KB Seminars: Growing an online portal; 05/13

Growing PortalKBR

Jakarta, Indonesia

30 April to May 1 2013

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Day 1: Audience Development

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Marketing

Social Media Optimization and Marketing

Agenda

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Audience Development: Sources

Where do users come from?

1. Direct: User knows your brand and its online address. User types address into the address bar or bookmarks the address. User Characteristics: Brand loyal, regular visitor, “older users”

Marketing: Mostly traditional brand marketing – promotions, events, ...

• Search: User is looking for a specific item of information on the web. User Characteristics: - New user, occasional users, lazy users (can’t remember your web address)- Users more interested in the information than the source!

Optimization: Focus on website specifics to improve ability of search engines to find, understand and rank web pages

Marketing: Focus on paid services that drive additional visits from search engines to a website or specific sections of a website

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Audience Development: Sources

Where do users come from?

3. Social: User receives a recommendation from a “friend”.User Characteristics: Referrer a “loyal follower” of your site.

Optimization: Focuses on site and social profile improvements that help build followers to your social media streams.

Marketing: Focuses on paid services which help build followers for your social media streams.

4. Referrals: Users who reach your site through a link on another website. User Characteristics: User interested in link topic.

Optimization and Marketing included in the discussion of search and social.

Google Analytics will give you a summary of your traffic by source.

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Audience Development: Sources

Simple

Real Time

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Today we will focus on different ways to develop your audience online

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Marketing

Social Media Optimization and Marketing

Agenda

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Search Engine Optimization: Reasons

Why are search engines important?

Audience Development: Search engines account for between 20% and 50% of any website traffic.

Advertising Revenue: Search engines support major advertising networks like Google AdSense, as well as others.

The better you do in search engines, the better ad networks can send your site an ad that generates revenue.

New Product Development: Search engines help you manage your audience, including:- Introducing new features- Creating new multi-media sections- Serving audiences in multiple languages

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SEO: Three Step Process

To understand Search Engine Optimization, it is best to understandthe three work steps for any search engine :

1.Crawl – Find the site

2.Index – Understand the site

3.Rank – Deliver the results

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SEO: Three Step Process

• Each web page is made up of multiple files:- HTML, JPG, MP3, ....

• When a page is visited or ‘called’, the files automatically fill out a frame according to the ‘coded’ instructions.

• Each set of files is (usually) held in a separate database:- Content Database- Media Database- Advertising Database

Step 1: Crawl – A “crawler”, a code robot works across the web to find website files.

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SEO: Three Step Process

Step 1: Crawl

• The crawler or “robot” moves across the webpages downloading web files.

• Often called a “spider”, because it moves on a “web”.

• For a typical daily news site, the crawler may download several hundred pages a day.

• The crawler may “visit” a daily news website multiple times during the day.

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SEO: Three Step Process

Step 2: Index•Search engines analyze each downloaded file for subject keywords.

•The search engine tries to answer the question:“What is this file about?”

BUT, Search engines can only see TEXT!

Indexing creates special issues for radio, since their original programming is invisible to search engines!

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SEO: Three Step Process

Step 3: Ranking

•Google then ranks each page based on a formula – “the algorithm”.

•Files with high ranks are at the top of a search return; low rankings at the bottom.

•Search Engine Optimization focuses on making your pages as highly ranked as possible

Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

High Rank

Low Rank

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SEO: Three Step Process

Step 3: Rank

Google provides every site with a factor called “Page Rank” that determines the relative importance of the site’s pages in the search results.

Page Rank is from 0 to 10

Page Rank is calculated periodically based on three groups of factors:1. Site stability, speed and longevity Older, faster sites with limited downtime get higher ranks

2. Ease of understanding the subject Clear page titles, file labels/captions, limited broken links.

3. Links to other sites with high Page Rank. - Theses are often called “backlinks”. - BUT, social media “links” may not add to Page Rank in the same way.

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SEO: Three Step Process

Step 3: RankThe Page Rank that Google assigns to a site is an open dataset that is viewable by advertisers and ad networks.

Several websites provide Page Rank Checker services:

- PR Checker

- Check Page Rank

- PRCheck.net

Page Rank is set by Google based on many different inputs. How the inputs are weighted is a “secret”.

Page Rank is set periodically perhaps every month or so.

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SEO: Three Step Process

For each step, SEO helps you maximize your site’s traffic from the search engines.

SEO Elements

1. Crawl: Site Registration

1. Index: Site/WebPage Details

2. Rank: Managing Page Rank

Element Why it is important.

• 350 – 400 million active websites today.US adds 150 – 200 thousand sites a day!Register to help the Google find you

• Helps the search engines understand whatcontent is available on your site

• Manage detailed inputs to Page Rank:- Speed- Backlinks- Complexity- Open Graph (Perhaps)

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SEO: Site Registration

To help the search engines find your site, set-up an account with Google Webmaster services.

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Google site registration will require you to “verify” your site with the search engine.

There are multiple ways to verify your site and prove ownership of the site.

The most common method requires you to add a short code line to the header of the site.

For example:

Audience Development: Site Registration

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But there are other ways to verify your site.

Verifying with HTML- Similar to adding a Meta Tag to your site’s header.- Upload a “hidden” piece of HTML from Google to your site’s home page.

Verifying with your DNS provider- Requires you to have DNS control (mapping between the site and the servers)- Upload a text code (two types) to the DNS

After adding the verification (text, tag or HTML) from Google, the site will send out a crawler to check if the right code is where it supposed to be.

SEO: Site Registration

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But there are other ways to verify your site.

SEO: Site Registration

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After you have created your webmaster account and verified your sites, you can use these tools to “talk” to Google.

Most important functions to start are:Submit Site Map: Submitting a site map/RSS feed informs Google how content is organized and when there is new content on your site.

Identify Languages: Search engines use different indices based on different languages. - AC English =>portalkbr.com/asiacalling/english/- AC BI => portalkbr.com/asiacalling/indonesia/- AC Khmer => portalkbr.com/asiacalling/khmer/But Google can only read one language at a time.

Manage Crawlers: Webmaster tools manages the crawler:- Crawlrate: How frequently the crawler downloads pages from your site.- Broken links: Identifies where the crawler has encountered an obstacle.

SEO: Site Registration

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SEO: Webmaster Tools

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SEO: Page and File Elements

After telling the search engines who you are with webmaster tools, you have to make sure each page is readable.

Text: Search engines “read” text, not photos, or videos.

Do: Make sure posts are long enough to be readable (300 to 500 words).

Do: Use text to label photos and videos – title, caption, alt-tags.Don’t: Assume that just because the story is about Obama, that the search engine will know that the photo is of Obama.

Files: More files on the page with supporting text labels, the more likely the search engines will know what the page is about.

Do: Add photo, video and other related files.Do: Label each file clearly, including file name, captions and any “alt-tags” that are hidden in the page code.

Clarity: Be clear, avoid pronouns.

“We Won!” not as clear as “Manchester United Beats Liverpool”.

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SEO: Page and File Elements

There are some specifics to pay attention to:

Page Titles: For Google the most important label on a webpage is the Page Title.

It may be visible in the URL, like this story from Kompas: “Calon Wali Kota Malang Didesak Buat Pakta Integritas” which has this URL:

http://regional.kompas.com/read/2013/04/23/1550033/Calon.Wali.Kota.Malang.Didesak.Buat.Pakta.Integritas

It may be included in the “invisible text” that Google reads:

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Audience Development: Page and File Elements

There are some specifics to pay attention to:

Page Titles: For Google the most important label on a webpage is the Page Title.

The goal is for Google to display the page as:

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SEO: Page and File Elements

The Open Graph helps social media platforms read the specifics of a page.Page Description and Meta Tags: This “hidden text” is no longer important to Google, but does provide important information to other sites.

The Open Graph Protocol: • Especially relevant to social media sites like Twitter, FaceBook, …• Creates a social media “object” for web pages• Helps the social media sites read the details of a page• Specifically, OGP uses meta tags to identify

- Title- Type of File- Image- URL

• FaceBook is the largest user of the Open Graph

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Audience Development: Page and File Elements

Alt-tags, file names and captions: All multimedia files have three ways to include a text clue for the search engines.

Google looks for these clues for their photo/video/audio search.

File names – often attached by the equipment - cameras or sound recorders. !! Record size in the name…!!

Not good <186668.jpg>

Good

<1116524-rzf-presiden-bertolak-ke-luar-negeri-620X310>

Captions – the photo/video description used online. Always try to use a caption.

Audience Development: Page and File Elements

Alt-Tags – These are “hidden descriptions that pop-up when your mouse touches the photo.

Rick Santorum

File Name = 120302_POL_santorum.jpg.CROP.jpeg

Caption

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SEO: Search Engine Rank - Backlinks

Search engines rank your site based on how engaged your site is with other sites.

It’s all about links! The more links to your site and from sites with higher Page Rank, the faster your page rank will rise.

Do: List your site with major Site Directories- Open Directory Project - DMOZ.org (Page Rank = 7)

- Yahoo Directory (Page Rank = 8)

Do: Create profiles for your site on Wikipedia (Page Rank 9)

Do: Create profiles for your site on other social media and directories:- FaceBook (Page Rank = 9)

- Google Plus (Page Rank = 10)- Twitter (Page Rank = 10)

Do: Encourage comments on the site and comments on blogs.

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SEO: Search Engine Rank – Internal Links

Creating internal “structural pages” can also improve search engine results and act as a destination for search engine marketing efforts.

Topic Pages: Creates internal summaries of similar pages to support search engines:- Location pages: Internal pages with links to stories about a place For example: Jogya, Jawa Timur, …- People pages: Internal pages with links to stories about a person. For example: SBY, …- Topics: For example: Environment, Religion, Crime, Auto, Technology, …Trending Topics: Creates internal summaries of all stories related to a current topic or issue.- For example: General Elections, Corruption Scandals, …Correspondents: Creates internal summaries for all the stories from a particular correspondent.

Correspondent pages are an input to support inclusion into Google News.- Google News has not yet launched in Indonesia, but is expected in 2013.

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SEO: Search Engine Rank

Finally, Google now considers site speed as one input into Page Rank.

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Search Engine Optimization: Google News

Google News will eventually come to Indonesia.

Now is a good time to prepare to submit your articles to Google News. The global requirements for Google News are:

Follow Basic News Guidelines:- Regularly updated news content (not press releases)- Original content, high journalistic standards- Authority (related to site Page Rank)- Accountability – create correspondent pages with contact info.- Readability

Technical Guidelines:- Follow WebMaster guidelines - HTML text, no PDF’s- Permanent URL’s- Submit News Site Map

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Search Engine Summary

Search engines play an important role in helping new and returning users find your site.

A couple of simple steps will begin the process of developing search engine traffic.

1.Register your site with Google Webmaster Tools

2.Manage your web site and web pages to clearly use text and “hidden text” markers to tell the search engines what each page is about.

3.Manage the links to and from your site to be the most relevant possible.

The more relevant links the higher your page/site will be ranked which will contribute to position in the Search Engine Return Page.