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Hello, and welcome to the Tech Briefing "Timely Information
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DON CAMERON: Good afternoon --
Good afternoon and welcome to this week's Tech Briefing.
My name is Don Cameron of IT Services Tech Training and I'd
like to welcome
Stephan Spencer here from NetConcepts.
He's going to be talking today about Google Search Engine
Optimization.
Before we get started with our presentation today, I would
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Thank you very much and pass the floor over to you, sir.
STEPHAN SPENCER: Good afternoon, everyone.
So, I'm Stephan Spencer.
I founded NetConcepts.
We're an SEO firm, we have some SEO technology.
So -- oh, and I'm also authoring a book with a few other
folks to be published
with O'Riley who's a fan of O'Riley notebook publisher.
It's called "The Art of SEO."
It'll be out in October.
So... All right.
Let's get going.
I've actually got quite a lot of material here. I'm going to
give you guys access
to the power point.
It's, like, 60 slides or something crazy like that.
I'm not going to be able to go through all of it.
I'm going to go through it at a pretty fast clip and I'll skim
over some things and
some things I'll go in in some depth.
Okay?
So, I gave you a big power point so that you can go back and
have some reference
material for later.
So, we're going to go through seven steps for higher rankings,
higher Google
rankings, specifically:
Getting your site fully indexed, getting your pages visible,
building links,
building up your PageRank, leveraging your PageRank
throughout your entire site,
encouraging Clickthrough through the search results,
tracking the right metrics,
SEO metrics, and then avoiding worst practices.
So, first of all, what is SEO?
An obligatory, funny comic here.
We got, go ask your search engine.
All right?
So, Search Engine Optimization.
Six times more effective than a banner ad.
It delivers, by its very nature, qualified leads and so it's
not search engine
marketing, though.
Search engine marketing is a more all-encompassing term that
includes Pay Per
Click paid search.
And so SEO is the organic side, the natural side, the
algorithmic side.
Okay, so, that's the left, where you're not paying for
rankings, over on the right and
up at the very top sometimes you'll see paid results as
well.
Those sponsored results are on a cost-per-click basis.
So, your Google listings are really like your virtual sales
force.
They can drive a specific amount of interest and business
and so forth for you.
It's like every one of your pages that's indexed is a
virtual salesperson.
If you have a ten-page web site and all ten pages are
indexed, well, that's only
ten virtual salespeople.
A thousand pages all pages indexed that's a thousand virtual
salespeople.
And, so, if you think about every page being an opportunity
to rank for maybe one or
several different keywords, having more pages is a good
thing.
Right?
More content, more opportunities.
So, looking at how much opportunity you're leaving on the
table here's just a
quick equation you can run to get a sense for each keyword
that -- what amount
of money are you leaving on the table if you're selling
something, for example, or
if you can associate a dollar amount to a lead that's
generated if somebodies
out the "contact us" form or whatever.
What's that worth to you if you download a white paper?
Google's really an 800-pound gorilla and that's where we're
going to focus.
I can't explain it.
It's just a funny feeling I'm being Googled.
So, keyword "research."
We're going to start with the -- figure out which keywords are
the right keywords to
be targeting.
'Cause - just because it's the keyword you think is
important to your business
or your organization it's not necessarily the keywords that
folks are typing in
to Google's search box.
So, we need to use some tools to identify those keywords.
Actually, I need to pull that one out.
Word tracker is one of those services.
It's a keyword research tool.
It costs money but it's worth it.
And what it does is put in keywords and then it gives you
some suggestions back
that are related to those keywords as well as the specific
keywords you put in
and gives you some counts around what the popularity is for
each of those
keywords, how many times folks did searches for those
keywords.
Keyworddiscovery.com is another service.
This one is a little bit different because it also gives you
historical
trending.
So you can see, like, during the holiday season, searches
for digital cameras
and other consumer electronics really peaks during that
November/December time
frame because people are looking to buy holiday gifts.
So, Google has a fantastic keyword tool, the Google AdWords
keyword tool, which
gives you a lot of intelligence into what folks are
searching for on Google.
Cause those other tools that I showed you don't tell you
what Google searchers
are looking for -- this one does 'cause it's from Google --
and it's free, and
it gives you historical trending.
This is Google Trends, which is also free.
It's at Google.com/trends.
This tool allows you to see historical trending as well and
it just gives you
some interesting other additional features like for example
it tries to
correlate peaks and valleys inflection points with, uh, news
events.
So, it pulls those from Google News and then puts labels on
the graph which is
kinda cool.
Also allows you to identify the topmost popular cities, and
regions, and
languages relating to those search terms.
Then you have Google Suggest which is actually built into
the Google toolbar.
Have you seen when it tries to do an auto complete for you?
Well, that's actually a keyword research tool.
You can type in, for example, "digital cam" and see "
cameras" shows up at the
top and then digital camera, and then digital camera
reviews, and so forth.
And that gives you a quick review of which keywords are more
popular than
others.
Digital camera, for example, is more popular than digital
camcorder.
Keyword research is also a -- kind of a bit of a science
because you get some
numerical data back and then you can calculate some ratios
based on the number
of searches versus the number of pages in the search
results.
This is called KEI score and it's a metric that can be
useful for identifying
which keywords are easy to go after.
If there are few search results for that term and it's very
popular, that should
be relatively easy to rank for.
Okay.
So, SEO is, of course, a moving target. Lots of things are
changing with
regards to how Google is evolving its algorithm;
personalization; universal
search where it pulls in different kinds of results like
news results, book
results, blog results, and product results, and so forth.
So, let's skip ahead here and -- Oh, this is kinda cute.
This is my daughter, Chloe.
She's now 18.
She started blogging when she was 15.
This is her blog and she makes money, passive income, via
Google.
It's pretty cool.
So, she gets traffic from Search Engine Optimization and she
turns that into
revenue through Google AdSense.
So you can see, for example, this is the beginning of a
search, an AdSense box
of ads, and there's some link ads up above, ads by Google,
and those lead to paid
search results. Let me just show you what it looks like
live.
Have you guys heard of Neopets?
Anyone?
It's very popular kids site owned by Nickelodeon.
Like, tens of millions
of users and, hey, there's my daughter's web site in the top
ten.
Awesome.
I'm not a proud dad or anything.
This is her blog and here's an example of a Google AdSense
ad unit.
So, there are three text ads and when somebody clicks on one
of those ads she
gets a share of the income, Google gets the rest of the
income.
And those link units that I told you about -- Okay.
That's kinda weird.
They're not showing the regular item.
So, anyways, that's Google AdSense and it's a passive income
source.
If you get traffic coming in through SEO or some other
promotion -- promotional
channel then you can monetize that traffic, even if you're
not selling it.
All right.
So let's move on from the keyword research side to getting
into optimizing your
web site, getting those pages to be visible in the index and
to rank highly --
actually then generate the clicks which then hopefully turn
into conversions.
So, getting your site fully indexed is -- it's not a given
that you're going to get
all your pages into Google's database, into Google's index.
You need to make your pages search engine friendly.
You need to make sure they're not, like, a mile long with a
very complex URLs
with lots of ampersand and equal signs.
Google doesn't really like that.
If you can make them nice, and short, and simple, with
keyword in them separated
hyphens, that's a good thing.
So, there are also a lot of technical details around this.
So, for example, redirects.
There are two types of redirects: 301's and 302's.
302's are temporary redirects, that's what people use by
default when they're
figuring their web sites, redirecting from one URL to
another.
Unfortunately, that doesn't pass PageRank or the important
score Google
associates with web page.
That means that, uh, if you have a web site and you move
that web site location
to another place, like you change domain names, if it's a
302, all that
wonderful PageRank that you built up by having people link
to you over the years
now you have a new web site that needs to transfer all that
trust, authority,
and PageRank needs to transfer to the new site.
If it's a 302 it doesn't.
Needs to be a 301, permanent redirect.
So, here's just an example of a pretty major brand getting
it wrong in terms of
their redirect strategy.
You've got 30 -- not only do they have a 302. They have a
chain of 302s.
Not a good idea.
So, getting your pages to have good URLs and all the back
end stuff in terms of
the redirects and everything is important but that's just,
like, the
fundamental, the basic foundational stuff.
Getting your pages into Google doesn't mean they're going to
rank well.
To get them to rank well you need to make sure that the
pages really sing to the
search engines.
There are a lot of different -- what Google calls signals --
that help to, uh,
determine relevance.
And so these signals include things like your title tag, the
page title, the
headliner H1 tag, the keyword prominence or where in the
document the keywords
are placed.
Is it at the top or is it at the bottom?
All right?
So, if I want to rank for digital cameras and I start
talking about digital
cameras in the first paragraph that's a good thing.
If I kind of forget to talk about digital cameras until the
end in the last
paragraph and I say, oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you
this whole page was
about digital cameras... which one's going to rank?
Right?
It's the former, not the latter.
So, every page has a song to sing.
You want to go after the right keyword theme.
Remember, we did the keyword research, we're going to apply it.
We're going to figure out which pages should sing to the search
engines which
terms.
Let's say you have an online music store.
You're selling CDs and maybe downloadable music.
So, you have on the homepage, a keyword theme around maybe,
uh, online music,
and mp3's, and downloading, and CD's, and so forth.
Okay?
So, that's a keyword theme for the homepage.
Now you have at the secondary page level -- if you manage a
site tree -- you
have at the secondary page level let's say your artists are
at that level.
Okay?
So, now you have -- no.
Let's say generas.
That would make more sense.
You'd have, like, country music, and rock, and jazz, and so
forth within a
category.
Now you're at the third level.
Right?
So, now you're two clicks deep into the site tree.
Now you're at the artist level.
So, you're in country music, and now you're looking at Brad
Paisley, that's an
artist page two clicks deep.
Okay?
So, each click down into the site tree you're losing
PageRank, you're losing
importance or the scoring methodology that Google uses to
determine which pages
are more important than others.
A page that's ten clicks deep into your site tree isn't very
important because
if it were it would be highlighted on your homepage and it
would be one click
away; right?
So, having this tree structure to your web site really gives
a sense to your
search engines what these page s' level of importance are.
So, now back to this concept of every page has a song.
Well, once you're within, say, an artist's page, Brad
Paisley, then you have,
uh, his various albums, that's at another level even deeper
and then you might
have the discography of the various songs would be linked
from that album page.
Now you're down at the song level, maybe you have the lyrics
and so forth.
So, if you want to rank for one of his songs the most
appropriate page in your entire site
tree to target as far as going after that search term would
be the song page.
That's pretty deep in the site tree but that's the most
appropriate page.
That's the one that you would make sing to the search
engines for that
particular search term.
Now, if you wanted to rank for his name, Brad Paisley, that
would be at the
artist level.
You'd want your artist page to rank for that term so you'd
go after that term.
If you want to rank for online music CDs then you'd use your
homepage to go after
that 'cause that's the most appropriate.
You can't target everything on a particular page.
You can't do a hundred different search terms that you're
going after on one page.
You might want to rank for, I don't know, Britney Spears and a
bunch of other
things on the homepage.
Problem is, you can only go after maybe several keyword
themes and be effective
with it.
You can't stuff a ton of keywords all over the place and
expect some useful
results outta that.
So, now we've also gotta look at the HTML coding and see
what really is going to
make those pages sing to the search engines.
Here we have a title tag that says -- see up in the blue bar
here -- "Visa
Global Gateway. Credit cards and other payment solutions."
That's a pretty decent title.
It's not great.
Global Gateway, you know, what does that mean?
Certainly I'm not going to type that into Google.
But I see credit cards and I see payment solutions.
Those are pretty good search terms.
You can contrast that with Discover Card's homepage and
their title tag is:
"Discover Card, it pays to Discover".
They don't even mention the phrase "credit cards."
So, perhaps they don't want to rank for credit cards.
I don't know.
So, the title tag is the most important element on the page.
So, we have on-page factors and we have off-page factors.
The on-page factors are things that are on the page.
They don't have to be visible on the page.
They can be inside the HTML code and the source code and
just visible when you
view source.
So, that's on-page factors or signals.
And off-page factors are things like links pointing to the
page, the anchor
text, the underlined words that are used when you're linking
to that page or
when others are linking to that page.
So, those are off-page.
Those are not on the page.
They're out there somewhere else on the web.
It could be somewhere else on your web site, they could be
somewhere else, umm,
you know, in some other country on somebody's web site
pointing to yours.
Here we have another retailer, Sears, where it looks like
there's a lot of copy
here.
You hit "control A" or "command A" and you can highlight
everything on the page,
select all, and what that does is help you to visually
differentiate what is
text and what is graphic.
Because things that look like text may not be.
They could be graphical.
Like this.
"Remarkable ways to save" is part of graphic.
It's invisible to the spiders.
Spiders cannot see that ask so if you wanted to rank for
those terms -- which I
can't imagine they would -- but if they did, if Sears wanted
to rank for that,
that would really need to be text.
You can use what's known as "Alt tag" or "Alt attribute".
This is alter net text that you can associate with an image
and that's what you
see when you mouse over an image and just hover over there.
That isn't given very much weight at all by the search
engine.
So I wouldn't give it a lot of focus. I would really try and
get as much text
on the page with good keywords as possible you don't make it
a big wall of text
that's not going to convert well for your users.
So, let's move on to another example of a retailer.
Looks like a fair amount of text here, too.
Unfortunately, when you hit "control A", this shows that
there's no text on the
page.
Yikes!
It's all graphics.
So, what is this page about?
What is the keyword theme or keyword focus?
I don't know.
If I'm a spider I cannot tell.
I can only get really what's in the title tag and the links
that are pointing to
this page, the anchor text, what are those underlined words,
and maybe there's a
copyright statement way at the bottom so I know it's about
copyright 2009.
I don't have a good sense of what this page is about.
So, that's a real missed opportunity for them.
Here we can do -- just view source or view the page source
and see what's going
on behind the scenes, like meta, meta description and so
forth.
Now, who's heard of meta tags?
Okay.
Good.
So, meta tags, umm -- would you say that meta tags, umm,
are, I don't know,
perhaps good for SEO?
Okay.
Would you say they could improve your rankings?
This is a trick question.
No, they can't.
They're good for SEO but only the meta description and it's
not going to improve
your rankings.
Meta keywords are worthless.
Don't waste your time on them.
Meta descriptions is useful in that it can influence what's
displayed in the
snippet part of the search listing which will increase the
Clickthrough.
So, instead of saying, copyright 2009 all rights reserved
blah blah blah blah
blah legal notices for your, you know, little snippet in the
search result it
might say something really useful, like "free shipping", you
know, whatever,
"buy now", various calls to action.
Right?
So, that would be a more compelling message to put in -- to
build into your
search listing and the meta description's the way to do
that.
Now, we have, scrolling down into the HTML, a bunch of Java
Script code, you'll
have CSS code, and so forth.
There could be, uh, a lot of bloat in that code.
And that's not great.
It's not going to destroy your SEO to have a lot of comment
code and Java Script
and so forth.
Problem is, though, it's bad for your users.
It actually adds a lot of bloat that decreases the download
time.
If you can't take out the Java Script and the CSS code and
put it in a separate
file, an external file, and just reference it, now you take
hundreds of lines of
code, you turn it into one line of code, and the hundred
lines of code go into a
separate file then.
When the user's browser fetches the web page it also fetches
that CSS file or
Java Script file and then it caches it on the computer.
So, as you surf around the web site, it has the local copy
of that CSS file or
JS file, meaning it doesn't have to download it every single
page that you visit
on the web site.
You got a hundred lines of code here, and then a hundred
lines of code here, and
a hundred lines -- just got it once and now it has it
cached.
So, it's a much better user experience and it is not a --
not a bad idea from an
SEO standpoint.
It's not a strong signal, though, 'cause there are a lot of
really crummy web
pages on the web.
If they were to penalize web pages that have poor coding
practices, the code
doesn't validate and that sort of stuff, most of the web
would be penalized
unfortunately.
So, we're going through this process of getting our pages
indexed, making sure
they're in the database, now we're making sure that the
pages are ranking in
terms of the on-page factors.
Now let's go into the off-page factors.
We want to make sure that there are signals that point to this
page and say, hey,
this is an important page!
'Cause if there is a web page, that, you know, sitting on
your web site, and
nobody links to it, not even you, it's not going to rank.
Guaranteed.
So, we need links that kind of connotes votes and the more
votes the better but
it's not just a numbers game.
It's about the authority of those links as well.
So, this is not a democracy.
It's Americatocracy.
A link from CNN is way more powerful than a link from Jim
Bob.
Right?
Jim Bob's not going to do much for you.
The CNN link will do a lot.
So, weighted form, link popularity, Google calls it
PageRank, PageRank as in
Larry Page, not as in web page.
Just so you know.
PageRank is not ranking in the results.
That's the important score that is associated with your web
page.
Each web page has its own web rank score.
You can see what your PageRank score is by using the Google
Toolbar and I put
the Google Toolbar into Firefox here.
Hope you don't mind.
So, let's see, enable PageRank.
I'm just going to finish doing this -- and that will give us
Google Toolbar right
here and inside the Google Toolbar is a PageRank meter.
So, let's go to Stanford's homepage.
Stanford.edu.
I think you guys have a pretty decent PageRank.
Let's see.
Yeah.
That's not too bad.
That's an eight out of ten.
You think, well, eight, that's not so great.
I thought we were more important than that.
Well, an eight is actually pretty darn good because this is
on a logarithmic
scale, so those integers are not evenly spaced; all right?
So, the difference between a three and a four, that gap
between those two
integers is a world of difference between that and between
an eight and a nine.
Right?
So, eight and a nine would be, like, from here to the moon
versus thee to four
would be like the length of an inch worm sort of thing.
So, that is a pretty darn good PageRank.
But as you click around and go deeper and deeper down your
site, you're going to
lose PageRank score because not very many people are linking
to a page that is
deep in your site and if you're not linking to it either
from a high-up page
then you're not passing a lot of PageRank to it.
You're probably thinking, what the heck?
This is one click away from the homepage yet its PageRank is
zero.
What's up with that?
It's a brand new page.
That's why.
PageRank is not instantaneous.
At least not the PageRank that we see.
The PageRank that Google uses in the ranking algorithm is,
like, secret sauce
stuff, behind the black box.
Inside the black box.
We cannot see that.
What we do see is an export of the PageRank score that's
truncated, so it's not
very precise.
Remember, when you have a logarithmic scale and it's a
seven, if it's a low seven
versus a high seven there's a big difference between the
two.
All right?
Big, big difference.
You can't see that difference, though, not with the Google
Toolbar.
So, when you -- so, that's pat of the problem with really
relying on the Google
Toolbar and the PageRank meter in terms of determining what'
s important and
what's not important.
Another problem is the fact that this is not real-time.
It'll take several months for this page to -- this -- for
this page to be
reflected with its appropriate PageRank in the PageRank
meter.
So, it's like a snapshot in time, like, from several months
ago.
Kinda what you're looking at in the sky is a snapshot in
time from many millions
of years ago, you know, when the -- perhaps the star isn't
even alive anymore
but yet you're still seeing it.
So, what you're seeing here is zero PageRank but you might
be, umm, going to a
page that ranks -- that has a really poor PageRank score yet
it ranks really
well.
But the thing is that that PageRank score could be months
old, it could be six
months old.
Certainly going to be at least a few months old.
So, it might have inherited a lot more PageRank in the
meantime.
You might have linked to it from your homepage three weeks
ago and then it shoots
up to the top in the rankings because it has so much link
authority yet it's not
reflected in the toolbar yet.
Okay.
So, umm, let's move back to the PowerPoint.
There's the Google Toolbar.
You can download it from toolbar.google.com.
It works for Firefox and Internet Explorer.
And...
Okay.
So, now we're going to spend that PageRank wisely.
So, we've earned some PageRank, people are looking to us.
Most people are linking to our homepage so it's up to us to
figure out how we
want to convey to the search engines what's important and
what's not important
within our site.
Remember my analogy of the online music store and how that
site tree could be
laid out.
A page that's very deep down in that site tree is not given
a lot of PageRank
because the main source of PageRank is the homepage and you
lose PageRank each
click down deeper into the tree.
So, if you want to rank for something and it's a page that's
deep, what would you
do?
Any guesses?
It's not a trick question.
STEPHAN SPENCER: What's that?
STEPHAN SPENCER: Yep.
So, add a link, say, on the homepage.
All right.
Then you have some technical issues that I'll just mention
in passing.
I don't want to get too geeky here.
There's this thing that is known as canonicalization.
A canonical URL is like a definitive one.
It's the main source URL.
You can have multiple copies of a page in Google's index
that could be an
accident, basically.
It could be that, umm, you'd have a misconfiguration on your
server, you might
have multiple click paths that lead to that same page of
content but the way
that you click through the site the URL changes depending on
that.
It could be all sorts of issues that -- session IDs.
There's a lot of issues that can lead to canonicalization
issues and duplicate
content or duplicate pages in the index.
Here's an example which is kind of ironic because this is
the Google Store,
Google's own store of paraphernalia, like Google branded
umbrellas and baseball
caps and so forth.
And it has rampant duplicate content.
Look at that.
I see six copies of the same exact product code.
So, this SKU or S-K-U is GO 40031.
That particular product is in Google's index six times and
then you could just
see a lot of products in Google's -- Google Store are
showing up multiple times.
Which isn't so bad.
It was really bad few years ago when they were running an
older version of the
Google Store and you can see that there are 7,330 copies of
their accessories
page in Google's index.
Oops.
So, you can manage which one's going to rank, if any.
It's severe PageRank dilusion.
You have all these different copies of the same page loading
up Google's index
and each getting a very small number of votes or links.
That's a problem.
Here is an example of a URL that is not search engine
friendly.
It's very long, very, very long.
It doesn't even fit within scrollable -- or the viewable
address window, there.
Search engines don't like that.
They might not even index that URL.
Encourage Clickthrough from the search results.
Now we got the pages indexed, we got them ranking, and we've
got links pointing
to them so they're important and they're ranking even
better.
We want to get people to click on our search ranking's rather
than our
competitors'.
Well, what do we do?
We incorporate calls to action, we incorporate value
propositions and so forth,
and we need to think about where people look on the screen
before we start doing
this.
Because if we, let's say, have a call to action, like "free
shipping", and let's
say we're number seven in the search results, okay?
From this heat map, this, uh -- this is from click -- or an
eye tracking study.
Where to people look on the screen?
This is an aggregate, whole bunch of different people where
do they look as they
were navigating through Google search results?
Well, they certainly aren't looking over on the right-hand
side are they?
All these companies paying lots of money to be advertising
on the right-hand
side and people just aren't looking over there.
They're looking, of course, at the top listing over at the
left and the second
listing and so forth.
But note the F-shaped pattern and how as you go further down
the page people aren't
reading left to right.
They're just going straight down.
Think about how you use Google.
If you don't see that the first result's a good one aren't
you just going to kinda
go just straight down until you go to the next page or hit
the back button or try a
different -- try a different search or something?
So, that's basically how people use Google Search.
And when you have a snippet or a title tag that at the end
of it says "free
shipping" -- so it's way on the right-hand side and I'm
number seven so all
they're seeing is the first couple words of my listing they
don't see that value
proposition or call to action.
It's invisible.
So they have a blind eye to it.
So, you need to think about that and how that correlates.
If you're ranking very high then they're going to get more
visibility at what you're
search listing is.
But, remember, too, that the way the people use the internet
they're not really
reading the content.
They're not reading the search listings, they're not reading
your web pages.
They're scanning them.
They're looking for just the...
Okay.
So, when you have a whole bunch of content, and links, and
so forth on a web
page they're not reading it to decide then what's the very
best option for me to
go to?
They're just going to find a good enough one and click on it.
I'm not going to finish, you know, looking through all of them
and then determine
which one's the best one.
So, you gotta weigh this with the fact that people are not
going to look down into
the search listing so you need to rank high, You need to
have content on the page, you have to have keywords, but yet
you
don't want to have a big wall of content 'cause that's not
something people are
going to read.
They're going to be just numb to that and they're going to hit the
back button.
A successful page from a usability and conversion standpoint
is when there's a
very easy-to-define and easy-to-identify path forward.
I can quickly scan it and I can see what's the next action.
That's not a great page from an SEO standpoint because
there's not a lot of
content there.
So, you gotta weigh this.
Now we gotta track the right metrics because this is not
just a set it and
forget it sort of proposition.
We have to continually optimize, and improve, and iterate
over time.
Never finish.
So, you need to track metrics and watch those metrics and
continue to improve
and iterate. While these are some of the basic metrics here,
we have
indexation, we have popularity and rankings, keyword
popularity and so forth,
but there's a whole graft of different metrics that are much
more sophisticated
than this which I could go into but I don't want to
overwhelm you.
So, let's start with these.
We want to note that we have our pages indexed so we want to
check to make sure all
of our pages are showing up in Google's index.
We want to make sure that there are links pointing to our
site, so we're going to
check how many links are pointing to our site and our
PageRank score.
We're going to the rankings for our various important keywords,
where they are placed
in the search results.
We also want to look at keyword popularity.
Are these search terms that I'm targeting, or keywords, that
I'm targeting popular
or not?
And then cost and ROI.
So, if I -- return on investment.
So, if I am expending effort on Search Engine Optimization I
want to know that
that's the best use of my time.
If I'm focusing on, let's say, building more links and
getting more people to
link to me and I'm also spending some time writing some
content, and I'm also
spending some time re-architecting my web site, changing the
linking structure
and so forth, what are the best activities that I should be
doing and which
things are low-value activities that I should stop doing?
I don't know that unless I'm tracking my time and dollars
spent to do this
optimization or, you know, associated with the results I'm
getting.
So, let's flip ahead here.
Now we're into worst practices.
These are things that you should avoid at all costs because
either they're going
to earn you a penalty or they're going to just hurt your
rankings inadvertently.
They're not something that's just evil and makes you look
bad in front of search
engines.
They're just -- they're going to hurt you because the web site
isn't very
optimized.
So, let's have a look at some of these things.
Let's start with spamming activities.
Search engines spam, unlike e-mail spam, search engine --
so, e-mail spam, just
to differentiate the two -- e-mail spam, you get in your
inbox, it's very cheap
to e-mail so if you send 3 million e-mails in an our that's
pretty cheap.
Okay?
And if you get even a .0001 percent conversion rate out of 3
million e-mails you
might make 50 bucks.
And it's like, okay, I spent ten-cents or whatever it was
sending out this spam
blast and I made a hundred bucks or whatever.
That's -- I'm going to keep doing that all day long.
So even just one out of a thousand people or 10,000 people
buying a product from
a spammer from an e-mail campaign is just going to go to the
mine.
It's just really bad.
Now, you have web spam, or search engine spam.
That's where people want to sell you, I don't know, let's
just say Viagra,
right?
And they have a page that they want to rank so that people
click on it and buy
their Viagra tablets.
So, how are they going to get people who aren't searching for
Viagra to end up on
this page?
They're going to do all sorts of bait and switch tactics,
they're going to play
different games, hide keywords, they're going to build links
and really kinda evil
sneaky ways, like putting garbage comments on people's
blogs, right?
Have you seen that before?
Blog comments that are just useless?
Like, great site; love your site; keep it up.
Right?
And then the name of the person is Car Rental San Jose.
All right?
That doesn't sound like somebody with a real name.
It's because they're trying to get links with good anchor
text, keywords, in
those underlined words, that point to their web page.
So, that's all bad stuff.
You don't want to do any of that, obviously.
But just be aware that that's rampant throughout the web and
it's a constant
battle search engine engineers, you know, Google engineers
are battling wits
with these spammers and it's just like a chess game.
Here's an example of a -- a wayward company that we all
probably know, BMW.
This is their Germany site and this doesn't look like a page
that's really meant
for people, does it?
This is called a doorway page.
A doorway page is meant only for the spiders and it's got
lots of keywords in
it.
Lots and lots of keywords in it.
And it might rank.
It might actually do the trick but then you don't want to put
a user on this page.
Right?
The ewe!
Yuck.
They're not going to convert.
They're just going to hit the back button.
So, then what the site did was a sneaky redirect.
You end up on this page very quickly.
Okay, well, that wasn't what I was looking at.
If I'm a Googlebot, search engine spider, I'm looking at
that previous page not
at this and this one should rank for all those different
keywords that were
stuffed into that page.
So, this is really a bait and switch tactic and this is a
major way I'm doing
it.
They just happened to hire a rogue SEO to SEO their site and
these sort of
tactics were employed and it's got the BMW site banned out
of Google.
Zero pages in those, suddenly dropped off the face of the
earth and traffic went
way down.
Oh, and chief web spam engineer at Google, Matt Cutts,
blogged about them on his
blog.
So, just to add insult to injury.
All right.
These are tactics that are not spam but they're just going to
hurt your rankings.
Things like having a bunch of links on your site that say
useless stuff like
"click here", "read more", "find out more", that sort of
stuff is throw away
text.
It's a missed opportunity.
If I wanted to rank for "click here" I would use "click
here" as my anchor text.
But I don't want to rank for that.
You guys want to know what the number one search result is in
Google for "click
here"?
Anyone want to take a guess?
It's the Adobe Acrobat Reader download page.
Kinda makes sense, right?
Think of all those links all over the web that say "click
here" and the text
around it says "we have a bunch of PDF's for you to read and
download and in
order for you to read them you need the Acrobat Reader to
download it.
So, click here.
Number one, click here.
Yes, question?
STEPHAN SPENCER: It hurts you in that it's a missed
opportunity.
You're telling the search engines not just Google but Yahoo!
and Bing both work
in the same way.
They associate those underlined words with the page that's
being linked to.
So, when you're linking to a page that says "learn more"
you're telling the search
engines the page over here is about "learn more" and that's
not a very good
signal.
You are sending the signal that says, hey, this is
important, 'cause you're
linking to it from your homepage but you're not sending good
context with the
link.
STEPHAN SPENCER: Okay.
So, what would be some things that are not good for rankings
besides "click here"?
Well, how about a title tag on your homepage that says "
Welcome to our web
site"?
I don't want to rank for "welcome to" so that would be a bad
idea.
What if I put my web site name at the beginning of every
single title tag across
my whole web site?
That's not a good idea, either, 'cause I want to rank for the
keywords that each
page is about.
Remember the analogy about online music store.
If I want an artist name, you know, I have an artist page, I
want to rank for that
artist name, I want to start my title tag with that artist
name.
I don't want to say, welcome to this page of this artist and
by the way his name is
Brad Paisley.
Do I want to rank the page with a title tag like that?
No way.
All right.
Oh, and having -- this is one that I kinda glossed over
earlier.
When I was talking about duplicate content, duplicate pages
in Google's index
and canonicalization issues this happens a lot.
And what it is a misconfiguration on the server's site.
What happens when you leave off "www" from a URL and it
doesn't do a 301 redirect?
That creates another version of your web site , a duplicate
version of your web
site, that Google can explore and index that competes with
your main web site.
Can I get an example of a URL that starts with www?
Yeah.
'Cause a lot of you guys are on sub domains I'm sure of
Stanford.
But give me an example of w --
STEPHAN SPENCER: Okay.
www.museum.edu.
Right.
So, that's a sub domain.
Museum.stanford.edu.
All right.
So, what I'm saying is that when somebody links with "ww"
and when somebody
links without www those are two different locations, two
different web sites
unless one does a redirect to the other.
And this one did a redirect so that's good.
Yeah?
STEPHAN SPENCER: Mm hmm.
STEPHAN SPENCER: Okay.
STEPHAN SPENCER: Well, let's first see if there's a problem.
Okay?
So, server header checker -- I'm going to type this into Google
-- and what this
allows me to see is whether it's a 301 or 302.
That's really important.
Let's pick one of these.
They all work.
And put in the URL and then hit the button.
So, this is the version that doesn't redirect, status code
of 200, the page just
loads.
It's okay.
Now, if I put www, this is where the redirect's going to
happen, I want to make sure
it's a 301 not a 302, and that's not so good.
It's a 200.
So, something weird's happening here.
They're probably using a meta refresh tag on a very small
little HTML page.
'Cause 200 is not a 301 and it's not a 302.
So, one thing you can do -- and I'm going to get kinda geeky
here for a minute --
is use a terminal application.
STEPHAN SPENCER:
[mumbling] Let's see if that's installed.
I don't know.
Standby.
STEPHAN SPENCER: Okay.
So, now I'm in one of my servers and I'm going to type in a
command that allows me
to see behind the scenes what's happening as well as what
the actual document is
that I -- before all the redirects and the meta refreshes
happen I want to see
what's going on behind the scenes under the hood.
So, I'm going to do www.museum.stanford.edu.
STEPHAN SPENCER: It's pretty slow.
STEPHAN SPENCER: There it is.
STEPHAN SPENCER: Okay.
So, it's doing a 200, as we saw, it's not redirecting.
Now, let's see if there's a meta refresh in here that tells
it to redirect.
Oh, we're doing a redirect.
There's no redirect?
So, how did one go from -- didn't one change the -- Let's do
it again.
Museum.stanford.edu.
Oh, it didn't redirect.
I thought I saw a redirect.
So, you have two copies of your web site.
STEPHAN SPENCER: Yeah, it's going to be duplicate content and
so forth and that's
not a good thing.
Now, a lot of times Google's pretty smart about figuring
this out and even
though you have a misconfiguration they figure it out
anyways.
So, let's see if that happened.
Are your fingers crossed?
So, I'm typing in the site colon query operator into Google
and then putting in
the URL and it doesn't find any pages of that www version,
which is good.
Now, I'm going to do -- okay. So, now I see without the www I
got 332 pages of
your web site in Google.
That's good.
Now, I just want to verify that this is indeed correct.
I'm going to do a link colon query operator.
I see 230 links pointing to www.museum.stanford.edu.
Now I'm going to take off the www and see what happens.
And it's still 200 this is right.
So, it has canonicalized them together even though it's
misconfigured.
So, you're okay with regards to Google.
Doesn't mean that Yahoo! and Bing have figured it out,
though.
We'd have to go and check those out and do site colon and
all that.
So, that's -- Oh, and by the way if you're wondering why so
few things, that's
230 links pointing to Stanford museum, that's not a lot.
Well, it's because Google only shows a sampling of links
pointing to your web
page, your web site.
It doesn't give you a complete comprehensive list and the
reason why is because
spammers like to use that information and use it for
nefarious purposes so they
kinda broke that -- Google did -- on purpose.
So now we don't get the benefit of it, either, as just well-
meaning search
engine optimizers.
But there is a tool called "Yahoo! site explorer" which is
at
siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com which does show us backlinks.
So, I can put in a URL -- actually, I'm going to go ahead and
login here.
The reason why I'm logging in, you get more comprehensive
results out of Yahoo!
Site Explorer if you do that.
STEPHAN SPENCER: All right.
So, now I am logged in as you can see up here in the top
right.
I'm going to put your URL in here.
What this tool does, it shows me how many pages of my site
are in -- or any
site -- how many pages are in the index of Yahoo! and how
many links or what
Yahoo! calls Inlinks and Google calls backlinks are pointing
to that site or
that web page.
So, here we have 970 pages of your site in Google's index.
I mean in Yahoo!.
Sorry.
Thank you.
I'm going to go ahead and also to see if you have a
canonicalization in Yahoo! see
if there are any pages of your ww -- oh, shoot.
Sorry.
So, even though Google figured it out Yahoo! did not.
You have 117 pages of www.museum.stanford.edu in Yahoo! and
you have 970 was it
pages of museum.stanford.edu.
Okay?
So, without the dub dub dub, 970, with the www a hundred and
whatever.
It's not so good.
Now we're going to look at Inlinks or backlinks.
Who's linking?
This is the www version and now we're going to do the non www
version which is the
main one; right?
That's the one that people are probably linking to.
Including the university.
So, that's 4,500.
That's much better.
A little trick here that is important I think to do using
this tool where it
says show "Inlinks" I would -- instead of saying from all
pages I would say except
from this sub domain. What that's going to do is exclude your
own pages linking to
yourself.
You don't want to see that.
That did you want really count in the way that, you know, a
link is a vote
counts.
And then we're going to choose "entire site" instead of "only
this URL" and what
that does is says any link pointing to the site anywhere if
it links to the "about
us" page or it links to the "contact us" page or it links to
some article I
want to see it all, all the deep links as well as the links to
my homepage.
That's much more comprehensive set.
This isn't every single link that points to your site but
it's a much better
sampling than what you would get using the link colon
operator in Google.
Now, there's this thing called Google Webmaster Central.
Who's heard of that?
Okay.
A few of you.
This is also a free tool.
The search engines provide some very awesome free tools.
Okay?
So, next time you see a Googler be sure to thank him or her
for that.
Okay.
Webmaster.
So, Webmaster Central.
It provides a whole library of support materials,
information, FAQ-type pages,
forums in the form of Google Groups, and a bunch of tools
and reports.
But you feed to verify that you're the site owner or one of
the site owners in
order to gain access to all this valuable data.
I'm going to go ahead and login with an account so just
standby.
STEPHAN SPENCER: Okay.
So, now I am entering the dashboard for Webmaster Central
for the Webmaster
Tools.
Now, let's have a look and see what sort of cool stuff we
have.
Remember, we were looking at backlinks 'cause we were
wanting to see who links
to us.
With Yahoo! Site Explorer we can see who links to our
competitors, too, which is
very useful if we want to see how to get more links to our
site; right?
If, let's say if there's a more popular museum that you
compete with kind of --
I mean, I know it's friendly competition -- but if they have
a lot more links
than you, why don't you check out what their backlinks are?
Who's linking to that museum?
And then you go after that museum -- those different web
sites and say, hey,
what about me?
What about my museum?
Well, you don't say it like that, but you get the point.
So, let's have a look here and what reporting we can get in
Webmaster Central
there's actually a link report that once we verify that we'
re the site owner we
can gain access to it.
This is really, really cool.
So, notice over here these are most of my sites that I'm
verified for and then
whether I'm verified -- actually, there's a total list of
sites that I'm
tracking and then whether I have verification status or not.
Okay.
So, here's the dashboard for this particular site which is
my NetConcepts.com
web site.
Now, I'm going to go into the reporting.
I'm going to look at links to your site which is just like it
sounds.
I can see that to my homepage I have 10,757 links.
That's not too bad.
That's pretty cool.
Here's a page of my site content management article I think
links -- there are
1,988 links.
You know, it's a nice little report there and I can click on
that number and see
what those links are.
So, there we go.
BarCamp Madison.
So, BarCamp Madison's homepage is linking to my homepage.
This is a much more comprehensive set of results than you'd
get from the link
colon search and it's more comprehensive than what you'd get
from the Yahoo!
Site Explorer.
One limitation to the Yahoo! site explorer that I haven't
mentioned yet is it's
limited to a thousand results.
So, I can see a thousand links ask that's it.
If I wanted to see, I'd have to, like, type in a different
URL.
Let's say I start with my homepage but say I want to see other
links to other
pages within my site I'd start typing in those URLs, too,
like my "about" page
and see the links to that and so forth.
But even that -- I mean, that whole thing is very painful.
I wouldn't even try it.
I wouldn't even attempt to do that with the Yahoo! Site
Explorer tool.
I would use Google Webmaster Central, I would also download
the table as a excel
CSV file, load it into my Microsoft Excel application, I
would use a paid tool,
one that I haven't mentioned yet but it's definitely worthy
of mention.
It's called linkscape.
Type in SCOmage, so S -- it's hard to type with one hand --
SCOmage.org/linkscape.
This is painful to hunt and peck.
There we go.
This is a paid tool, starts at 70 bucks a month but once you
have access to it
it's amazing.
You can get a much more comprehensive set of backlinks using
this tool to any
web site, your competitors and other industry sites and so
forth.
Really cool.
So, we're going to type in www.museum.stanford into this one.
Oh, and I need -- I'll need to login 'cause the data I'm
going to get for free is
pretty limited.
But even without an account it's still useful.
I'm still -- add this to your list of tools.
What is this?
This is a -- it's like an approximation for PageRank.
Remember how I complained that PageRank is very imprecise,
the version that we
get to see?
It's, like, is it a high seven or a low seven?
I don't know.
Well, with this approximation of PageRank, they call it
MozRank, they came up
with a much more precise score that they're willing to
share, 4.29 out of ten.
So, that's, you know, several more significant digits than
Google's willing to
share with me.
The problem is, this is not Google's algorithm that this is
based on.
This is an approximation based on things like original paper
that Larry Page and
Sergey Brin wrote.
It's based on a lot of analysis and so forth and hiring ex-
Google engineers to
work on it and all sorts of stuff.
But it's a pretty good approximation.
It's definitely something I would check out to see how
important various pages
are.
You can also see how many links but you can't see what those
links are.
So, now I'm going to go ahead and login, and...
Now I got to see additional data that's -- rather than
running a report -- an
advanced report, which will take a little while, I'm just
going to go into a saved
report and show you a previously run one just for the sake
of time.
All right.
Let's go to, oh, this one, Steve Spangler Science.
Steve Spangler is a science guy like Bill Nye.
He's been on the Ellen show a bunch of times.
Pretty cool guy.
He's a client of ours.
So, what this allows me to do, not only see all these links
that point to the
site but also to filter, to show me the links that, for
example, are image links
and not text links.
'Cause if they're image things there's no underlined anchor
text.
Missed opportunity there.
So, maybe I can go back to those sites and say, hey, thank
you for the link.
Really appreciate it.
Can you make it a text link?
Of course I probably wouldn't say that in that way because
they'd say, yeah,
okay.
Delete.
Now you don't have a link.
How do you like them apples?
So, you have to be very careful about how you -- you know,
the strategies and
tactics you employ in building links because you don't have
control.
You have control over your own web site.
You don't have control over what other people -- web masters
-- do on their web
sites.
So, in a way you're, like, a PR professional -- public
relations professional --
you're trying to influence the journalists or in this case
bloggers and web
masters.
There's a lot of extra really cool data I can get to and
then the filtering I
can access through this tab here, links to domain.
Now I can do things like show me just ones that are image
links.
Link with image, show only.
And I can download this as a CSV file and load it into Excel
and there we go.
These are sites that have image links pointing to his site.
Okay.
So, let's make sure that I covered everything that I wanted
to in my PowerPoint
and then we're going to do some sort of interactive site
analysis and -- we end at
3:30; is that right?
So, we have plenty of time to tear apart your web sites in a
nice way.
So, an SEO audit.
What is that?
That's looking at all the different attributes or factors
that will influence
your rankings.
The links that will point to your site, the anchor text that
you use internally
within your own links, the linking structure, your site
tree, your site
architecture, whether you have 301's or 302's as far as the
redirects and all
that sort of stuff, canonicalization issues, etc.
Deep dive into all those different issues.
So, that's an SEO audit.
And then here's a really simple case study example that
shows the power of
making simple changes -- ones that I think will seem very
straightforward now
that you've attended the session.
So, here's the homepage of Homestead.com which has since
been acquired by
Intuit.
So, this is an okay looking web page but it doesn't rank.
It's not on Page 1 for web site hosting for example which is
their money term.
What could we do to this page?
Okay, so, I'm going to do the little trick of control A
highlighting all the text
on the page and images.
So, there's a lot of stuff here that's image; right?
All that's image.
That over there's image.
Image.
The only text on the page is right here.
So, what do you guys think?
What would you do to improve this page from an SEO
standpoint?
STEPHAN SPENCER: The title tag.
Very good.
So, it says currently, "Homestead, your website company".
What would you change that to?
If you wanted to rank for website hosting what would you
change that to?
STEPHAN SPENCER: Yeah.
So, how about starting it with website hosting?
So, what could we say?
Website hosting from Homestead?
Something like that?
I mean, that's a good start, right?
That's much better than what they have now.
What else?
Yeah?
STEPHAN SPENCER: Right.
So turning that into text, the autumn special and whatever
verbage is around
that.
Maybe there's some good hosting-related keywords that are
part of that package
description.
STEPHAN SPENCER: Yeah.
Yeah.
STEPHAN SPENCER: Yeah.
Which is a really bad practice from an SEO standpoint.
I see that a lot, yeah.
STEPHAN SPENCER: All sub pages, your entire site, every page
of your site is part of your virtual
sales force, remember?
So, we've got a thousand page web site, we want all thousand
pages to be singing
to the search engines, not just the homepage.
STEPHAN SPENCER: You are.
Yeah.
STEPHAN SPENCER: I actually would say it depends whether I
put the name of the
company in the title tag or not.
For example it would depend on the brand recognition of that
company.
If there's zero brand recognition heck no.
I'm not going to put it in the title tag.
That's wasted space.
It's diluting the keyword focus in that title tag.
So, what else would we do here?
What about to this copy in anything we could do here?
STEPHAN SPENCER: See any keywords in there?
Yep.
Keep hosting towards the front.
Exactly.
So, keep talking about how this is an easy solution for web
hosting or web site
hosting.
Exactly.
Yeah.
What about up here?
STEPHAN SPENCER: Change it to text, yeah.
STEPHAN SPENCER: Yeah.
So, the -- that's right.
When people see it and they have a browser setting that
makes the text really,
really huge then it might kinda screw up the way the page
looks.
But at least they'll be able to read the content; right?
Which is really the important thing.
Yep.
An H2.
Good plan.
So, H1, H2, all way through H6, those are heading tags.
And when you use a heading tag that tells the search engine
that bit of text, or heading, and therefore more important
than other text around it.
So, it gets more weight, in other words.
So, an H1 or an H2 here would be a really good thing.
And for that to be text obviously then.
So, now let's look at the version that the -- great job, by
the way.
Good SEO insights there.
So, let's go ahead and see what the final version was that
we went to.
By the way, they gave us the constraint that we could not
change the look of the
webpage.
Which is, like, you're kidding, right?
There's, like, nothing on the page.
There's, like, four sentences.
So, we had to work within our constraints.
Doesn't look that different, does it?
Let's hit control A.
Hello!
That looks like text now.
That looks like text as well.
That's still text but it's got some keywords in there and a
title tag.
Look at that.
Website hosting and web page design software from Homestead.
Free trial.
So, there's a value proposition there, a call to action, "
free trial", that, uh,
is at the end of the title tag but these guys ranked number
one for website
hosting so people could see the whole thing.
It's way up at the top there.
And also -- let's see, what else did we do?
I remember login.
Yeah.
That's still there -- and that doesn't matter that it's
still text.
There's a graphic but do we want to rank for member login?
Nah.
We also worked in some keywords into the anchor text of
links pointing to
internal pages so that those pages can -- the context of
those links can be
around whatever the important keywords are.
Like website packages, like hosting services, website
building software.
So, when you go to that page and there are further clues to
the search engines
that this page, for example, is about website building
software, like its
mention in the title tag and so forth.
That's going to help you rank for those things.
Yeah?
STEPHAN SPENCER: Right.
So, how long did it take to get to number one once these
changes were in place?
It was pretty fast.
Uh, we first saw it jump onto Page 1 -- and by the way you
notice that it's
website hosting with website as one word?
We did that on purpose even though that wasn't as popular as
web site hosting
when we did the keyword research and the reason why is that
this was a lot more
attainable to get high ranking for website hosting than web
site hosting.
The competition was fierce for web site hosting and we
decided we didn't want to
play that game, we'd go after the easy one and that worked
out really well.
So, a few weeks I think it was before they appeared on Page
1 and, you know,
maybe it was a month or two, just moved up the rankings.
Gotta bear in mind, though, that they had a PageRanking
eight at the time which
is huge.
So that helped a lot.
If you have a PageRank three and you make all these changes
you might wait for
many weeks to start seeing the benefit of what you're doing
in terms of the
various SEO initiatives you're putting in place.
Yes?
STEPHAN SPENCER: This was -- yeah.
It was not an iteration.
We'd like to do that.
We'd like to be able to continue to stay involved and
improve because as I said
earlier this isn't just a set it and forget it kind of
proposition.
For them it was, though.
They were, like, this is -- we're going to do -- this is, like,
a project and once
that project's done we have budget for it and that's it.
We're done.
Until maybe next year.
So, we had to just do it as an audit, give them some advice
-- and by the way,
they had to implement themselves 'cause they had access to
the web server
internal editing stuff but we didn't and they didn't want to
give it to us.
So, we just had to coach them on making all the changes
which can be
frustrating.
All right.
So, we covered keyword research, and optimizing content;
right?
Weaving those keywords, the important keywords that we found
through the
keywords research into the copy, into the title tags and so
forth, we talked
about building links and PageRank, getting more people to
link to you and
hopefully with the right anchor text that have your keywords
in there, spending
your rank wisely by getting the right sort of site
architecture and site tree to
pass the PageRank down into your site in the right way to
the most important
pages first.
We talked about measurement and making sure that we are
tracking the success.
We have some metrics that we are, umm, measuring and KPIs,
key performance
indicators.
'Cause you can't improve what you can't measure, at least
not reliably and
continuously.
And then rinse and repeat, basically.
Here are a bunch of blogs and web sites that are good
resources for SEO.
And right.
So, that's it.
So, we have what?
Seven minutes, eight minutes left?
Let's just do some little site critiquing and also some Q
and A all mixed
together.
Yes?
STEPHAN SPENCER: Indexing dynamic content.
Right.
So, I kinda covered that when I talked about URL structure
and eliminating as
many of the complex bits and pieces in the URL like trying
to eliminate
ampersands and equal signs and question marks making a nice,
short URL with
keywords separated by hyphens 'cause --
STEPHAN SPENCER: Right.
STEPHAN SPENCER: Yeah.
Right.
So, most web sites these days are dynamic and all these
rules apply to insuring
success when you have a dynamic web site.
If you have -- we have a dynamic web site so if I go to
NetConcepts.com that
site is powered by WordPress.
There's a database behind it and every page is created on
the fly.
Doesn't exist until the database calls are made.
But yet PageRanks really well.
So, what are -- or the site ranks really well.
So, we have the homepage here and then we have, you know,
things like articles
on SEO and then we have -- so, this is like a category
within, umm -- here's a
page within the site, okay?
So, these are all dynamic pages.
This dynamic page has a nice, short keyword-rich URL.
You'd never know this was a dynamic web site.
This is NetConcepts.com/faceted-navigation-article.
So, we're targeting faceted navigation which is a geeky term
for a certain type
of search capability on big E-commerce sites.
So, that's the URL structure.
That's usually the hardest part when you have a dynamic
site.
An easy thing -- something that makes life a lot easier,
though, when you have a
dynamic site is your pages are being generated using page
templates.
So, the article page will have an article page template.
You'd go in and you'd change things like oh, that's a font
tag.
I should make that an H1.
So, you'd fix these things once and then it's reflected in
all thousand articles
or technical reports.
So, that's a good thing.
STEPHAN SPENCER: Okay.
From a search engine spiders point of view I shouldn't have
to worry whether
this is a dynamic database-driven web site or it's static,
created by, you know,
by scra -- from scratch using Dreamweaver or whatever.
Yeah?
STEPHAN SPENCER: Underscores are not the same.
They are -- as of at least -- you know, sometime this year I
asked Matt Cutts if
they've started treating underscores as word separators yet
and they hadn't.
When you see, let's say
faceted_navigation it looks like faceted at underscore
navigation.
It doesn't look like two different words.
Uh-huh.
STEPHAN SPENCER: Drupal.
Yeah.
Drupal is very similar in, umm, to WordPress in that it has,
you know, page
templates and the capability of having search engine-
friendly URLs that don't
have query strings with, you know, ampersands and equal
signs but it has
additional capabilities that WordPress doesn't have, at
least not without
plug-ins.
So it's not vastly different, really.
Doesn't matter what your CMS is -- content management system
is -- could be
Drupal, could be WordPress, could be, oh, let's see, give me
a big clunky one
like Broad Vision or something.
It doesn't matter as long as you can make the -- from the
spider's point of view
make the page, the HTML, look like it's a good content page
with keywords and
HTML tags being the right sort of tags like we spoke about
already, H1's and so
forth, and then having a good URL structure and a good
linking structure.
That's -- it's not really any different.
So, is there another question over here?
STEPHAN SPENCER: Okay.
So, yes?
STEPHAN SPENCER: Mm hmm.
STEPHAN SPENCER: Yeah.
STEPHAN SPENCER: Umm, there are some overlaps but it is
pretty different.
All right?
So with -- with the compliance situation -- now, remember.
Most web pages would fail the validation test.
So, they're not -- they're not even coded correctly.
So, if Google were to penalize those pages the whole web
would be penalized, or
most of it.
Now, if we want to make our pages accessible for folks using
screen readers who
are visually impaired, having things like tables, table tags
being used for
layout purposes is a really bad thing really, really bad.
So, if you want to fix that, use CSS and, uh, so forth.
But the thing is, that's not going to help your rankings when
you switch from
table-based layout to CSS-based layout, at least for the
most part.
It might -- you might rearrange some content in the process
where it's higher in
the HTML code and thus it helps your keyword prominence but
overall it's not --
it's not -- it's not an initiative that I would be focused
on for SEO.
STEPHAN SPENCER: SEO and video?
Oh, boy.
Umm, when you're dealing with multimedia files they
oftentimes have meta data,
like part of the file is -- has meta data capability.
So, like, for example, an mp3 file might have an ID three
tag which has some
additional information about the file than just the audio
bits.
So, that's one thing you can do is make sure that there's a
keyword-rich copy.
Like, for example you can have the show notes for a Podcast
episode built into,
like, a AAC file, you know, mp3 type of file.
So, that's one thing.
And another one would be to take your videos and upload them
to YouTube.
The reason why you'd want to focus on YouTube is 'cause that's
actually the number
two search engine.
It's no longer Yahoo!.
Or more search queries to YouTube than to Yahoo!.
And so if I were to, like, say, do a search for
nanotechnology in YouTube and
one of your videos about nanotechnology ranks pretty well on
YouTube you'd get
a ton of visablity and brand recognition for that.
You could also then, umm -- you're not going to get any
PageRank flow from YouTube
to your site from this but you also benefit from the fact
that it's a social
network, YouTube is, so all these YouTube users can favorite
things and then pass
them onto friends and write comments and give ratings all
that.
All that great social media-type stuff that will help
something that is worthy
of being viral go viral.
I think we're about out of time.
We'll do, like, one or two really quick questions.
That okay?
Yep?
STEPHAN SPENCER: AJAX is really bad.
It's cool.
It's very cool, but what it does is it asynchronously pulls
content out of the
cloud and puts it on the web page.
It's not viewable on the HTML source code.
It's not visible to the spiders.
What can be done?
Uh, you can make an HTML version, you can throw away the
AJAX, I guess.
It's not -- if the content is visible in the HTML source
code and it's just view
source and the AJAX is just pulling that content from that
page that's --
that'll work.
But that's not really AJAX.
I mean, the cool thing about AJAX is it's pulling stuff off
of the web
asynchronously as you're doing stuff on the web page.
So, they don't really work well together, SEO and AJAX,
unfortunately.
That could change.
Google's getting a lot smarter about dealing with Java
Script.
Right now unfortunately it just pretty much chokes on most
Java Script.
STEPHAN SPENCER: Yep.
Yep.
Yeah, actually, let me give you a URL now and then it'll
also get posted I'm
sure on the techbriefings.stanford.edu web site.
But let me just give you that URL.
It's www.NetConcepts.com/learn/seo101.ppt.
Ppt as in PowerPoint.
All right.
We're out of time.
Thanks very much.
>>
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