Search Engine Optimization
White Hat
Dr. Drew Hwang
White Hat Optimization
• Techniques that search engines recommend
as part of good design
• Conforms to the search engines' guidelines
• Tend to produce results that last a long time
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Search Engine Optimization
3 Focus Areas
• On-page optimization
– Refers to the keyword optimizations you make in
your web page code
– Has fairly little SEO importance but is easy to control
• On-site optimization
– The navigation and linking structure of the site
– Very important and within your control
• Off-site optimization
– Promotion
– Backlinks
– Extremely important but very difficult to control.
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Search Engine Optimization
Finding Keywords
• Use “~” in Google search for related terms
• Use a lexical database for keyword suggestions
• Use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool for
keyword suggestions
(adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)
• Use Google Trend to compare regional volumes
(www.google.com/trends)
• Use Google Insights to further compare search
volume patterns across specific regions,
categories, time frames and properties
(www.google.com/insights/search/#)
• Use keywords suggested by various keyword
suggestion tools
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Search Engine Optimization
Keywords Guidelines
• Don’t be too broad – you cannot be everything
to all people
• Find what people are actually searching for
• Find low competition & high search volume
phrases
• For example:
A long title: “Your source for discount iPod
accessories, including FM transmitters, cases,
skins, chargers, and much more.”
A better, short title: “Discount iPod Accessories,”
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Search Engine Optimization
Keyword Density
• A measure (shown as a percentage) of how often a
keyword or phrase appears on a page.
• A page containing 10 words total, one of which is a
keyword, would have a keyword density of 10%.
• Increasing keyword density will increase search
engine rank. (Zhang and Dimitroff, 2005)
• Use the Keyword Density tool from SEOchat.com for
keyword density analysis
(www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density)
• Approach 1: Simply adding line after line of the
keyword or adding it out of context - will cause the
search engines to penalize the site
• Approach 2: Reducing the overall number of nonkey
words on the page.
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Search Engine Optimization
Finding Domain Name
• With more then 46 Million active dot com domain
names registered, it is difficult to find a good
domain name that matches a product, service, or
website concept that is not already taken.
• Use Domain Name Suggestion Tool
(domain-suggestions.domaintools.com)
• Guidelines:
– Register domain for more than a year
– No dashes in domain name (they look spammy to Google)
– .com is better than .info, .net, etc.
– Use shorter words
– Use plural words
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Google's SEO Starter Guide
• A SEO white hat guide
• Doesn’t release any of Google’s algorithm secrets
• Covers Google’s best practices for title tags, meta tags,
URL structure, navigation, content, anchor text,
headers, images and of course, Robots.txt, etc.
• Claiming that following the best practices outlined
below will make it easier for search engines to both
crawl and index your content.
• However, the guidelines do not necessarily yield what's
best for Internet users and do not leave much room for
innovation around Web site design (e.g., Flash, Flex.
Etc.).
(www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf)
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Google's SEO Starter Guide
• Reveals what the topic of a particular page is
• Ideally a unique title for each page
• Shown in the snippet of the SERP
• Homepage : list the name of the business and
other important information like the physical
location of the business or its main focuses or
offerings
• Deeper pages: accurately describe the focus of
that particular page and include the business
name.
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Google's SEO Starter Guide
• Good practices:
– Accurately describe the page's content
– Create unique title tags for each page
– Use brief, but descriptive titles
• Avoid:
– choosing a title that has no relation to the content on the
page
– using default or vague titles like "Untitled" or "New Page
1“
– using a single title tag across all of your site's pages or a
large group of pages
– using extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users
– stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags
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Google's SEO Starter Guide
– Description
• A summary of what the page is about
• A sentence or two or a short paragraph
• Might be used as snippets or in the Open
Directory Project
• Add it to each page
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Google's SEO Starter Guide
– Description
• Good practices:
– Accurately summarize the page's content
– Use unique descriptions for each page
• Avoid:
– Writing a description meta tag that is not relevant to the
content on the page
– Using generic descriptions like "This is a webpage" or
"Page about baseball cards“
– Filling the description with only keywords
– Copy and pasting the entire content of the document into
the description meta tag
– Using a single description meta tag across all of your
site's pages or a large group of pages
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Google's SEO Starter Guide
URL Structure
• Creating descriptive categories and filenames
for better crawling and indexing
• Making backlinks clear and easy to
remember
• Dynamic URLs: better than static ones, but if
done incorrectly, could cause crawling issues
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Google's SEO Starter Guide
URL Structure
• Good practices:
– Use words in URLs
– Create a simple directory structure
– Provide one version of a URL to reach a document
• Avoid:
– Using lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs
– Choosing generic page names like "page1.html“
– Using excessive keywords like "baseball-cards-baseball-cards-
baseballcards.htm”
– Having deep nesting of subdirectories like
".../dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/page.html"
– Using directory names that have no relation to the content in them
– Having pages from subdomains and the root directory (e.g.
"domain.com/page.htm" and "sub.domain.com/page.htm") access
the same content
– Mixing www. and non-www. versions of URLs in your internal linking
structure
– Using odd capitalization of URLs (many users expect lower-case URLs
and remember them better)
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Google's SEO Starter Guide
Navigation
• All sites should have a home or "root" page
• Sitemap page: a simple page on your site that displays the
hierarchical structure of the website to guide viewers and
search engine
• Submit XML Sitemap: can be submitted through Google's
Webmaster Tools to help Google navigate the site; also one
way (though not guaranteed) to tell Google which version of
a URL you'd prefer as the canonical one (e.g.
http://brandonsbaseballcards.com/ or
http://www.brandonsbaseballcards.com)
• Google Sitemap Generator
http://code.google.com/p/googlesitemapgenerator/
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Google's SEO Starter Guide
Navigation
• Good practices:
– Create a naturally flowing hierarch
– Create a simple directory structure
– Use mostly text for navigation
– Use "breadcrumb" navigation (a row of internal links
at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors
to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the
root page)
– Put an HTML sitemap page on the site, and submit
an XML Sitemap file to Google
– Consider what happens when a user drops off a part
of the URL in the hopes of finding more general
content; use 404 redirect page
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Google's SEO Starter Guide
Navigation
• Avoid:
– Creating complex webs of navigation links, e.g. linking
every page on the site to every other page
– Going overboard with slicing and dicing the content
– Having a navigation based entirely on drop-down menus,
images, or animations (Google likes text.)
– Letting the HTML sitemap page become out of date with
broken links
– Creating an HTML sitemap that simply lists pages without
organizing them
– Allowing the 404 pages to be indexed in search engines
(make sure that the web server is configured to give a
404 HTTP status code when non-existent pages are
requested)
– Using a design for your 404 pages that isn't consistent
with the rest of the site
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Google's SEO Starter Guide
• Tells Google something about the
page is linking to
• The better the anchor text is, the
easier it is for Google to understand.
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Google's SEO Starter Guide
• Good practices:
– Write short but descriptive text
– Format links so they're easy to spot between regular text and
the anchor text
• Avoid:
– Writing generic anchor text like "page", "article", or "click
here“
– Using text that is off-topic or has no relation to the content of
the page linked to
– Using the page's URL as the anchor text in most cases
– Writing long anchor text, such as a lengthy sentence or short
paragraph of texts
– Using CSS or text styling that make links look just like regular
texts
– Using excessively keyword-filled or lengthy anchor text just for
search engines
– Creating unnecessary links that don't help with the user's
navigation of the site
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Google's SEO Starter Guide
• The filename and contents of the alt attribute
provide information about the picture.
• When image is used as a link, the alt text for
that image will be treated similarly to the
anchor text of a text link
• Optimizing the image filenames and alt text
makes it easier for image search projects like
Google Image Search to better understand
the images.
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Google's SEO Starter Guide
• Good practices:
– Use brief, but descriptive filenames and alt text
– Supply alt text when using images as links
– Store images in a directory of their own
– Use commonly supported filetypes
• Avoid:
– Using generic filenames like "image1.jpg", "pic.gif",
"1.jpg”
– Writing extremely lengthy filenames
– Stuffing keywords into alt text or copying and pasting
entire sentences
– Writing excessively long alt text that would be
considered spammy
– Using only image links for your site's navigation
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Google's SEO Starter Guide
Quality Content and Services
• Good practices:
– Write easy-to-read text
– Stay organized around the topic
– Use relevant language (use Google keyword tool)
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
– Create fresh, unique content
– Offer exclusive content or services
– Create content primarily for your users, not
search engines
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Google's SEO Starter Guide
Quality Content and Services
• Avoid:
– Writing sloppy text with many spelling and grammatical
mistakes
– Embedding text in images for textual content (users may want
to copy and paste the text and search engines can't read it)
– Dumping large amounts of text on varying topics onto a page
without paragraph, subheading, or layout separation
– Rehashing existing content that will bring little extra value to
users
– Having duplicate or near-duplicate versions of your content
across the site (Google is fine with "regular" and "printer"
version of each, but will penalize sites with intentionally
created duplicated content.)
– Inserting numerous unnecessary keywords aimed at search
engines but are annoying or nonsensical to users
– Deceptively hiding text from users, but displaying it to search
engines
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Google's SEO Starter Guide
robot.txt
• Tells search engines whether they can access
and crawl parts of your site
• Placed in the root directory of your site
• Use the robots.txt generator in Google
Webmaster Tools create this file
• Example:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /include/
Disallow: /docs/
Disallow: /temp/
• robotstxt.com tutorial (www.robotstxt.org)
• User-agents list (www.robotstxt.org/db.html)
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Google's SEO Starter Guide
robot.txt
• Good practices:
– Use more secure methods for sensitive content. (One
reason is that search engines could still reference the
URLs you block if there happen to be links to those
URLs somewhere on the Internet. Also, search engines
that don't acknowledge the Robots Exclusion Standard
could disobey the instructions of your robots.txt.
Finally, a curious user could examine the directories or
subdirectories in your robots.txt file and guess the URL
of the content that you
• Avoid:
– Allowing search result-like pages to be crawled
– Allowing a large number of auto-generated pages with
the same or only slightly different content to be
crawled
– Allowing URLs created as a result of proxy services to
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Google's SEO Starter Guide
rel="nofollow"
• Use rel="nofollow“ in the tag to tell
Google that certain links on your site
shouldn't be followed (If a site has a blog
with public commenting turned on, links
within those comments could pass the site’s
reputation to the linked.)
• Use content="nofollow“ name="robots“ in a
tag to tell Google not to follow all of
the links on a page
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Google's SEO Starter Guide
Off-site Optimization
• Good practices:
– Blog about new content or services
– Don't forget about offline promotion (e.g., business card,
newsletter, etc.)
– Know about social media sites
– Join Google's Local Business Center
– Reach out to those in your site's related community
• Avoid:
– Attempting to promote each new, small piece of content; go
for big, interesting items
– Involving the site in schemes where the content is artificially
promoted to the top of these services
– Spamming link requests out to all sites related to the topic
area
– Purchasing links from another site with the aim of getting
PageRank instead of traffic
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Off-site Optimization
XML Sitemap
• Create Google Webmasters Tools account and
submit Sitemap from time to time
• Yahoo! & MSN search engines now use the
same XML format
• Creating sitemap:
Google Webmaster Tools
xml-sitemaps.com (www.xml-sitemaps.com)
• XML sitemap sample
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Off-site Optimization
RSS Feeds
• An acronym for Really Simple Syndication
or Rich Site Summary
• RSS (noun) - an XML format for distributing
updated information on the Web
• Update multiple RSS online directories
• Perform bulk updates (e.g., Pingomatic XML-
RPC call)
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Off-site Optimization
RSS Feeds in Working
YOU
New feed content
pulled back into reader
http:// RSS
Reader
Reader “pings” to check if
feed (page/site) has been
updated) Titles | Dates | Links |
Authors | Content**
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Off-site Optimization
Creating RSS Feeds
• Text Editor: You must be familiar with all of
the fields and accepted formats.
RSS Specifications (www.rss-specifications.com)
Make RSS Feed (www.make-rss-feeds.com)
• Desktop Software: allows users to quickly
and easily, create, edit and publish RSS feeds
that conform to specifications in wizard that
makes feed creation very easy.
FeedForAll (www.make-rss-feeds.com)
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Off-site Optimization
Posting RSS Feeds
• Feeds can be exported to HTML or HTML
tables and included in the website as a server
side include.
• RSS feeds can be submitted to RSS search
engines. For example: http://www.rss-
specifications.com/rss-submission.htm
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Off-site Optimization
DMOZ Directory
• DMOZ.org (www.dmoz.org)
– The Internet’s largest directory system containing over 4
million web sites
– Maintained by human editors
• DMOZ submission (www.dmoz.org/add.html) works hand in
hand with search Engine Optimization (SEO) for:
– more website visits
– more website backlinks (because other directories will
also copy DMOZ content)
– getting established as the leader in a certain category
• Google takes URL-s from DMOZ, matches URL-s with
their PageRank number on Google and copies into
Google Directory
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Off-site Optimization
Posting RSS Feeds
• Feeds can be exported to HTML or HTML
tables and included in the website as a server
side include.
• RSS feeds can be submitted to RSS search
engines. For example: http://www.rss-
specifications.com/rss-submission.htm
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