library websites: are you meeting your seo goals?

ALA 2012

Library Websites: Are You Meeting Your SEO Goals?

Jennifer Grappone@jengrappone

Gradiva Couzin@gradiva

ALA 2012

About Us

Jennifer Grappone & Gradiva Couzin

Partners, Gravity Search Marketing LLC

Coauthors, Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day (Wiley, 2011)

Find out more about us: www.yourseoplan.comTwitter: @jengrappone, @gradiva

ALA 2012

What We’ll Cover

• Defining Goals• Measuring Goals with Google Analytics• What’s Getting in the Way of Your Goals?

www.slideshare.net/gravitysearch/

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Know Your Goals

What do you want your website to accomplish?

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Ranks Are Not Goals

“We aren’t anywhere”

“We’re on the third page”

“We’re number one!”

“We should be ranking ahead of that site”

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Ranks Are Not Goals

But…

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Search Engine Ranking Factors

Inbound Links

Keywords

Search engines can find your pages

Search engines have reason to trust your pages

Search engines can understand your pages

Site Structure

Semantic tagging

XML Sitemaps

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Clarify Your SEO Goals

I want to on my site

Separate goals for separate audiences

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Clarify Your SEO Goals

I want to on my sitestudents

at my school

find items from our catalog

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Clarify Your SEO Goals

I want to on my sitelocal

school-age

children

sign up for homework

help

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Clarify Your SEO Goals

I want to on my siteresearchers find scholarly resources

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Clarify Your SEO Goals

I want to on my sitemobile users

find our locations and hours

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Clarify Your SEO Goals

I want to on my sitestudents

at my school

find documents from our catalog

These are your target audiences

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Clarify Your SEO Goals

I want to on my sitestudents

at my school

find documents from our catalog

These are your conversions

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Clarify Your SEO Goals

For each of your conversions:

• What page/type of page on your website will this person enter?

• How are you going to measure success?

These need to be accessible to robots and optimized for search

Know your way around your analytics program

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Measure Your Success with Google Analytics

Google Analytics:

• Free• Works great for SEO• Can be used as a

supplement to another analytics system

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Measure Your Success with Google Analytics

Common conversions

• Page views• Time on site/# of pages viewed• % of total site traffic that comes from organic

search• A visit to a "thank you"/"success" page

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Measure Your Success with Google Analytics

Goals that are hard or impossible to measure

• Offline conversions (walk-in visitors,phone calls)

• Awareness• Word-of-mouth referrals

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Measure Your Success with Google Analytics

Analyze and Interpret!

• Exit pages: exit may mean success• Time on site: are your users engaged or lost?• Low-frequency conversions: find proxy

conversions• Bounce rate: view by audience segment

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Measure Your Success with Google Analytics

Segment your audience

Average time on site: 50 seconds

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Measure Your Success with Google Analytics

Segment your audience

Average time on site: 50 seconds• For visitors arriving via keywords containing

[name of special collection]: 4 minutes

ALA 2012

Measure Your Success with Google Analytics

Segment your audience

Average time on site: 50 seconds• For visitors arriving via keywords containing

[name of special collection]: 4 minutes • For visitors landing on your “hours and

location” page: 32 seconds

ALA 2012

Measure Your Success with Google Analytics

Segment your audience

Average time on site: 50 seconds• For visitors arriving via keywords containing

[name of special collection]: 4 minutes • For visitors landing on your “hours and

location” page: 32 seconds• For visitors in Germany: all bounce out

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Measure Your Success with Google Analytics

I want to on my sitethepublic

find digital collections

Case Study

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Measure Your Success with Google Analytics

• How many people are coming to the Cuneiform collection via organic search?

• What keywords are they using?

• Are they finding it useful?

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Measure Your Success with Google Analytics

No search entries

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Measure Your Success with Google Analytics

Only a few relevant referring keywords

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Measure Your Success with Google Analytics

Low time per visit

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Measure Your Success with Google Analytics

High bounce rate

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Measure Your Success with Google Analytics

All the traffic using the keyword “cuneiform” is landing on the same URL.

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Measure Your Success with Google Analytics

This landing page is a terrible destination!

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Measure Your Success with Google Analytics

Why?

• The cuneiform collection pages are blocked from search engine crawling

• The terrible landing page is findable by search engines

• The terrible landing page has keywords on it

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Structure Your Site for Search-Friendliness

What do search engines see on your site?

• Access to pages (find)• Keywords on page (understand)

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Structure Your Site for Search-Friendliness

Access to pages

Are there pages on your site that search engine robots can’t reach?

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Structure Your Site for Search-Friendliness

Barriers to Access: Form input / Search

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Structure Your Site for Search-Friendliness

Barriers to Access: Form input / Search

Possible Solutions: • XML sitemap – Webmaster Tools• Navigable (clickable) path

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Structure Your Site for Search-Friendliness

Barriers to Access: Content behind authorization

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Structure Your Site for Search-Friendliness

Barriers to Access: Content behind authorization

Possible Solutions: • Expose preview info (80 words: abstract,

description, etc.)• First click free program (Google)

http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40543

• Avoid blanket restrictions – use intelligent rules

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Structure Your Site for Search-Friendliness

Site Structure Diagnostic Tools

• Your own analytics• Google Webmaster Tools• crawl errors• fetch as Googlebot

• “site:” search in Google

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Structure Your Site for Search-Friendliness

What do search engines see on your site?

• Access to pages (find) ✔✔• Keywords on page (understand)

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On Page OptimizationExample: Huffington Post

This page is an attempt to rank well for “egypt protests”

HTML title

Page URL

Text on page

Internal links on site

(understand)

(find + understand)

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Structure Your Site for Search-Friendliness

On-Page Optimization Basics

• Unique content at every URL • Unique, descriptive HTML titles on every

page• Descriptive text (keywords) on page

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On-page Keywords

Case Study: Berkeley Public Library – Kindle

I want to on my sitepatronsknow we

offer Kindlebooks

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Google Search Suggestions

Search suggest

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Google Insights for Searchgoogle.com/insights/search

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Google AdWords Keyword Tool

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

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Google AdWords Keyword Tool

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

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On-page Keywords

“Kindle” appearsonce on this page

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On-page Keywords

Berkeley Public Library – Kindle keywords

Solutions: • There should be a page on this site

dedicated to Kindle borrowing. • For each of your website goals, create (at

least) a dedicated page or family of pages containing relevant keywords

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Resources for Further Learning

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Search Engine Ranking Factors: Resources

• LOCAL RANKING FACTORS 2012 http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml

• SEARCH ENGINE LAND’s Periodic Table of SEOhttp://searchengineland.com/seotable

• WATCH THIS SPACE FOR FUTURE EDITIONS (last was June 2011, may be biannual) http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

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Tools For Checking Ranks

• SEOMOZ RANK TRACKER (paid)http://www.seomoz.org/rank-tracker

• ADVANCED WEB RANKING (paid)http://www.advancedwebranking.com/

• GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLShttp://www.google.com/webmasters

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Tools for Site Diagnostics

• GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS http://www.google.com/webmasters

• SEO BROWSER (spider emulator)http://www.seo-browser.com

• REX SWAIN’S HTTP VIEWERhttp://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html

• WEB DEVELOPER BROWSER EXTENSIONhttp://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/

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Untapped Possibilities

• Social signals• Authorship• Mobile search• Semantic tagging• Local search

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Untapped PossibilitiesSocial Signals

One student clicks “Like” or “+1” on your site.

Original person AND other interconnected members of the community see results biased in your favor

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Untapped PossibilitiesSocial Signals

Social sharing links

Recommended at a minimum: • Google+• Tweet this• Facebook Like/Recommend

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Like vs. Recommend

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Untapped PossibilitiesAuthorship

Identify page author in search listings:• Ties to Google+ or

on-site profile page

• Adds credibility

• Likely to increase clickthrough rate

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Untapped PossibilitiesMobile Search

Mobile search to exceed desktop search circa 2013

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Untapped PossibilitiesSemantic Tagging

Schema Tags - http://schema.org/Library

• Conveys meaning to search engines• Supported by Google, Bing. Rank effect unknown if any.• Can be used for basics (location, hours) or more complex• May be problematic if you don’t want your content repurposed

by Google

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Untapped PossibilitiesLocal Search

• Google will show local results if query deserves

• Google Places listing merging with Google+

• Claim your business to manage, edit

Local Results More & More Prominent