The Search For Success - Optimizing Search Engines

Welcome to Digital
Marketing
Chapter -4
The Search for Success – Optimizing search engines
Search: the online marketer’s holy grail
• More than 80 per cent of internet users find new websites is by typing a query into
one of the major search engines
• Where do you go when you’re looking for information, products or services online?
 Do you start typing random URLs into the address bar of your favorite browser and
hope for the best.
 Or do you head over to the home page of your favorite search engine and type in a
query
• In fact, if you type something that’s not a URL into the address bar of today’s most
popular browsers, you’re automatically redirected to your default search engine,
using the text you entered as your search string.
• Both the increasingly widespread adoption of high-speed internet access in the home
and the ever-increasing capability and market penetration of mobile digital devices
• The rise of social networking sites, and the word-of-mouth and viral marketing
opportunities may in time dilute the prominence of SEO and paid search advertising
Likewise, as ever increasing numbers of web users comfortable with their favorite
online brands
• They are likely to access more and more sites directly and rely on search less and
less.
• Why is search engine optimization so important?
Simply because search engines give website owners a prime opportunity

to put their products, services or brands in front of a vast and ever-
growing market of prospective customers at the precise time those
customers are looking for them.
The better the search experience for the user, the better the reputation of
the search engine and the more users it will attract.
• Mechanism
To deliver accurate, relevant, high-quality search results to their users

search engines need to gather detailed information about the billions of
web pages out there.
They do this using automated programs called ‘bots’ (short for ‘robots’) –
also known as ‘spiders’ – which they send out to ‘crawl’ the web. Spiders
follow hyperlinks and gather information about the pages that they find.
• Mechanism
Once a page has been crawled by a spider, the search engine stores
details about that page’s contents and the links both into and out of it in a
massive database called an index.
This index is highly optimized so that results for any of the hundreds of
millions of search requests received every day can be retrieved from it
almost instantly.
• Provide an easy path for Spiders
If you’re looking to attract search engine traffic, the last thing you want to
do is make it difficult for search engines to index your website.
Make sure your site design doesn’t present unnecessary obstacles to

search engine spiders.
Spiders are interested in text, text and more text. They don’t see the
graphics, clever animations and other flashy bells and whistles that web
designers routinely use to make sites look pretty.
Words are the key to unlocking the power of search
• Choosing effective keywords
Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes, sitting in front of your favorite

search engine looking for information on the product or service you’re
selling. What would you type into the box?
Common but personalized words do work faster.
Google AdWords (http://tinyurl. com/qkfuh) and

SEO Book website (http://tinyurl.com/ 22w6pa)
These websites offer a free basic service with paid upgrades for a more
comprehensive version.
• Analyse the competition
Services on sites like SEO ToolSet (www.seotoolset.com) and

Compete (www.compete.com) can provide information on which keywords are
driving traffic to your competitors’ websites from the major search engines
Which of your competitors’ sites are ranking for

which keyword phrases – all of which can inform the choice of keywords you want to
optimize for.
• I have my initial keyword list; now what?
First thing you’ll want to do is narrow your initial list down to a more manageable size.
To whittle your list down to size, start by eliminating all of the words or phrases that are much too
general
Be more product/brand oriented, for example: don’t add typical words, like estate agency rather
prefer the complete name of the business.
The more general a keyword, the less likely it is that your site will contain what the searcher is trying
to find.
Effective SEO isn’t just about generating traffic volume, it drives the maximum volume of targeted
traffic to your site.
• Long-tail versus short-tail keywords
Keywords in SEO fall into two broad categories. Short-tail keywords are simple one- or two-word
phrases that are typically very general in nature and attract a large volume of individual search
requests.
Examples might include ‘cheap city centre hotel Dublin’, ‘stags weekend hotel Temple Bar Dublin’ or
‘business hotel with gym and spa Wexford’.
Too long to retain consumer and SEO interest.

• Long-tail versus short-tail keywords
• Focus on one page at a time
Remember ! When a search engine presents results to a user, it’s not presenting
whole sites; it’s presenting the individual pages that, according to its algorithms, best
match a user’s query.
Each page in your website will have different target keywords that reflect the page’s
content’
• Choose your page <title>s carefully
A small but very important HTML tag that lives in the header section of the code on
each of your web pages. It’s called the ‘title’ tag.
One of the most important textural content on the website
Should be Extremely prominent and clear
Giving your pages concise, compelling and informative titles will entice more users to
click through to your page when it appears in search results.
Content – the most important thing on your site
When writing content for your site the key thing to remember is that you’re writing
it, first and foremost, for a human audience, not for search engine spiders.
Yes, your pages need to be ‘search engine friendly’, but the spiders should always be
a secondary consideration: put your human audience first.
• Content and the search engines
Today’s generation of search engines, unlike their predecessors, don’t rely on meta-
data to judge the content of a page.
They analyze and interpret the actual content presented to the user. And they’re
getting better at doing it all the time.
• Keywords in content
The subject of keywords in content is something that generates a lot of debate in SEO
circles: where to place them, when and how often they need to appear on the page
and lots.
Just make sure that your chosen keyword or phrase is contained in the title tag and
URL
Make sure It appears with the relevant graphics in case of visual illustrations .
Links – second only to content
• Why are links so important?

Links have a high importance and significance, when we talk about SEO
 Search engines need to decide which pages in their index are relevant to the user’s query,
 and then they need to rank those pages in terms of quality and importance.
The role of internal and external links
External links are links that reside on pages that do not belong to your domain – in
other words, links from other websites.
Internal links are the links that reside on pages that belong to your domain or
subdomains – in other words, links between pages on the same website, or pages
that reside in subdomains of the primary domain.
Link-building tips
• Generate truly valuable content that other sites will want to link to
These one-way unsolicited links are by far the most valuable kind. Search engines
love them and see them as a genuine endorsement of one site by another.
As your site becomes more visible, the content will organically attract more links,
which in turn will improve your visibility, attracting even more links.
Link-building tips
• Let people know your site is out there
Promote your site at every opportunity, especially in places where you know there
are other website owners. Use the medium to your advantage. Blogs, Online
communities, forums, social networking sites and e-mail lists all offer great
opportunities.
Link-building tips
• Create your own blog
A blog can be an incredibly powerful promotional and link-building tool can be a
great way to increase both visibility and incoming links.
Network, network, network

Use your network of contacts both online and offline to promote your site and
encourage people to link to it.
Link-building tips
• Ask the people who link to your competitors to link to you
Approach those sites and ask them if they’d be willing to link to your site too. After
all, if they link to your competitors, why wouldn’t they?
• Submit your site to high-quality directories

Getting your site listed in high-quality, well-respected online directories can be a
great way to get your link building started. These links will help both search engine
spiders and that all-important human traffic to find your site
Advertising on the search engines
What is pay-per-click (PPC) search engine advertising?
These are usually labelled with something like ‘sponsored links’ or ‘sponsored results’
to make it clear to users that they are, in fact, paid-for ads and not part of the search
engine’s organic listing.
How does paid search advertising work?
With PPC, you’re not paying for a promise, and you’re not paying to load an ad onto a
page. You’re paying for an actual result, a click. With PPC, you don’t pay if nobody
sees your ad, and you don’t even pay if someone does see it but doesn’t click. You
pay only when someone clicks your ad.
How does paid search advertising work?
Later,
someone If the
The arrives at searcher
The
advertiser the search . The search clicks the
The The advertiser
joins a engine, engine ad, he is
advertiser advertiser specifies
search enters one finds the taken to the
creates a specifies how much
engine’s of the matching advertiser’s
small text with which he’s willing
PPC keywords ads and Web site,
ad (in some keywords to pay each
program or keyword places them and the
cases, PPC the ad time
and “loads” phrases on the advertiser
can include should be someone
the account specified, results is charged
images). associated. clicks on
with some page. for the click.
the ad. and clicks
money .
the Search
button.
Black Hat, the darker side of search
Black hat SEO is a practice against search engine guidelines,

used to get a site ranking higher in search results.
These unethical tactics don’t solve for the searcher and often end in a penalty from search engines.
Black hat techniques include keyword stuffing, cloaking, and using private link networks.
Techniques
• Keyword stuffing
This is repeating keywords over and over again on a given web page.
Example
“We are in the business of selling outbound marketing software. Outbound marketing

software is what we sell. If you are thinking of getting outbound marketing
software get in touch with one of our outbound marketing software consultants.”
Techniques
• Cloaking
involves showing one piece of content to users and a different piece of content to search engines. If
you find cloaking on your website, then you should worry as your website will get banned by search
engines.
• Sneaky Redirects
A redirect involves sending someone to a different URL than the one they initially clicked. for example,
LinkedIn redirecting you to someone's full profile when you are logged in, rather than show you the public version
of a users profile when you are logged out.
Techniques
• Buying expired domains
This is the practice of buying up expired domains that were once high-ranking pages to try to acquire
some of the old site’s inbound links.
Spam page
This is a page with no meaningful content that is full of ads that the webmaster makes money from if
someone clicks on them.

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Welcome to Digital

Simply because search engines give website owners a prime opportunity

To deliver accurate, relevant, high-quality search results to their users

Make sure your site design doesn’t present unnecessary obstacles to

Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes, sitting in front of your favorite

Common but personalized words do work faster.

Google AdWords (http://tinyurl. com/qkfuh) and

Services on sites like SEO ToolSet (www.seotoolset.com) and

Which of your competitors’ sites are ranking for

Too long to retain consumer and SEO interest.

One of the most important textural content on the website

Should be Extremely prominent and clear

• Why are links so important?

Network, network, network

• Submit your site to high-quality directories

Black hat SEO is a practice against search engine guidelines,

“We are in the business of selling outbound marketing software. Outbound marketing

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