SEO - Search Engine Optimization

From: SEOmoz

---

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | GWT

1. How Search Engines Operate

Search engines have four functions

• crawling
• building an index
• calculating relevancy and rankings
• serving results

Crawling - Indexing - Answering

• Imagine the World Wide Web as a network of stops in a big city subway system - The link structure of the web serves to bind together all of the pages in existence.
• The search engines parse the code from the pages and store selected pieces in massive hard drives, to be recalled when needed in a query
• When someone makes a query, engines (1) provide relevant results only and (2) rank them on importance
• 100's of factors influence relevance
• currently, importance is determined by popularity
• algorithms comprised of 100's of components called 'ranking factors' come up with relevance and ranking

How do they do it?

• Google: (64% searches, 78% sent from)
  • Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as cloaking.
  • Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
  • Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content. Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
  • Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
• Yahoo: (18% / 10%)
  • The number of other sites linking to it
  • The content of the pages
  • The updates made to indicies
  • The testing of new product versions
  • The discovery of additional sites
  • Changes to the search algorithm – and other factors
• Bing: (12% / 8%)
  • In the visible page text, include words users might choose as search query terms to find the information on your site.
  • Limit all pages to a reasonable size. We recommend one topic per page. An HTML page with no pictures should be under 150 kb.
  • Make sure that each page is accessible by at least one static text link.
  • Don't put the text that you want indexed inside images. For example, if you want your company name or address to be indexed, make sure it is not displayed inside a company logo

This is just the tip of the iceberg, though... you can run your own tests (e.g. one finding that links closer to the top of a page carry more weight than those below), or there are a number of resources to find out more.

Top

2. How People Interact With Search Engines

Once you grasp how the average searcher, and more specifically, your target market, uses search, you can more effectively reach and keep those users.

AOL Search query log leak showed:

• The first ranking position in the search results receives 42% of all click-through traffic
• The second position receives 12%, the third 8%, the fourth 6%, and all others are under 5%
• The first ten results received 90% of all click-through traffic, the next 10 results (normally listed on the second page of results) received 4%, the third page - 2%, and the fourth - 1%. All other pages of results received less than 1% of total search traffic clicks.

Important Conclusions

• Search is very, very popular. It reaches nearly every online American, and billions of people around the world.
• Being listed in the first few results is critical to visibility.
• Being listed at the top of the results not only provides the greatest amount of traffic, but instills trust in consumers as to the worthiness and relative importance of the company/website.
• An incredible amount of offline economic activity is driven by searches on the web

3. Why Search Engine Marketing is Necessary

SEO is the process of taking a page built by humans and making it easily consumable for both other humans and for search engine robots. Need to make compromises to satisfy both users. Modern search technology is not all-powerful. There are technical limitations of all kinds that can cause immense problems in both inclusion and rankings.

Technical Limitations in Search Technology

• Spidering and Indexing Problems
  • content in forms is hidden
  • poor link structures can lead to failed or inadequate spidering
  • non-HTML content like Flash, frames, Java applets, plug-in content, audio files & video - these have content that search engines cannot access
• Content vs Query String Mismatching
  • e.g. people search for fridges but your site only calls them refrigerators
  • color vs. colour - i.e. language and internationality issues
  • language expectations in general (e.g. english vs japanese)
• Generating Popularity
  • engines have no inherent gauge of quality or notability and no potential way to discover and make visible web content
  • having other pages link to your pages is what is meant here
  • this is a task that demands talented Internet marketers.

History

• 1990's: Meta tags, keywords
• 2004: link bombing with anchor text, buying hordes of links from automated blog comment spam injectors and the construction of inter-linking farms of websites
• 2010: social media marketing and vertical search inclusion

Top

4. The Basics of Search Engine Friendly Design and Dev

Content Must Be Indexable

• HTML format - images, Flash files, Java applets, and other non-text content is virtually invisible
• Images in gif, jpg, or png format can be assigned 'alt attributes' in HTML, providing search engines a text description of the visual content.
• Images can also be shown to visitors as replacement for text by using CSS styles.
• Flash or Java plug-in contained content can be repeated in text on the page.
• Video & audio content should have an accompanying transcript if the words and phrases used are meant to be indexed by the engines.
• tools like Google's cache, SEO-browser, the mozBar or Yellowpipe show what elements of your content are visible and indexable to the engines
• SEOmoz's Term Extractor displays words and phrases ordered by frequency - and analyzes the content of a given page and extracts the terms that appear to be targeted at search engines. It applies certain weights to HTML elements and other on-page factors to determine what it thinks is a targeted term.

Crawlable Link Structures

• 100,000's of sites hide or obfuscate their nav
• pages that have no direct, crawlable links pointing to them
• How are pages unlinked-to like this?
  • links in forms - bots will not attempt to 'submit' forms so any content or links that would be accessible via a form are invisible to the engines
  • JavaScript: bots do not crawl or give very little weight to the links embedded in JS
  • Links pointing to pages blocked by the meta robots tag or robots.txt are not crawlable by bots. More details
  • links in both frames and I-Frames are crawlable, but both present structural issues for the engines in terms of organization and following.
  • Spiders will not attempt to perform searches to find content
  • Links in flash, java, or other plug-ins
  • Keep it under 100 links - bots won't crawl more.

Rel="nofollow" in the anchor tag

• originally for stopping automated blog comment, guestbook, and link injection spam
• but now is a way of telling the engines to discount any link value that would ordinarily be passed
• different engines treat it differently - Google no follow nor impact; Yahoo/Bing don't count it but may get commutative links; Ask.com ignores the nofollow

Keywords

• keywords are used in indexing (determines which server)
• in a query, search engine looks at the words primarily, but also their order, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization
• One of the best ways to "optimize" a page's rankings is, therefore, to ensure that keywords are prominently used in titles, text, and meta data
• Keyword Density = a Myth: NOT a part of modern web search engine ranking algorithms for the simple reason that it provides far worse results than many other, more advanced methods of keyword analysis.
• DO accomplish Keyword Optimization by:
  • Use the keyword in the title tag at least once, and possibly twice (or as a variation) if it makes sense and sounds good (this is subjective, but necessary). Try to keep the keyword as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible.
  • Once in the H1 header tag of the page.
  • At least 3 times in the body copy on the page (sometimes a few more times if there's a lot of text content). You may find additional value in adding the keyword more than 3X, but in our experience, adding more instances of a term or phrase tends to have little to no impact on rankings.
  • At least once in bold. You can use either the <strong> or <b> tag, as search engines consider them equivalent.
  • At least once in the alt attribute of an image on the page. This not only helps with web search, but also image search, which can occasionally bring valuable traffic.
  • Once in the URL. Additional rules for URLs and keywords are discussed later on in this section.
  • At least once (sometimes 2X when it makes sense) in the meta description tag. Note that the meta description tag does NOT get used by the engines for rankings, but rather helps to attract clicks by searchers from the results page (as it is the "snippet" of text used by the search engines).
  • Generally not in link anchor text on the page itself that points to other pages on your site or different domains (this is a bit complex - see this blog post for details).

Title Tags

• meant to be an accurate, concise description of a page's content
• value in three specific areas: top of page (little attention though), keywords will be highlighted in search queries, keywords here are important for search engine ranking
• 70 char max will show in search query results (... after that, so can go more but...)
• put important keywords first
• start with brand name mention (opinion)
• consider people reaction too - readibility, emotion

Meta Tags

• Originally intended to provide a proxy for information about a website's content
• Meta Robots tag for spider activity: (defaults underlined) Index/NoIndex, Follow/NoFollow, Noarchive, Nosnippet, NoODP (Open Directory Project), NoYDir (Yahoo, like NoODP)
• Meta Description: not used for ranking but it shows in the query results snippet. An extremely important part of search marketing... Google will bold the keywords. Any length but cuts at 160 char.
• Meta Keywords: no longer valuable to SEO
• Meta refresh, meta revisit-after, meta content type, etc.: not critical to SEO though they do have uses

URL Structures

• In query results: for readibility, click-through, ranking
• Appear in web browser's address bar
• link anchor text

URL Construction Guidelines

• employ empathy (readibility, etc.)
• shorter is better
• keyword use, but not overuse
• static better than dynamic
• use real words, be descriptive
• use hyphens to separate words - better than _, +, or [space]

Canonical and Duplicate Versions of Content

• Canonicalization is the practice of organizing your content in such a way that every unique piece has one and only one URL.
• i.e. combine like pages to one and use 301 redirects
• <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog"/> - this says treat the current page as though it were a copy of the 'blog' one, and flow all the metrics back to the 'blog' url.
• in a way this acts a little like a 301 redirect
• Practical use: a site with regular (maybe with ads) and print-friendly versions - use the canonical tag on the print-friendly versions and point to the regular versions.

Defending your site from Scrapers

• scrapers pluck your site's info and put it on theirs, sometimes modified
• scrapers make remarkably good earnings by outranking sites for their own content and displaying ads
• ping the major blogging/tracking services when you use feeds like RSS/XML etc.
• use the scrapers' laziness against them - use absolute links (e.g. wwww.smmtc.org/ not /)
• if it becomes further nuisance seek help online / legally

Top

5. Keyword Research

Important, valuable, high-return... tells you what to target but also something about your customers: what they want now, what they will want

Judging Keyword Value

• keyword research tools tell what people search for
• to research further, make some hypotheses, test, and iterate - the classic web marketing formula
• Determining a keyword's value:
  • is it relevant (human judgment whether it will fulfill both side's needs)
  • Search for the term/phrase in the major engines - many ads mean a high-value keyword
  • Buy a sample campaign for the keyword at Google AdWords and/or Bing Adcenter
  • estimate value of a single visitor to your site with the given search term or phrase

The long tail of keyword demand

• 5,000 searches a day for a keyword is great... 500 is good... but 70% lie in long tail
• the long tail: exposes the myriad of human thought, research, and opinion to the spiders of the search engines
• Don't ignore the long tail - while impossible to predict, ignoring it will make you lose to your competitors.

Keyword Research

• From research sources like:
  • Google Adwords' Keyword Estimator
  • Google Insights for Search
  • Google Trends Keyword Demand Prediction
  • Microsoft AdCenter Keyword Forecasting
  • Wordtracker's Free Basic Keyword Demand
• Google is predicting both the cost of running campaigns for these terms as well as estimates of the number of clicks a campaign might receive
• See Professional's Guide to Keyword Research for more info

Keyword Difficulty

• essential to not only understand the demand for a given term or phrase, but the work required to achieve those rankings

Top

6. How Usability, User Experience, and Content Affect Search Engine Rankings

timing, source, anchor text, and number of links are all factored into its potential performance (i.e., ranking)

Search engines look at quality of site too

• Easy to use, navigate, and understand
• Provide direct, actionable information relevant to the query
• Professionally designed and accessible to modern browsers
• Deliver high quality, legitimate, credible content

The Impact of Usability and User Experience

• direct ways: keyword placement, links, and site structure
• indirect, like intuition: usability is a "second order" influence
• indirect but measurable
• no one likes to link to a crummy site

Content

• appealing, useful content is critical to SEO
• Search intent: many flavors
  • navigational: search engine acts like a white pages
  • informational: non-commercial and non-transaction-oriented
  • commercial investigation: between pure research and commercial intent
  • transactional: creating an account, finding a local business
• Satisfy the intent through what suits: creativity, high quality writing, use of examples, images, and multimedia

Top

7. Growing Popularity and Links

think of links as the streets between pages, and like votes in a democracy saying which pages are important and popular (called the reasonable surfer model)

What is PageRank?

• Links from "important" pages carry more weight than links from less important pages.
• An important page under this system is one that is linked to by other important pages, or by a large number of less important pages, or a combination of the two.
• This signal is known as PageRank
• PageRank can be thought of as a model of user behavior: We assume there is a "random surfer" who is given a web page at random and keeps clicking on links, never hitting "back" but eventually gets bored and starts on another random page. The probability that the random surfer visits a page is its PageRank.

Overview

• link-based factors are primary to search engines
• engines analyze the popularity of a site / page based on both the number and popularity of pages linking to them
• metrics like trust, spam, and authority factor in as well
• Trust: measured by things like MozTrust. Measured like 6 degrees of separation to a trusted source (universities, governments especially trusted)
• Link building is a top SEO task

Link signals used by search engines

• elements of a link used by the search engines
  1. Links Higher Up in HTML Code Cast More Powerful Votes
  2. External Links are More Influential than Internal Links
  3. Links from Unique Domains Matter More than Links from Previously Linking Sites
  4. Links from Sites Closer to a Trusted Seed Set Pass More Value
  5. Links from "Inside" Unique Content Pass More Value than Those from Footers/Sidebar/Navigation
  6. Keywords in HTML Text Pass More Value than those in Alt Attributes of Linked Images
  7. Links from More Important, Popular, Trusted Sites Pass More Value (even from less important pages)
  8. Links Contained Within NoScript Tags Pass Lower (and Possibly No) Value
  9. A Burst of New Links May Enable a Document to Overcome "Stronger" Competition Temporarily (or in Perpetuity)
  10. Pages that Link to WebSpam May Devalue the Other Links they Host
• find this out by analysis of patent applications, papers submitted to information retrieval conferences, and hands-on experience and testing
• Global popularity of site that links to you
• Local/specific sites (local in geography or topic)
• anchor text - DO NOT use "click here"! use appropriate keywords for the 'to' page
• TrustRank. maybe 60% of web is spam. measure degrees from spam.
• link neighborhood (reciprocal links): wise to choose those sites you link to carefully and be equally selective with the sites you attempt to earn links from

Link Building Basics

• building links is an art and most challenging part of an SEO's job
• go vast and varied
• avoid being unnatural, non-standard and manipulative
• Types:
  • natural links: by people from sites who agree (example: SMMMTC's links page)
  • manual suggestion and approval: solicited from bloggers, submitting to directories, paying for listings. SEO creates proposition and fulfills it manually
  • self-created, non-editorial: links through guestbook signings, forum signatures, blog comments, or user profiles. Spamming fits here. Low in value but in aggregate can have impact.
• Starting a Link Building Campaign: it's really hard to measure - rely on a number of less measurable signals (above) and metrics (below) to help build a rating scale of link value
  • Page Ranking for relevant search terms (search for some of the keywords and phrases the page targets, especially title and headline)
  • Google PageRank: note they don't update often (3-5 months) and may throw in some inaccuracies to discourage spammers. High pageRank implies more link value passed on
  • SEOmoz mozRank: shows popularity. More popular pages linking to you help you more than less popular pages.
  • SEOmoz domain authority: without querying, it analyzes domains vs queries
  • Google blogsearch: shows attention via links from blogs and feeds
  • Yahoo! Site Explorer: shows sites that link to your site or pages. Importance of links can be seen.
  • Number of links on a page: if a page with a lot of other links links to yours, it migh not be as important as one that only has a few links.
  • Direct click throughs and referral traffic: check site stats. Ultimately this is your goal, the direct traffic.
  • If you see traffic from engines like Bing and Yahoo! are rising while Google stays constant, it's possible that you need to seek more authoritative, better trusted links (as Google is the most "picky" of the engines when it comes to link evaluation).
• Five examples of Link Building strategy
  • Directories:
  • Get your customers to link to you
  • company blog: valuable, informative and entertaining
  • Create content that inspires viral sharing and natural linking ("linkbait")
  • licensing agreements like Creative Commons
• Note paid links have discounted use on search engines.
• Building links naturally is the best way.

Top

8. Search Engine Tools and Services

provide data points and opportunities for exchanging information with the engines that are not provided anywhere else.

Common search engine protocols:

• Sitemaps: hint to the search engine how they can crawl your site. 3 types: XML (best), RSS and txt. (Why or would you use more than one?)
• Robots.txt: put in root directory... indicate which areas to disallow robots, also where sitemap is, and crawl speed allowed. Realize bad bots exist and won't follow rules, may even look there.
• Meta Robots: page-specific robot instructions, in header tag. format: <meta name="ROBOT NAME" content="ARGUMENTS" />. ROBOT NAME = robots for all robots or a specific robot. ARGUMENTS: noindex, nofollow, noarchive, etc. (Why would you use this?)
• REL="NOFOLLOW" within an anchor link tag... search engines still follow but pass little juice.

Search Engine Tools

• Google Webmaster Tools:
  • you can set: Geographic target (country), Preferred domain (www. or not... note it asked me to verify for Maxine's), Image Search, Crawl rate
  • Diagnostics: crawling problems and search engine unfriendly things like duplicate tags
  • Statistics
  • link data
  • sitemaps
• Yahoo! Site Explorer: Statistics, Feeds, Actions... actions good for dynamic URLs
• Bing Webmaster Center: Profile, Crawl issues, Backlinks, Outbound links, Keywords and sitemaps
• SEOmoz Open Site Explorer: similar things plus: strongest domains, anchor text analysis, head to head comparison (these sound good...?)

Top

9. Myths and Misconceptions About Search Engine

Most common myths:

• Search Engine Submission: unscalability and misuse => useless since 2001
• Meta tags: keywords spammed to death and so no longer used. Title and description tags still important.
• Keyword Stuffing and density: # words on a page / # times a phrase used. Keyword density IS NOT an important metric. (I guess it's not necessarily detrimental to use a word too much though either?)
• Paid search: largely a myth that this helps. but: That said, we have seen anecdotal evidence that bidding on keywords you already organically rank for can help increase your organic click through rate.
• Personalization: i.e. Google considers what you've recently searched for or where you've been. First time searching though you should get standard results. while rankings changes can be dramatic, they only happen when there's substantive query volume from a user around a specific topic.
• Reciprocal Links: link exchange directories of dubious value because easy to catch and discount. Why not just submit to directories w/o reciprocating. 3 or 4-way reciprocal linking (link wheels I think) also not good because it's manipulative.

Search Engine Spam

• means creating pages and schemes designed to artificially inflate rankings or abuse the ranking algorithms employed to sort content
• people flock to Google not just for improved relevancy but for their ability to control and remove spam better than their competitors (probably)
• search engine tactics are many and varied and make "white hat" methods much more lucrative.
• (not mentioned: they're refining them all the time, so if you think you have a way around it now, that might not keep holding.)

We will cover the various factors the engines use to identify spam so as to help SEO practitioners avoid problems.

Page Level (URL-level) Spam Analysis

• Keyword stuffing (same words repeated a lot in a page) does not increase ranking. Non-relevant keyword inclusion not good either.
• Manipulative Linking:
  • Reciprocal link exchange programs - links back and forth to one another - search engines are good at spotting these
  • incestuous or self-referential links: fake or low-value sites used for linking - engines good at detecting connections between site registrations, link overlap or other common factors.
  • paid links - search engines try to stop these (but... some value?)
  • low quality directory links - Google tries to thwart by removing PageRank score from toolbar, but now always
• Cloaking: = when content shown to the engine's crawlers is not the same as you show to an ordinary visitor. There can be positive reasons for cloaking and sometimes web engines let those pass. Article on white hat cloaking
• "Low Value" Pages: Search engines filter them.
  • affiliate content (pages whose material is used on dozens or hundreds of other sites promoting the same product/service)
  • duplicate content (pages whose content is a copy of or extremely similar to other pages already in the index)
  • dynamically generated content pages that provide very little unique text or value (this frequently occurs on pages where the same products/services are described for many different geographies with little content segmentation)

Domain Level Spam Analysis

• Linking practices: kinds and quality. A whole site could get banned if it's real bad.
• Trustworthiness: ("bacon trust" - how many links to a good site, also how many to a bad site): Trust Rank has to do with links your domain has earned. If you publish low quality, duplicate content on your personal blog, then buy several links from spammy directories, you're likely to encounter considerable ranking problems. But if you published them on Wikipedia instead you would do well. (domain level)
• Content value: unique and valuable across the domain

So, how do you know if you have been bad??

• Rule out:
  • errors on your site that may have limited crawling
  • Changes to your site or pages that may have changed the way search engines view your content. (internal link structure, content moves, etc.)
  • Updated ranking algorithms - check if a similar site has changed too (how?)
• Step 2: flowchart: confirm you've been penalized vs just lost out to competitors
  • is your site still indexed? Yes=move on. No or only the home page means you've probably been banned. Verify with Webmaster Central to check then you can file a re-inclusion after you've removed spam.
  • does your site still rank for its domain name or other unique branded terms? Yes=move on. No: you probably have a penalty. Remove bad outbound links, paid links, on-page issues. Go to Webmaster Central.
  • Search for 5-6 relatively unique terms from your title tag. Do you rank in top 10-20? Yes=move on. No = many of your links wiped of their value. Fix and apply for forgiveness.
  • You're probably ok. Just get better at SEO!

Getting Penalties Lifted: painful, often unsuccessful, with little feedback on what happened

1. Register with the engine's webmaster tools if you haven't already
2. review data there to be sure something isn't just broken
3. send re-consideration request through the tool
4. give full disclosure / own up... Google will be happy if you give them info they can use to prevent further spam
5. remove/fix all you can
6. be patient, it may take months
7. if you're big, it helps if you know or find someone at the search engine

Top

10. Measuring and Tracking Success

You can track info about ratings, referrals and links

Universal metrics

note there are more analytics outside SEO

1. Search engine share of referring visits: check trends, e.g. if search engine and type-in traffic falls but you're getting a lot of referral links, this is not good.
   • Direct Navigation (type in traffic, bookmarks, email links without tracking codes, etc.)
   • Referral Traffic (from links across the web or in trackable email, promotion and branding campaign links)
   • Search Engines (queries that sent traffic from any major or minor web search engine)
2. Visits referred by specific search engines
   • 95% US traffic from big 3; 80% international from Google (with exceptions)
   • compare actual to est market share
   • if there is a drop, check by search engine - if all, probably accessibility issue. If just Google, there could be a penalty or devaluation issue
   • on-page optimization techniques gets you better with Bing and Yahoo while better anchor link terms on other sites to yours gets you better with Google
   • don't rule out demographics and biases
   • US Google share said to be 65-70% (Comscore, Hitwise or Compete.com) but many see 80-85%
3. Visits referred by specific search engine terms and phrases - review often to check for new trends, gauge performance, and find terms that are popular but you don't have a lot of content on. A decline in referrals is troubling since overall volume increasing (could it be seasonality, or overall ranking?).
4. Conversion rate (getting someone to sign up for something) by search query term/phase: can be misleading... focus on keywords that brought them there and the landing page.
5. Number of pages getting at least one visit from search engines: learn indexation, trends. With large websites, inclusion is enough to get you traffic. Pages that get search traffic is possibly the best method to get traffic

Analytic Software

• Google Analytics tops, then Clicky, Yahoo Analytics; AWStats if you can't put a tracking code; there's a lot more
• can be useful to test different versions of pages on your site and make conversion rate improvements based on the results
• Google's Website Optimizer is a good free testing tool
• Metrics for Measuring (along with analytics): search engine algorithms are not known but there are some practices. The engines provide some insight through publicly available queries and competitive intelligence. Need a reason and a plan for them to be useful.
  • Google (and Yahoo and Bing and Ask) Site Query: e.g. in Google search type: site:maxinegower.com - shows number and list of indexed pages. site:smmtc.org/maint inurl:COSCA should pull out urls with COSCA in them, not sure this is working though.
  • Google.com/trends: keyword search volume/popularity data over time
  • Trends.Google.com/websites - if high enough traffic
  • google.com/insights/search: regional usage, popularity, related queries for keywords (looks useful)
  • on Yahoo: linkdomain:seomoz.org
  • Bing: ip:216.176.191.233 - shows shared hosting
  • Bing: adlab.microsoft.com/alltools.aspx - keyword research
  • Google blog search: link:www.seomoz.org/blog
  • SEOmoz has page-specific and domain-specific metrics

Then what? Apply it

• Fluctuation in page and link counts: if accompanied by traffic drops, could signal loss of link juice or penalty, malware, hacking.
• Traffic falls from one search engine only: penalty, you've accidentally blocked access, or ranking algorithm changed
• Traffic falls from multiple engines: blocked crawlers or indexation has stopped - check robots.txt, host problems, DNS issue or other technical breakdown
• dramatic rankings decrease on single terms: check for over optimization, cloaking, keyword stuffing; were links recently lost or gained? "Freshness boost" might have worn off too.
• Things take time, days or weeks - increases in metrics happen before ranking increases

Top

Extra: Google Webmaster Tools

• xml sitemap is to let browsers know of your site. can be important if you have a bunch of dynamic pages. html sitemaps is for users.
• use alt text for all images. don't need to put e.g. photo in alt text.
• think of meta titles and descriptions as a billboard. use content analysis feature.
• duplicate content: google will choose which to show; best to eliminate it. can also put preferred one only on sitemaps.xml. 301 redirects, link to preferred version too.
• Impressions: The number of times pages from your site were viewed in search results. Clicks: The number of times your site's listing was clicked in search results. CTR (clickthrough rate): The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click to your site. Queries: The total number of search queries that returned pages from your site.
• check out Google Website Optimizer to run experiments

Top