Search Engine Optimization: Technology February 2, 2010
Posted by maheshpatwardhan in SEO.1 comment so far
In the previous post we took a look at the analysis phase of the search engine optimization cycle. In this post we will take a look at the guidelines that need to be complied with from a technology perspective.
Doing this will involve considering the designing of the site architecture – the technical Issues, keyword selection, and search spider control, Programming Guidelines that will include the use of HTML tags, Page Issues, and Search Engine Robots and the factors to consider while choosing a Content Management System.
Designing proper site architecture is very important from an SEO perspective. This is important because it comprises of some key elements that impact SEO. Structuring of categories where content is laid out in proper taxonomy which allows both the users and the spiders easy navigability, plays an important role in improving the value of a site. Topic relevance is very important and search engine algorithms exist that determine the degree of relevancy of a topic to the targeted keywords.
The selection of the keywords and the content on the site have to be arrived at after careful consideration as these play an important role in determining the rank of a site. Another factor to be carefully considered is the levels to which content is nested, meaning how many clicks does a user have to go through to get to the content he or she is looking for.
A deep architecture means the search engines are unlikely to crawl more than 3 levels. So although having a deep architecture allows better categorization and finer selection, it is always a good idea not to go in too deep in terms of the levels for the site. Keeping the maximum number of levels or clicks to an optimum number will ensure that you can both categorize the site and allow for proper crawling by the spiders which will eventually end up adding to the ranking of the site.
At the core of any architectural consideration should be the level of accessibility of the site by the search engine spiders. If there are obstacles in the path of the spiders then this will prevent the spiders from crawling the site and navigating the links which will eventually impact the pages that can be indexed by the search engines. The structure of the URLs is important. Spiders like static simple urls. If they are dynamic then clean urls with no more than 2 parameters are best favoured by the spiders.
If the site uses frames, flash, audio, video then special care has to be taken to ensure that there are alternate arrangements that have been made to ensure that the content is made available in some form or the other which can be made known to the spiders to help with determining the relevance of the site. Similarly with the use of AJAX and Javascript. Pages that are called through the use of javascript cannot be crawled by spiders and there has to be an alternate text link to the same content to allow the spiders to find the content.
With regards to the keywords that are to be targeted for the site, the selection of the keywords themselves while being the decision made more by the marketing division, the placement and embedding of the keywords on the site is something that needs to be done by the programmers.
There are some specific guidelines regarding the placement of keywords on the site. Keywords can and should be placed in the title tags, in the meta description tags, in the header tags and in the document text itself. You should make sure you do not overpopulate with the keywords as that would get labelled as spam.
The use of tags and html code plays an important part in SEO. The Web Developers SEO cheat-sheet is a neat and concise gudeline sheet which can be of great help.
The HTML tags that are important from an SEO standpoint are the Title tag, the H1, H2, H3 … tags, Bold, Strong, the alt-tags, the hyperlinks.
There are times when you do not want certain areas of your site being crawled by the spiders and certain areas that you would not want your users to see but which should be found by the spiders. This is known as restricting spider access and cloaking and segmenting content delivery.
You need to avoid duplication of content, meaning setting up multiple pages with the same content. This will lead to the wrong pages being considered as the original page – spiders would then pick one they think is the relevant one and discard the rest. If there are multiple pages (old pages, updated urls etc.) then proper use of redirects should be made to a single canonical page that will be the page that needs to be considered.
When you set up your site ensure that you have a sitemap available which will allow the spiders to easily navigate your site. Submission of sitemaps to search engines helps.
The number of active links on any given page also needs to be within a given limit as the spiders will not follow any links above that number.
Another technology consideration while doing SEO is in the choice of the CMS that you use to build and maintain your site. There are guidelines to the factors that need to be considered while choosing the CMS. These factors include examining how the CMS handles Title Tag Customization & Rules, Static, Keyword-Rich URLs, Meta Tag Customization, the enabling of custom HTML Tags, customization of the internal anchor Text , flexibility in configuration and Intelligent Categorization Structure , Pagination Controls and the 301-Redirect functionality. There is a very good blog post Choosing the Right CMS for your website (from an SEO perspective) which talks about these factors in detail.
Search Engine Optimization: The Analysis Phase January 30, 2010
Posted by maheshpatwardhan in SEO.3 comments
The previous post, Search Engine Optimization: An Introduction, offered a quick overview of what SEO is all about and why we would want to go about doing it.
The different phases of a recommended SEO Strategy are Analysis of the environment and technology, Implementation and Maintenance.
In this post we will take a look at the Analysis phase.
The Analysis phase includes Keyword Research, Page and Site Analysis, Ranking Analysis and Link Analysis.
Keyword Research is the core of the Analysis phase. A good amount of brainstorming and research should be done during this stage. During the keyword identification stage, those words need to be identified that will allow your site to be ranked highly in the search engines. These should be the words that the organization feels are going to be what users are most likely to search for when the intent is to find information that is available on the website. This stage essentially should result in a list of keywords (combination of 1, 2 and 3 words) that would establish relevance of the site to the intent of the search.This is one of the main elements that gives the page strength and makes it “friendly” to the search engine spiders. Who should ideally be doing this? The people in the organization who are responsible for marketing. This is not a call that the IT department can make. What the keywords are should be decided mainly by the marketing folks. Where on the page and site these words need to be placed is what the programmers or IT department will decide.
An analysis of target terms involves analysing the content of any given page and extracting those terms that appear to be targeted at search engines. Using a tool like Target Terms will give you valuable insight about what words the search engines may find relevant on your webpage. This will allow you to decide if your site has the right mix of words that you have thought to be relevant to the content of your site. This will allow you to decide on the changes that need to be made of the keywords that are contained in your site. That is why it is important to identify the most prominently employed words and phrases on the site.
Another type of analysis involving keywords is the Keyword Difficulty analysis. This helps you determine if the words that you have narrowed down on and feel should be the words most relevant to the content on your site can be easily ranked highly in the search engines. This is essentially an analysis of the competitive landscape of a particular keyword, providing a percentage score and a detailed analysis of the top ranking sites at Google and Yahoo.
After carrying out a detailed analysis on the keywords, the next thing to do is to carry out a Page and Site analysis to determine how accessible is the site and the various pages to the major search engines.
The Crawl Test will help determine the accessibility of the site to search engines and provide an overview of the site’s search friendliness. It gives you an idea of the extent of indexing in the major search engines and will give you a detailed report on on http status code, primary keywords on the page, meta description, and the number of internal links on each page.
The Page Strength tool can be used to measure the number of sites/pages that link to your site. It will measure the number of times your brand is mentioned on the web. Using this tool you can run a competitive analysis to see which other sites in your field are doing well. It will allow you to monitor your progress over time.
A Competitive Analysis will give you an idea how the competitive sites are ranking for the same keywords that you have arrived at.
A Link Analysis helps in the identification of how many unique domains are linking to a page, subdomain, or to your entire website. This will allow you to analyze competitors to see what they are doing successfully. It will help you in the identifying the most important links pointing to a page as well as the anchor text used most frequently by those links
A Ranking Analysis will help you determine how your site ranks across various search engines. A tool like Tracking Rank can be used in the retrieval of search engine rankings for pages and keywords, tracking rankings in Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Bing over time and validating progress toward SEO goals.
In the next post we will take a look at the Technology considerations that affect the SEO process.
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Search Engine Organization: An Introduction January 27, 2010
Posted by maheshpatwardhan in SEO.2 comments
With this post I am starting a five-part series on Search Engine Optimization.
The first part will be a basic primer and introduction to why we need Search Engine Optimization. This will talk about what search engine optimization is, the need for sites to be “search engine friendly, and an overview of the different stages that are involved in a Search Engine Optimization exercise.
The next few posts will deal in detail with the Analysis phase, the Implementation phase, the Tools that can be used, the Maintenance phase and a section on where you can find more resources on the subject.
To start things off – what is search engine optimization? The answer is simple – its making your site easy for search engines to find, crawl, index and give it a high enough rank so that when users search for content that is available on your site, your site is among the first ones that show up on the search engine results pages.
How do search engines find you? They send out spiders to find you. Your website should be “friendly” to the spiders that crawl the web so that they can find you easily and crawl your site without a problem. These bots go out all over the web and crawl websites they come across and follow links and then they take all that information and put it into a huge big database which becomes the search engine’s index. Now when other people come looking for something that you may be able to help them with, the search engine will look at the search query, look at the index, pick up links to all the sites that they think can answer this guy’s question and go ahead and show the user the entire list of links for him to choose from. All very fine when put that way. Not so fine when you consider that usually the number of sites that the search engines find that could be relevant to the search query could very easily run into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, and that the results are displayed only a page at a time, and a page will contain only ten results at a time. That means if the search engine thinks that your site is not really all that relevant to what the user is looking for, it is very likely to place you in position 6 on page number 122,456. With that happening it is not very likely that you are going to be found by the person who is looking. To give you some perspective, a search for the word “seo” on google produced 186,000,000 results.
So if you are serious about life, the universe and being found on google’s search results pages in one of the top 10-20 positions, then you also need to get serious about SEO. Life, the Universe and SEO!
One of the first things you would need to do is get down to understanding why your site ranks where it does in the search engines. Heres the thing. Smart as the search engines may be, they still need to depend on the sites to help them effectively crawl them and determine how and where they should rank in the results page. So it makes sense that you do whatever is in your power to make it easier for them to do so.
There is of course the other reason why you should pay attention to your site and the way it is structured and put together. And that’s for your human readers. By now it should be clear that your site is being built to cater to two kinds of audiences – one the human kind, which comes along, finds your site, makes a judgemental decision on your site purely relying on their subjective impulses and decide whether it’s worth their attention or not, and the other – the spider, the bot, the messenger of the mighty search engines, that come crawling along and traverse the web navigating their way through sites, following links and building up their index and using complex algorithms to decide where exactly your page should rank for what query.
To allow for good “spiderability” your site needs to comply with guidelines and follow accepted standards that will ensure that it is search engine friendly.
Some of the things that you need to do to make this happen is to pay attention to Site Architecture, Technical Issues, Keyword selection, and following Programming Guidelines that include the use of HTML tags and standards to be followed while considering the designing and building of pages. Another important thing to be kept in mind is the factors that need to be considered while choosing a CMS for building and maintaining your website.
An approach to Search Engine Optimization involves the following stages: Analysis of the environment and the technology, Implementation of the recommendations from the analysis phase and the monitoring and maintenance phase for ongoing SEO.
The Analysis stage involves extensive keyword research to determine what are the likely keywords that users are going to be using to look for content that is available on your site. It will also analyze your site to see if the use of keywords and the site structure is good enough for spiders to crawl your site and for search engines to rank your site. Analysis basically is of two types – one is analysis of the site/page itself and the other is analysis of the links.
There are two factors that play a key role as far as search engines go – the relevance of your site, and the importance of your site.
These are the two main things that decide where your site ranks in the digital world according to the search engines. To arrive at this conclusion based around these two factors, search engines use close to two hundred rules (google does) which they use in their ranking process.
Relevance of your site is simply how relevant or close to the user’s keyword is the content contained in your site. This is decided by the search engine based on how you have structured your site and by the way you have written your content.
The importance of your site is decided by the external links that your site has. How many other sites have links on their pages that link to your site. The search engines determine that and then go on to determine the importance of the site that has linked to you. The importance of the sites linking to you plays an important role in determining the importance of your site, so its not simply the number of links that your site has from external sites. This in effect is a vote for your site by other sites out there on the web – so the more valuable votes your site gets, the more it climbs in value.
The analysis phase is where you analyze your site to determine in what state it currently is in terms of the search engines and how you could optimize it. You could also do a competitive analysis to see how your competitors are ranking in the search engines. The analysis is also a good time to find out what it is that they are doing right that allows them to rank better in the search engines.
The Technology phase is when you do an analysis of the technology that is powering your site. This is when you determine if the architecture that you have used is optimal, whether the code that you have on your site is “search engine friendly”, and what are the guidelines that you need to be following while programming. Another important part is evaluating your CMS (if you are using one) to see if it complies with the guidelines that allow for a search-friendly site to be built and maintained.
Once your analysis is done with regards to the environment and the technology, the next phase is the implementation of the optimization. This is done in two stages – the first is the on-page optimization, where the page/site itself if optimized, and the second is the off-site optimization, where the link-building strategies are implemented using a number of ways.
After implementation, there is an ongoing maintenance phase where the site has to be monitored and maintained to track the impact of the optimization that has been done.
In the next post we will be taking a more detailed look at the Analysis Phase of a SEO implementation.
Mobile becomes a social media lifeline? November 18, 2009
Posted by maheshpatwardhan in Uncategorized.add a comment
Approaching the end of 2009 and looking back on all the progress that social media has made, one would say that it has been on predictable lines. With nothing significantly and spectacularly different being thrown up. Social media has gained ground, a very good sign. We have seen it gaining ground in specific industry segments, an even better sign. I have had the opportunity of working on social media initiatives in some varying segments this year and the approach and the acceptance levels in each has been different and to say the least, a learning experience in itself. The one learning that I have come out with from all this during this one year is this. There are some that get it. And some dont. Well, here’s power to those who do, and a hope and a prayer for those who dont – hope you DO get it at the earliest!
In a recent post titled Six Social Media Trends for 2010, David Armano, founder of Dachis Group, an Austin based consultancy delivering social business design services, has some observations that are quite insightful.
The one which stood out apart from the others, is the one that talked about the mobile becoming a strong social media lifeline. With a lot of Corporates shunning social networking and clamping down on access to them by shutting off every port possible in their firewalls, the mobile is going to be a strong access point to the various networks. People, like Armano says, are going to be taking less of cigarette breaks, and more of mobile breaks.
A brief summary of his other predictions are:
– Corporations will look at scaling up their social network marketing efforts and make it a lot more strategic.
– Social networking companies will move much more heavily into entertainment.
– Companies will have well defined social media policies which might actually be enforced. Companies will look at formalizing its views on social media and rules of engagement for employees.
– Mobile becomes a social media lifeline. Forget the cigarette break at work. In 2010 you will be taking social media breaks.
– e-mail will be rapidly replaced as a means of sharing information. All forwards to friends and colleagues will now be done using networks such as facebook and Twitter.
– Social media begins to look less social.
Does all this mean there is a definite move towards it becoming a more acceptable means of formal communication and dialogue? I doubt that, but it definitely will become a lot stronger as a collaborative and brand communication platform.
Search Wars July 29, 2009
Posted by maheshpatwardhan in Search.add a comment
Today’s announcement of the Microsoft Yahoo! deal opens up another chapter in the search wars. With this deal going through Yahoo! will be throwing in the towel on its search engine and sticking to what it does best – managing its highly successful media properties. As per the deal, it is expected that Microsoft’s Bing search technology will power the search on the Yahoo! portal. Yahoo will continue to control the ads on its own sites and will sell ads for Microsoft – using Microsoft’s ad delivery platform. The revenue share between Microsoft and Yahoo will see a large share going to Yahoo in the first couple of years. A detailed report on the deal which analyses the various parts of the announcements can be found here. The main points of the deal can also be found summarized here.
So the big question now is – How does this impact Google? Not much at present one might say given that Google has a 65% market share in the search market. The deal gives Microsoft/Yahoo 30%. There is also the rapid strides that Bing is making in the market. This coupled with Yahoo taking on the combined sales for Microsoft and Yahoo along with using the Microsoft ads platform could start causing Google some concern in the days ahead.
Another angle to the deal is that the implementation just might be delayed due to reported speculation that Google may lobby the regulators as the previous deal between Google and Yahoo had been impacted by the lobbying of Microsoft at that time.
It will be interesting to see what exactly Google’s reaction will be to this announcement.
Looking Through The Right End Of The Telescope July 20, 2009
Posted by maheshpatwardhan in Uncategorized.Tags: digialmarketingscenario
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A recently published report on the digital market scenario in India, “Digital Media Outlook 2009”published by Webchutney, detailed the current scenario of the digital marketplace, the current ad spends and the projected trends in usage and spends on advertising in the digital space. There are a few points that came out of the report that give clues to the Indian Marketer’s perception of the Internet as a medium for marketing communication and how that could be coming in the way of using the Internet effectively in marketing. This also clears a few questions I had earlier.
The main point that seems to come out from report is that Marketers in India still have a skewed perception of the Internet’s ability to provide a platformfor a strong and effective marketing communication program. The misconceptionarises from the way the Internet is perceived by the marketers who consider it primarily to be a platform for generating leads and sales. ‘Reaching TargetAudience’ is the single greatest driver in allocating budgets. In their effort in concentrating on ‘Reach’, the unique ability of the internet delivering ‘selective and targeted audience’ is ignored.
This expectation of the Internet being a vehicle for ‘Lead generation, quick response and conversion’ results in it being used as a direct marketing platform rather than a medium of marketing communication. Another observation is that although the objective of using the internet is “Lead Generation”, the perception is that it is more effective for “driving traffic”. This basic contradiction in the mind-set of the marketers does lead to the full potential of the Internet not being utilized.
One more contradiction which comes out is that even though the use of Social Media as a marketing initiative has a fairly high satisfaction level (above display ads and Networks). While this is the case, the share of digital ad spends for Ads (display and networks) still ranks high – second to the development and maintenance of websites. Social Media initiatives account for hardly 13%. So, despite satisfaction levels being high, the spends are low. This would point to to a lack of understanding of marketers for the use of the Internet medium and its measurability in general Social Media in particular.
With the Total ad spend on Internet being around Rs. 435 Crores, the good news is that it is set to grow from the present 4% of all ad spends to around 8% of all ad spends making it a Rs. 525 Crores market in the coming year. Given the rate of increase in Internet users, the only way to further grow the size of the market would be for the Marketers to broaden their horizons beyond ‘reaching consumers’ and ‘generating leads’ and understanding that marketing communication is not about “Reaching Customers” but “Reaching Customers and Staying on Top of their Minds”. They need to appreciate the Cost effectiveness of reach and leverage the internet to build excellent consumer experiences and relationships.
They probably should figure out which is the right end of the telescope and start looking through it.
