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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
The most comprehensive coverage of search engine optimization In Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition, Bruce Clay--whose search engine consultancy predates Google--shares everything you need to know about SEO. In minibooks that cover the entire topic, you'll discover how search engines work, how to apply effective keyword strategies, ways to use SEO to position yourself competitively, the latest on international SEO practices, and more. If SEO makes your head spin, this no-nonsense guide makes it easier. You'll get the lowdown on how to use search engine optimization to improve the quality and volume of traffic on your website via search engine results. Cutting through technical jargon, it gets you up to speed quickly on how to use SEO to get your website in the top of the rankings, target different kinds of searches, and win more industry-specific vertical search engine results! * Includes new and updated material, featuring the latest on Bing!, Google instant search, image search, and much more * Covers SEO and optimizing servers for SEO * Provides important information on SEO web design * Shows you how to use SEO to stay "above the fold" If you're a website owner, developer, marketer, or SEO consultant, Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies, Third Edition is the only resource you need to beat the competition.
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Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies®, Third Edition
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015947060
ISBN: 978-1-118-92175-3
ISBN 978-1-118-92176-0 (ebk); ISBN ePDF 978-1-118-92177-7 (ebk)
Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies
Visit www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/searchengineoptimizationaio to view this book's cheat sheet.
Table of Contents
Cover
Introduction
About This Book
Foolish Assumptions
Icons Used in This Book
Beyond the Book
Where to Go from Here
Book I: How Search Engines Work
Chapter 1: Putting Search Engines in Context
Identifying Search Engine Users
Figuring Out Why People Use Search Engines
Discovering the Necessary Elements for Getting High Keyword Rankings
Understanding the Search Engines: They're a Community
Chapter 2: Meeting the Search Engines
Finding the Common Threads among the Engines
Getting to Know the Major Engines
Checking Out the Rest of the Field:AOL and Ask.com
Finding Your Niche: Vertical Engines
Discovering Internal Site Search
Understanding Metasearch Engines
Chapter 3: Recognizing and Reading Search Results
Reading the Search Engine Results Page
Understanding How People Look at Search Results
Identifying Mobile Users’ Search Patterns
Discovering the Features of a Search Results Page
Chapter 4: Getting Your Site to Appear in the Right Results
Seeking Traffic, Not Ranking
Avoiding Spam
Understanding Personalized Search’s Impact on Ranking
Using News, Images, Books, and Other Search Verticals to Rank
Showing Up in Local Search Results
Making the Most of Paid Search Results
Chapter 5: Knowing What Drives Search Results
Using Advanced Search Operators
Understanding Long-Tail Queries
Using Predictive Search as a Research Assistant
Chapter 6: Spam Issues: When Search Engines Get Fooled
Understanding What Spam Is
Discovering the Types of Spam
Reporting Spam
Avoiding Being Evil: Ethical Search Marketing
Realizing That There Are No Promises or Guarantees
Following the SEO Code of Ethics
Book II: Keyword Strategy
Chapter 1: Employing Keyword Research Techniques and Tools
Discovering Your Site Theme
Doing Your Industry and Competitor Research
Researching Client Niche Keywords
Checking Out Seasonal Keyword Trends
Evaluating Keyword Research
Chapter 2: Selecting Keywords
Selecting the Proper Keyword Phrases
Reinforcing versus Diluting Your Theme
Picking Keywords Based on Subject Categories
Understanding Keyword-Based Search versus Semantic Search
Chapter 3: Exploiting Pay Per Click Lessons Learned
Analyzing Your Pay Per Click Campaigns for Clues about Your Site
Reducing Costs by Overlapping Pay Per Click with Natural Keyword Rankings
Chapter 4: Assigning Keywords to Pages
Understanding What a Search Engine Sees as Keywords
Planning Subject Theme Categories
Choosing Landing Pages for Subject Categories
Organizing Your Primary and Secondary Subjects
Understanding Siloing “Under the Hood”
Consolidating Themes to Help Search Engines See Your Relevance
Chapter 5: Adding and Maintaining Keywords
Understanding Keyword Frequency and Distribution
Adjusting Keywords
Updating Keywords
Using Tools to Aid Keyword Placement
Book III: Competitive Positioning
Chapter 1: Identifying Your Competitors
Getting to Know the Competition
Figuring Out the Real Competition
Knowing Thyself: Recognizing Your Business Advantages
Looking at Conversion as a Competitive Measure
Recognizing the Difference between Traffic and Conversion
Determining True Competitors by Their Measures
Sweating the Small Stuff
Chapter 2: Competitive Research Techniques and Tools
Realizing That High Rankings Are Achievable
Getting All the Facts on Your Competitors
Calculating the Requirements for Rankings
Penetrating the Veil of Search Engine Secrecy
Diving into SERP Research
Chapter 3: Applying Collected Data
Sizing Up Your Page Construction
Learning from Your Competitors’ Links
Taking Cues from Your Competitors’ Content Structure
Book IV: SEO Web Design
Chapter 1: The Basics of SEO Web Design
Deciding on the Type of Content for Your Site
Making a User-Focused Website
Choosing Keywords
Using Keywords in the Heading Tags
Keeping the Code Clean
Organizing Your Assets
Naming Your Files
Keeping Design Simple
Making a Site Dynamic
Making Your Site Mobile Friendly
Developing a Design Procedure
Chapter 2: Building an SEO-Friendly Site
Preplanning and Organizing Your Site
Designing Spider-Friendly Code
Creating a Theme and Style
Writing Rich Text Content
Planning Your Navigation Elements
Implementing a Site Search
Incorporating Engagement Objects into Your Site
Allowing for Expansion
Developing an Update Procedure
Balancing Usability and Conversion
Chapter 3: Building a Mobile-Friendly Site
Choosing the Right Mobile Approach
Designing for a Mobile User
Making Mobile a Part of Your SEO Strategy
Testing Mobile Friendliness
Chapter 4: Making Your Page Search Engine Compatible
Optimizing HTML Constructs for Search Engines
Enriching Your Site with Rich Snippets
Using Clean Code
Making Your Site W3C-Compliant
Externalizing the Code
Choosing the Right Navigation
Chapter 5: Perfecting Navigation and Linking Techniques
Formulating a Category Structure
Selecting Landing Pages
Absolute versus Relative Linking
Dealing with Less-than-Ideal Types of Navigation
Naming Links
Book V: Creating Content
Chapter 1: Selecting a Stylefor Your Audience
Knowing Your Demographic
Creating a Dynamic Tone
Choosing a Content Style
Developing a Blog
Using Personas to Define Your Audience
Chapter 2: Establishing Content Depth and Page Length
Building Enough Content to Rank Well
Developing Ideas for Content
Using Various Types of Content
Optimizing Images
Mixing in Video
Making the Text Readable
Allowing User Input
Creating User Engagement
Writing a Call to Action
Chapter 3: Adding Keyword-Specific Content
Creating Your Keyword List
Developing Content Using Your Keywords
Optimizing the Content
Finding Tools for Keyword Integration
Competitive Analysis Tools
Chapter 4: Adapting Your Content for Local Search
Taking Advantage of Local Search
Optimizing Content for Local Searches
Chapter 5: Dealing with Duplicate Content
Sources of Duplicate Content and How to Resolve Them
Duplication by Outsiders
Chapter 6: Crediting Your Content
Factoring in Intellectual Property Considerations
Chapter 7: Using SEO to Build Your Brand
Selecting Keywords for Branding Purposes
How to Build Your Brand through Search
Using Engagement Objects to Promote Your Brand
Building a Community
Book VI: Linking
Chapter 1: Employing Linking Strategies
Theming Your Site by Subject
Implementing Clear Subject Themes
Siloing
Making the Most of Outbound Links
Obtaining Inbound Links
Chapter 2: Structuring Internal Links
Subject Theming Structure
Optimizing Link Equity
Creating and Maintaining Silos
Building a Silo: An Illustrated Guide
Maintaining Your Silos
Including Traditional Sitemaps
Using an XML Sitemap
Chapter 3: Obtaining Links
Understanding the Benefits and Risks of Link Building
Identifying Quality Links
Attracting Links
How Not to Obtain Links
Chapter 4: Vetting Inbound Links
Identifying Inbound Links
Avoiding Poor-Quality Links
Dealing with Search Engine Spam
Chapter 5: Connecting with Social Networks
Making Use of Blogs
Discovering Social News Sites
Promoting Media on Social Networking Sites
Optimizing Social Media
Social Signals as Search-Ranking Factors
Building Community
Incorporating Interactivity
Book VII: Optimizing the Foundations
Chapter 1: Server Issues: Why Your Server Matters
Meeting the Servers
Making Sure That Your Server Is Healthy, Happy, and Fast
Excluding Pages and Sites from the Search Engines
Creating Custom 404 Error Pages
Fixing Dirty IPs and Other “Bad Neighborhood” Issues
Serving Your Site to Different Devices
Chapter 2: Domain Names: What Your URL Says about You
Selecting Your Domain Name
Registering Your Domain Name
Covering All Your Bases
Pointing Multiple Domains to a Single Site Correctly
Choosing the Right Hosting Provider
Understanding Subdomains
Chapter 3: Using Redirects for SEO
Discovering the Types of Redirects
Reconciling Your www and Non-www URLs
Chapter 4: Implementing 301 Redirects
Getting the Details on How 301 Redirects Work
Implementing a 301 Redirect in Apache .htaccess Files
Implementing a 301 Redirect on an NGINX Server
Implementing a 301 Redirect on a Microsoft IIS Server
Using Alternate Ways to Redirect a Page
Chapter 5: Watching Your Backend: Content Management System Troubles
Avoiding SEO Problems Caused by Content Management Systems
Choosing the Right Content Management System
Customizing Your CMS for SEO
Optimizing Your Hosted E-Commerce Site
Avoiding Problems with JavaScript Frameworks
Chapter 6: Solving SEO Roadblocks
Inviting Spiders to Your Site
Avoiding 302 Hijacks
Handling Secure Server Problems
Book VIII: Analyzing Results
Chapter 1: Employing Site Analytics
Discovering Web Analytics Basics
Measuring Your Success
Examining Analytics Packages
Log Files Analysis
Chapter 2: Tracking Behavior with Web Analytics
Measuring Website Usability
Tracking Conversions
Tracking the Success of Your SEO Project
Analyzing Rankings
Chapter 3: Mastering SEO Tools and Reports
Getting Started with Conversion Testing
Discovering Page and Site Analysis Tools
Seeing Visitor Paths through the Site
Understanding Abandonment Rates
Book IX: International SEO
Chapter 1: Discovering International Search Engines
Targeting International Users
Identifying Opportunities for Your International Site
Realizing How People Search
Chapter 2: Tailoring Your Marketing Message for Asia
Succeeding in Asia
Discovering Japan
Succeeding in China
Finding Out about South Korea
Operating in Russia
Chapter 3: Staking a Claim in Europe
Succeeding in the European Union
Knowing the Legal Issues in the EU
Working within the United Kingdom
Discovering France
Operating in Germany
Understanding the Netherlands
Chapter 4: Getting Started in Latin America
Succeeding in Latin America
Geotargeting with Google Search Console
Working in Mexico
Operating in Brazil
Discovering Argentina
Appendix: The Value of Training
Making the Most of Industry Conferences
Picking the Right Training Courses
Training for Professionals
Getting Things Done for Do-It-Yourselfers
About the Author
Cheat Sheet
Advertisement Page
Connect with Dummies
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
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Introduction
Internet marketing is a dynamic marketing channel because of its accuracy and ease in tracking traffic. It also generates new opportunities for communication and marketing at breakneck speeds.
In the early days of the Internet, search engines evolved to bring the web to users who were looking for sites, products, and like-minded users. These days, savvy marketers know that showing up on search engine results pages is a fruitful way to reach potential new customers. But landing your business’s website in that precious spot high on the results pages is far from guaranteed. Search engine optimization (SEO) grew out of the need to persuade search engines that your site offers the best content for a particular topic.
Search engine optimization isn’t a difficult discipline, but it is complex because of its many different parts that you need to tweak and adjust so that they work in harmony. And as far as marketing disciplines go, SEO is a wildly moving target. This latter quality makes a book on search engine optimization a challenging undertaking, often requiring a focus on broad concepts rather than specifics. Many of those specifics change or even fade away so often that they can need to be replaced or updated a hundred times just while this book is being updated for the newest edition.
To keep pace with the unavoidably fluctuating nature of SEO recommendations and search engine guidelines, your business needs to avoid chasing search engine algorithms. Instead, your goal should be simply to present your pages as the most relevant for a given search query. Resist the urge to assume that one aspect of search engine optimization is more important than another. Keep in mind that to succeed, all the various aspects of your SEO endeavors need to work together.
About This Book
Throughout this book, we reference tools as well as experts (ourselves and others) in the field. Search engine marketing (SEM), as an industry, is very active and excels at knowledge sharing. Although we cover the basics here, we strongly urge you to take advantage of the community that has developed since search engine marketing began. Truly, without the SEM community, we couldn’t have written this book.
We hope that you keep this book near at hand, picking it up when you need to check for answers. For that reason, we attempt to make each minibook stand on its own. If something falls outside the scope of a particular minibook, or requires a mention in one but more detail in another, we refer you to the correct chapter or minibook for more information.
Search engine optimization has grown and changed over the years, along with the search engines themselves, and it continues to change at such a fast pace that sometimes the tools and features of the search engines become outdated even soon after this book’s publication. For example, over the course of writing this book, Google changed the name of its webmaster tools platform from Google Webmaster Tools to Google Search Console, and modified the layout of local search results pages multiple times. This changeability means that you may have to research the most current tools and features available to you at at any given moment.
This book uses the following conventions, as follows:
Text appears in brackets when it represents a search query that an Internet user might type into a search engine’s search box, like this: [when is Mother’s Day].
Web addresses and programming code appear in
monofont
. If you’re reading a digital version of this book on a device connected to the Internet, you can click or tap the web address to visit that website, like this:
www.dummies.com
.
Foolish Assumptions
We wrote this book for a particular sort of person. We assume that you, the one holding this book, are a small-business owner who’s pretty new to Internet marketing. You might have a website, or maybe you’re thinking about finally diving into this online thing; either way, we presume that you’ve already figured out how to turn on your computer and connect to the Internet.
We also assume that you’re either somewhat familiar with the technologies that power websites or that you have access to someone who is. HTML, JavaScript, Flash, and other technologies are broad topics on their own. We don’t expect you to know everything there is to know about JavaScript programming or Flash, but we also don’t spend time explaining them to you. If you don’t know how to program in these technologies, find a super-smart programmer to help you in your journey of developing your business’s online presence. For a primer, you may want to seek out the For Dummies titles devoted to these topics.
Icons Used in This Book
This icon calls out suggestions that help you work more effectively and save time.
Try to keep items marked with this icon in mind while you optimize your website. Sometimes we offer a random tidbit of information, but more often than not, we talk about something that you’ll run into repeatedly, so you should remember it.
SEO can get pretty technical pretty fast. If you’re not familiar with the terminology, it can start to sound like gibberish. We marked the sections where we get extra-nerdy with this icon so that you can be prepared. If these sections go over your head, don’t worry: You can move on without understanding every nuance.
If you see a Warning, take extra care. This icon denotes the times when getting something wrong can nuke your site, tank your rankings, and just generally devastate your online marketing campaign.
Beyond the Book
Because SEO and the Internet are always growing and changing, we encourage you to keep your knowledge of Internet marketing fresh through reading and research beyond these pages. We have written a lot of extra content that you won’t find in this book, and that we will update as strategies and tactics change. Go online to find the following:
The Cheat Sheet at
www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/searchengineoptimizationaio
Bookmark this Cheat Sheet in your web browser so that you can easily access server status codes, advanced search operators, and an SEO checklist while you’re tuning up your website. The SEO checklist is a quick-hits guide to making sure that every element on a web page helps your page rank. Use the advanced search operators to search Google, Bing, and Yahoo like a power user, filtering results to just the websites or types of pages you’re looking for. And have the server status codes handy as you check that your web server is behaving.
Online articles covering additional topics at
www.dummies.com/extras/searchengineoptimizationaio
In the online Web Extras, we expand on some of the tools and how-to steps that we mention in the book. You’ll find in-depth instructions on using the free Keyword Suggestion tool to capture new search traffic; how to use the SEO Multi-Page Information tool, another free tool created by Bruce Clay, Inc.; use a checklist for making sure that your website is optimized to be mobile friendly; find some tips for enlivening content that could otherwise be boring; how to use the Free Link Analysis Report tool; explore new options for top-level domains; and find out how to set goals in Google Analytics. And finally, if you’ve read about international SEO and business opportunities in Asia, Latin America, and Europe but need some more help deciding if it’s right for your business, you can get some help with that decision here.
Updates to this book, if we have any, are at
www.dummies.com/extras/searchengineoptimizationaio
Where to Go from Here
The best thing about this book is that you can go anywhere from here. Although we’ve written it like a regular instruction manual that you can read from beginning to end, we also want you to be able to use it as a reference or a go-to guide for tricky problems. So, start anywhere you want. Jump into mobile website design or take a crack at creating great content for blogs and social media.
If you’re brand new to SEO, we recommend that you start at the beginning. After that, it’s up to you. Good luck and have fun. Just because this is business doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy the ride.
Book I
How Search Engines Work
Visit www.dummies.com for great Dummies content online.
Contents at a Glance
Chapter 1: Putting Search Engines in Context
Identifying Search Engine Users
Figuring Out Why People Use Search Engines
Discovering the Necessary Elements for Getting High Keyword Rankings
Understanding the Search Engines: They're a Community
Chapter 2: Meeting the Search Engines
Finding the Common Threads among the Engines
Getting to Know the Major Engines
Checking Out the Rest of the Field:AOL and Ask.com
Finding Your Niche: Vertical Engines
Discovering Internal Site Search
Understanding Metasearch Engines
Chapter 3: Recognizing and Reading Search Results
Reading the Search Engine Results Page
Understanding How People Look at Search Results
Identifying Mobile Users’ Search Patterns
Discovering the Features of a Search Results Page
Chapter 4: Getting Your Site to Appear in the Right Results
Seeking Traffic, Not Ranking
Avoiding Spam
Understanding Personalized Search’s Impact on Ranking
Using News, Images, Books, and Other Search Verticals to Rank
Showing Up in Local Search Results
Making the Most of Paid Search Results
Chapter 5: Knowing What Drives Search Results
Using Advanced Search Operators
Understanding Long-Tail Queries
Using Predictive Search as a Research Assistant
Chapter 6: Spam Issues: When Search Engines Get Fooled
Understanding What Spam Is
Discovering the Types of Spam
Reporting Spam
Avoiding Being Evil: Ethical Search Marketing
Realizing That There Are No Promises or Guarantees
Following the SEO Code of Ethics
Chapter 1
Putting Search Engines in Context
In This Chapter
Identifying search engine users
Discovering why people use search engines
Pinpointing elements for getting high keyword rankings
Defining relationships between search engines
The Internet offers a world of information, both good and bad. Almost anything a person could want is merely a few taps on a screen or a couple clicks of a mouse away. A good rule of thumb for the Internet is if you want to know about something or purchase something, there’s probably already a website just for that. The catch is actually finding it. This is what brings you to this book. You have a website. You have hired what you hope is a crack team of designers and have unleashed your slick, shiny, new site upon the web, ready to start making money. However, there is a bit of a problem: Nobody knows that your site exists. How will people find your website? The most common way that new visitors will find your site is through a search engine. A search engine is a web application designed to hunt for specific keywords and group them according to relevance. It used to be, in the stone age of the 1990s, that most websites were found via directories or word-of-mouth. Somebody linked to your website from his website, or maybe somebody posted about it on one of his newsgroups, and people found their way to you. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing were created to cut out the middleman and bring your user to you with little hassle and fuss.
In this chapter, we show you how to find your audience by giving you the tools to differentiate between types of users, helping you sort out search engines, identifying the necessary elements to make your site prominent in those engines, and giving you an insider look at how all the search engines work together.
Identifying Search Engine Users
Who is using search engines? Well, everyone. A significant amount of all visitor traffic to websites comes from search engines. Unless you are a household name like eBay or Amazon.com, chances are people won’t know where you are unless they turn to a search engine and hunt you down. In fact, even the big brands get most of their traffic from search engines. Search engines are the biggest driver of traffic on the web, and their influence only continues to grow.
But although search engines drive traffic to websites, you have to remember that your website is only one of a half trillion websites out there. Chances are, if someone does a search, even for a product that you sell, your website won’t automatically pop up in the first page of results. If you're lucky and the query is targeted enough, you might end up somewhere in the top 100 of the millions of results returned. That might be okay if you're only trying to share your vacation photos with your family, but if you need to sell a product, you need to appear higher in the results. In most cases, you want the number one spot on the first page because that’s the result everyone looks at and that most people click.
In the following sections, you find out a bit more about the audience available to you and how to reach them.
Figuring out how much people spend
The fact of the matter is that people spend money on the Internet in increasing numbers. It’s frightfully easy: All you need is a credit card, a computer with an Internet connection, and something that you've been thinking about buying. The U.S. Commerce Department reports that in 2014, e-commerce spending in the United States was over $300 billion (https://www.internetretailer.com/2015/02/17/us-annual-e-retail-sales-surpass-300-billion-first-ti). Combine that with the fact that Americans spend an average of 5 to 6 minutes of every hour online doing online shopping, and you’re looking at a viable means of moving your product. To put it simply, “There’s gold in them thar hills!”
So, now you need to get people to your website. In real estate, the most important thing is location, location, location. On the web, instead of having a prime piece of property, you need a high listing on the search engine results page (SERP). Your placement in these results is referred to as your ranking. You have a few options when it comes to achieving good rankings. One, you can make your page the best it can be and hope that people will find it in the section of the search results normally referred to as the organic rankings; or two, you can pay to appear in one of the advertising slots, identified on the search results page as ads. In the middle of 2014, it was projected that by the end of the year, marketers would spend more than $135 billion on Internet ads worldwide (http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Digital-Ad-Spending-Worldwide-Hit-3613753-Billion-2014/1010736).
While paying for ads is one way to get your business in front of Internet users, search engine optimization (SEO), when properly done, helps you to design your website in such a way that when a user does a search, your pages appear in the unpaid (that is, organic) results, in a top spot, you hope. Your main focus in this book is finding out about SEO, but because there is some overlap, you pick up a bit of paid search marketing knowledge here and there along the way.
Knowing your demographics
In order to get the most bang for your SEO buck, you need to know the demographics of your web visitors. You need to know who’s looking for you, because you need to know how best to promote yourself. For example, if you’re selling dog sweaters, advertising in biker bars is probably not a great idea. Sure, there might be a few Billy Bob Skullcrushers with a cute little Chihuahua in need of a cashmere shrug, but statistically, your ad would probably do much better in a beauty salon. The same goes for your website in a search engine. Gender, age, and income are just a few of the metrics that you want to track in terms of identifying your audience. Search engine users include slightly more male than female users across the board. Of the major search engines, Bing attracts the smallest percentage of users over the age of 55. Search engines even feed their results into other search engines, as you can see in our handy-dandy Search Engine Relationship Chart in the section “Understanding the Search Engines: They’re a Community,” later in this chapter. Table 1-1 breaks down user demographics across the three most popular search engines for your reference.
Table 1-1 User Demographics Across Major Search Engines
Google Search
Yahoo Search
Bing Search
Female
47.8%
47.4%
48.7%
Male
52.2%
52.6%
51.3%
18–34
35%
33.5%
35.3%
35–54
40.6%
42%
43.1%
55+
24.4%
24.6%
21.5%
Less than $30K/year
27.4%
27.6%
28.4%
$30K–$100K/year
53.8%
53.8%
52.5%
More than $100K/year
18.8%
18.7%
19%
For the month of July 2013 (via Compete.com)
These broad statistics are just a start. You need to know who your search engine visitors are, because demographic data helps you effectively target your desired market. This demographic distribution is often associated with search query keywords. Think of your keywords as the words that best indicate what your website content is about and that search engine visitors might use to search for what your website offers. A search engine looks for these keywords when figuring out which web pages to show on the SERP. (For an in-depth look at choosing keywords, check out Book II, Chapter 2.) Basically, your keywords are the words searchers might actually use in a search query — what they type (or speak) into a search engine — or what the engine thinks the searcher intended to search for. If you are searching for something like information on customizing classic cars, for example, you might type [classic custom cars] into the search field. (Note: Throughout the book, we use square brackets to show the search query. You don’t actually type the brackets into the search field.) Figure 1-1 displays a typical search engine results page for the query [classic custom cars].
Figure 1-1: Keyword query in a search engine: [classic custom cars].
Simply put, the search engine goes to work combing its index for web pages about these keywords and returns with the results it thinks will best satisfy you. As a website creator, therefore, if you have a product that’s geared toward a certain age bracket, toward women more than men, or toward any other demographic, you can tailor your keywords accordingly. You want to choose keywords that appeal to the right audience. For example, on the classic custom cars website, you might say convertible, open-air, top-down, roadster, drop top, or rag top (all synonyms for convertible), depending on which terms people in your target demographic use. It may seem inconsequential, but trust us, this is important if you want to be ranked well for targeted searches.
Figuring Out Why People Use Search Engines
We’ve already established that a lot of people use search engines. But what are people looking for when they use them? Are they doing research on how to restore their classic car? Are they looking for a place that sells parts for classic cars? Or are they just wanting to kill time watching videos that show custom cars racing? The answer is yes to all the above. A search engine is there to scour the billions upon billions of websites out there in order to get you where you need to go, whether you’re doing research, going shopping, or just plain wasting time.
Research
Most people who use a search engine for research purposes. They are generally looking for answers, or at least for data with which to make a decision. They're looking to find a site to fulfill a specific purpose. Someone doing a term paper on classic cars for his or her Automotive History 101 class would use a search engine to find websites with statistics on the number of cars sold in the United States, instructions for restoring and customizing old cars, and possibly communities of classic car fanatics out there. Companies would use a search engine to find websites their clients commonly visit and even to find out who their competition is.
Search engines are naturally drawn to information-rich, research-oriented sites and usually consider them more relevant than shopping-oriented sites, which is why a lot of the time the highest listing for the average query is a Wikipedia page. Wikipedia.com is an open-source online reference site that has a lot of searchable information, tightly cross-linked with millions of links from other websites (backlinks). Open source means that anyone can have access to the text and edit it. Wikipedia is practically guaranteed to have a high ranking on the strength of its site architecture alone. (We go over site architecture in depth in Book IV.) Wikipedia is an open-source project; thus, information should be taken with a grain of salt as there is no guarantee of accuracy. This brings us to an important lesson of search engines — they base “authority” on the quality of your content and the quality, relevance, and quantity of other sites linking to your site — that's what positions your site as an authority in the eyes of the search engine. Accuracy of information is not one of their criteria; notability is. Search engines are prone to confusing popularity with expertise, though they are improving in this area.
In order to take advantage of research queries, you need to gear your site content toward things that would be of interest to a researcher. In-depth how-to articles, product comparisons and reviews, and free information are all things that attract researchers to your site.
Shopping
Many people use a search engine to shop. After the research cycle is over, search queries change to terms that reflect a buying mindset. Phrases like “best price” and “free shipping” signal a searcher in need of a point of purchase. Optimizing your web page to meet the needs of that type of visitor results in higher conversions (actions taken by a user who meets a sales or business goal) for your site. As we mention in the preceding section, global search engines such as Google tend to reward research-oriented sites, so your pages have to strike a balance between sales-oriented terms and research-oriented terms.
Although Google and Bing do integrate products right into their regular search results, shopping is where specialized engines also come into the picture. Although you can use a regular search engine to find what it is you’re shopping for, some people find it more efficient to use a search engine geared directly toward buying products. Some websites out there are actually search engines just for shopping. Amazon.com, eBay, Alibaba, and Shopping.com are all examples of shopping-only engines. And Google has its own shopping platform called Google Shopping. When you type in a query for the particular item you are looking for, your results include the actual item instead of websites where the item is sold. For example, say you’re buying a book on Amazon.com. You type the title into the search bar, and it returns a page of results. Now, you have the option of either buying it directly from Amazon.com, or, if you’re on a budget, clicking over to the used book section. Booksellers provide Amazon.com with a list of their used stock, and Amazon.com handles all the purchasing, shipping, and ordering info. With shopping searches on Bing and Google, all those results can also be shown, mixed in with ads, so you can jump to Amazon.com, eBay, or Mike’s Bookshop just as easily. And as with all things on the Internet, odds are that somebody, somewhere, has exactly what you’re looking for. Figure 1-2 displays a results page from a Google Shopping search.
Figure 1-2: A typical Google Shopping search results page.
Entertainment
Research and shopping aren't the only reasons to visit a search engine. The Internet is a vast, addictive, reliable resource for consuming your entire afternoon, and lots of users out there start with the search engines to find ways of entertaining themselves. They look up things like videos, movie trailers, games, and social networking sites. Technically, it’s also research, but it’s research used strictly for entertainment purposes. A child of the ’80s might want to download an old-school version of the Oregon Trail video game onto her computer so she can recall the heady days of third grade. It's a quest made easy with a quick search on Google. Or if you want to find out what those wacky young Hollywood starlets are up to, you can turn to a search engine to bring you what you need.
If you’re looking for a video, odds are it’s going to be something from YouTube, much like your research results are going to include a Wikipedia page. YouTube is another excellent example of a site that achieves high listings on results pages, especially in Google (which owns YouTube). This immensely popular video-sharing website enables people with a camera and a working email address to upload videos of themselves doing just about anything, from talking about their day to shaving their cats. The videos themselves have keyword-rich listings in order to be easily located in video searches, plus videos show up in regular web search results as well, so videos provide lots of ranking opportunities. Many major companies have jumped on the YouTube bandwagon, creating channels for their companies (a YouTube channel is a specific account housing many videos). Record companies use channels to promote bands, production companies use them to unleash the official trailers for their upcoming movies, and even your business can produce videos that can be seen by searchers everywhere (not just in a theater near you).
Discovering the Necessary Elements for Getting High Keyword Rankings
If the mantra of real estate is location, location, location, and the very best location on the web is on page one of the search engines, you need to know the SEO elements that can get you there. A good place to start is with keywords.
Search engines use advanced processes to categorize and analyze keyword usage and other factors in order to figure out what each website is about and bring searchers the web pages they’re looking for. The more relevant your keywords and content are to the user's query and intent, the better chance your page has of ranking in a search engine's results. Keeping the keywords clear, precise, and simple helps the search engines do their job a whole lot faster. If you’re selling something like customized classic cars, you should probably make sure your text includes keywords like classic cars, customized cars, custom classic Mustangs, and so forth, as well as clarifying words like antique, vintage, automobile, and restored. You can read more about how to choose your keywords in Book II.
In the following sections, you get a broad, brief overview on how you get a higher rank than the other guy who’s selling restored used cars. You need to know the basics, or you can't do targeted SEO.
The advantage of an SEO-compliant site
Having an SEO-compliant website entails tailoring your website so that it follows search engine guidelines and communicates clearly what it’s about and in a way search engines can understand. Basically, you want search engine spiders to easily digest all the juicy content in your website and not find any red flags along the way. Communicating well with search engines includes optimizing your page titles and metadata (the page title, description tag and keywords tag are collectively known as metadata) so that they contain (but aren’t stuffed with) relevant keywords for your subject. Also, make sure that your web pages contain searchable text and not just pretty Flash animations and images (because search engines have limited capability to understand non-text content), and that all your images contain an Altattribute (a description of an image) with brief text that describes the content of the image. You also need to be sure that all your internal content as well as your links are organized in a hierarchical manner that allows both search engines and users to easily understand what a site is about. You want to be sure to optimize every single one of these elements. Use this list (individual items are covered later in this book) to get yourself organized:
Title
tag
Meta Description
tag
Meta Keywords
tag
Heading tag(s)
Textual content
Alt
attributes on all images
Fully qualified links
Sitemaps (both XML and HTML, as explained in
Book VI
)
Text navigation
Canonical
elements
Structured data markup
URL structure (file naming, limiting parameters)
Ordered and unordered lists
JavaScript/CSS externalized
Robots text (
.txt
) file
Web analytics
Keyword research (technically a process — see
Book II
)
Link development
Image names
Privacy statement
Contact information
Dedicated IP address
Defining a clear subject theme
Another way of getting a high keyword ranking is having a clear subject-matter theme to the site. If you’re selling kits to customize classic cars, keeping your website focused on the topic of classic car customization not only makes it easier for users to navigate your site and research or purchase what they need, but it also increases your credibility and your chances of ranking for related keyword queries. Search engine spiders are programs that crawl the World Wide Web to search for and index data. The more similarly themed keywords you have on your pages, the better. It’s the nature of a search engine to break up a site into subjects that add up to an overall theme for easy categorization, and the more obvious your site theme is, the higher your results will be.
It’s kind of like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet and deciding you want to get a salad. You, the search engine, immediately go to the salad corner of the buffet because it’s been clearly labeled, and from there, you can do your breakdowns. You want romaine lettuce, croutons, parmesan cheese, and Caesar dressing, so you go to where they keep the lettuce, the trimmings, and the dressings in the salad bar section. It’s easy to find what you want if everything is grouped accordingly. But if the restaurant stuck the dressing over with the mashed potatoes, you’d have trouble finding it because salad dressing and potatoes don’t normally go together. Similarly, when you keep your website content organized with everything in its proper place, the search engine views your content with clarity, understanding what you're about — which in turn improves your credibility as an expert and gives you a better chance to rank. Siloing is a way of structuring your content and navigational links in order to present a clear subject-matter theme to the search engines. For more on this technique, refer to Book II, Chapter 4 as well as the entirety of Book VI.
Focusing on consistency
Methodical consistent implementation is the principle that says that when you update your website, you should do it the same way every time. Your site should have a consistent look and feel over time without massive reorganizations at every update. In order for a search engine to maintain efficiency, you need to keep related content all placed in the same area.
It is confusing to customers to have things constantly changing around. Search engines and visitors to your website face the same challenge as a restaurant patron. Getting back to our salad bar analogy from the preceding section, the restaurant owner shouldn’t scatter the salad dressings according to the whims of his buffet designer, randomly moving things every time he gets in a new topping or someone discontinues one of the old dressings.
You also need to keep all your updating processes consistent. That way, if something goes wrong during your next update, you can pinpoint what went wrong where without too much hassle, since you update things the same way every time.
Building for the long term
You need to consider your persistence for the long term. How long will your website be sticking around? Ideally, as with any business, you want to build it to last without letting it fall behind and look dated. Relevancy to the current market is a big part of this, and if your site is behind the times, it’s probably behind your competitors. The technology that you use to build your website is inevitably going to change as the Internet advances, but your approach to relevancy should remain the same, incorporating new technologies as they arise. In the early days of the web, for example, frames were used to build sites, but that looks very outdated now. A few years ago, splash pages (introductory pages, mostly built in Flash and providing little content or value to the user) were very popular. Today, they are discouraged because the search engines cannot typically see much of the content behind the Flash programming and therefore don't know what the page is about. Web developers and designers should use code that is compatible with the search engines. The Internet is an ever-changing entity, and if you’re not persistent about keeping up with the times, you might fall by the wayside.
Understanding the Search Engines: They're a Community
You’ll be happy to hear there are really only a few search engines that you need to consider in your SEO planning. Each search engine appears to be a unique company with its own unique service. When people choose to run a search using Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask.com, or any of the others, they might think they’ve made a choice between competing services and expect to get varying results. But they’d be surprised to find out that under the surface, these seeming competitors are often actually working together — at least on the data level.
Google’s stated purpose is to “organize the world’s information.” When you think about the trillions of web pages that exist, multiplying and morphing every day, it’s hard to imagine a more ambitious undertaking. It makes sense, then, that not every search engine attempts such a daunting task itself. Instead, the different search engines share the wealth when it comes to indexed data, much like a community.
You can see at a glance how this community works. Figure 1-3 shows how the major players in the search engine field interact.
Chart courtesy of Bruce Clay, Inc.
Figure 1-3: The Search Engine Relationship Chart depicts the connections between search engines.
The Search Engine Relationship Chart (subject to change; the current chart is at www.bruceclay.com/serc/) includes all the major players in the United States. The arrows depict search results data flowing from supplying sites to receiving sites. Only two players — Google and Bing — are suppliers. They actually gather and provide search results data, both organic and paid. Ask.com maintains its own organic data but receives paid listings from Google. Yahoo, on the other hand, receives its organic data but generates its own paid ads. The chart makes it clear that when you do a search on Yahoo, for instance, the order of the results is determined by Yahoo, but the indexed results are supplied by Bing.
A look back: Search engines in the beginning
Bruce Clay first published his Search Engine Relationship Chart® in 2000. Back then, more major players were in the search game, and things were, to say the least, somewhat cluttered. The chart had 26 companies on it: everyone from Yahoo to Magellan to that upstart Google. Fifteen of those companies took their primary results from their own indexes; five of those supplied secondary results to other engines. Without a road map, it was an impossible task to keep it all straight. But over the years, things changed. What was once a cluttered mess is now a tidy interplay of a select group of companies. This figure shows what the very first Search Engine Relationship Chart looked like.
Note: To see an interactive view of how the search engine landscape changed over time, check out www.bruceclay.com/serc_histogram/histogram.htm.
Looking at search results: Apples and oranges
One more thing to know about search results: There are two main types. Figure 1-4 points out that a search engine can show these two different types of results simultaneously:
Organic search results are the web page listings that search engines find most relevant to the user’s search query and perceived intent. SEO focuses on getting your website ranked high in the organic search results (also called
natural
results).
Paid results are basically advertisements. — the website owners have paid to have their web pages and products display for certain keywords, so these listings show up when someone runs a search containing those keywords. (For more on the whys and hows of paid results, you can read about pay per click advertising in Chapter 4 of this minibook.)
Figure 1-4: A results page from Google with organic and paid results highlighted.
On a search results page, you can tell paid results from organic search results because search engines set apart the paid listings, putting them above or to the right of the primary results, giving them a shaded background or border lines, labeling the column as “ads” or “sponsored,” or providing other visual clues. Figure 1-4 shows the difference between paid listings and organic results.
Typical web users might not realize they’re looking at apples and oranges when they get their search results. Knowing the difference enables a searcher to make a better informed decision about the relevancy of a result. Additionally, because the paid results are advertising, they may actually be more useful to a shopping searcher than a researcher (remembering that search engines favor research results).
How do they get all that data?
Okay, so how do they do it? How do search engines keep track of everything and pop up results so fast? Behold the wonder of technology!
Gathering the data is the first step. An automated process (known as spidering) constantly crawls the Internet, gathering web-page data into servers. Google calls its spider Googlebot; you could refer to the data-gathering software processes as spiders, robots, bots, or crawlers, but they’re all the same thing. Whatever you call them, they pull in masses of raw data and do so repeatedly. This is why changes to your website might be seen within a day or might take up to a few weeks to be reflected in search engine results.
In the second step, search engines have to index the data to make it usable. Indexing
