Improving the Visibility of your WebsiteSearch Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Skills surgery

What is SEO?

• SEO is the strategy of increasing your website’s ranking in search engine results.

• SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience

• This means making your pages as attractive as possible to search engines so that what you put on a page, how you put it on there and the way in which you structure your overall content lends itself to being picked up by search engine tools.

Search engine - the top brass

•Google 82.80%

• Yahoo 6.42%• Baidu 4.89%• Bing 3.91• Ask 0.52%

• AOL 0.36%

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The rest: www.thesearchenginelist.com

Its all about Google!

• Google search handles over 1 billion searches per day

• 7.2 billion daily page views

• 87.8 billion monthly worldwide searches conducted on Google sites

• Google’s global search market share is 85%

• Daily visitors to Google is 620 million

• Google analytics is used on 57% of the top 10,000 websites 10,000 websites

[ Jeff Bullas - May 2011 ]

• Google keeps your search history for 18 months!

Search engines - what and why?

A search engine operates in the following order:

1. Web crawling

2. Indexing

3. Searching

Web crawling

1. Web crawling – using spiders and robots to collect information about each page

Spiders

1. Read HTML from left to right – top to bottom

2. Follow links on your page

3. Place different emphasis on keyword placement

4. Will not read CSS or Javascript

5. May or may not be interested in Meta Tags

Google use ‘spiders’ to search every website and ranks them in terms of quality and relevance.

Quality and relevance are judged based on the number of clicks, ‘inlinks/out links’, key words and phrases, optimal page usage.

2. Indexing – for faster retrieval the information collected by the web crawlers is analysed and indexed based on principles from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, physics, and computer science.

The data is the text, graphics, and media on the page, for example, words are extracted from the titles, headings, or special fields called meta tags

Indexing

3. Searching - when we enter a query into a search engine (using key words), the engine examines its index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria.

What can I do?

There are two factors which are important to improving your SEO:

• On page optimisation

• Link building

Writing your web pages with search engines in mind:

• Keyword research and analysis

• Page specific meta tag creation

• Title tags

• Alt tag optimisation

• Content placement

On page optimisation

Key words

Key words/phrases – Are vital to site optimisation. Use words and phrases that people will use in a search engine.

There are various Google tools that can help to identify what keywords and phrases to use:

•  Adword tool – Whilst this tool is primarily for placing ads in Google it is also useful for finding out what key words will get the most attention in a search engine. For example, if you wanted to advertise an event on your website this would help you to choose which keywords to use for optimal presence.

•  Insights – Comparing your phrases and search terms with each other. Eg – take five different keyphrases and compare them to see what rating they get and who is currently using them and the volume of clicks that they get.

How the Business School use AdWords

What?

The Business School currently have an Adwords campaign running for each of their programmes.

Why?

To supplement organic search on Google

To inform their search engine optimisation (SEO) work;

- what keywords people are searching for

- what keywords convert how visitors are interacting with the site etc.

Next?

Become less reliant on AdWords

Through the increase in knowledge gained through the analysis of AdWords campaigns they hope to gain better understanding about their customers behaviour and tailor their SEO to exploit this.

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Keywords!

Adwords - Business School example

Keywords

50% of searchers use key phrases with three words or longer30% use two words or longer13% use one word

Writing for search engines

Keyword placement

1. Page titles

2. Meta tags

3. Headings <h1>

4. Body content

5. Text links

6. Alt tags

Where do people look on a page?

Order of words in sentence, heading, paragraph.

The Google spider reads from left to right. The importance of word placement on a page should be considered – headers and first words in a paragraph are primary.

 

 

Writing for search engines

 

1. Page Title – this is really important and should be unique for each page. It is given the greatest weight in search engines and should be 60 characters or less.

Important words should be at the front. What you do, then who you are.

 

Writing for search engines

2. Meta data – optimising Meta Tags through good use of key words. These can be coded in html and contain detail about the page that is not necessarily displayed on the page but which search engines pick up.

For example the meta data on Imperial’s home page:

<meta name="keywords" content=", imperial, college, london, university, Imperial College London, Imperial College London" />

<meta name="description" content="Imperial provides world class scholarship, education and research in science, engineering, management and medicine" />

<meta name="title" content="Imperial College London" />

 

Adding meta data to your page (College CMS)

Where to add meta data to a page: properties area

Adding meta data to your page (College CMS)

Where to add meta data to a page: in the Editor

Adding meta data to your page (Medicine CMS)

Where to add meta data in the page properties area

Writing for search engines

Adding a meta description – what does this look like on Google?

Auto-generated descriptive textwww.imperial.ac.uk/alumni/giving/whattogiveto

Description added:www.imperial.ac.uk/alumni/giving/waystogive

Headings

•Match with the page content

•Include primary keywords

•Use in descending order:

<h1><h2><h3>

Body

•Primary keywords in the first paragraph(www.imperial.ac.uk/alumni/giving/whattogiveto)

•Check keyword density – don’t keep repeating the same words!

•Use paragraphs with headings

Images

Use of graphics Google spiders ignore text that is set into a graphic. For example ‘Imperial College London’ in the college logo will not be read. Alt text will be read by Google spiders and can therefore bolster page optimisation through the choice use of words to describe the image.- Alt text is crucial for accessibility -Never sacrifice these for SEO-Use informative descriptions which contain page’s keyphrases

Currently Google ignores Flash. This may change in the future.

Keep your website up-to-date

If your website has not been kept up-to-date the search engines will assume it is not relevant and you will drop down the search lists.

If you don’t have time to refresh your pages you could consider pulling in information such as blogs, news, events, the College social media accordion

Make the most of your links

•Try to use your keywords in your links – employ your keywords as much as possible, links are a perfect opportunity to use them.

•Hyperlinks - words used in hyperlinks should be relevant and key to the page they are linked to. Google spiders look at these links and the relevance of the words that are used to rank the page. Therefore ‘click here’ is not going to be relevant search criteria.

•Giving relevant names to links also meets with accessibility requirements!

Don’t fall into traps !

Two easy mistakes to make:

1.Using lots of links - instead, the best idea is to have a few good, solid links

2.The other mistake is to pack your text with key words. Use them, of course, but if you over do it, search engines will penalise you.

Surround your keywords with description text

•Your links and titles should contain your key words, but you don’t want to over use them, so surround them with different, but relative and descriptive text.

Indicate your location

If your location is important, for example, you are a local business, then make sure your location is clearly marked over your page.

-If a prospective student is searching for a course in London then Imperials address becomes very important.

Having ‘London’ in our organisation title helps!

-This might also be relevant for an event or if your page is about how great Imperial’s location is make sure you clearly state the location in the text.

Look after your code

This means building a website that is easy for the search engines to understand. Your website should make use of up-to-date technologies like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to minimize the amount of formatting in the HTML page code.

We are already doing this for you through the College CSS!

Don’t use underscores in your URL !

Google treats a hyphen as a word separator, but does not treat an underscore that way. Using underscores can cause Google to see words in the URL string as one big word and hamper the ability for people to find your site through a keyword search.

Instead, use dashes in your URLs.

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/business-school

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/business_school

Link building

link building – is an important aspect of SEO

This includes building internal links (inlinks) within the College site and links to external ‘quality’ sites. For example: you may include relevant links in a news story or links to external organisations such as UCAS

Inbound links to a page will increase your page rank

Link quality is important – one link from a high quality website may be better than 100 links from low quality ones

Trading links will increase the amount of visitors to your site and its reputation, as long as you make sure the sites you trade with are respectable.

Analytics and monitoring

There are various ways to look at the website’s performance through

Google. Type the following into the Google search box:

• Cached pages - To find when Google last looked at a web page type the URL into Google’s search box. Follow the arrow which appears when you hover your cursor over, and select ‘Cached’ above the page preview.

• You’ll get something like this:

Analytics and monitoring

• To find out who and how many links there are to a website and who they are, type Link:URL e.g. link:www.imperial.ac.uk/alumni

• To get a list of all other sites under a web address - type site:URL into the Google search box e.g. site:www.imperial.ac.uk/alumni

Google Analytics

To find out how you are doing.

Before you start to optimise your pages take a benchmark.

In Google Analytics you can check how many visitors and pageviews there

are for each page or to see how your overall page group is performing on

a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis.

Find out how your page(s) are doing before you optimise them, then go

back and check the number of hits after a period of time.

This is a very good way to see how a newly launched website is doing. As

your pages exist within a larger site any changes will probably be very

subtle.

How do I get access to the College’s statistics?

To get access to the College Google Analytics area you need to:

1. Set up a Google account login using your College email address. To register please go to: https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount

2. Email Peter Gillings (p.gillings@imperial.ac.uk) and he will give you access to the College Google Analytics area

3. Go to: http://www.google.co.uk/analytics/ and login.

Top tips

• On-page optimisation• Link building strategy• Use SEO tools to help you out• Keep refining and reviewing your performance

Help

For help with your page groups and pages please contact your Faculty Web Officer

Representing Name

Business School Maurice Farmer

Engineering Caroline Detchenique

Medicine James Moore

Natural Sciences Lucy Stagg

Admin/Support Peter Gillings

Thank you!