Search Engine Marketing and Optimisation (SEO)

ReSearch

Articles

• SEO Insight on the Purposes and Benefits of Using Subdomains - http://www.scribewise.com/blog/bid/377702/SEO-Insight-The-Purposes-and-Benefits-of-Using-Subdomains
• SEO and User Experience: Finding the Common Ground http://www.pitstopmedia.com/sem/seo-and-user-experience-finding-the-common-ground - Excellent explanation of the factors that influence SEO
• SEO Keyword Tool: Leverage More Powerful Keyword Data - http://www.wordstream.com/seo-keyword-tool

Related Ideas

• Web Development - Promote Accessibility
• Internet Marketing Strategy
• How Web Crawlers Work
  • Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages are automatically found. (does not require personal submission)
  • Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Dependent on multiple factors. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may be a factor if pages get crawled
  • When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is then parsed, and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled. As a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wish crawled. Pages typically prevented from being crawled include login specific pages such as shopping carts and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches.

Glossary

• Search Engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo)
• Crawlers
• Spiders
• Cloaking
• Robots Exclusion Standard

Learning Resources

• Moz.com's Beginners Guide to SEO - https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/

Tools and Services

• WordStream Free Keyword Suggestion Tool - http://www.wordstream.com/keywords - 30 Free Searches
• Google AdWords Keyword Planner Tool - http://adwords.google.com/keywordplanner
• Microsoft Bing Ads Intelligence - http://advertising.microsoft.com/small-business/adcenter-downloads/microsoft-advertising-intelligence
• Wordtracker's Free BasicKeyword Demand - https://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
• Moz Keyword Difficulty and SERP Analysis Tool - https://moz.com/tools/keyword-difficulty
• Google Trends - https://www.google.com/trends/explore - Search trends of keywords
  • Reputation Hawk: Online Reputation Management Services That Work - http://www.reputationhawk.com

OUTLINE

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_marketing

About Search Engine Marketing or SEM

• What is SEM?
  • a form of Internet marketing
  • promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) through Optimization (SEO) and advertising.
  • SEM may use Search Engine Optimization (SEO), that adjusts or rewrites website content to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages or use pay per click listings

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEO

About Search Engine Optimisation or SEO

• What is SEO?
  • process to affect visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results.
  • Goal of SEO: earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users.
  • Targets different kinds of search: (image, local, video, academic, news and industry-specific vertical search engines
• Why is it Important? Who does SEO affect? Why should I learn about SEO?
  • If I want to be found by search engines: Getting Indexed by Search Engine Web Crawlers
    • Search Engines Use Crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results
    • Examples
      • Yahoo!: operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling for either a set fee or cost per click. Guarantees inclusion in the database, but not specific ranking within the search results.
      • Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project both require manual submission and human editorial review.
      • Google: Google Webmaster Tools, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that are not discoverable by automatically following links.
  • If I don't want to be found by search engines: Prevent Crawling
    • To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes: instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain.
    • Explicitly exclude a page from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots
• What Should I learn to get started on SEO
  • How search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience
• How to do SEO?
  • Optimize your website: edit content, HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
  • Promote your site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links

GUIDE

How to Get Listed on Search Engines

• 2 Ways to Get listed on Search Engines (White Hat Vs White)
  • White Hat:
    • Search Engine Recommended.
    • Conforms to Search Engine Guidelines: indexed and ranked Content = same content seen by user
    • No deceptions
    • Content created for users, not for search engines
    • Making content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than trick the algorithm from its intended purpose.
  • Black Hat
    • Aims to Improve rankings
    • Use of hidden text (Text same color as background, in an invisible div, positioned offscreen)
    • Cloaking: Give a different page when requested by human or search engine
    • Search engines may penalize black hat sites by reducing rankings or removing listings from their databases automatically by algorithms, or manual site review.
    • In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should prevent indexing of internal search results because those pages are considered search spam.

How to Optimise and Promote your Site to affect the prominence of a webpage

• Engage Webcrawlers: robots.txt in the root directory of your site
• Cross-Linking: Cross linking between pages of the same website to provide more links to most important pages may improve its visibility.
• Key-word Phrasing: Writing content that includes frequently searched keyword phrase, so as to be relevant to a wide variety of search queries will tend to increase traffic.
• Constant Updates: Updating content so as to keep search engines crawling back frequently can give additional weight to a site.
• Adding labels and keywords: Adding relevant keywords to a web page's meta data, including the title tag and meta description, will tend to improve the relevancy of a site's search listings, thus increasing traffic.
• Multiple URLs pointing to one page: URL normalization of web pages accessible via multiple urls, using Links or via 301 redirects can help make sure links to different versions of the url all count towards the page's link popularity score.