What is a Search Engine?

Transcript What is a Search Engine?

What is a Search Engine?
• Definition:
An internet-based tool that searches an index of documents for a
particular term, phrase or text specified by the user. Commonly used to refer to large webbased search engines that search through billions of pages on the internet.
• Different than a Directory
• Common Characteristics:
• Spider, Indexer, Database, Algorithm
• Find matching documents and display them according to
relevance
• Frequent updates to documents searched and ranking
algorithm
• Strive to produce “better”, more relevant results than
competitors
Examples popular Search Engines
How Do Search Engines Work?
•
Spider “crawls” the web to find new documents (web pages, other documents) typically
by following hyperlinks from websites already in their database
•
Search engines indexes the content (text, code) in these documents by adding it to their
databases and then periodically updates this content
•
Search engines search their own databases when a user enters in a search to find
related documents (not searching web pages in real-time)
•
Search engines rank the resulting documents using an algorithm (mathematical
formula) by assigning various weights and ranking factors
Search Engines statistics
1. Google – 41.6%
2. Yahoo – 31.5%
3. MSN – 27.4%
4. AOL – 13.6%
5. Ask Jeeves – 7.0%
% bases on usage
Why is Search Engine Marketing
important?
•
85% of all traffic on the internet is referred to by search engines
•
90% of all users don’t look past the first 30 results (most only view top 10)
•
Search engine traffic is low and websites aren’t indexed because they are
generally poorly optimized
•
Cost-effective advertising
•
Clear and measurable ROI
•
Operates under this assumption:
More (relevant) traffic + Good Conversions Rate =
More Sales/Leads
What is Search Engine Optimization?
• SEO = Search Engine Optimization
– Refers to the process of “optimizing” both the
on-page and off-page ranking factors in order
to achieve high search engine rankings for
targeted search terms.
– Refers to the “industry” that has been created
regarding using keyword searching a a means
of increasing relevant traffic to a website
What is a SEO Algorithm?
•
Top Secret! Only select employees of a search engines company know for
certain
•
Reverse engineering, research and experiments gives SEOs (search engine
optimization professionals) a “pretty good” idea of the major factors and
approximate weight assignments
•
The SEO algorithm is constantly changed, tweaked & updated
•
Websites and documents being searched are also constantly changing
•
Varies by Search Engine – some give more weight to on-page factors, some to
link popularity
Steps to developing a good SEO
strategy:
•
Research desirable keywords and search phrases
(WordTracker, Overture, Google AdWords)
•
Identify search phrases to target (should be relevant to business/market, obtainable
and profitable)
•
“Clean” and optimize a website’s HTML code for appropriate keyword density, title tag
optimization, internal linking structure, headings and subheadings, etc.
•
Help in writing copy to appeal to both search engines and actual website visitors
•
Study competitors (competing websites) and search engines
•
Implement a quality link building campaign
•
Add Quality content
•
Constant monitoring of rankings for targeted search terms
Ranking factors
• On-Page Factors (Code & Content)
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•
•
•
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Title tags <title> #3
Header tags <h1> #5
ALT image tags #4
Content, Content, Content (Body text) <body> #1
Hyperlink text #6
Keyword frequency & density #2
• Off-Page Factors
• Link Popularity (“votes” for your site) – adds credibility
#2
• Anchor text #1
Introduction to SEO
What a search engine sees
• Spiders do not see a page like humans do, as it
cannot describe an image, or tell you how
pretty a site looks
– Instead, it looks at the HTML code and structures
it to make sense.
• Using a text browser, or disabling images and CSS are a
good way of seeing your site through a search engines
eyes.
What a Search Engine Sees
• View > Source (HTML code)
Crash Course in HTML/CSS
• (X)HTML is used to describe the data that is on your page
• CSS is used to format HTML and make it look more presentable.
• Web standards are continuously trying to separate content from
presentation
– Previously, HTML was used for both content and presentation.
• Latest Versions of the languages
– XHTML 1.1
– CSS 3
Crash Course in HTML/CSS
HTML Basics
• HTML uses <tags> to describe data
– Data is usually enclosed in these tags
• <tag>Data</tag>
• <tag attribute=“data” />
– Tags can be images, paragraphs, titles, tables, and
more
• Browsers render these tags differently on your screen.
– There is a tendency to depend on these tags also for
formatting, e.g. using tables to keep non-tabular data
• Not Good!
Crash Course in HTML/CSS
HTML Basics (cont.)
• Every HTML document has some mandatory elements :
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C ... ml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta … /> Extra information about the document
<title>Document Title</title>
</head>
<body>
Page Content
</body>
</html>
Crash Course in HTML/CSS
HTML Basics (cont.)
• Here are some basic tags important to SEO
– <h1></h1> , <h2></h2> , <h3></h3> , …
• Header tags – Makes text large and bold
– <img src=“location of pic” alt=“alternate text”>
• Image tags – note the alternate text for SEs
– <a href=“link URL” title=“link title”>link</a>
• Link tags - Browsers makes the text inside a link
– <b>Bold Text</b>
• Not recommended, but is said to help in SEO
SEO Techniques
Keywords
• Keywords are the words on a webpage that
best describe that page
• Keyword selection is the most important step
to effective SEO
– The keywords you use will be the phrases where
you want to be highly ranked on SEs
– Time and research should go into selecting the
appropriate keywords before doing any SEO
• What are the words one would use to find your site?
SEO Techniques
Keywords (cont.)
• Continuation on how search engines work…
– When a spider goes through a webpage, it
determines the weight of frequently used words
in the document, and considers them the most
important in the document.
• The more you use a word in important places, the more
search engines give importance to it.
– The words with highest weight are more likely to
bring up your web page when used as a search
term.
SEO Techniques
Keywords (cont.)
• You must decide whether to focus on less
frequently used keywords (niche) or
compete for the commonly used ones.
• Here are some tools you can use to see
which keywords are searched for
frequently
– Google Suggest (beta) (free)
• http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
– Google adwords
• Offers a free keyword tool with its adwords services
– WordTracker (paid)
• www.wordtracker.com
SEO Techniques
Meta Tags
• Meta tags are used to provide a description of
the page, and a list of main keywords it uses.
• There is a debate over whether to cram loads
of keywords into these tags, or just select the
most important ones.
– Search engines are getting smarter everyday, so
they may penalise you for cramming
– Some search engines reportedly don’t even look
at the meta tags (e.g. Google)
SEO Techniques
Title Tag
• The text in this tag shows up on the top of
your browser window.
• Quite important to include keywords here, as
the title will give a general summary for what
your page is about.
• Most search engines see this tag as an
important tag for categorising what type of
site you have.
SEO Techniques
Anchor Tags
• One of the most important tags you must use for SEO.
– Spiders use these to crawl your site, so you must have links to
pages throughout your site.
– Other sites that link to yours will send spiders your way also.
• Google (and others) use anchor tags to rank your site in
many ways:
– Firstly, text in anchor tags are given a lot of importance.
– If other sites link to you, this must mean your site is popular,
and so you increase in rankings.
• The most popular sites would, in theory, be linked to by many
websites throughout the internet.
SEO Techniques
Anchor Tags (cont.)
• Since anchor tags are so important, it is vital that you include
keywords in these tags
– SEs think the words to describe a link should give a good indication of
what that page is about.
• This is one reason why it is good to have a navigation bar that uses
links to all your sites.
– Better that you use words, not images
– Try and use <a> tags, and not image maps, flash, etc.
• A sitemap is also an effective way of tying your site up if you link all
your pages to this site map.
SEO Techniques
Anchor Tags (cont.)
• Here is an example of why a sitemap is effective
This is a website with a site map.
Sitemap
This is a website without a site map.
Page 4
Page 1
Page 1 and 2
can only reach
page 3 via page
4
Page 2
Page 1 and 2 can now
reach page 3 in many
ways
Page 3
SEO Techniques
Text and Content
• Throughout your page you will need to use
keywords in order to rank well for that
word
• The most important places of your content
to put keywords are in the headers, at the
beginning, and the end of paragraphs.
• It is importance to balance the overuse of
keywords for the sake of SEO and keeping
the text relevant, readable, and informative
– There is no point in having a highly ranked
page if it provides no information to a user, as
they will leave your site immediately
SEO Techniques
H1, H2, H3, etc. Tags
• These tags are considered by search
engines to be a description of your page.
– Very important to put in some keywords there.
• It is always a good idea to structure your
content so that it contains these tags at
beginning of paragraphs, tables, sections,
etc.
• It is quite logical that a search engine gets
the overview of a paragraph from a header
tag
– We know what this slide is about by looking at
the title of the slide
SEO Techniques
Images
• Images are not read by search engines, and so
you should avoid using too many images on
your site
– Many sites use images for fancy fonts, when they
contain keywords that are never read by a search
engine
• Always use an alt attribute when including an
image
– This gives a spider a description of the image, and
also doubles as making your site accessible to
blind people.
SEO Techniques
Code Structure
• It is important to look at your HTML code and see the
structure of it.
– Some pages have too much code, and too little content
– Some code makes it so that content is found at the bottom of
the page.
• Pages that use tables for layout are notorious for doing this.
• Make sure that keywords are found at the top of your
source code as well as on the actual web page
– Remember, SEs don’t see pages like we do, they only see our
HTML code.
SEO Techniques
Update your site regularly
• Sites that are updated regularly are
spidered and indexed more frequently by
SEs
• Sites that change often are considered by
SEs as sites that provide current
information, and must therefore (although
not always) provide up to date information
– This would provide a more relevant set of
results than providing a user with pages that
were made 10 years ago
• News Items are a great way of including a
regular changing page.
SEO Techniques
Dynamic Code
• Dynamic code can make updating your site
very easy
– Also useful for creating pages on the fly
• E.g. A shopping cart with items you want to buy
• SEs do not always look favourably on pages
with dynamic data
– These pages usually have a ? after the page
name and are followed by data
– You have to regularly update your site if you
want to do well with dynamic pages
• E.g. Forums
SEO Techniques
Inbound Links
• As said before, links from other sites are
very important.
– Google will no list your site if its not found on
an other webpage listed by them
• Methods to get links on other pages
– Link Exchange (free)
– Paid Advertising
• Google Adwords
• Overture
• Specific Websites
Measuring Results
• Once you have started your SEO campaign,
you need to measure your results and make
sure you are improving on SE Rankings
• When you first make changes, SEs may take up
to about four weeks to scan your site for
changes.
– There are millions of web pages for them to crawl,
and so it takes time for them to get to you.
Measuring Results
Reasons for no improvements
• Sometimes, you may not notice an
improvement in your rankings
– This can be due to many reasons as many
factors affect your SE rankings
• Competition may be doing better
– Marketing
– More linking from other sites
– Better SEO
• Bad choice of keywords
• Too much competition
• Etc.
Measuring Results
Statistics Monitoring
• You can view statistics of visitors to your site.
– Onestat (paid)
– Google Analytics (free)
– StatCounter (free)
• You can see what engines are used more to find your site
– You can also see which keywords are used to find your site, which
helps with keyword research
– This can help you target particular search engines and accommodate
their searching methods.
Measuring Results
SEO software
• SEO software can be used to scan many SEs
for phrases of your choice and produce visual
results of how your website is doing.
– Much faster than doing this manually
– You can run regular searches and monitor your
positioning easily and efficiently
• Some SEO software can also help you scan you
pages and make suggestions for
improvements.
Measuring Results
SEO software (cont.)
• SEO tools :
– WebPosition Gold(paid)
– Advanced Web Ranking (free)
Resources
• Links to further SEO resources
– www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox.html
– www.searchenginewatch.com
– www.w3schools.com
– www.search-engine-war.co.uk
Limitations of SEO
• Searching is an evolving process from the
point of view of providers (the search
engines), users and website owners. What
worked yesterday may not work today and be
counter-productive or harmful tomorrow. In
the result, monitoring or regular checks of the
key search engines and directories is required
to maintain a high ranking once it is achieved.
• The cost of SEO is rising. More expertise is
required than before and this trend will
continue. The techniques employed are more
sophisticated, complex and time consuming.
There are fewer worthwhile search engines
and directories that offer free listings. Paid
placement costs are rising and the best key
words expensive.
• The search lottery. Search engines collect only
a fraction of the billions of sites' pages for
various technological reasons which change
over time but nonetheless will mean for the
foreseeable future that searching is akin to a
lottery. SEO improves the odds but cannot
remove the uncertainty altogether
• SEO is a marketing exercise and, accordingly,
the same old business rules apply.