Sonoma Introduction to SEO Seminar Handout
- 1. Introduction to Improving Online Visibility Through Search Engine Optimization The Goals 1. Achieve visibility when a potential customer searches for our product 2. Establish credibility and expertise on the website 3. Facilitate conversion (e.g. phone call, email, walk-in, etc.) How Google Works 101 When you do a search, you arent actually searching the web. You are searching Googles index of the web. 1. Crawling - The process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index 2. Indexing - Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page 3. Returning Results - When a user enters a query, Google's machines search the index for matching pages and return the most relevant results. Top Algorithmic Variables Content Site Structure Inbound Links Age of URL Speed Traffic Bounce Rate Social Signals Keyword Research Tools www.adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal www.google.com/trends www.spyfu.com www.wordtracker.com Qualifying Backlinks Questions to determine if a link is effective: Is the page getting indexed? Is the link coming from a link farm? Is the link on a page that sells ads? Is the text on the page relevant to my site? Is the link nofollow? Is the link passing through an adserver? Is the link in Javascript? Kimberly Ercius 悋kimberly@sercius.com 悋 2707-978 )015( 悋www.sercius.com
- 2. Off Page Promotion Strategies Local companies that you work with on a daily basis Local associations that you belong to Conferences that you attend Press releases with useful local information Top Sites: PRWeb www.prweb.com Free Press Release www.free-press-release.com PRLog www.prlog.org openPR www.openpr.com Network on blogs and forums online Add useful and timely content to your site, and natural citations / link building will naturally occur Tool Recommendation: Use http://www.opensiteexplorer.org to identify backlinks to your site and your competitors. Measuring Success Unique visitors Page views Top referral sources Top entrance pages Top exit pages Feeder markets Conversion (goals and funnel tracking) Search Innovation Utilize schema.org markup to create rich snippets for products, events, etc. Tool Recommendation: www.schema-creator.org will make it easy to generate the code Set up authorship to link content you publish on your domain to your Google+ profile. Tool Recommendation: View the instructions at http://www.plus.google.com/authorship to get it set up. Kimberly Ercius 悋kimberly@sercius.com 悋 2707-978 )015( 悋www.sercius.com