What E business are you in ?

Search Engine Optimization

y Are your search terms are the ones that will bring the visitors? y And are those visitors, ones that will convert - whether it's goods or

information that you are selling?

y What is your market doing and what alliances can you forge in and

around it, to be more competitive?

y What kind of fresh ideas can perk up your site, its reach and its

visibility - and maybe even open up some completely new viewing markets?
y Would your site benefit from other forms of web visibility like pay-

per-click advertising?

y Search engines are changing their algorithms from month

to month
y Your customers' tastes and needs are changing with time

and the season.

What you need to do ..keep doing

y Constantly reinventing your site y Creating content y Looking at the web logs y Experimenting with new ways of presenting your goods.

How search engines work

y Most of the major search engines work by sending an automated

crawler, known as a spider or bot, around the Web to find new pages and existing, updated pages. (Google), AltaVista, Excite and Fast etc. builds a copy of the Web in its index.

y Examples of such search engines are Google Bot, Fresh Bot y The crawler in question makes a copy of each page found and so y When a human actually uses a search engine to find a specific

product or service, the search engine looks at its index of the Web and displays a list of results. relevant results first.

y That list of results is in order of direct relevancy, with the most

y Content relevancy is the search engine s measure of

how well a particular Web page accurately matches a searching question. y Some search engines quote relevancy as a percentage but many don t quote it at all. y Each search engine uses a different algorithm to calculate relevancy.

For any website to produce consistent and relevant search results, there are two important factors that need to be implemented:
1.

It needs to be optimized on the right keywords and key phrases

2. It needs the right amount of keyword density or

keyword occurrence

Phase I: Planning and Preparation

Step I: Phrases that Pay

y Proposition development y Keyword discovery y Keyword attractiveness y Keyword deployment

Step 2: Courting the Crawl

y How Google finds y Setting up a new site y Managing an existing site y Site structure and navigation

Phase II: The SEO Campaign

Step 3: Priming your Pages

y How Google stores y On-page optimization y Asset optimization y Snippets

Step 4: Landing the Links

y How Google ranks y Off-page optimization y Whats new in Web 2.0 (user generated content) y Avoiding penalties

Step 5: Paying for Position

y Selecting match drivers y Ad text optimization y Landing page optimization y Bid and campaign management

Step 6: Making the Map

y Language optimization y Geographical optimization y Google Earth and Google Maps y Priming for local search

Phase III: Ongoing Maintenance

Step 7: Tracking and Tuning

y Google analytics y Google webmaster tools y Other useful tools y Tuning the campaign

Step I: Phrases that Pay

Keyword Discovery
y It is the process of finding all the keywords and

keyphrases that are most relevant to your website and business proposition y About 20% of SEO efforts should be spent on identifying the right keywords and keyphrases (combination of keywords)

Common Mistakes in Keyword Selection

y 1. Trying to rank number one on Google for the name of

the business
y The real power of a search engine is its ability to deliver

quality leads from people who have never heard of your business

Common Mistakes
y 2. Wanting to rank well for a supply-side terminology y Those phrases may not be the ones customers are using to search

Common Mistakes
y 3. Wanting to rank well for single words, rather than a

chain of words
y Research by OneStat.com proves:
y y y

20% of the people search on single words 33% search on two-word combinations 26% search on three-word combinations

Common Mistakes
y 4. Copying the keyword/keyphrases of competitors
y

Good SEO is about finding phrases that pay that are popular with actual searchers but relatively underused by competitors

Common Mistakes
y 5. Overusing certain keywords (called keyword stuffing)

and underusing related key words

y Make liberal use of synonyms and related words y Use a thesaurus (ontological analysis)

D-A-D analysis tool

y Keyword Discovery y Keyword Attractiveness y Keyword Deployment

Create a Spreadsheet with the Following 6 Columns

y A: Keywords y B: Keyword popularity ( Frequency of Monthly searches) y C: Keyword competitiveness (Raw competition) y D: Directly competing sites y E: Keyword Effectiveness - KEI (Keyword Effectiveness

Index) y F: KOI (Keyword Opportunity Index)

Keyword Discovery

A: Keyword discovery involves building a large number of keywords for Column A

Discovery shortcut: Learning from competitors

y Try putting into Google search terms related to your

business and look a the top 5 results y For each result, look at view source and make a note of the keywords in the ,<TITLE>, <META NAME>= Description and <META NAME=Keywords> tags y Use www.abakus-internetmarketing.de/tools/topword.html. y Here you can enter the urls of your competitors and read off the keywords they use

CUSPs: Commonly Used Search Phrases

y Phrases people use to search and also to narrow down the

results returned y CUSPs have two parts:

y Stem phrase y Qualifying phrase y E.g.> Business cards is a stem phrase y Cheap is a qualifying phrase y SEP: Semantically Equivalent Phrase
y

Synonyms and more intuitive variants

E.g.:
y Stem: Business Cards y SEP: Cheap Business Cards y CUSPs: Inexpensive Business Cards, Discounted Business Cards, Special Offer Business Cards

Identifying Related Keywords

y Related keyphrases and keywords have a similar meaning

or inference to your main keyphrases and keywords y Google and other search engines make increasing use of semantics in assessing the quality of the page for ranking y A high quality page is typically full of words semantically related to the main search terms used

Tool for locating related keywords:

y GoRank Ontology Finder (Related Keywords Lookup Tool) y www.gorank.com/seotools/ontology y Use this tool and a thesaurus to find related terms

Long-tail Analysis
y Long-tail analysis seeks to identify, for your most

common keyword categories (stems), the phrases where the demand is relatively high but competition relatively weak. These are relatively under-exploited keyphrases.
y These are typically 3 to 4 or more words

Keyword Discovery- Summary

y Visit competitors sites and find the 2, 3 and 4 word

keyphrases using the Abakus tool and add this list to the list of keywords
y For a 10 page site, we should now have about 30 to 40 one

word and two-word phrases and 60 to 75 three-word and four or more word combinations

Keyword Attractiveness

y Balance the demand for your chosen keywords against the

number of competing sites supplying relevant results

y Attractive key phrases are those that are relatively under-

exploited

Keyword Attractiveness
y Keyword popularity y Keyword competitiveness

Keyword Popularity (Column B)

y What are the keywords most customers will use today to

find your site? y Search engines make available for research purposes, insider data about what people search from their sites y This is the highest-quality market research data that is ever available, continuously refreshed in real time and based on massive sample sizes

y Use a keyword-analysis tool y www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion y This gives you the search frequencies for the most recent month, search words y Visit the tool and enter some of the two, three and four word combinations on your keyword list y Note the frequencies and put them in the 3rd column of the DAD table

Keyword Competitiveness (Column C)

y The number of results returned from a Google search on

the search terms concerned (usually in millions)

y Perform a search on Google for al the listed keyphrases

and enter the number of results in the column C.

y A numerical sort of the column will give you the most

competitive raw search terms related to your business

Directly Competing Sites (Column D)

y These are sites that have exact keyword phrases you are

analyzing in the anchor text (the text the user clicks) of links to their site from other web sites

y To find out this, use the Google operator, allinanchor y Perform an allinanchor search for each of your key words

and enter the number of results in to the column D

y A numerical sort of this column gives you the truly

competitive search terms related to your business

Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) (Column E)

y This is used to rank the effectiveness of different keyword combinations y Popularity squared divided by the number of the sites using that key word y KEI= P*P/C y Square the number in Column B and divide by the number in the Column C and enter in Column E y A numerical sort of Column E ranks the key words that are most effective

Keyword Opportunity Index (KOI) (Column F)

y Popularity squared divided by the number of directly

competing sites
y KOI=P*P/D y Square the number in Column B and divide by the number

in the Column D and enter in Column F

y A numerical sort of the column F ranks the key words that

are most effective

Keyword Deployment
y Narrow down the list of key phrases y Use them efficiently in combination with one another y When you are building links, choosing domain names, writing page

text etc use these keywords in a search engine-friendly way

y Elements of keyword deployment are y Keyword prominence y Keyword proximity y Keyword density y Keyword prominence

Thinks to remember
y Start out slowly. Develop your content first. y Get an easy to remember domain name. y Learn basic HTML (Many search engine optimization techniques
involve editing the behind the scenes HTML code. Your high rankings can depend on knowing which codes are necessary, and which aren't.)

y Choose keywords wisely

More things to remember

y Write at least 200 - 250 words of visible text copy based on your chosen keywords y Create a killer Title tag. HTML title tags are critical y Use extra "goodies" to boost rankings. y Don't expect quick results. y If possible, link to other pages which have the keyword in the file names.