyword
 Listed in DMOZ / Open Directory Project (ODP) and
Yahoo directories
 High number of shares on social networks
 e.g. Facebook, Google +1 or Twitter
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 14

15. Positive Off-Page Factors ...
 Site age (stability)
 Google sandbox?
 Domain expiration date
 High PageRank
 ...
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 15

16. Negative Off-Page Factors
 Site often not accessible to crawlers
 e.g. server problem
 High bounce rate
 users immediately press the back button
 Link buying
 rapidly increasing number of inbound links
 Use of link farms
 Participation in link sharing programmes
 Links from bad neighbourhood?
 Competitor attack (e.g. via duplicate content)?
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 16

17. Black Hat Optimisations (Don'ts)
 Link farms
 Spamdexing in guestbooks, Wikipedia etc.
 "solution": <a rel="nofollow" href="...">...</a>
 Keyword Stuffing
 overuse of keywords
- content keyword stuffing
- image keyword stuffing
- kewords in meta tags
- invisible text with keywords
 Selling/buying links
 "big" business until 2007
 costs based on the PageRank of the linking site
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 17

18. Black Hat Optimisations (Don'ts) ...
 Doorway pages (cloaking)
 doorway pages are normally just designed for search engines
- user is automatically redirected to the target page
 e.g. BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany banned
in February 2006
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 18

19. Nofollow Link Example
 Nofollow value for hyperlinks introduced by Google in
2005 to avoid spamdexing
 <a rel="nofollow" href="...">...</a>
 Links with a nofollow value were not counted in the
PageRank computation
 division by number of outgoing links
 e.g. page with 9 outgoing links and 3 of them are nofollow links
- PageRank divided by 6 and distributed across the 6 "really linked pages"
 SEO experts started to use (misuse) the nofollow links
for PageRank sculpting
 control flow of PageRank within a website
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 19

20. Nofollow Link Example ...
 In June 2009 Google decided to treat nofollow links
differently to avoid PageRank sculpting
 division by total number of outgoing links
 e.g. page with 9 outgoing links and 3 of them are nofollow links
- PageRank divided by 9 and distributed across the 6 "really linked pages"
 no longer a good solution to prevent Spamdexing since we loose
(diffuse) some PageRank
 SEO experts start to use alternative techniques to
replace nofollow links
 e.g. obfuscated JavaScript links
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 20

21. Where to Get SEO Information
 Guidelines from search
engine providers
 e.g. Google webmaster
guidelines
 Various SEO websites
 http://www.seobook.com/
 http://www.seomoz.org/
 Blogs
 Matt Cutts (GoogleGuy)
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
 ...
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 21

22. Webpage Validation
 Browsers forgive errors in
HTML documents
 weakens the standard
 HTML pages can be
checked against standard
 http://validator.w3.org/
 Less HTML errors
 easier parsing for search
engines
 might also be a ranking factor
for search engines
 faster rendering
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 22

23. Google Webmaster Tools
 Various services and infor-
mation about a website
 Site configuration
 submission of sitemap
 crawler access
 URLs of indexed pages
 settings
- e.g. preferred domain
 Your site on the web
 search queries
 keywords
 internal and external links
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 23

24. Google Webmaster Tools ...
 Diagnostics
 crawl rates and errors
 HTML suggestions
 Use HTML suggestions for on-page factor optimisation
 meta description
- duplicate meta descriptions
- too long meta descriptions
 title tag
- missing or duplicate title tags
- too long or too short title tags
 non-indexable content
 Similar tools offered by other search engines
 e.g. Bing Webmaster Tools
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 24

25. XML Sitemaps
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.example.com/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.tenera.ch/zyliss-trommelreibe.html</loc>
<lastmod>2011-07-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.4</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.tenera.ch/tenera-universalmesser.html</loc>
<lastmod>2010-12-05</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.1</priority>
</url>
...
</urlset>
 List of URLs that should be crawled and indexed
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 25

26. XML Sitemaps ...
 All major search engines support the sitemap format
 The URLs of sitemap are not guaranteed to be added to
a search engine's index
 helps search engine to find pages that are not yet indexed
 Additional metadata might be provided to search engines
 relative page relevance (priority)
 date of last modififaction (lastmod)
 update frequency (changefreq)
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 26

27. Web Analysis Tools
 Logfile analysis tools
 Google Analytics
 easy to "install" over the Web
 website admin has to add a
piece of JavaScript code to
the website
 Google gets information
about site visitors
 a user can normally choose
to use a free service (e.g.
Gmail) but has no choice
when it comes to being
tracked via Google Analytics
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 27

28. Product Search
 Various shopping and
price comparison sites
import product data
 some of them are free, for
others one has to pay
 Google Product Search
 started as Froogle, became
Google Products and now
Google Product Search
 product data uploaded to
Google Base
 very effective vertical search
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 28

29. Social Networks and Bookmarking
 Social networks offer
another great opportunity
to attract new visitors
 "word of mouth"
 inlinks do often not count
 Offer visitors the possi-
bility to easily bookmark
and share a website on
social networks
 use sharing services such
as AddThis
- http://www.addthis.com/
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 29

30. Non-Organic Search
 In addition to the so-called organic search, websites can
also participate in non-organic web search
 cost per impression (CPI)
 cost- per-click (CPC)
 The non-organic web search should be treated
independently from the organic web search
 Quality of the landing page can have an impact on the
non-organic web search performance!
 The Google AdWords programme is an example of a
commercial non-organic web search service
 other services include Yahoo! Advertising Solutions,
Facebook Ads, ...
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 30

31. Google AdWords
 pay-per-click (PPC) or
cost-per-thousand (CPM)
 Campains and ad groups
 Two types of advertising
 search
 content network
- Google Adsense
 Highly customisable ads
 region
 language
 daytime
 ...
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 31

32. Google AdWords ...
 Excellent control and monitoring for AdWords users
 cost per conversion
 In 2010 Google's total advertising revenues
were 28 billion USD
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 32

33. Conclusions
 SEO is a continous and lengthy process that should be
synchronised with decisions about a website's content,
structure, design and used technologies
 Optimisation of on-page and off-page factors leads to
increased ranking and visibility
 Non-organic search as a paid alternative to increase the
visibility
 profits from SEO since the landing pages will be of higher quality
 Many opportunities and free services
 e.g. Google Product Search
 Social marketing and social search is rapidly growing!
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 33

34. References
 Google Webmaster Tools
 http://www.google.com/webmasters/
 The W3C Markup Validation Service
 http://validator.w3.org/
 Matt Cutts
 http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
 SEO Book
 http://www.seobook.com
 SEOmoz
 http://www.seomoz.org
September 9, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 34

35. Next Lecture
Current and Future Trends in Web Search
2 December 2005