Abstract
This guide is intended for marketers in an e-Commerce business in a competitive market looking to optimize a website to accurately index their website on search engines and plan to create value to their website. As a current computer science graduate student with an interest toward website development and web engineering, I will try to approach this guide for the tech-savvy with little to no knowledge of web development being that this is a paper for a marketing course. It is from my experience and impression that search engines want to give searchers accurate and satisfying results, thus encouraging the legitimate means of approaching the "top of the fold," or top 10 search results for specified keywords.
Summary
My interest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is influenced by the constant refinement of my own website I have completely developed from scratch. From around the year of 2003, I began a humble little blog as a means to practice my meager skills in web programming. I constantly made improvements in design at first, then functionality, and finally eventually moved to SEO to gain some exposure on the web. My blog entries do not focus on mainstream topics so I have a meager following of friends and family, but what fascinated me most was being found on search engine results. I generally blog about my personal life, church related activities, and other interests, thus, not really focused on a particular area for Google to favor my website in their search queries. Observing the behavior of the index and ranking of keywords to my website using Google Web Master Tools has given me an idea of how my website had been ranked. Through monitoring traffic using Google Analytics and a manually implemented traffic monitor, I was able to see where traffic was coming from and where it was going to. Aside from the personal blog, I monitor several other websites that I have developed as well.
Introduction
Welcome to the world of search engines where Google reigns supreme over its competitors in providing accurate and satisfying results. The sole intention of a search engine is to assist users in finding the best results. If you are in this to be one of the best results, you must not only follow SEO guidelines, but provide the best content over your competitors as well. This guide does not heavily focus on Search Engine Marketing (SEM), promoting a website to increase traffic and visibility, because it covers a much broader range. SEO focuses more on interaction with bots, indexing, and analysis of click-streams.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is accurately indexing a website on search engines, enabling
findability, and providing results most preferred by searchers. There are literally billions of web pages out there and finding exactly what you want is a very complex process for search engines to provide that for you. SEO is assisting the search engines in finding your website in this gigantic hay stack called the Internet. Essentially, this is done by following search engine rules and providing content people want to find and possibly share with others. Another way of looking at this is to follow the intentions of Google and Yahoo!:
Google's mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. (1) Yahoo! : To connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge. (2)
Search engines want to provide users with the
best results provided the keywords that were inserted into the query.
"Best" is the key word in SEO because it is what determines whether you are in the "top half of the fold" or not. Google and Yahoo wants everyone to find what's best, "useful," "up-to-date," or "their passions" and give it to them, not spam or irrelevant websites. If people want what you provide, search engines will deliver it to them for you, if it is legitimately indexed and visited.
Findability
Findability is SEO. Not only do you want your website to be found, you also want it to be found over and over again. As plainly put by Aarron Walter from A List Apart put, findability enables people to:
- find content within websites, and
- rediscover valuable content they’d found.
- find the websites they seek,
"Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry" by Aarron Walter, A List Apart (4)
He further explains its potential of successful implementation:
The fundamental goal of findability is to persistently connect your audience with the stuff you write, design, and build. When you create relevant and valuable content, present it in a machine readable format, and provide tools that facilitate content exchange and portability, you’ll help ensure that the folks you’re trying to reach get your message.
A website that ignores findability is whispering into the wind, hoping that someone passing by might catch a hint of its message. To further complicate the chances of reaching your target audience, a cacophony of other websites are vying for the same commodity—attention.
"Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry" by Aarron Walter, A List Apart (4)
Issues
Issues search engines face in SEO are websites that illegitimately climb the ranks of search engines through spam and false traffic. Websites can be reported and blacklisted, thus being a route that should not be taken. This will be covered later in this guide.
Web 2.0
In this age of information technology, Web 2.0 is the keyword that best describes its current state. Web 2.0 is a business model used in today's internet. Web 2.0 is free services, participation, high-traffic, user-generated content, and making the Internet a platform for networking and lots of interactivity between users. Examples of this are social networks (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, etc.), content sharing (i.e. Youtube), and Google's search engine. All of which live based on the clickstreams, or web traffic, and the data it generates. (3) Later on this paper, I will discuss monitoring website traffic and other web administrating tools.
The Website Gone are the days in the age of Web 1.0 where people used domain names to find what they needed. Back then, people would create simple, memorable domain names like "tshirts.com" or "flowers.com" to have their domain easily found by guessing. Now, we have search engines and keywords. Because there are so many websites in existence, keywords can better describe the specific website you may be looking for and the best ones appear on top based on rank. The ranking systems of search engines are left unknown due to risk of exploitation but however it works, it seems to give you results with great accuracy, which Google and other search engines today have been doing fairly well thus far. As a marketer or business owner, your skills in web development are likely to be little to none and would be looking to find a different solution, therefore, what you may be looking for is a Content Management System (CMS). A CMS is basically a pre-built website that has many functions a typical website would need with a fairly easy level of installation and customization. Plugins may be installed to acquire additional functionality.
Pros of using a CMS:
- It is commonly free.
- Many people use it, therefore, you may find web designers and even web developers that are familiar with it.
- Using templates can change the look and feel of a website drastically to make it very unique.
- Finding help is easy, especially when using very popular CMSs.
Cons of using a CMS: - Because a CMS is usually used by many, crackers or script kiddies can attack your website using exploits discovered in source code, which can be found for many free CMSs that are open source. This is a very dangerous security risk because finding websites using your CMS can be automated scripts or applications, and the integrity of your website may go down.
- If there is a very custom solution required to be implemented for your website, the CMS may limit your possibilities.
- Developers would be required to learn how to develop around the CMS which can take more time and become more costly.
- More difficult to implement new or better SEO practices.
If your budget is large and the security of the website's sensitive content (i.e. credit card numbers, user's personal information, emails) is something that should not be risked, hire a web developer or two to get the job done. The trust of your customers are always a high priority and the content must also be valued.
Already have a website? Then, you are well on your way to getting started. If your website is old enough, it may have already been indexed, but not ranked very high in keywords that you would like your website to relate to.
Feed the Bots!
This area is generally the core of SEO and here are the basic terms, concepts, and guidelines to follow so that you can go on your way to optimizing your website. Bots, also known as crawlers or spiders, are programs that traverse the pages of all websites and also traverse the sites that are linked to them. The bots can only read text and store them into the database to appear in search results. Most importantly, you must understand that bots try to imitate users. I will explain this as I cover the different aspects of how bots behave.
Keywords
Keywords are words that the search engine gather to index and rank your website in the search engine database. Keywords define the pages that they are in and what makes the search engine's task of indexing keywords on a web page is knowing which ones are most important. This is where SEO comes in to help the search engine do this. There are a few areas in which the search engine look for keywords: meta, title, anchor and header tags, linked sites, URLs and, of course, the web page. These areas are where search engines store in the database and, through complex unknown algorithms, store and rank the page. By observation, keywords are seen highlighted or in bold font in search engine results. This is a good way of knowing where the search engine found the keywords and how it was ranked. For instance, you would see that the search item results with bold-font keywords in the title to be higher than bold-font keywords in the body of the text. You might also notice that the engine will attempt to
Meta Tags Meta tags are HTML entities located in the header of the HTML document on each page. This aspect is generally unseen by users but what makes this an effective tool is the general fact that it's easy for the Google bot to find specific information about the web page. For example, Google uses the first so many characters in the page to describe the entire contents of the website. From the bots perspective, it may mistaken some miscellaneous text placed at the front of the web page. According to SEO Made Easy writer Brad Callen (9), the meta tags you must pay attention to are:
- Content-type This describes the format of the document. Although it is obvious that your web page is an HTML document, it helps the browser render pages correctly, especially in different languages.
- keywords The keywords that best describe the contents of the current webpage. You are limited to five keywords, so choose wisely.
- description Generally, using the same first 255 characters in your document would suffice being that it should describe the contents of the entire document.
- robots This directs robots to traverse further into the website or not. This is important where you do not want a search engine to index specific pages like login pages or anywhere that may lead access to administrative access.
The following is an example set of meta tags with description of how they are used.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <meta name="keywords" content="Keywords separated by commas"> <meta name="description" content="Description of the page"> <meta name="robots" content="FOLLOW,INDEX"> "SEO Made Easy," by Brad Callen (9)
I would suggest looking at the source code of many websites and see what they put into their meta tags; especially high ranked websites. The general guidelines to this is to make the keywords and description different for every page. If you use the same thing in every page, the Google Index would probably ignore the contents of them or index the webpage inaccurately. From this point forward, you, as a webmaster, should focus on designing the web page catering to the user. In other words, make the web page pleasing the viewer by displaying content that the user was looking for in a simple and easy-to-find fashion.
Title (<title&rt;) and Header () Tags
As a rule of thumb, the title and header tags (<h1>) should be identical in contents. Sub-header tags (<h2>) would be used after . The title of the document should best describe what a user is about to read within about 50 or so characters. Of course, you should not flood the title of every page with keywords or you will not only mislead a user but be flagged for spamming. (9) Again, it makes sense for a user to find words in very large font to define the website's contents; a search engine will imitate the user and view it in the same way.
Anchor
Tags ()
Anchor tags are links going to another page, usually, to reference any terms or events or increase relevance of keywords in a web page. One break-through in Google's PageRank algorithm by Larry Page and Sergey Brin was taking into account the links going to a page and going out. This was similar to to academic citation counting, which was successful at determining rank of web pages, especially at the beginning development of the PageRank algorithm. The issue of a low ranked website linking to a high ranked one was resolved by penalizing web pages for linking to irrelevant websites, thus do not abuse this form of creating relevance. (p.75-76, The Search, 6) Later on, as the algorithm got more sophisticated, the keywords found on the existing links had determined the keywords that were most relevant to the page. In the same way, you should begin to link to other sites to increase the relevance of keywords you would like to emphasize. You may be linking to potential competition, but you are only making the playing field more level for both pages because quality and user preference will precede relevance.
sitemap.xml
Sitemaps are basically, a listing of all pages on your website that you would like search engines to traverse and index. This will allow robots to know if there has been any new pages created after each visit, and index them appropriately. This is an easier way robots can read your website without browsing through the website for new pages, thus made a standard agreed upon by the major search providers: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
url="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd"
xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
http://url.of/a/webpage/1
http://url.of/a/webpage/2
sitemaps.org, 12
SEF URLs
Search Engine Friendly URLs are just like titles, they can also describe keywords that are relevant to the web page. It is also potentially useful like domain-names because SEF URLs should be easy for a user to memorize and later write it. A good example of that would be like using Wikipedia, where the URL can be used to submit a query to their search engine without using a search box:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/<insert query>
If you use Google to find certain things, you sometimes see that the keywords used in the query can be found bold as well. This indicates that SEF URLs can also increase relevance, but again limit the length of the URL and keywords used. By using Google Web Master Tools, you will be able to
Abuse Cloaking is manipulating text to mislead bots and the Google index by making the font difficult to find or read. This can be done by making font very tiny and colored the same as the background rendering them unreadable. Such practices are not tolerated and can be reported to Google causing your website to be blacklisted and render your optimization efforts useless. (10) Spamdexing is the exploiting the of the above SEO techniques by the over use of it. For example, flooding the title, meta, and header tags with popular keywords and linking to as many websites of possible relevance causing the search engine to index your website inaccurately. This can be reported and blacklisted, thus not recommended.
Feed the Engine!
Now that you have your website primed for SEO, you can start adding content, but you must keep in mind a few things. In using Google Web Master Tools, you can monitor your website through statistics and the rate at which a Google bot visits your website. For my personal blog, it is visited very infrequently being that Google has detected my website being only updated only once a week. By logical reasoning, Google would find a website that updates frequent, reliable updates and flow of on news based on specific keywords to have a higher rank. A current issue with search engines is predicting what users want next. Generally, what users want is new and reliable information. Websites like CNN or other high-traffic news websites would be visited much more frequently, where as my tiny blog with infrequent visitors and new content would be less valuable to Google. I have compiled these factors of rank based on content here:
- integrity of information determined by how many users visit this website often
- How often content is added.
- How often people prefer this website over others.
- How often other websites link to this particular website.
These measurements can gauge how frequent a Google bot needs to visit the site and provide Google's users with up-to-date news. I came up with an analogy for feeding the engine by comparing it with a coal train. The faster and more coal is added to the engine, the faster it go. But again, it depends on the quality and how many people click through Google to your website. Websites of high traffic usually have a blog or user generated content. Attracting traffic is a moving beyond findability and that would be getting into Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Advertising (SEA), which involves the usage of advertising and taking advantage of Google's AdSense to protect keywords and trademark phrases. Different strategies of SEO involve things like building a website with user generated content, but it would lead to many other topics like laws and regulation. This also leads to website design and accessibility. These cater to navigation of the website as a user and ensuring that content can be found easily the next time the website is visited.
Looking Ahead in Search
Search is considered to be only about 5% solved (The Search, p. 252, 11) and I think one of the obstacles of it is the fact that not all websites have been properly optimized and/or legitimately indexing their websites. Search may take long to improve but it would never be too late to join everyone trying to be found by it. Learning about search is endless and it does not end here. As technology advances, so will search engines and information on the Internet will continue to grow at a high rate.
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