SEO Workshop: Optimize Your Site for Search

Search
Engine
Optimization

SEO Workshop

By: Navneet Kaushal

WHO AM I?
Navneet Kaushal
Founder & CEO of PageTraffic
11 Years of SEO experience
Editor www.pagetrafficbuzz.com
Expert author on WebProNews, Search Newz, Website Notes, DevWebPronews, PromotionWorld.
Regularly quoted on ET Now, Seattle Times, Hindustan Times, Livemint, BenefitIT, AlooTechie.

About PageTraffic
Established in 2002
95 people strong, with offices in New Delhi, Mumbai, Chicago & London
Offers SEO, PPC, Link Building, Web Design & Development services
More than 300 clients worldwide
Ranking among the top SEO Companies of India
Winner of Red Herring Top 100 Asia Award 2011

www.pagetraffic.com

Search Marketing from a
business perspective
 Helps you create a better website

 Brings in qualified traffic

 Helps you create better content

 Measurable/Actionable

Set Goals
Why do you need Search Marketing?

Research Keywords
How & What do people search for?

Onsite Optimization
Create a site that search engines will love
But create with humans in mind

Offpage Optimization
Make your website trustworthy

Reporting
Keep Track of Everything you do

Quick Quiz
• What do the following stand for?
• HTML
• URL
• RSS
• SERPs

Choosing the Right Keywords
How to target competition better

Choosing the Right Keywords
• It’s necessary to do some keyword analysis…
• What is the volume of traffic for the keyword
combination?
• Have other websites optimized for those
keywords? Would it be hard to get a high
ranking?
• Who sits in the No. 1 spot for those keywords?
• What keywords are my competitors targeting?
• What do the keywords say about the searcher’s
intent/mindset?
• Surfers
• Researchers
• Buyers

Tools for Keyword Research

http://bit.ly/keywordtool2012

Use Google Keyword
Tools to create initial
list of related search
terms and search
volume

Select location and
language


http://www.google.com/insights/search/

Other Keyword Research Tools

• Wordtracker
• Wordstream
• Keyword Discovery


Search suggestions and completions from the top providers on the internet

http://www.soovle.com/

www.pagetraffic.com

www.pagetraffic.com

Übersuggest is Google Suggest on steroids!

http://www.ubersuggest.org/

www.pagetraffic.com

KEYWORD ORGANIZATION
• Organize your • Brand name
keywords by:
• Languages • Product name
• Locations • Model numbers, etc.
• Target audiences
• Purchase cycle
• Importance
• Legal requirements

Google Keyword Suggestion Tool
• http://bit.ly/keywordtool2012
• Visit the site now and plug in a generic word
that relates to your business.
• Take a minute or two to review the
data…because I’m going to ask you to come
up with the best keyword combination for your
home page shortly…

Keyword Advice
• Optimise each page for a different keyword
combination
• Don’t choose single keywords – 3-5 word
combinations are best
• Don’t choose generic keywords - be
specific
• Don’t choose hotly-contested keywords
• Use geographic qualifiers – i.e. India
• Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes
• Choose keywords that align with a ‘buying’
state of mind

On Site Optimisation
• On-site factors play a big role in
determining your search engine
rankings
• These are the things that you can do
yourself or that you can task your
web developer to do on your behalf

Use of multimedia platforms
Be careful when using multimedia platforms,
such as Flash, particularly as navigational
elements
Your website must be ‘spiderable’, otherwise it
won’t get good search engine rankings
Text-based navigation can be ‘spidered’; links
embedded within a Flash element cannot.
Be careful also with Javascript, DHTML or other
graphical navigation elements
If you use these, provide a text based navigation
bar elsewhere on the page

On-site navigation
Your navigation structure and accessibility is
critical for search engine rankings – search
engines need to be able to access your content
in order to index it
KISS principle
Employ the 2 click rule (3 click rule at most)
Use textual links from your home page
Use a Sitemap which can be accessed from your
home page
Employ inline / contextual links

The TITLE tag
The singularly most important on-site factor!
If you do one thing to your site, then this should
be it!
This is what appears in the top bar in your
browser
Almost always the heading that Google chooses
for its listings – therefore it needs to be enticing
or contain a call-to-action

The TITLE tag
• Include your chosen keywords within the
TITLE tag – preferably near the start of the
tag
• Try to keep it to 70 characters
• Must be relevant to the page content
• Very important - each page should have a
different TITLE tag

Exercise
• Open your own website in your browser
• View the source code (View menu)
• What is your TITLE tag?
• Is it appropriate?
• Could it be better?
• What does your main competitor have as
their home page TITLE tag? Is it better
than yours?

Metadata Tags
• Search engines also use a series of
metadata tags that reside in the header of
the page to index websites

• These tags can’t be seen by human
visitors to your website – but they’re still
interrogated by the search engines

The DESCRIPTION tag

• A textual description of what the page
is about
• Regularly used in Google search
results as the description of your site

The DESCRIPTION tag
• Include keywords close to the start of the
tag, but don’t repeat more than 3 times
• Try to keep it to 150 characters
• Must be relevant to the page content
• Each page should have a different
DESCRIPTION tag

The KEYWORD tag
• Less important than TITLE and
DESCRIPTION, but still worth including

• Up to 10 individual words, separated by
commas

Body Text
• Google loves original, high quality textual
content
• Body text is extremely important for search
engine rankings because this is what
human users come to see
• Keywords, synonyms and variations of the
primary keyword combination should be
included in the body text, but not so that it
reads ‘artificially’. It should read naturally.

Keywords in URLs
• URLs that contain keywords are better than
those that don’t
• Quite easy to do if your website is static, a
little more difficult for database-driven sites
• Don’t make the URLs too long because this
will be seen as an attempt to manipulate the
search results
• Good and bad:
• www.mysite.com//health-insurance
• www.mysite.com/search.asp?insuranceI
D=435&locID=32

Heading Tags
• Heading tags – eg. <h1>, <h2> - within the
HTML identify headings within the page
copy and break up the text
• They are used by search engines to
determine page content
• Use keywords in these tags, but don’t
overdo it.
• Use Web Developer Toolbar to evaluate
the same.

Link Anchor Text
• The ‘anchor’ text contained within hyperlinks
provides Google with an understanding of
what the linked content is about
• Every hyperlink on your site should have
descriptive anchor text, rather than ‘click
here…’
• Inline links or contextual links are best
• eg.
• Blue Train Enterprises offers a free white
paper on how to optimise your website for
the search engines

Image ALT Text
• There is the opportunity to specify
‘alternate’ text for every image on your
website
• The ALT text is displayed if the image
doesn’t load in the user’s browser
• It also can have a positive effect on your
website rankings
• The ALT tag should describe the image
• Keep it short and to the point
• Don’t use ALT tags as a place to stuff
keywords

A word on domain names…
• Domain names can assist search engine
rankings too
• If you are thinking of changing names, or
planning a new business, think carefully about
the domain name you choose
• Best to have .in for Indianmarket, but if
possible secure .com as well
• Try to keep it short, memorable
• Try to include keywords in the domain name
• Register the name for as long as possible

Customer Assurance Factors
• It is recommended that your website contains:
• Business information –
• Telephone number – 1800 adds credibility
• A physical address
• Information about your business – ‘about us’
• Policies
• Privacy
• Security
• Terms of use / disclaimers
• A sitemap with links to major pages

Getting Value from Links

• Links – both inbound and outbound – are
important factors for Google when
assessing a website’s importance

Inbound Links
• These are links on other websites that link to your
site
• Good quality inbound links serve as a ‘vote of
confidence’ for your site – if a good site links to your
site, then by association, your site must be good, too
• Try and get links from ‘authority’ websites to your
site
• Thematically-linked sites
• It’s not the volume of inbound links that is important
– it’s the quality

Inbound Links
• When requesting a link, try and engineer it
so that your keywords are included in the
anchor text – eg. Compare Health
Insurance Deals

Outbound Links
• There is evidence to suggest that your
outbound links contribute to your rankings
• Only link to good quality, thematically-aligned
content on third party websites
• Only link to sites that would be of interest to
your audience
• Be aware that outbound links take visitors
away from your site – and that is not
necessarily what you want to do.

Caution…
• Reciprocal links – I’ll link to you, if you link to me
• You can get some value from these only if the two sites
are thematically aligned and are both high quality
• Most requests for reciprocal links should be deleted,
particularly three-way link swaps

• Paid Links
• Google frowns upon paid links – the Google algorithm is
sophisticated and can detect links which seek to
artificially manipulate its rankings
• Link Farms & ‘Bad Neighbourhoods’
• These are sites that allow you to post your link for free
alongside thousands of other sites
• Being linked from these sites can damage your standing

Getting listed in Directories
• Being listed in major directory-based websites can
boost your rankings considerably

• http://www.dmoz.org - a difficult one to get into
• http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
• http://www.google.com/local/add - a very important
one that will see your business plotted on Google
Maps

Other ways to get Inbound Links
• Articles / interviews published on other
websites
• Press releases
• Forum posts
• Blog comments
• Guest Blogging
• ‘Link bait’ – controversial is best!

Content is King
• Ever heard the saying?
• Search engines are simply a means
to locate great content
• Does your site have great content?
• Or is it ‘brochure-ware’?
• Does your site ‘do’ anything else that
will bring visitors back time and
again?

Content is King
• Add content that people want to read and will
pass on – top ten tips, ‘how to’ guides, free
white papers
• Text should be in short sentences, compact
paragraphs, be well punctuated, and contain
headings to break up the text – time-poor
people don’t read, they scan
• Pages should not scroll and scroll and scroll…
• One page per theme (optimised for that
theme) and cross-link

Content is King
• Text should be written from a WIIFM
(What’s in it for me?) perspective – no fluff,
just tell the customer what they want to
hear.

• Add content regularly – if your site remains
static, then it will lose its prominence in the
search engines (and visitors won’t want to
come back)

Add content regularly
• Some ideas for new content for your website:
• New products
• Company activities
• Special offers or discounts
• Achievements – awards
• New staff profiles
• Case studies about your products or services
• Testimonials from customers
• ‘How to’ guides
• General advice about products or services
• Observations about the market

Web 2.0 Content
• Web 2.0 is a term describing changing trends
in the use of World Wide Web technology and
web design that aims to enhance creativity,
secure information sharing, collaboration and
functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts
have led to the development and evolution of
web-based communities and its hosted
services, such as social networking sites,
video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, etc
(Wikipedia)
• Google loves this content and you should
employ it where appropriate

Blogs
• Blog = web log
• In essence, an online journal or diary, ordered
by date
• An excellent way of adding content regularly
to your website
• You can quickly establish yourself as an
expert in your field via a blog
• Can be setup within minutes online:
• Wordpress.com
• Blogger.com
• TypePad.com
• But it takes dedication and patience!

RSS
• RSS = ‘really simple syndication’
• A ‘push’ method of distribution for new
content
• Allows users to receive automatic updates
when content is released
• RSS feeds generally viewed in RSS readers
– inc. browsers, Outlook
• Can also distribute to mobile devices and
social networking sites

Video
• The biggest growth area on the web as broadband
uptake and bandwidth increases
• Over 20 hours of video every minute is uploaded
to YouTube
• Video can be done cheaply with a handheld
camcorder
• Viral impact can bring thousands of visitors to a
website in a short space of time
• Examples:
• Elf Yourself
• The Greatest Job in the World
• The World’s Greatest Business Mind

Social networking
• Web based services that allow users to create
online communities based on shared interests
and activities – there are over 2,000 of them!

Facebook
• Over 175 million users worldwide
• Has beaten MySpace in Australia – 41.88%
of social networking traffic goes to Facebook
(Source: Hitwise)
• Businesses can establish a Facebook Page
or Group
• But many businesses still block access to
Facebook in the workplace…

Twitter
• Fastest growing, hottest property right now –
anybody using it?
• Micro-blogging; 140 character limit – basically
‘SMS on the web’ (but also can be done via
mobile device)
• You follow people, they follow you; your ‘tweets’
are seen by your followers, you see the ‘tweets’
of people you follow
• But who would be interested in this seemingly
banal, nebulous information?
• Business can use it as an information channel to
‘push’ information to prospects – and it helps
with search engine rankings!

Bookmarking / Tagging Sites
• Consider implementing an AddThis or
AddToAny button on your pages
• www.addthis.com
• www.addtoany.com
• A simple piece of code that adds a button to
your page:

 Add Site & submit XML Sitemap
 Verify meta or html
 Once verified, go to diagnostic then click on crawl errors
 Download all crawl error source in csv (if error found)
 Convert CSV to XLS format and add three columns: Status
(Fixed/NotFound), Comments, Last Updated
 Once errors fixed, regenerate xml sitemap, upload and
resubmit
 Next in diagnostic go to HTML suggestions
 Check & download duplicate meta descriptions-if any issues
found
 Check & download duplicate titles tags-if any issues found
 Pass the issues to related team member and
get it fixed
 Update your log file

 W3C validation  Update Static & XML
Sitemap
 Navigation to be crawler
friendly i.e. no js menu/no  Fix broken links
flash menu/avoid image
rollover  Google Analytics Code
Integration and Goal Setting
 H tags distribution: H tags
needs to be at relevant  Google WMT & Bing WMT
places verification file upload and
verification
 Footer if possible to have
address in micro format  All footer pages to have link
to static sitemap
 Alt tags as per mapping
sheet

 Check site’s home page for known issues in Lynx Browser

 Canonical Issues-Consistency in hyperlinking www Vs non
www Vs index vs home

 Reduntant metas to be removed

 Spacing in code to be removed

 CSS external

 JS external

MOST IMPORTANT ONPAGE FACTORS WHICH WE USUALLY
FORGET

• H Tag Distribution

• Footer Optimization

• Copyright (Keyword Rich)

• Sitemap (Static & XML)

• Verification (google & bing)

• Content is King

• Use relevant keywords or key-phrases with a
density of between 3% and 5%

• Bold helps

77

• Inbound
• Higher ranking site
• Text in link important
• Outbound
• Less the better
• Crawler follows link
• Intra site
• Helps with navigation

78

• JavaScript
• Some Crawlers can not navigate
• Commonly found in Menus
• Flash
• Crawlers can not view
• Use HTML version as option or SWFobject
• Images
• Should have alt tags

79

• Inbound
• Higher ranking site
• Text in link important
• Outbound
• Less the better
• Crawler follows link
• Intra site
• Helps with navigation

80

• JavaScript
• Some Crawlers can not navigate
• Commonly found in Menus
• Flash
• Crawlers can not view
• Use HTML version as option or SWFobject
• Images
• Should have alt tags

81

• “site:yoursite.com keyword”
Result: shows if your site is indexed for a
particular keyword

• “inurl:keyword.”
• Result: Web sites using keywords {or
your brand} in URL

• “site:yoursite.com”
• Result: shows the pages of your site
indexed
82

• “linkdomain:yoursite.com”
Result: shows all links to your domain

• “linkhttp://yoursite.com.page.html”
Result: shows all links to that page

• “linkdomain:yoursite.com-site: yoursite.com”
• Result: shows links, excluding internal links

83

More things that you should
do…
• Monitor your server statistics – unique visitors
is the key metric to track (not ‘hits’)
• Set up Google Analytics on your site -
http://www.google.com/analytics/
• Set up Google Webmaster Tools -
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
• Set up Google Alerts for your business -
http://www.google.com/alerts
• Try out Google Adwords pay per click
advertising using a trial offer -
http://www.google.com.au/contactadwords

Other technical things to do…
• Remove multiple ‘instances’ of your site with a
Permanent 301 redirect to eliminate dilution of
your website standing
• Implement a robots.txt file
• Implement an XML sitemap
• Ensure that your pages load quickly by
streamlining your code and optimising your
images
• Ensure that your site’s server has close to 100%
uptime – if it isn’t live when the spider arrives,
your rankings may be affected
• Make your site W3C compliant –
http://validator.w3.org

What you should NEVER DO
• Hidden text
• Keyword stuffing
• Display duplicate content
• Cloaking – displaying different content to
visitors and spiders
• Use Flash alone
• Use Frames

A final thought
• If you employ one of the strategies mentioned
in this presentation, you will get some benefit
in the search engine results pages
• If you employ a couple, you will get much
greater benefit
• If you employ all of them properly, then you
will most likely go to the top of the results
• The little things count and, when you employ
them together, they can make a big difference
to your site performance

THANK YOU!

Website: www.pagetraffic.in
Email: nkaushal@pagetraffic.in
Twitter: @navneetkaushal
Blog: www.pagetrafficbuzz.com

www.pagetraffic.com

SEO Workshop: Optimize Your Site for Search

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