The SEO Business Guide pptx

Chapter 6: Local Search Local search is playing an increasingly important role in the overall SEO landscape, with the majorsearch engines devoting ever-increasing amounts of space on the

Outwit, outrank, and overtake your competitors

Hey there!

If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you’re here to learn how to rank on the first pages of popularsearch engines, get more traffic, and, ultimately, increase your revenue

Ignoring SEO puts you in a vulnerable position

If you rely on your website to generate sales, competing sites will outrank yours in search results and winmore business

If you’re a web designer or developer, your competitors will get a larger share of the work because they’reable to offer customers an important service that you can’t

Without the essential knowledge, there’s also a chance you’ll be taken advantage of by rogue SEO ants” who promise you the world and don’t deliver

“consult-So, if want to learn SEO for your own business or to help your clients, there are usually two options

Option One: You can scour tons of websites for free and paid SEO advice and tools to get you up to

speed This option is okay if you have the time or money to spend sifting through thegarbage and scams out there to find what you need

Option Two: You can invest in one high-quality product that shows you everything you need know

about how to benefit from SEO (I might be a little biased, but this option seems like thebetter one Don’t you agree?)

If you have the time for Option One—great If not, here’s Option Two (well, part of Option Two) You canget the whole version later …

But for now, all you need to do is enjoy this sample PDF with three chapters of SEO brilliance

I’ll chat to you again at the end!

Enjoy!

Chapter 1: Search 101

In this chapter, we’ll give you a historical overview of search on the Web, explain how search works,and begin looking at some of the most basic SEO techniques

Chapter 2: Best-practice SEO

If you only read one chapter in this guide, this should be it: we’ll cover all the basics of ethical, practice optimization step by step You’ll learn how to conduct keyword research, develop a site plan

best-or hierarchy, implement technical optimizations, and build high-quality backlinks

Chapter 5: Paid Search

So far, our primary focus has been on organic search results In this chapter, we’ll take a detour to look

at its partner, paid search advertising Organic and paid search are synergistic, and work best whenused in combination; hence, a strong understanding of how to run a PPC campaign will be a great asset

to you as an SEO professional

What’s in the rest of the guide?

Chapter 3: Advanced Tatics

There’s more to SEO than meets the eye, and in this chapter we’ll dig deeper into some of the vanced tactics available to the skilled search professional We start by going over some considerationsyou should bring to bear on your campaigns, including user intent, natural language processing,and link valuation Then we look at some practical techniques for competitive research, and someimportant recent developments in the world of search

ad-Chapter 4: Enterprise SEO

While the techniques applied are the same, optimizing a large organization’s website does comewith its own particular challenges and opportunities, and that’s what this chapter is all about Fromdealing with sprawling site architecture and tracking down duplicate content, to managing multi-lingual sites and leveraging strong brands, you’ll learn everything you need to work in the big league

Chapter 6: Local Search

Local search is playing an increasingly important role in the overall SEO landscape, with the majorsearch engines devoting ever-increasing amounts of space on their results pages to local results.Optimizing a site for location-specific queries has a few important considerations that must be takeninto account, and we’ll highlight them in this chapter

Chapter 7: Starting an SEO Business

Now that you’ve acquired a strong search skill set, it’s time to bring it to the market This chaptercovers business essentials like developing your proposition, finding and retaining clients, special-izing in a niche area, and developing effective reporting documents

Chapter 8: Leveraging Technology and Staff

As we’ve mentioned, SEO is a process-driven discipline This means that the best way to increaseyour profits and grow your business is to manage those processes efficiently Fortunately, there is

a range of excellent tools available, many of them free, that can greatly simplify your day-to-day

tasks This chapter will look into a few of those tools, as well as some important considerations tokeep in mind when you reach the point where you need to take on staff to continue growing.

Chapter 9: Value-added Services

In the final chapter, we’ll look at how you can integrate additional services with your SEO offering

to maximize your revenue potential The three services we’ll focus on are web design, conversionoptimization, and PPC management

Appendix: Online Resources

Finally, we’ve compiled a list of the best online resources covering all topics related to SEO

As you read, you’ll also notice references like this: “See theSearch Contractfile in this guide’s ation.” These notes refer to the information contained in the Documents tab, and on the accompanyingCD

document-The CD and Documents

The CD contains electronic copies of all the documents referred to in this guide It also contains anumber of spreadsheet and presentation documents that are referred to throughout the text

You can use theindex.htmlfile on the CD to locate specific documents by filename

The final tab in the guide also contains printed versions of a number of these documents

Email templates

We provide a slew of common emails to clients for you to base your communications on—from

“cold calling” a new client, to providing a weekly report, to a contact follow-up email—we haveyou covered

Presentation templates

In this business, you’ll often find yourself presenting to clients (or potential clients) We’ve included

a few templates of strategy and pitch presentations to start you off on the right foot

Client briefing questionnaire

When signing up a new client, use a variation of this questionnaire to determine what the needs ofthe company are, and what will be involved in carrying out the campaign

Clean start checklist

This is a one-page checklist covering all the key bases of site optimization Use this as your minute safety net when launching a new site

last-Site SEO checklist

This is an in-depth checklist of every conceivable aspect of site optimization Use it as a road map

in your campaigns

Interview questionnaire

Hiring new staff can be a daunting proposition, especially in a relatively new field like SEO Thisdocument contains an extensive list of questions to ask any potential staffer, in order to ascertain

if they really know their stuff

The SEO Business Guide (www.sitepoint.com)

x

Site audit template

This is a template of a full-site audit document: fill it out with the relevant details and present it

to your client as a summary of your research into their site’s current search performance

Recommendations template

Use this template to summarize your recommendations for a client’s SEO strategy

Sample search agreement

Use this sample SEO contract to cover the work that you’ll do for your clients, such as how you’repaid and transfer of intellectual property, among other issues You can then use this as a basis fordrawing up your own agreements (in conjunction with a lawyer)

Sample non-disclosure agreement

You should have employees and contractors sign a confidentiality agreement, such as the sampleprovided here

Search marketing, which encompasses search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC), is one ofthe fastest-growing and highest-paid careers in the world As consumers move online and away from tradi-tional media, more and more companies are allotting significant funds towards their online marketing.Google has built a multibillion-dollar business around search in just over ten years On the back of that,thousands of professional search marketers have started businesses focused on optimizing company websites,ensuring that their clients appear in searches for the most profitable keywords in any given market

SEO is an industry that has historically been shrouded in behind-the-scenes mystery This is partly because

no search engines officially publish the “secret formulas” of how they rank websites Unfortunately, thisleft a lot of room for unscrupulous providers to use techniques and tools that were unethical and ill-informed,leaving many clients with undesirable results In this guide, we’ll be focusing on proven, ethical techniquesthat give lasting value to websites to which they’re applied

Search has evolved over the past four or five years into an industry with figureheads and industry rockstars There are professional search conferences every other week somewhere in the world Companies allacross the globe are beginning to hire in-house search professionals SEO is maturing to the point whereit’s now a well-respected discipline in the web development and design community

Search marketing, and SEO in particular, has become an essential part of all web development projects,and web developers who possess these skills have an immediate advantage over their peers Being able totruly understand and communicate the relationship between good web development and great searchrankings is a valuable asset, and one which clients increasingly understand and seek out The potential tobuild a large and recurring revenue base that runs alongside your traditional design and developmentbusiness is massive Each new web development project has the potential to provide six to twelve months

of ongoing SEO work

You’re going to need to be patient as you work through this guide SEO is a process-driven discipline, wheretime management and accountability are almost as important as the skills you possess and the tools youuse Learning these methods now will help you stay ahead of the game, ultimately presenting new oppor-tunities for you

Who should read this guide?

This guide is aimed at anyone who wants to learn the ins and outs of successful SEO, especially those whowould like to profit from their skills by either running their own SEO consultancy, or adding SEO services

to an existing web design or development business While some of the SEO recommendations we’ll bemaking are technical in nature, nothing other than a rudimentary knowledge of HTML and an understanding

of how the Web works is required

We’ll cover not only the techniques and practices that help ensure a site will rank as highly as possible for

a given set of keywords, but also some of the important information you’ll need to sell your services to clients,

as well as tools to improve your processes and workflow, allowing you to squeeze additional profits fromyour work

of how comprehensive or minimal they might be With the right amount of practice and a good work ethic,you’ll learn how to do some amazing things using sound and trusted techniques.

Throughout the course of this guide, you’ll be introduced to concepts and topics that may be foreign to you

at the moment, even though you interact with these tools and services every day

You will learn how search engines evolved into the complex, all-encompassing online resources they aretoday You’ll understand the underlying principles that ensure a given website ranks highly for a specifickeyword while others don’t You’ll also learn how to run your own SEO business and help your clientsgain the greatest value from their websites

We’re going to assume that you have little or no knowledge of the way in which search engines work, ortheir history We will, however, take for granted that you have at least a basic understanding of:

■ your computer (files, directories, browsers, and the like)

■ how to write and edit HTML

Although this guide will show you SEO techniques that apply equally well to all search engines—includingGoogle,1Yahoo,2and Bing3—these teachings will be based on techniques proven to work on Google

Google currently commands roughly 60% of the United States’ search market, and up to 95% in a number

of countries such as Australia So our focus on Google is a practical choice: focusing your efforts wherethere is the greatest possible return makes good business sense Just remember, as a rule of thumb, the

1 http://www.google.com/

2 http://www.yahoo.com/

Google-specific optimizations you implement will have a positive effect across all other search engines;that is because most search engines use the same basic formulas and signals to determine content relevance.

Search engines are constantly evolving and changing the ways in which they rank various trust signals—any

indicator a search engine uses to determine that a website’s content is trustworthy and relevant to a ular search term But by focusing on ethical optimization techniques and avoiding shortcuts, you can ensurethat now and in the future your search rankings will endure without fear of penalty

partic-A Brief Overview of the Early Web

Search engines are such an integral part of everyday life that it’s hard to remember a time before they were

so essential But it hasn’t always been that way: in the past, search engine results were often filled with relevant content, spam, and other kinds of malicious material Results were also influenced heavily bymarketers with big budgets

ir-Before you begin your journey to becoming a search engine optimization expert, it’s a good idea to take alook back at some of the key developments in the industry and understand how they helped shape the way

in which search engines work today

After Tim Berners-Lee invented what we know today as the World Wide Web using hypertext markuplanguage (or HTML) in 1991, the very first online robot—the World Wide Web Wanderer—was launched

in June 1993 Its initial task was to measure the growth of the Internet, where it actively counted the number

of servers connected to the Web The role of this first robot was quickly expanded to capture actual URLs,and the database it constructed was known as Wandex

The very first service resembling what would today be called a search engine—named the Repository-BasedSoftware Engineering (RBSE) spider—was launched in late 1993 This was the first site that allowed users

to search by relevance for content it had indexed while crawling the Internet

Then, in 1994, a name that’s likely to be more familiar to you entered the landscape, when David Filo andJerry Yang created the Yahoo Directory In the beginning, Yahoo was just a collection of Jerry and David’sfavorite links; as the list grew, they added functionality that allowed users to search the database of sites

The Birth of Search Engines as We Know Them

In early 1994, the first real search engine—which included a spider that crawled entire websites and indexedthem according to relevance—was born This step forward in search and indexing technology preemptedthe launch of many innovative search engines that year Among the newcomers were Lycos, Infoseek, andAltaVista

The mid to late ‘90s saw a rapid expansion of the Web, with millions and millions of pages of content beingcreated and indexed by search engines By late 1996, Lycos had already indexed some 60 million pages ofcontent

The rapid growth of online content led to the emergence of a much greater problem with all search engines:the relevance of the results returned for keyword searches A simple search algorithm would work sufficientlywell with a database of 10,000 documents, but trying to return the most relevant site out of an index of 100million documents was another story altogether

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Google Is Launched by Sergey Brin and Larry Page

In early 1996, two PhD students at Stanford University began collaborating on a search engine they calledBackRub The difference between their project and other search engines of the day was that BackRub used

a unique technique: analyzing the backlinks pointing to a website to determine its relevance for a particular

search query

Citation notation—common in academia—was the underlying concept behind BackRub’s ranking engine.

If one source is cited frequently by other documents, it usually means that it’s more important and relevant

On the Internet, a backlink is, in effect, a citation

During 1998, these two enterprising engineering students launched Google This new search engine wasbuilt around a technology they dubbed PageRank, which was based on BackRub’s ranking engine

By the year 2000, Google was powering the searches for AOL, Yahoo, and various other major online viders The company had raised over $25 million in funding, and had come to essentially dominate thesearch engine landscape

pro-The Missing Link: Making Money from Search

During 2000, Google launched what would grow to power its phenomenal growth and allow it to expand

to markets as broad as books, video, news, and maps AdWords, as it was called, was a service that soldads on a cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis; by 2002 it had evolved into the current model, which places ads

using a cost-per-click (CPC) auction system.

AOL chose Google to provide its paid search functionality, which it ran alongside relevant search results,

in early 2002 This marked a turning point in Google’s history: until then, the company had been growingquickly, but had yet to tackle the paid search market, which had up to that point been dominated by a

company called Overture

Search in 2003 and Beyond

Since 2003, all major search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Overture, and Microsoft’s Live Search (nowBing), have maintained the same underlying business model: indexing web page content, and serving adsalongside search results

Major search engines all employ the same basic page layout, with search refinement options on the left,site listings in the middle, and paid ads across the top and right-hand side of the page

The difference between the major search engines that existed in 2003 and those we have in 2010 is the

underlying algorithms that are used to index and rank content according to relevance Google’s superiortechnology and matching techniques are the major reasons why it has captured the most significant share

of the worldwide search market

Search engine algorithms rely on scale, and on machine learning to adapt to market changes and understandvarious nuances within specific niches For example, a good search algorithm will attempt to understandthe meaning of a phrase and its context, rather than just search for the frequency of a given keyword

Moreover, the more people search for a given phrase, the more visitor interactions can be recorded by thesearch engine The engine can then learn which kinds of results are more relevant for particular phrases

data it captured across a multitude of different niches and categories allowed its engineers to deliver evenmore relevant and meaningful results.

The search wars of today are waged over relevance; paid search results are simply the ammunition thatfuels massive research and development budgets at search companies Google continues to dominate thesearch industry: in the 2009 financial year, Google’s revenue was just under US$24 billion, with over US$8billion in profit

Microsoft Starts Taking Search Seriously

Microsoft was famously late to the search party, given that it had total market domination of desktop puters connected to the Internet Microsoft’s first foray into online search was made through the MSN portal,which launched in 1998; however, it was only in early 2005 that MSN stopped using external providerssuch as Yahoo to power its search engine, and brought search technology in-house

com-In late 2006, Microsoft launched its Live Search (Live.com), which was its first serious attempt at becoming

a player in the search space This service never gained the traction Microsoft had hoped for, constantlylagging behind both Google and Yahoo in relevance and market share

With falling market share and inferior search technology, Microsoft made one of the biggest plays in thehistory of the Web—an attempt to purchase Yahoo outright for over US$44 billion Although the bid wasultimately unsuccessful, it was the turning point that signaled both Yahoo’s decline and Microsoft’s resur-gence as an online player

On May 28, 2009, Microsoft launched Bing, the replacement for the Live.com search engine, which has ceived praise for innovations and for its content-type-specific results pages At the time of writing, Binghas roughly 12.1% share of the US search market, which remains lower than Yahoo’s 18.3% and Google’s63.7% shares While there are certainly other search engines, these are—at least for now—the three mainones you need to concern yourself with

re-The Anatomy of a Search Results Page

You now know the backstories of Google, Yahoo, and some of the other major online forces involved insearch So, let’s take a closer look at the core component of a search engine, and our ultimate goal as SEO

professionals: the search engine results page (or SERP).

All of the major search engines follow the same basic layout and usability principles, and this is no accident.The SERP is made up of the following elements:

Search box

All three major search engines place the search box front and center on the page, giving users the ability

to conduct more searches

Search refinements

The left-hand side of each SERP features more advanced segmentation of the search results you’reviewing You can sort by media type (images, video, and so on), country, website, date, and other re-finements

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Organic results

Located below the search box are the natural search results or organic search results—those results

that have been ranked purely on the basis of the search engine’s algorithms, that is, on their relevance.These results are sorted on the basis of each search engine’s specific algorithms, and the goal of yourSEO campaign should be to appear in the first position within this section

Figure 1.2 Search engine results from long-term player Yahoo

Figure 1.3 Newish kid on the block: Bing’s SERP

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How Search Works

Search engines are constantly indexing content, and recording which site links to which other site, thecontent that appears on each page, the tags and keywords associated with certain topics, and a number of

other elements In all, there are hundreds of different signals search engines use to determine relevance—a

word that’s used to indicate how, well, relevant a given page is to a given query.

The search engine indexing process starts with the search spider When we refer to a search engine spider

or bot (short for robot), we’re talking about one or more dedicated computers that have been programmed

to crawl the Web and collect all the information they can find, and store how all that information is related

to various search terms

Modern search engine spiders have two distinct tasks:

Crawling is the traveling from site to site, and page to page, discovering content and links.

Indexing is the task of building a database (or an index) of keywords and phrases, the sites and pages that

are relevant to them, and the links between those sites

The process by which a search engine spider works is illustrated in Figure 1.4 Within each site, the spiderwill follow internal links from the top-level index page down through all of the site’s other pages

Figure 1.4 How a search engine spider works

Once the search engine spider has scoured pages, various bits of information are stored in the search engine’sindex Some of those important pieces of information include:

■ the content and structure of each page

■ a record of all other pages—both internal and external to the site—that are linked to from the page

■ a record of all the pages that link to the page

■ key HTML tags such as the page title, headings, and images

This is a very basic list of the types of data that search engines index There are obviously some very smartways in which they identify relationships between pieces of information and index websites, but for thepurposes of this chapter, those pieces of information are all you need to concern yourself with

Once this information has been collected and stored in a database, the search engine’s proprietary algorithmstake over; each engine uses its own special calculations to determine how relevant your website’s content

is to a particular search term These algorithms are the difference between a search engine that any mer could write in a week, and the dominant search engines today

program-The major factors that search engines use to determine a page’s relevance for a particular search query aremuch the same now as they were in the days when Google first launched its PageRank technology; however,they’ve become more sophisticated and complex over time through the ongoing battle for more relevantsearch results

Two key factors are:

■ the number and authority of related websites that link to the page

■ the relevance of the content on the page to the query

Again, this is a highly simplified way of looking at SEO, as there are hundreds of different factors that candetermine where a page will rank for a given search term You’ll learn these over time, but they’re not thefocus of this guide—instead, we’ll be concentrating on improving your skill base with practical and provenSEO techniques

There is, however, one extremely important lesson to take from this discussion: external factors—that is,those outside of your control—play a major part in any SEO campaign These external factors will oftenhave a bigger impact on determining relevance than your content does Building the best site in the worldwill do no good if there’s little attention focused on these external ranking factors That said, having qualitycontent with a unique perspective will influence other sites to link to you; hence, these external factorsare, to a degree, within your control

SEO Techniques: the Good, the Bad, and the Iffy

When you’re starting out with SEO, you’ll be tempted to try many different methods of fast-tracking yoursuccess There are hundreds, if not thousands, of courses, gurus, and guides that’ll try to tell you they havethe magic formula for success It’s a compelling offer

But with SEO, as in life, there are no free lunches, and there’s certainly no real way to “Get to the top ofGoogle in 30 days!” We’re going to tell you right now to ignore any such offer you might come across: ulti-mately, it’s nothing more than snake oil

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To help you discern perfectly okay advice from questionable suggestions—and from downright reprehensiblemisinformation—here’s a quick guide to the various SEO techniques and their credibility.

The Good: White Hat SEO

White hat SEO is the most ethical form of search optimization Any practitioner who follows the principles

of white hat SEO will engage only in the ethical, long-term optimization of both their own sites and those

of their clients

When you adopt a white hat SEO philosophy, the methods you’ll employ will follow the guidelines set out

by the search engines The fundamentals of white hat SEO involve:

■ conducting thorough keyword research and targeting

■ creating high-quality, unique content

■ improving internal linking and site structure

■ building links from relevant, quality sites

“Well,” you might be thinking, “that sounds easy enough!” Sadly, it isn’t Each element of a white hat

campaign is a time-consuming, grueling test of endurance played out over months or even years

Time is measured a little differently in the world of SEO than it is in the email marketing or PPC universes,both of which allow you to quickly test, enhance, and deliver campaign results These tools are like FormulaOne cars—quick off the starting blocks, expensive to run, and highly tuned

Ethical SEO campaigns require months of effort, quite often producing little results Think of white hatSEO as being like an oil tanker: it takes a lot of energy to get moving, but once it’s moving, it’s highly efficientand carries a lot of momentum

What you need to learn to do from the outset of your SEO career is to think long term You need to understand

that the return on investment (or ROI) of an SEO campaign will almost always be negative for the first fewmonths There’s no shortcut to profitability Without a long-term view of any project—and without setting

a client’s expectations accordingly—you’ll be doomed to failure

Now that you understand these challenges, it is time to discuss the big advantages of adopting the whitehat SEO approach

The long-term benefits start with peace of mind: you’ll know that now, and in the future, you and your

clients will avoid the penalties that are applied to sites that breach ethical guidelines These penalties can

be severe—in some cases, all evidence of a site is removed from the search results! At the very least, therelevance of the site is reduced, so it loses ranking position and, ultimately, traffic

Discriminating between ethical and unethical techniques is relatively simple Just ask yourself, “Does thisoptimization improve users’ experience or understanding of my website, or am I simply doing it for an SEObenefit?” Let common sense—and the user experience—prevail in every SEO decision you make, and

chances are you’ll stay within the realm of white hat SEO

The Bad, and The Iffy

Everybody knows that feeling deep down inside when our conscience warns us that we’re about to do

something that’s not quite right You’ll get that feeling if ever you stray into the less respectable areas of

SEO The rules of good SEO aren’t complicated—after all, we just learned what ethical SEO involves, and

it isn’t rocket science!

The techniques we’ll discuss here should be avoided if you’re focused on building rankings that will standthe test of time Many of these tactics will incur penalties from search engines if they’re discovered, andsome might lead to the site being removed from the search listings altogether Black hat tactics—as theseare commonly called—should be seen as the mark of desperation: those that employ them do so becausethey lack the skill and dedication to build a strong SEO campaign

Buying Links

Search engines dislike being tricked into thinking that a website is more relevant than it actually is That’swhy buying paid links from other websites is an issue: it can have an undue influence on the makeup of asearch results page

Imagine what would happen if search engines openly allowed paid links without any punishment Thecompany with the deepest pockets would always be ranked first! Fortunately for us internet users, search

engines do penalize paid links, so relevance is still the deciding factor in determining rankings.

Make no mistake: buying links is an extremely common practice Chances are that your competitors havetried it, or are doing it right now But when those links are ultimately identified as paid, search enginesdevalue them, and the site’s rankings will decrease as a result

Duplicate Content

Writing content can be difficult—even on a good day But writing totally unique, engaging content thatranks highly in search engines is harder There are thousands of online services that allow you to syndicatecontent; in effect, allowing you to populate a website with content from another system without having towrite a word

On paper this technique sounds like a brilliant idea: fill the site with content, because the more content,the higher the rankings—right? Wrong Search engines have sophisticated systems for identifying and de-valuing duplicate content This means that your website will quickly become little more than a repository

of useless content

There is a place for syndicated content: news streams are a perfect example Once again, though, use your

common sense and ask yourself, “Does adding this content provide value to my visitors?” If the answer isyes, adding syndicated content can make sense

Keyword Stuffing

If you discuss SEO with anyone who built websites around the year 2000, they’ll often have the opinionthat the more keywords you add to a page, the more relevant that page becomes to a search engine The

practice is called keyword stuffing: stuffing the page full of keywords for the sole purpose of tricking search

engines into thinking the page is more relevant than it actually is Today, keyword stuffing often makes

your page less relevant for a keyword, rather than more relevant.

All the major search engines employ extremely complicated phrase, sentence, paragraph, and page analysis

to every single site that they spider and index Natural language patterns are analyzed, and keyword-stuffed

pages—which bear little resemblance to natural language—are devalued It’s that simple.

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When a website presents one version of content to a visitor and a different version of the same content to

a search engine, it’s called cloaking There are dozens of ways to cloak web pages, and quite a few of these

methods work very successfully, delivering high rankings for those web pages

But make no mistake: cloaking is on all the major search engines’ blacklists This is an extremely unethicaltechnique that will result in your site being banned completely from a search engine if your tactics are

discovered And, given that your competitors are likely to have an eye on the tactics you’re employing andcan easily report you, discovery is all but inevitable

Once again, remember the mantra: develop websites that are optimized for the users’ experience as well as

the search engines’ spiders

Automated Link Building

Hundreds of applications and services on the market today claim to be able to develop thousands of backlinks

to your site for next to nothing This sounds like quite a deal, but as usual, if it sounds too good to be true,

it usually is

Using software or services to automate your link-building efforts is a bad idea These systems work by

submitting your website to tens of thousands of extremely low-quality directories, whose sole purpose is

to receive submissions from automated software tools

You’ll receive the 10,000 links, just like the software promises However, what those selling the servicesfail to mention is that one relevant link from a trusted website in your industry can have ten times the impact

of those 10,000 links

Do the math, and it’s not hard to work out that your time is better spent focusing on quality, rather than

quantity

How to Learn SEO

There’s no way to learn search engine optimization without actually putting what you learn into practiceand seeing the results as you work During the course of this guide, we’ll often prompt you to do just thatand use the skills you’ve learned

A fundamental tenet of conducting SEO is the mantra “analyze, strategize, implement, measure, repeat.”

Isolating Your Variables

It’s much easier to learn whether or not what you did was successful if you trial it in isolation from other

activities There’s always the temptation to try to put all the techniques you’ve learned into practice at once,

but then you’ll end up struggling to determine what, if anything, had any impact.

The best way to experiment with the techniques we will discuss is to register your own domain name andset up a website to use as a sort of guinea pig But that doesn’t mean you need to waste time working on asite that’s of no interest to you, and has no potential for return

Your Site Concept

It’s easy to stay motivated if you’re working on a project you love You’ll get enjoyment from this guide ifyou’re able to apply these techniques to a real website based on a topic you’re interested in

Since this may be your first foray into SEO, it’s absolutely essential that you have realistic expectations.Trying to compete for mortgage or credit card keywords is unrealistic at this point; there’s simply too muchcompetition, and ultimately you’ll learn very little attempting to apply your new-found SEO skills in thisparticular arena

Instead, think of a topic that you’re passionate about: it might be dog training, cars, hairdressing—you nameit! Now, think more specifically about a facet of that topic that you know or enjoy, for example:

■ how to braid long hair quickly

■ reconditioning a Commodore VL carburetor

■ training a Labrador to fetch a stick or ball

You’ll notice that all these suggestions are personal, and they’re quite specific By choosing a personal,specific topic, you can speak from your own, real-world experience, and engage users with your insights

Finding and Registering a Domain Name

The domain name can play an important part in the search rank your site achieves for particular keywords;with this in mind, try to choose a domain name that includes a few of the keywords from your chosentopic Some domain examples for the topics we’ve just discussed include:

■ BraidingHairQuickly.com

■ CommodoreReconditioning.com.au

■ LabradorTrainingTricks.net

All these domain names clearly communicate their topics and feature major keywords that relate directly

to the sites’ content There’s no need to worry about whether the available domain names are com, net,

or org—worry more about the domain making sense and containing relevant keywords

Where possible, go for the shortest available domain that matches your requirements, and try to avoid mains that use hyphens; long names, hyphens, and underscores (_) tend to be more difficult for users toremember and type

do-Setting Up Your Website

A critical step, and one whose SEO impact is often overlooked, is how and where you host your websitecontent Most people start off by having their site hosted as part of a larger shared system such as Blogger4

or WordPress.com, but these services’ limitations become clear when you need to exert some control overthe technical aspects of your site; for example, controlling search engine access, or managing how yourURLs are constructed

When you’re choosing stand-alone hosting solutions, you’ll need to consider factors such as the geographiclocation of the data center in relation to your target audience, server speed, server availability and/or uptime,

4 http://www.blogger.com/

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and the operating system that the server runs (normally, you’ll have a choice between Windows and Unix).

Of course, your budget will affect some of these decisions as well

Once you have the hosting sorted, the easiest way to start a website and add content is to use a content

management system (CMS); for example, a platform such as Joomla,5Drupal,6or WordPress.7Choose

whichever platform you’re comfortable with; from an SEO perspective, these three have good default settingsand markup

The Best Way to Learn Is to Do

Setting aside half an hour to an hour per day to work on your website will help you form the habit of armingfor the battle that is an SEO campaign SEO is an ongoing process that never finishes: even if you do rank

in the first position for your chosen keyword, your competitors will always be trying to outmaneuver you

So far, we’ve been speaking mainly of general search principles But in the coming chapters, we’ll be focusing

on a number of proven techniques that you can employ to improve your site’s search engine rankings

Ready? Let’s do it

5 http://www.joomla.org/

6 http://www.drupal.org/

Conducting a best-practice SEO campaign involves the application of a relatively simple set of ethicalprinciples These principles will become the basis of your thinking, flowing through every decision youmake when marketing and optimizing a website.

There are four key elements to any ethical SEO campaign:

SEO is a process-driven discipline, which is the reason why the list above is numbered rather than bulleted.When approaching a new campaign, you should follow each step in order We’ve highlighted this processbecause for too many years traditional web design has worked in the reverse order; this had an extremelynegative impact on an SEO campaign, ultimately hurting rankings and those of your potential clients

The conventional process worked like this:

1 You design the layout and information architecture of your website

2 You launch the site and wait for the traffic to start flowing

3 You start to panic because there’s little or no traffic from search engines.

4 You hire a company to conduct an SEO campaign as an afterthought

The problem with this method is that it fails to take into account that building the site based around sumer-based search terms is an important part of the entire SEO process

con-Throughout the next few sections you’ll learn how to conduct an SEO campaign from start to finish Theseprocesses can be applied regardless of whether you’re involved in developing a site from scratch, or not;however, being involved in the site from the development stage is ideal

Keyword Research

Conducting keyword research as the first step makes sense, because every decision you make thereafter isbased on the right base words and phrases It allows you to see which keywords users actually employ tofind products and services within your chosen market, instead of making guesses at the keywords you believeare the most popular

Your first task with a client’s brief is to open up the first of many tools we’ll introduce you to: the GoogleKeyword Tool.1It will become your best friend when making decisions about target keywords for yourclients’ sites Best of all, it’s free and the data is accurate There are, of course, many third-party keywordresearch tools; however, we recommend sticking to the free alternative in this case

Instead of explaining the reasons behind the way this process works right now, let’s dive in and go through

a very simple example brief

Example 2.1 Example Client Project

1 https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

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The following recommendations are based on the assumption that you lack access to the previous website’sstatistics and data.

Open up the Google Keyword Tool and conduct some initial research on the phrase “green tea.” Since Bob

is based in the USA, chooseUSAfrom theLocations and Languagesbox in theAdvanced optionsdrop-downmenu It’s important to remember to set a location whenever you’re conducting keyword research The

keywords for each topic will vary greatly from region to region based on seasonality, colloquialisms, andother factors If you’re conducting a global campaign, you should chooseAll Countriesin this section

As shown in Figure 2.1, let’s leaveAll keyword ideaschecked at this point; we’ll come back to these optionslater in your keyword research

Figure 2.1 The Google Keyword Tool

Once you’ve set the variables, click onSearchin the bottom corner You should now be staring at a list

similar to the one shown in Figure 2.2

Figure 2.2 Google keyword ideas

This list is sorted byRelevanceas a default As you can see, it has some key information in the columns tothe right of each keyword Let’s focus onGlobal Monthly Searchesfor the sake of our initial keyword research.Click on that column’s heading and it will re-sort the keywords by volume, from highest to lowest

Now that you have your initial keyword list, you can further refine it by changing the Match Types in the

left-hand sidebar of the keyword tool, as shown in Figure 2.3

Figure 2.3 Match types in the Keyword Tool

There are three keyword match types: broad match, exact match, and phrase match

Broad match

The most common method of how searches are conducted, this is when the words are entered in thesearch box without refinements, and the returned results are based on any order or distribution If youwere looking at the broad match volume for the term “tennis shoes” (for example), the data associatedwith this keyword would also include the keywords “tennis,” “shoes,” and many other relevant vari-ations, which can be anything topically related

However, terms like “tennis and basketball shoes” would be excluded, because they don’t include theexact phrase in the exact order you entered.

When using the keyword tool throughout this guide, we’ll focus on looking at exact match targeting of

keywords This will allow you to gain a better idea of the organic search volume specific to the chosen

keywords DeselectBroad, and select[Exact] The list of keywords in the main panel—and their

volumes—should have now updated

In front of you now should be a list of the most popular keywords related to green tea, sorted by search

volume Let’s focus on the top ten only for the moment, as shown in Figure 2.4

Figure 2.4 Google popular keywords for “green tea”

Without having done anything more than enter a single search term into the keyword tool, this simple

keyword list provides enormous insight into the product and website Let’s ignoreCompetitionandSearch Trendsfor the moment and focus on theLocal Monthly Searches; this column shows us the number of searchesfor each specific keyword within the region we chose—the USA

Based on this list, you can instantly see that some of the secondary keywords receive a significant amount

of searches each month These keywords should be included in our content strategy and within our overallsite planning For the sake of focusing on basic keyword research—and because the top ten keywords listedare all highly relevant to our client’s site—let’s take these and make them the focus of our example SEO

strategy

An important point to remember when choosing keywords is that the context in which a visitor uses a

keyword is just as important as the volume of searches

Example 2.2 Example Search Terms

Say, for instance, that your client wanted to rank for the search term “cars” when they’re selling used

Subarus A quick search on any search engine—or just common sense—is enough to see that visitors

searching for the term “cars” are unlikely to be looking for a used Subaru Rather, they’re likely to be

searching for general information on cars Use your common sense when sorting through keywords Thehighest volume is often not the most relevant for your campaign In this case, the term “used Subaru,” while

it might have a lower search volume, will likely deliver more conversions

Always remember to conduct a check of all search terms, and think about the relevance to the intent of avisitor Put yourself in their shoes: it’s a great way to target search terms that will be valuable to the client’swebsite.

Fortunately for us, all the terms we have are relevant in both context and intention to Bob’s visitors Takethe search term “herbal tea” and do a search on Google, Yahoo, or Bing, and conduct some basic competitorresearch This will give you a good idea of the kind of content and websites you’ll ultimately be competingwith in order to rank for this search term

There are many tools that make this task easier, collecting data about your competitors and highlightingweaknesses for you During the course of this guide, you’ll be introduced to some of these techniques andtools For the moment, let’s focus on using simple searches and a bit of guesswork to make educated decisionsabout your campaigns, as illustrated in Figure 2.5

Figure 2.5 A search for “herbal tea” on Google

No surprises here: Wikipedia is the top website For the moment, let’s ignore Wikipedia—it’s not a truecompetitor in the commercial sense, and it receives a lot of external help as a result

The first aspect that stands out on the first page of this search is that there are no big global brands such asLipton, Twinings, or any other multinationals This is good for our site, as the competition consists

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primarily of more focused and highly relevant small- to medium-sized businesses That’s not to say that

any of these sites are easy competitors—in fact, the exact opposite is true in this category

Repeat this sanity check for each of the chosen keywords and confirm that the kinds of websites that show

up in paid and organic sections seem relevant to your client’s site

Each keyword you identify in this initial exploratory phase, such as “oolong tea,” should then be fed backinto the keyword tool and the same process repeated: sort, check for relevance, and store for your records

Always conduct your keyword research before diving into the next steps Quite often you’ll identify keywordsand niches that you may be unaware of, and this can change the whole focus of the campaign

Content Development

In web design circles, the phrase “content is king” has been often touted—and it’s even more relevant toSEO campaigns Your site content, and the way in which you structure and present it, can make or breakyour online marketing efforts in more ways than one

First, let’s define what falls within the realm of content development—at least as far as SEO is concerned:

■ navigational flow and menu structure

■ site copy or articles

■ headings and sections

If you’ve been involved in web development in the past, these aspects may seem outside your reach: keting or development teams generally determine site structure, and the client almost always determinesmenu choices

mar-Overcoming this perception will be one of your major hurdles when involved in an SEO campaign, especiallywhen a site is being redeveloped or launched But SEO needs to be baked into—and flow through—eachand every step of the web development and marketing process

When a client approaches you to work on their site—or if you’re optimizing a site of your own—your firsttask is to understand the dynamics of the market, as well as the business’s goals Without an understanding

of these, your optimization efforts will likely be wasted, no matter how hard you try

Now let’s have a look at each of the three points involved in content development

Navigational Flow and Menu Structure

Using the keywords that you identified earlier during your initial keyword research, you can make somedecisions on the ideal structure of your client’s website and its navigational flow

When planning this aspect of a site, the initial inclination is to categorize items into logical areas, what wewill call silos of content (more on this term later) Here’s an example of how you may want to order the

content for Bob’s Green Tea site:

Example 2.3 A Sample Menu Structure

This is the amount of related content that sits in each silo of content on your website, or each folder

The idea is to make sure that all of the content related to each keyword sits in that keyword’s top-levelfolder from your home page If you have a folder for oolong tea that only contains product pages, you should

also add in articles and any other associated content; this increases that section’s overall depth of content.

What you should not do is fill each silo of content with junk, such as syndicated content and other forms

of recycled material The key is to develop unique content that’s relevant to users and to search engines—butmore on that later

Care should also be taken to avoid falling into the trap of making your silo of content too deep, or to containtoo many nested levels You can run the risk of limiting how much internal search engine value is distributedfrom the home page down to your content pages (see the section called “Authority” below) Should youfind yourself creating a large amount of content in one silo, consider splitting that content into relevantsubtopics or themes

Authority

If you’re building on an existing site, chances are that the most authoritative page on that site, at least cording to a search engine, will be the home page

ac-Let’s look at this through the lens of PageRank, Google’s indication of your page’s authority.

PageRank has, over the years, attracted more attention than it deserves in the field of SEO, even though it’s

a fundamental component of Google’s search algorithm This attention most likely stems from the “Rank”part of its name: many people mistakenly think PageRank directly impacts how pages and sites are ranked

in search results In fact, it’s simply a measurement of how one web page links to, and is linked to by, otherweb pages

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PageRank flows in one direction, which is mostly down So, an example of a site’s PageRank could be trated as follows:

illus-Example 2.4 illus-Example of PageRank

Think of it like a waterfall, cascading down through each level of your site PageRank is by no means themost important ranking factor; however, it’s a good visual way to communicate how authority flows frompage to page on your website

Always remember that whatever the authority of a page or folder on your website, the content that sits inthat silo will inherit a slightly diminished level of authority from it

Authority isn’t just captured at the home page, however Should a particular page within a site gather

enough interest and, in turn, backlinks, it has the real possibility of gaining a higher PageRank value thanthe home page This should illustrate that rather than being a site measurement, PageRank is a measurement

of the page’s authority, as the name suggests

When a page attracts backlinks and gains authority in this fashion, the distribution of its PageRank isn’t

contained to the pages below it Its PageRank is actually distributed up as well, through the main site

nav-igation, including the ubiquitous link to the home page

Relevance

A great way to help search engines determine the relevance of your keywords, as well as each section of

your site, is to include the target keywords you’ve identified in top-level menu items, folders, and page

headings

Each time you link to a page or section using the related keyword, you’re improving that page or section’sauthority and relevance Every time an external site links to a page on your website, it also greatly improvesits relevance With a high enough concentration of links, it’s even possible for a deeper page—that is, a

page that’s a greater number of clicks away from your home page—to outrank the home page

Since relevance is becoming more of a driving factor behind the success of search engines, we have to becomesmarter in ensuring the strongest signals are given to them While once it was sufficient to include the rel-evant keywords in your links to your targeted pages, this is not the case now

Ccontextual relevance has become the phrase du jour for SEO What it means is that your link should not

only be relevant to the pages it connects to, but that the text and content surrounding the link (that is, the

link’s context) are also relevant to that topic This is why editorial links are valued over footer links or links

on pages comprising only links

You should always commence with keyword research, and use it to produce a mock sitemap—this should

only consist of very rough groupings of keywords at this point Then, use your knowledge of how searchengines (and people) think about grouping content to refine that sitemap, and group blocks of content andkeywords to improve relevance

A good rule is to simply think about what makes the most sense For example, placing your content related

to oolong tea within the “Oolong tea” section would make sense to an end user and to a search engine; thus,

it makes your visitors’ lives easier, as well as improving your rankings along the way

Site Copy and Articles

Now that you have your top ten target keywords and your basic site structure worked out, it’s time to startplanning what content should sit in each of the main sections of the site, and how you can improve it from

an SEO perspective

Existing content can quite easily be retasked to suit more specific needs, but if you need to write new content,you should always consider what value that content brings to the site, apart from just an SEO benefit.Never write articles or sections purely for SEO purposes, and always make sure that the content is uniqueand of a high quality, instead of being just stuffed full of keywords

Remember, you’ll receive little to no benefit from producing low-quality content; search engines are smartand can quite easily sniff out spam, and identify duplicate or very similar content Duplicate content extendsbeyond being just the same content repeated Google has defined duplicate content as anything that is

“appreciably similar”—quite a large net that’s easy to be caught in

Let’s focus on a specific section of the website, “Oolong tea,” and develop a mini content strategy based onkeywords related to that specific phrase We’ll use the Google Keyword tool once again to conduct someresearch on what our potential visitors are searching for, and what Google considers related to oolong tea

Open up the keyword tool and input the same options we used before (United States,Exact Match, andAll keyword ideasselected) Enter the search term “Oolong Tea” and clickSearch The results are shown inFigure 2.6

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