SEARCH ENGINE

OPTIMISATION(SEO)
Introduction to SEO

 SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) involves

altering website code, content, and presence
in order to increase rankings in search
engines
 At least half a billion searches are made
worldwide on a daily basis
 If you are ranked at the top of a search engine,
you are essentially running a free marketing
campaign.
Introduction to SEO
Which search engine?
 There are some main players which you must always
consider optimising for, namely Google, Yahoo, MSN,
AOL.
 Although Google makes up for almost half of worldwide
searches, it is not always a good tactic to relate your site
prominence only on Google
 If half a billion searches are made per day, this means that
over 250,000,000 are made on other Search Engines
 Each search engine searches the web and ranks sites
differently, so when you may be at the top of one search
engine, you might not even be listed on another one
Introduction to SEO
How a search engine works
 Search engines use programs called spiders, or bots, to search
the internet and document their findings.
 Spiders firstly go to a webpage and analyse it
 Goes through the HTML code and categorises the most
important words (keywords) in the document.
 It then moves on to any pages that linked from the current
page.
 This is one way how search engines find new pages.
 It also visits pages that may not be linked by other pages, but
were submitted by search engines.
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.
Introduction to SEO
Search Engine Statistics

 Search engine market shares in November

2005 for searches in the USA
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
CSS Basics
 CSS can make a simple HTML page look
completely different.
 CSS has little or no impact on SEO
 You can make a site look like whatever you want
without losing SE rankings
 CSS code can be placed within an HTML
document, or in a separate file
 If you use a separate file, you can use it for every
page
 This makes updating the way your site looks very
easily, because you only need to update one file.
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
Meta tags
 Meta tags are used to provide a description of
the page and a list of main keywords it used.

 Title tags
 Most search engines sees this tag as an
important tag for categorizing what type of
site you have.
 The text in this tag chooses up on the top of
your browser window.
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
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
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.
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.
Queries....???


G Thank you …