Search engine optimisation november 2010

Search Engine Optimisation Client WorkshopGoogle’s mission is to organize the

world'sinformation and make it universallyaccessible and useful

Your job is to help it!

John Duffyjohn@nemisys.uk.com@johnrduffywww.nemisys.uk.com/blogs/nemisys

Nemisys Client Workshops

• This is one of a series of workshops we run for our clients

• Workshops run either in-house or open access where we take up to 5 clients a day

• The purpose is simple – if your web site works better for you, you may win more budget to further develop it. – We also want choosing to work with Nemisys to be a

“career-enhancing” decision!

• See www.nemisys.uk.com/workshops for our timetable

Agenda

• Understanding how search engines work

• “On page” factors – things you can change on your own site– Practical session – let’s optimise some of your pages today

• “Off page factors” – things you can do on other sites

• Concentrating on natural results

• Aiming for a higher number of relevant visitors– Or for those of you who have attended our Analytics

session – visitors who convert

Over to you

• Introductions and roles

• How do you use your web site?

Why focus on Google?

• 85%+ UK searches

• With limited time available to you, it makes sense to focus on the most productive engine

Our approach – ethical SEO

• This is all about getting the best value from your site’s content ethically – we will refuse if you ask us to “fool” the search engines– For more information about what Google doesn’t like,

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3

Our approach - accessibility

• Accessibility and natural SEO are bound up together

• On some sites which we have made accessible with no real focus on SEO, we have seen a trebling of natural search traffic

• SO, think long and hard about specifying functionality that isn’t accessible. – We will almost always insist that there’s an accessible

alternative

Our approach – “the long tail”

• People search for weird and wonderful variations of every “obvious” search phrase

• You will never guess all of those variations

• So don’t chase “hero” terms

• (If you have persistent questioning from HIPPOs, we can look at keyword demand analysis later if you really want to!)

• Some examples:

Example – “all england”

Our approach – summed up

• Write about what you do – be literal

• Write for people not search engines

• Don’t take short cuts when writing your copy, creating documents etc

• Make sure your web site is accessible (we do this for you)

• Make sure your information architecture is “correct” (that’s our job at design/specification stage!)

• Make sure your link architecture is correct (you’ll get the hang easily when using the CMS)

Results – e-commerce

Results – e-commerce

Results - recruitment

Results - ECMK

Results – England Hockey

On page factors

“Google's mission is to organize the world's

information and make it universallyaccessible and useful.

Your mission is to help Google do this!”

Our content checklist

• See course manual

• Email john@nemisys.uk.com if you can’t find your copy

To cover:

• Page title

• Short title

• Meta title

• Body copy

• Meta description

• Headings & subheadings

• Alt tags

• Documents

• Link text

• Meta keywords

Exercise – get stuck in

• Identify 2 pages on your site and optimise them step by step

• Make a note of which pages – we’re going to measure the results!

Off page factors

• You’ve optimised your site – what else can you do?

Requesting incoming links

• Look for potential link sites– List your “competitor” sites– Find out who links to them– Ask the best ones to link to you too – give them a reason, linkbait

• Example– Say you’ve just published a “guide to macular disease”– Search for “macular disease” to find high ranking sites– Then find out who links to the top site– And contact the best to ask for links

• Note syntax of the searches above– Wrong: “link:www.maculardisease.org”– Right: “www.maculardisease.org –site:www.maculardisease.org”

Exercise – incoming links

• Locate your competitors

• Produce a list of sites that link to them

Incoming links - requesting

• Ask people to use your keywords rather than just your web address– Good: Ovarian cancer information– Not so good: www.targetovarian.org.uk – Provide the code they need if you can!

• Who links to your competitors– Use Google to find out – search for– www.ecmk.co.uk -site:www.ecmk.co.uk

• NOT link:www.ecmk.co.uk– Then ask them to link to you

Feeds

• News feeds

• Regional structure

• Sister/affiliated organisations?

Linkbait – fishing for links

• Consider creating content designed to encourage people to link to you

• Eg– England Hockey Star Chat– Coverage obtained

• Other ideas that work well– Simple guides to ...– White papers– Blogs– Online conferences– Glossaries– Directories

Exercise

• Do you have any content on your site that could act as ‘linkbait’– Let’s form an action plan to use it

• Do you have any ideas for additional site content?

Incoming links - evaluating

• You will be approached by other people and offered links

• Check their PageRank– http://toolbar.google.com/T5/i

ntl/en/

• Check the format– Do they use “nofollow”

property?

• Check your analytics – what traffic do you get?

• Note: Google forbids you from buying/selling links to pass on PageRank – but it must be difficult to police!

Specialist directories

• Are there any specialist directories for your sector?– Check on http://searchenginewatch.com/links/ – Do your staff use any directories?

• Don’t be tempted to pay for links

Other link sources

• Social networks and forumsDon’t use these for PageRank – but do use them for traffic

• Online PR servicesMost claim to pass on PageRank – check for ‘nofollow’ tags

• Partners, customers, suppliers (Nemisys!)

Analytics – the other side of the coin• Measuring your results, and using your analytics

package to help you improve your SEO

• Track your search traffic

• Spot new sites linking to you

• Improve your landing pages

Measuring your SEO

• Volume of visitors from natural search

• Keywords used

• To specific pages

• To conversions if you have set up goals

Looking for incoming links

• Check your most successful referrers

• And “farm” them

• Check for errors – people linking to moved pages

• Build a network of peers– People running similar

sites– People running like-minded

sites– Network of advocates– Network of news sites

Landing pages

• Spot best performers

• Improve problem pages

• There’s no “right” or “wrong” figure

• But don’t just look at rates – concentrate on high volume pages

Webmaster tools

Webmaster tools – key reports

• Crawl statistics – check you are being crawled regularly

• Link text – check the way people are linking to you

• Search queries – what terms are people using to find you

• Diagnostics – any problems we should know about?

• Sitelinks – review & control block any Google sitelinks you aren’t happy with

Useful tools

Unless SEO is your sole job, and we know that for most of clients it isn’t, we really recommend that you don’t focus down on specific keywords, but instead concentrate on creating lots of lovely high quality content, BUT, if you force us ...

Paid

• Hitwise, but expect to pay £several000 either for your own license, or for a specialist to perform the analysis for youhttp://www.hitwise.co.uk/

• Wordtracker, poor man’s Hitwise, but at least it spans different engineshttp://www.wordtracker.com/

Free

• Google’s Keyword suggestion tool:https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

• Seasonal terms – get ready in time for the surge!http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

• DoubleClick Ad Plannerhttps://www.google.com/adplanner/

Homework

• Optimise 5 more pages – or even better, choose a whole section to optimise

• Track the performance of the pages you optimise

• Contact 5 sites and request links from them

Further reading

• Matt Cutts – lots of common sense. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/

• Google’s basic SEO starter guidehttp://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html

• Webmaster central – keeps you on the straight & narrowwww.google.com/webmasters/

• Search Engine Watch – the daddy of them allhttp://searchenginewatch.com

• Search:Johnston – buy the ebookhttp://www.searchjohnston.co.uk/resources/