Unit-3 Developing an SEO-Friendly

Website
The Major Elements of Planning
One should include SEO strategy into the site planning process long before
one’s site goes live
1. Technology Choices
SEO is a technical process, and as such, it impacts major technology choices.
For example, a CMS can help or damage your SEO strategy.
Some platforms do not allow you to have titles and meta descriptions that
vary from one web page to the next, create hundreds (or thousands) of
pages of duplicate content, or make a 302 (temporary) redirect the default
redirect.
2. Market Segmentation
▪ Another critical factor to understand is the nature of the market
in which you are competing.
▪ This tells you how competitive the environment is in general, and
augmented(improved) with additional research, you can use this
information to tell how competitive the SEO environment is.
▪ In some markets, natural search is intensively competitive. For
instance, Figure shows the December 2012 Google results for
credit cards. In this market, Visa, MasterCard, American Express,
and Discover all fail to make the #1 position in Google’s results,
suggesting that the market is highly competitive.
3. Where You Can Find Great Links
• Getting third parties to link their websites to yours is a critical part of SEO.
• Without inbound links, there is little to no chance of ranking for
competitive terms in search engines such as Google, whose algorithm
relies heavily on link measuring and weighting criteria.
4. Content Resource
• The quality and volume of your content is main thing
to drive any important links to your site.
• If your content is of average quality and covers the
same information dozens of other sites have
covered, it will not attract many links.
• At the beginning of any SEO campaign, you should
look at the content on the site and the available
resources for developing new content.
5. Branding Considerations
• Brand name of product makes a great impact on SEO plan
 6. Competition
Your SEO strategy can also be influenced by your competitors’ strategies, so
understanding what they are doing is a critical part of the process for both SEO
and business intelligence objectives. There are several scenarios you might
encounter:
• The competitor discovers a unique, highly converting set of keywords.
• The competitor discovers a targeted, high-value link.
• The competitor saturates a market segment, justifying your focus elsewhere.
• Weaknesses appear in the competitor’s strategy, which provide opportunities
for exploitation.
Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competition from an SEO
perspective is a significant part of devising your own SEO strategy.
 Making Your Site Accessible to Search Engines
The first step in the SEO design process is to ensure that your site can be found and
crawled by the search engines.
This is not as simple as it sounds, as there are many popular web design and
implementation constructs that the crawlers may not understand.
Indexable Content
• To rank well in the search engines, your site’s content should be in HTML text form.
For example, while the search engines do crawl images and Flash files, these are
content types that are difficult for search engines to analyze, and therefore they do
not help them determine the topical relevance of your pages.
• This is not to say that websites developed using Flash are inherently irrelevant,
or that it is impossible to successfully optimize a website that uses Flash for
search; however, in our experience the preference is almost always given to
HTML-based files.
• The search engines also face challenges with “identifying” images from a
relevance perspective, as there are minimal text-input fields for image files.
• While we do strongly recommend accurate labeling of images in these fields,
images alone are usually not enough to earn a web page top rankings for
relevant queries.
• In June 2011, Google announced improvements to its image search
functionality. By uploading an image, dragging and dropping an image from the
desktop, entering an image URL, or right-clicking on an image within a browser ,
users can often find other locations of that image on the Web for reference and
research, as well as images that “appear” similar in tone and composition.
Spiderable Link Structures
• search engines use links on web pages to help them
discover other web pages and websites. For this
reason, website developers should invest the time to
build a link structure that spiders can crawl easily.
• Many sites make the critical mistake of hiding or
obfuscating their navigation in ways that limit spider
accessibility, thus impacting their ability to get pages
listed in the search engines’ indexes.
• Google’s spider has reached Page A and sees links to
pages B and E. However, even though pages C and D
might be important pages on the site, the spider has
no way to reach them (or even to know they exist),
because no direct, crawlable links point to those
pages.
Here are some common reasons why pages may not be reachable:
Links in submission-required forms
Search spiders will not attempt to “submit” forms, and thus any content or
links that are accessible only via a form are invisible to the engines. This even
applies to simple forms such as user logins, search boxes, or some types of
pull-down lists.
Links in hard-to-parse JavaScript
If you use JavaScript for links, you may find that search engines either do not
crawl or give very little weight to the embedded links.
Links in Flash, Java, or other plug-ins
Links embedded inside Java and plug-ins are invisible to the engines. In
theory, the search engines are making progress in detecting links within Flash,
but don’t rely too heavily on this.
Links in PowerPoint and PDF files
PowerPoint and PDF files are no different from Flash, Java, and plug-ins.
Search engines sometimes report links seen in PowerPoint files or PDFs,
but how much they count for is not easily known.
Links pointing to pages blocked by the robots.txt or meta robot tag
The robots.txt file provides a very simple means for preventing web
spiders from crawling pages on your site.
XML Sitemaps
• Google first announced it in 2005, and then Yahoo! and MSN Search agreed
to support the protocol in 2006.
• Using the Sitemaps protocol you can supply the search engines with a list of
all the pages you would like them to crawl and index.
• Adding a URL to a Sitemap file does not guarantee that it will be crawled or
indexed.
• However, it can result in pages that are not otherwise discovered or indexed
by the search engines getting crawled and indexed.
Benefits: XML Sitemaps
• For the pages the search engines already know about through their regular
spidering, they use the metadata you supply, such as the date when the content
was last modified (lastmoddate) and the frequency at which the page is
changed (changefreq), to improve how they crawl your site.
• For the pages they don’t know about, they use the additional URLs you supply
to increase their crawl coverage.
• Verification/registration of XML Sitemaps may indicate positive trust/authority
signals.
• The crawling/inclusion benefits of Sitemaps may have second-order positive
effects, such as improved rankings or greater internal link popularity.
Identifying the Site Development Process and Players
• Process
– Q1: Who your target audience is?
– Q2: What your message is?
– Q3: How your message is relevant?
• Players
– Team manager
– Technical team
– Creative team
– PR
– Marketing and Advertising people
• Before you start working on any SEO project, you need to know three
things:
who your target audience is?
what your message is?
how your message is relevant
• marketing, advertising, and PR teams have to set the objectives before
implementation—successful SEO requires a team effort.
• Your SEO team should be cross-functional and multidisciplinary,
consisting of the team manager, the technical team, the creative team,
marketing, advertising and PR.
• Advertising needs to have its messages well thought out and
prepared.
• Advertising serves multiple purposes, but its most fundamental
purpose is to compel people to take a specific action. What action
are you hoping to compel people to take?
• The PR team has to take your story to the media and attract them
into writing and talking about it.
• (They tell story of your brand/company, They get into the minds of
the consumer and research)
• Marketing team has to do following:
• Understand the ROI, create new idea, monitor the competition,
focus on the customer, set the strategy, Plan the attack and execute
• The technical and creative team is responsible for delivering the
project
• They take direction from marketing, advertising, and PR on what
needs to be accomplished.

• Ongoing feedback is essential because the success of your project is

determined solely by whether you’re meeting your goals.
Identifying Current Server Statistics Software and
Gaining Access
Web Analytics
• Analytics software can provide you with a rich array of valuable data
about what is taking place on your site.
• It can answer questions such as:
• How many unique visitors did you receive yesterday?
• Is traffic trending up or down?
• What are the most popular search terms with which people find you?
• What are the most popular pages on your site?
• What are the best-converting pages on the site?
• if your site does not currently have any measurement systems in
place, you put something in place immediately.
• High-quality, free analytics tools are available, such as Yahoo! Web
Analytics and Google Analytics.
Logfile Tracking
• Logfiles contain a detailed click-by-click history of all requests to
your web server.
• Make sure you have access to the logfiles and some method for
analyzing them.
• If you use a third-party hosting company for your site, chances are
it provides some sort of free logfile analyzer, such as AWStats,
Webalizer, or something similar.
• Obtain access to whatever tool is in use as soon as you can.
• You can see longer-term trends of search engine crawling patterns,
and whether crawling activity is trending up (good) or down (bad).
Google and Bing Webmaster Tools
• Two valuable sources of data include Google Webmaster Tools and
Bing Webmaster Tools.
• This includes things such as external link data, internal link data,
crawl errors, high-volume search terms, and much, much more.
Determining Top Competitors
• Understanding the competition should be a key component of
planning your SEO strategy.
• The first step is to understand who your competitors in the search
results really are.
Seeking the Best
• Are their websites fully indexed by Google and Yahoo!?
• In other words, are all their webpages, including product pages, making it
into the search engines’ databases?
• You can use free tool for that
• Product and category pages have keyword-rich page titles (title tags) that
are unique to each page? You can easily review an entire site’s page titles
within Google or Yahoo! by searching for site:www.yourcompetitor.com.
• Do their product and category pages have reasonably high
PageRank scores?
• https://checkpagerank.net/
• Is anchor text across the site, particularly in the navigation,
keyword-rich?
• Are the websites getting penalized? -Too much keyword repetition
or too many suspiciously well-optimized text links can yield a
penalty for over-optimization.
• Sites can also be penalized for extensive amounts of duplicate
content.
Uncovering Their Secrets
• Let’s assume your investigation has led you to identify several
competitors who are gaining excellent search placement using
intelligent tactics.
• Now it is time to uncover their secrets:
• What keywords are they targeting?
• Look at the page titles across their home page and product category
pages
• Look at their meta keywords tag like:
<meta name=“keywords” content=“keyword1, keyword2,…”>
• Who’s linking to their home page, or to their top-selling product pages
and category pages?
• A link popularity checker can be quite helpful in analyzing this.
• Checked cached version of Google to verify cloaking
• Simply go to Compete.com, Quantcast.com, or Alexa.com and search on
the competitor’s domain. If you have the budget for higher-end
competitive intelligence tools, you can use comScore.com or
Hitwise.com. (Google trends for website)
• The wayback machine-to check their historical pages
Assessing Historical Progress
• Methods for measuring the results from your SEO efforts
Maintain a Timeline of Site Changes
• Keeping a log of changes to your site is absolutely recommended
• There is hidden visibility into how technical modifications to the
website might have altered the course of search traffic, whether
positively or negatively, is obscured.
• There are many scenarios in which you will want to try to establish
cause and effect, such as:
1. If search traffic spikes or plummets
• Sudden changes in organic traffic are obviously notable events.
• If traffic plummets, you will be facing lots of questions about why, and
having a log of site changes- put you in a better position to assess
whether any changes you recommended could have been the cause.
• Of course, if traffic spikes you will want to be able to see whether an
SEO-related change was responsible as well.
2. When gradual traffic changes begin
• Changes do not always come as sudden spikes or drop-offs.
• Even so, when you see the traffic beginning a gradual climb, you
will want to be able to assess the likely reasons.

3. To track and report SEO progress

• Accountability is a key component of SEO. Budget managers will
want to know what return they are getting on their SEO
investment.
Types of Site Changes That Can Affect SEO
• Your log should track all changes to the website
• Changes in sites have a big impact on SEO, Here are some examples:
1. Adding content areas/features/options to the site (this could be
anything from a new blog to a new categorization system).
2. Changing the domain of the site. This can have a significant
impact, and you should document when the switchover was made.
3. Modifying URL structures
4. Implementing a new CMS
 5. new partnerships-meaning your site is earning new links or
linking out to new places
6. changes to navigation/menu systems -moving links around on
pages, creating new link systems etc.
7. Implementing redirects either to or from the site.
 Content Delivery and Search Spider Control
Cloaking- to show search engines one version of content and show
humans a different version.
• If the engines feel you are attempting to manipulate their
rankings or results through cloaking, they may take adverse
action against your site.
• The intent of your content delivery doesn’t interfere with their
goals, you’re less likely to be subject to a penalty.
When to Show Different Content to Engines and Visitors

Multivariate and A/B split testing-

• A/B testing is a method of comparing two versions of a webpage or
app against each other to determine which one performs better
• Multivariate-This form of testing utilizes have core functionality
similar to A/B testing. But it is great to compare multiple variables
at once. The goal of multivariate testing is to determine which
combination of variations performs the best out of all of the
possible combinations.
• Testing landing pages for conversions requires that you show
different content to different visitors to test performance.
Content requiring registration and First Click Free
• If you force registration (paid or free) on users to view specific content pieces,
it is best to keep the URL the same for both logged-in and non-logged-in users
and to show a snippet (one to two paragraphs is usually enough) to
non-logged-in users and search engines.
Navigation unspiderable by search engines
• If your navigation is in Flash, JavaScript, a Java application, or another format
that the search engines may not be able to parse, you should consider showing
search engines a version of your site that has spiderable, crawlable content in
HTML. Many sites do this simply with CSS layers, displaying a human-visible,
search-invisible layer and a layer for the engines
Duplicate content
• If a significant portion of a page’s content is duplicated, you might
consider restricting spider access to it by placing it in robots.txt. This
ensures that you can show the engines the unique portion of your
pages, while protecting against duplicate content problems.
 Redirects
• A redirect is used to indicate when content has moved from one location
to another.
• There are two major types of redirects: 301 & 302 both send a human or
search engine crawler to the new location but in a different way
• Once a redirect is implemented, users who go to the old versions of your
pages will be sent to the new versions of those pages.
• Without the redirect, the user would get a Page Not Found (404) error.
With the redirect, the web server tells the incoming user agent (whether
a browser or a spider) to instead fetch the requested content from the
new URL.
Why and When to Redirect
• Redirects are important not only for users, but also for letting search
engines know when you have moved content.
• After you move a page, the search engines will still have the old URL in
their indexes and will continue to return it in their search results until
they discover the page is no longer there and discover the new page.
• You can help speed up this process by implementing a redirect.
• Here are some scenarios in which you may end up needing to implement
redirects:
• You have old content that expires, so you remove it.
• You change your hosting company.
• You change your CMS.
Good and Bad Redirects
Good and Bad Redirects
301 moved permanently
• This status code tells the browser (or search engine crawler) that the
resource has been permanently moved to another location, and there is
no intent to ever bring it back.
302 moved temporarily
• This status code tells the browser (or search engine crawler) that the
resource has been temporarily moved to another location, and that the
move should not be treated as permanent.
• Both forms of redirect send a human or a search engine crawler to the
new location, but the search engines interpret these two HTTP status
codes in very different ways.
• When a crawler sees a 301 HTTP status code, it assumes it should pass
the historical link juice (and any other metrics) from the old page to
the new one.
• When a search engine crawler sees a 302 HTTP status code, it assumes
it should not pass the historical link juice from the old page to the new
one.
• In addition, the 301 redirect will lead the search engine to remove the
old page from its index and replace it with the new one.
• The preservation of historical link juice is critical in the world of SEO.
• For example, imagine you had 1,000 links to
http://www.yourolddomain.com and you decided to relocate
everything to http://www.yournewdomain.com.
• If you used redirects that returned a 302 status code, you would be
starting your link-building efforts from scratch again.
• In addition, the old version of the page might remain in the search
engines’ indexes and compete with the new version for search
rankings.
Content Management System (CMS) Issues
how to ensure that a CMS will be search engine–friendly.

Title tag customization

• A search engine–friendly CMS must allows for title tags to be
customized on a page-specific level
Meta tag customization
• Being able to implement custom meta descriptions is critical. Enabling
editorial control is essential for a good CMS.
301-redirect functionality- sadly disallow by many CMS
• Many CMSs sadly lack this critical feature, disallowing the proper
redirection of content when necessary
Customizable URL structure
• If the default URL structure of the CMS doesn’t suit your needs, you
should be able to change it.
Pagination controls
• Pagination can be the bane of a website’s search rankings, so
controlling it through inclusion of more items per page, more
contextually relevant anchor text (e.g., not “next,” “prev,” and
page numbers) will make your important content get more link
juice and crawl attention.
Poor image handling
• Alt tags on images are a must for SEO—they serve as “anchor text”
for the search engines.
Best Practices for Multilanguage/Country
Targeting
• Many businesses target multiple countries with their websites, and for
such businesses, various questions arise.
Targeting a Specific Country
Starting with the basics of international targeting, it is important to let
the search engines know where your business is based in as many ways
as possible. These might include:
Using a country-specific TLD (ccTLD) for your domain (e.g., .co.uk)
Physical local address in plain text on every page of your site
Google Webmaster Central geotargeting to your country of interest
 Verifying your address with Google Maps
Getting links from in-country websites
Use of the local language on the website
Problems with Using Your Existing Domain
• Create multiple versions of your site and determine where the user is
in the world before either delivering the appropriate content or
redirecting that user to the appropriate place in the site (or even to a
subdomain hosted in the target country)?
The Two Major Approaches
• The best practice remains one of two approaches, depending on the
size and scale of your operations in the new countries and how
powerful and established your .com domain is.
• If you have a strong main domain, you may want to create localized
versions of your content either on country-specific subdomains
(http://uk.yourdomain.com, http://au.yourdomain.com, etc.) or in
subfolders (/uk/,/au/, etc.), with the preference being for the use of
subdomains so that you can set up local hosting.
• Both the subdomains and subfolders approaches allow you to set your
geotargeting option in Google Webmaster Central