Marketing Angels Search Engine Optimisation SEO

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Marketing Angels Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

• Presented by
• Natividad Hernandez-McKernan

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Search Engine Optimisation, the basic facts..

• Marketing Angels Conference
• Sydney
• October 12, 2008

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The Internet..some Basic facts

• Australia has 11.3 million Internet users
• 64 of Australian households have Internet access
  
• Australians spend more time online than watching
  TV 22 hours per week for the web compared to 14
  hours for TV
• 52 of people research a product or service
  online before they buy it in store
• 61 of Australian Internet users regularly
  purchase goods and services online
• Australians aged between 25-34 shopped online the
  most (71), followed by 35-44 year olds (66)
• The 4.4 million Internet users that don't shop
  online say they have no need to (34), have
  security concerns (20) or prefer shopping in
  person (19)
• online shopping has seen a 40 surge in growth.
  According to a recent Nielsen Online report, more
  than 80 of online consumers shopped online in
  2007, bringing total use over the past two years
  to the 40 growth mark.
•   Google continues to dominate with 70 market
  share in the US and world wide.
• Source Australian Bureau of Statistics Household
  Use of Information Technology 2006-07 report,
  Forrester research 2006 and ABC News 2008. 

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E-commerce trends(global)

• E-commerce is one sector that will see continued
  growth opportunities even in an economic
  downturn.
• industry observers say growth and revenue
  opportunities for e-commerce ventures -- such as
  alternative payment options, next-generation
  advertising technologies, trading services,
  lead-generation platforms, and more -- are as
  attractive as ever.
• Estimates are something like A991 million to
  1.5 billion was spent in 2007 using the internet
• NOTE Internet advertising represents just 10
  percent of global ad expenditures. Even so, that
  makes it a 21 billion industry -- one that's
  growing faster than any other advertising sector.
  Advertising as a whole is transitioning from
  print, radio and television to the Internet. This
  is a major media shift, and it will create great
  opportunity for start-ups.

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E-commerce contd

• E-commerce remains appealing to consumers
• and of interest to VCs (venture capitalists)
• for several reasons
• Increased Internet adoption,
• low-cost broadband,
• ubiquitous smartphones,
• increasingly sophisticated e-marketing
  technology and
• stronger security
• The above are driving consumers to shop online.
  In addition, when they shop online
• Consumers typically find the goods they want at
  prices that local retailers find hard to beat.
• Better still, orders are delivered to consumers'
  doors for much less than the cost of a tank of
  petrol

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Online Marketing

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

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So what are search engines?
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Types of Search Engines

• Crawlers-use software called robots, spiders, or
  crawlers to add new pages to its database which
  is called an index.
• Directories-use humans to manually fill their
  databases
• META engines - combines results from a number of
  search engines at the same time and lays them out
  in a formatted result page. Examples of
  multi-engines are MetaCrawler (http//www.metacraw
  ler.com) and DogPile (http//www.dogpile.com).
  MetaCrawler refers your search to seven of the
  most popular search engines (including AltaVista
  and Lycos), then compiles and ranks the results
  for you. Dogpile is a metasearch engine that
  fetches results from Google, Yahoo!, Live Search,
  Ask.com, About. ...
• paid-inclusion engines- with these engines you
  have no way other than to pay a recurring or
  one-time fee to keep your site either listed, re-
  spidered, or top-ranked for keywords of your
  choice. There are very few search engines that
  solely focus on paid listings. However, most
  major search engines offer a paid listing option
  as a part of their indexing and ranking system.

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Search enginesthe key players

• Google
• Yahoo
• MSN

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and the winner is.

• Google has approximately 70 of the US market,
  88 of the Australian market and 87 of the UK
  market.
• In the Australian market, Google search accounted
  for 88 of all searches in June 2008 - a 12
  increase compared with June 2007. MSN search
  accounted for 7 and Yahoo search accounted for
  4.00 of AU searches in June 2008

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Lets have a look at Google

• Google Fun Facts
• Google's name is a play on the word googol, which
  refers to the number 1 followed by one hundred
  zeroes. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta,
  nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner,
  and was popularized in the book, "Mathematics and
  the Imagination" by Kasner and James Newman.
  Google's play on the term reflects the company's
  mission to organize the immense amount of
  information available on the web.
• Google started as a research project at Stanford
  University, created by Ph.D. candidates Larry
  Page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 years old
  and 23 years old respectively (a combined 47
  years old).
• The basis of Google's search technology is called
  PageRank, and assigns an "importance" value to
  each page on the web and gives it a rank to
  determine how useful it is. However, that's not
  why it's called PageRank. It's actually named
  after Google co-founder Larry Page
• Google is 10 years old..

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The Google Spider
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Google botshow it works

• The Googlebot (and other search engine bots)
  use very complicated math to judge what sites
  should appear in search results and what sites
  get to be on the first page where customers are
  more likely to see and click on the result. These
  mathematical algorithms are like trade secrets
  that are constantly readjusted, in an effort to
  reward quality sites and devalue "tricks" like
  spam and other black hat tricks.
• They then go into a few simple points of on
  and off-site factors, especially using concrete
  language, having relevant incoming links and
  offering fresh content that reads like quality
  to human eyeballs.

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What is SEO?

• Search Engine Optimisation or website
  optimisation is what is commonly referred to as
  'on-page' optimisation. It involves assessing and
  removing any obstacles in a site that might
  hinder its search performance, the loading of key
  information in specific places on a page and the
  optimisation of technical areas of a site such as
  title tags, meta description tags, meta keyword
  tags, headings, image alt tags, and hyperlinks.
• On page Search Engine Optimisation services
  generally also include keyword research and
  analysis, the building of site content in service
  and/or product pages and more recently the use of
  Business Blogs.
• It is however, a PROCESS an ongoing one!!!
• Source SEO forum

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SEO simplified

• In simple terms, SEO is the active practice
  of optimising a web site by improving
  internal(technical) and external (blogs,
  graphics, content entry)aspects in order to
  increase the traffic the site receives from
  search engines. E.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.
• Human eyes see and judge the visual page.
  Usability is the art of making what people see
  and interact with the user friendly site. SEO
  is like usability for spiders. Search engines use
  programs called spiders to "see" and judge web
  pages.

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How can I best optimise a website?

• SEO can be broken down into 3 basic stages
•  
• Website build and Navigation (Development)
• Pre Launch (website content)
• Ongoing website management (web administration)

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SEM ( search Engine Marketing is

• While

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What is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?

• Search Engine Marketing is a much more
  holistic approach to promoting a website on the
  Internet and involves both 'on-page' factors
  (SEO) as mentioned and 'off-page' factors such
  as link building, content based marketing (such
  as article marketing), paid inclusion and pay per
  click campaigns (also known as PPC or sponsored
  links) provided through programmes such as Google
  AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing.

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Facts About SEO That We Need To Know

• Fact 1 SEO is a long, ongoing process
• Optimising a site is an ongoing process
  that needs constant attention.  When a new site
  goes live, it can take Google anywhere from 3
  weeks to 3 months to even find the site and store
  it in their database, and then another couple of
  months for the site to earn a place in search
  results.  Then once your site is up and running,
  boosting your PageRank (the scale that Google
  uses to determine the importance of your site and
  therefore where it ranks in searches) takes time
  and effort updating keywords, writing new
  content and organising links are all
  time-consuming, and then you have to wait for
  Google to find your changes.  So be patient.
• PageRank Google assigns a numeric weighting from
  0-10 for each webpage on the net and denotes the
  importance of the page in Googles eyes. The
  higher the number, the better it is in terms of
  importance.

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Fact 2 Do your keyword research

• You need to use keywords throughout your site so
  it gets listed in the search engine results when
  a consumer conducts a search using those words. 
  Therefore, you need to know what words your
  target audience are searching for so you can use
  them in your content.  This is called keyword
  research first you brainstorm a big list of all
  the words and phrases related to your business
  (even ask your clients), then use keyword
  generator tools to narrow down this list.  You
  also need to look at the competition for keywords
  and choose more specific words marketing is
  far too common, so try something like outsourced
  marketing Sydney. 
• Keyword research is essential for SEO

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Fact 3 Quality content is the key to success

• The hardest thing about optimising a website
  is creating content that is balanced between the
  needs of search engines and the needs of the
  target market. If its too SEO-focused, it will
  be gibberish for users but if you dont use
  enough keywords you wont rank well on search
  engines. The main thing is to only use keywords
  in your copy when they make sense and not to
  overuse them (the recommended is about 15 of the
  same keyword per page). Try to use variations of
  the main keywords through the text, because
  search engines will pick up on those too.
• Overall, the best to do is research your
  content thoroughly, tailor it to the needs of the
  clients business and write it well the search
  engines can tell if your copy is good, and
  theyll reward you for it.
• ( if youre not a copywriter, find a good web
  content writer)

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Fact 4 - You need keywords throughoutthe whole
site

• It is a misconception that you only need to
  list your key words on your home page (although
  that is important).
• It is just as important to use them
  throughout the site and adjust your keywords to
  the content of each page. 
• Keywords are important to be considered for
  your page title, Meta keywords, descriptions
  headings, and content. ( as discussed previously)
• WHY? Spiders crawl pages, not sites globally.

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By the Way

• According to Google there are now 1 trillion
  unique pages on the www . Google further
  estimates this number to grow at several billion
  pages per day!!!
• Source Nett magazine
• Sept.08issue

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What kind of witch are you?
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Fact 5 - Black hat techniques dont work

• When SEO first became a hot topic, some
  tech savvy people tried to trick the search
  engines by keyword stuffing (putting long lists
  of keywords in pages), using invisible text
  (putting keywords in the background colour so
  users couldnt read it but search engines could)
  and creating fake pages. These techniques worked
  in the short-term, but soon the search engines
  figured out what they were doing and penalised
  them. Now, the search engines are on the lookout
  for unethical things like this and will
  immediately ban any website that engages in black
  hat SEO.
• So no matter what SEO experts promise about
  how quickly they can boost a sites ranking dont
  do it! Its definitely not worth it.
• It sometimes takes 12 to 18 months for Google to
  re-consider indexing a banned website site again.

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Fact 6 - Search engines can't read images

• Take advice before having a flash site or
  one with lots of images and not much content. 
  This can go against you as the search engines
  don't register words that appear in images.  This
  is also important to consider for when you use
  flash in navigation, as keywords importance is
  also measured here. To make it easier for Google
  to log your site and content, your site is
  automatically mapped in text and in XML - so
  every time you make a change to your navigation
  or add a page, it is automatically adjusted.
• (XML is basically a file format, much like a
  Microsoft Word document, an Adobe Acrobat file, a
  spreadsheet file, an online HTML page, or a Comma
  Separated Values file.)
• Note Web Developers can use some software with a
  Flash effect and should also use the ltaltgt tags
  to define the image(s)
• Google also claims to have developed a new
  algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash
  files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and
  banners, to self-contained Flash websites but
  this remains to be seen.

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Fact 7 - The playing field can change at any
time

• The algorithm that Google uses to analyse and
  rank websites is not guaranteed Google can
  choose to change it whenever they want.  Websites
  that dont keep up-to-date with the changes will
  slide down the rankings and get overtaken by
  sites that follow the new algorithm. 
• Therefore, its very important that your website
  developer or SEO consultant stays up-to-date with
  the algorithm so they can advise you or make any
  changes quickly and keep the site ranking high. 
• THIS IS WHY SEO is a continuing PROCESS!!!!

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Fact 8 Updating your site regularly will make
you search engine friendly

• As mentioned, SEO isnt a one-off thing
  you cant write really good copy with lots of
  keywords and then leave it on your site for 2
  years.  You need to constantly update and improve
  it by adding in new articles, newsletters,
  updating statistics and product descriptions,
  rewriting and tweaking copy and fixing broken
  links.  Changes like this will draw search engine
  spiders back to your site, which will help you
  climb the ranks. 
• Constantly updating also ensures you are
  using still using the right keywords to reach
  your market and that your content is fresh and
  interesting for the humans that use your site!
• Therefore, HAVE CONTROL OF YOUR SITE with CMS.
• TIP If you havent got the time to write, search
  for writers. Go to elance.com and guru.com

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Fact 9 Getting links is essential

• The content of your site is only half the
  battle in SEO you need to have lots of other
  websites linking to yours so the search engines
  think you are important enough to put at the top
  of their rankings.  Dont get links using schemes
  like link farms, because Google will penalise you
  for this, and also try to avoid reciprocal links
  (Ill link to you if you link to me), because
  Google doesnt place much importance on these
  either. 
• Build links by sharing your content with
  other reputable sites sharing articles and
  eBooks, commenting on blogs, listing your
  business in directories and showcasing your work
  on community sites. 
•  Check your site is at least added to
  www.theweblisting.com, a site designed to start
  you off on the path of getting higher ranked
  sites linking to yours. And make sure you include
  a text link to your website every time you
  contribute something to another site.

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Some more things to remember.

• That important front door
• The front page of your website is 90 of the
  battle in winning a sale or getting a prospect to
  make contact.
• Take a step back for a moment and glance at your
  front page. Does it clearly summarise what you do
  and prompt visitors to look further, take action
  and/or make contact?

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Users hate slow websites

• Statistics suggest that if a website doesnt
  load within eight seconds, around one-third of
  visitors will leave.
• Beware! If your target audience is professionals
  aged between 25 and 55, you only have 10 to 12
  seconds to grab their attention and only 8
  seconds if your audience is younger than this.

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A website is never finished

• The degree to which your website evolves will
  depend on the type of website you settle upon and
  where it fits into your business as a whole. If
  changes are frequent you should seriously
  consider a Content Management System
• I personally like Joomla CMS

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Make your website really perform

• Make sure that you spend time analysing (and
  changing where necessary) all the variables to
  make a better website that will really work for
  you e.g.
• Your site may look great but has it been
  optimised for search engines? Can people find you
  online?
• Is the text on your web pages scannable,
  compelling, concise and web-friendly? And does
  your copy guide your visitors through their
  buying decision, by effectively communicating
  your site's key benefits?
• Do you have a mechanism to enable a two-way
  relationship with your site visitors (via opt-in
  / e-marketing)?
• Is your site designed to cope with platform and
  browser diversity?
• Is your site content 'sticky' and fresh enough to
  encourage repeat visits and word-of-mouth
  marketing?
• Are there enough calls to action and contact
  information points?
• Is your site accessible, quick and easy to use?
• Are you tracking visitor numbers and metrics
  effectively?
• Are you aware of the strengths, weaknesses and
  problems with your website?
• And just how enjoyable is your website visitor's
  experience?

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Ranking highly in Google can have a massive
impact on sales/ leads

• Put some of these ideas into action and you might
  just see your site start to climb the search
  engine rankings.

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The other side of the coin

• When your site is not optimised

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What is the implication to yourBusiness if the
site is not optimised?

• Obviously, you/your client miss out on utilising
  a cost effective tool that can drive your
  business.
• The website is then nothing but an online
  brochure that no one sees, unless traffic is
  directed to it (at a high cost).

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Solution

• Advise your client to take control of their
  website, starting with their Domain name
• Implement an SEO/SEM strategy as part of the
  marketing spend
• Employ all other tactics using your clients
  website

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Integrate the web into your clients business

• Remember
• A website is not a stand-alone marketing tool.
  It should work together with all the other
  business marketing communications tools you use
  -- brochures, advertisements, sponsorships,
  magazines, newsletters, letterhead and
  speeches/events

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Before I go

• Organic vs. Paid
• There's a growing debate in the search
  marketing industry on the differences between
  landing pages designed for pay-per-click
  campaigns and landing pages designed for organic
  optimisation. What is the difference between the
  two uses?

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BizReport Search Marketing September 26, 2006

• A study done in 2006 tracked 20 business to
  consumer e-commerce sites traffic and conversion
  data from January August 2006. It compared
  organic search returns to paid search returns.
• The big surprise? The conversion rates were
  nearly identical.
• Paid searches had a median order conversion rate
  of 3.4.
• Organic searches conversion rates were 3.13.

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What do you advise clients?

• Since SEO is a PROCESS (an ongoing one..)
• A client with a small budget and an existing
  (Flash driven/dynamic ) site, is better off using
  a PPC campaign initially.

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WHY??? doing dynamic landing pages and
micro-sites are no problem for paid search

• The logic is, "My creative in the search
  engines was interesting enough that the person
  actually clicked on it. Now I want to do
  everything I can to meet the needs of that
  searcher. Because if I can meet their needs,
  chances are I can meet my needs at the same time.
  They're looking to buy something and I'm looking
  to sell something, and if we can find that
  perfect fit where they agree that what I have to
  sell is exactly what they want to buy, then
  everybody's happy."
• You could do a much more graphically rich page
  for paid using Flash and not that much copy.

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FinallyWeb Analytics

• I love
• Google Analytics its FREE and has all the
  Metrics for tracking and analysing a sites
  performance versus the sites goal(s) observing
  site visitors' behaviour is a breeze with GA!

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Make the most of the metricsmine itdrill down
apply it to the SEO process.
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Thank you for your time!!!