Creating an SEO Plan

Before you can even begin to optimize your web site for search engines,
you need to have a search engine optimization plan in place. This will
help you create SEO goals and keep those goals in focus as the purpose
of your site changes, and as the methods for search engine optimization
change — and they will change.
Your SEO plan will help you see where you need to concentrate your efforts at
any given time. This need will change over time. In the beginning, you’re most
likely to be focusing on getting started with SEO. However, after you’ve put all
of your SEO strategies into place, the focus of your SEO activities will change.
Note that I said they will change, not that they will end. Once you’ve started
SEO, if you plan to continue using it, you’ll need to constantly monitor and
update your SEO plan, strategies, and activities. There was a time when the
only thing you had to worry about was which keywords or links would be
most effective for getting your site ranked high in relevant search results.
Today, very few search engines focus on a single aspect of search engine optimization.
This means that over time those who focused only on keywords or
only on links have found themselves with diminished SEO effectiveness.
Search engines will naturally change and mature, as the technologies and principles
that enable SEO and the engines themselves change. For this reason, the
SEO plan should be considered a dynamic, changing document. To keep up
with that document, you need to be evolving or changing as well. And that’s
where your SEO plan will help you stay on track.
Using the SEO plan, you can quickly and easily tell where you are and where
you need to be with your search engine optimization efforts.
Understanding Why You Need SEO
Before you can understand the reasons for using SEO, it might be good to have a definition of what
SEO — search engine optimization — is. It’s probably a safe assumption that if you’ve picked up this
book, you have some understanding of SEO, so I’ll keep it simple.
SEO is the science of customizing elements of your web site to achieve the best possible search engine
ranking. That’s really all there is to search engine optimization. But as simple as it sounds, don’t let it
fool you. Both internal and external elements of the site affect the way it’s ranked in any given search
engine, so all of these elements should be taken into consideration. Good SEO can be very difficult to
achieve, and great SEO seems pretty well impossible at times.
But why is search engine optimization so important? Think of it this way. If you’re standing in a crowd
of a few thousand people and someone is looking for you, how will they find you? In a crowd that
size, everyone blends together.
Now suppose there is some system that separates groups of people. Maybe if you’re a woman you’re
wearing red and if you’re a man you’re wearing blue. Now anyone looking for you will have to look
through only half of the people in the crowd.
You can further narrow the group of people to be searched by adding additional differentiators until
you have a small enough group that a search query can be executed and the desired person can be
easily found.
Your web site is much like that one person in the huge crowd. In the larger picture your site is
nearly invisible, even to the search engines that send crawlers out to catalog the Web. To get your
site noticed, even by the crawlers, certain elements must stand out. And that’s why you need
search engine optimization.
By accident your site will surely land in a search engine. And it’s likely to rank within the first few
thousand results. That’s just not good enough. Being ranked on the ninth or tenth page of search
results is tantamount to being invisible. To be noticed, your site should be ranked much higher.
Ideally you want your site to be displayed somewhere on the first three pages of results. Most people
won’t look beyond the third page, if they get even that far. The fact is, it’s the sites that fall on the
first page of results that get the most traffic, and traffic is translated into revenue, which is the ultimate
goal of search engine optimization.
To achieve a high position in search results, your site must be more than simply recognizable by a
search engine crawler. It must satisfy a set of criteria that not only gets the site cataloged, but can
also get it cataloged above most (if not all) of the other sites that fall into that category or topic.
Some of the criteria by which a search engine crawler determines the rank your site should have in
a set of results include:
Anchor text
Site popularity
Link context
Topical links
Title tags
Keywords
Site language
Content
Site maturity
There are estimated to be at least several hundred other criteria that could also be examined before
your site is ranked by a search engine. Some of the criteria listed also have multiple points of view.
For example, when looking at link context, a crawler might take into consideration where the link
is located on the page, what text surrounds it, and where it leads to or from.
These criteria are also different in importance. For some search engines, links are more important
than site maturity, and for others, links have little importance. These weights and measures are constantly
changing, so even trying to guess what is most important at any given time is a pointless exercise.
Just as you figure it out, the criteria will shift or change completely.
By nature, many of the elements are likely to have some impact on your site ranking, even when
you do nothing to improve them. However, without your attention, you’re leaving the search ranking
of your site to chance. That’s like opening a business without putting out a sign. You’re sure to
get some traffic, but because people don’t know you’re there, it won’t be anything more than the
curiosity of passersby.
Setting SEO Goals
Okay, so you understand how important it is to put time into SEO. Now, how exactly do you go
about it? One thing you don’t do is begin trying to implement SEO strategies without some sort of
goal for what you want to accomplish.
One of the greatest failings of many SEO plans, like all technology plans, is the lack of a clearly defined
goal. The goal for your SEO plan should be built around your business needs, and it’s not something
every business requires. For example, if you run a simple blog, SEO might be more expense than it’s
worth. But if your plans for that blog are to turn it into a brand, then the simplest of SEO strategies
might be just what you need to build the traffic that begins to establish your brand.
If you have a larger business, say a web site that sells custom-made silk-flower arrangements, one
way to increase your business (some estimate by more than 50 percent) is to invest time, money,
and considerable effort into optimizing your site for search. Just don’t do it without a goal in mind.
In the case of the silk-flower web site, one goal might be to increase the amount of traffic your web
site receives. Another might be to increase your exposure to potential customers outside your geographic
region.Those are both good reasons to implement an SEO plan. One other reason you might consider
investing in SEO is to increase your revenues, which you can do by funneling site visitors through
a sales transaction while they are visiting your web site. SEO can help with that, too.
So before you even begin to put together an SEO plan, the first thing you need to do is determine
what goal you want to achieve with that plan. Be sure it is a well-articulated and specifically defined
goal, too. The more specific, the closer you will come to hitting it.
For example, a goal to “increase web site traffic” is far too broad. Of course you want to increase
your web site traffic. That’s the overarching goal of any SEO plan. However, if you change that goal
to “increase the number of visitors who complete a transaction of at least $25,” you are much more
likely to implement the SEO that will indeed help you reach that goal.
Make sure the goal is specific and attainable. Otherwise, it’s very easy to become unfocused with
your SEO efforts. In some cases, you can spend all your time chasing SEO and never accomplish
anything. Search engines regularly change the criteria for ranking sites. They started doing this
when internal, incoming, and external links became a factor in SEO. Suddenly, every webmaster
was rushing to add as many additional links as possible, and often those links were completely
unrelated to the site. There was a sudden and often meaningless rise in page links. It wasn’t long
before the linking criteria had to be qualified with additional requirements.
Today, link strategies are quite complex and must abide by a set of rules or your web site could be
banned from some search engines for what’s called SEO spam, or the practice of targeting a specific
element or criteria of search engine ranking, with the intention of becoming one of the highest ranked
sites on the Web. If an SEO goal has been established, however, you’re more likely to have a balanced
traffic flow, which will improve your search engine ranking naturally.
In addition to well-focused goals, you should also consider how your SEO goals align with your
business goals. Business goals should be the overall theme for everything you do with your web
site, and if your SEO goals are not created with the intent of furthering those business goals, you’ll
find the SEO goals ultimately fail. Be sure that any goal you set for optimizing your site for search
is a goal that works well within the parameters that are set by your overall business goals.
Finally, remain flexible at all times. Get a goal, or even a set of goals. And hold tightly to them. Just
don’t hold so tightly that the goals get in the way of performing great SEO activities. SEO goals and
plans, like any others, must be flexible and must grow with your organization. For this reason, it’s
always a good idea to review your SEO goals and plans periodically — at least every six months, and
quarterly is much better.
Creating Your SEO Plan
Once you have a goal or set of goals in mind for your web site, it’s time to create your SEO plan.
The SEO plan is the document that you’ll use to stay on track as you try to implement SEO strategies
on your site.For many people, the thought of implementing SEO on a web site that includes dozens or even
hundreds of pages is overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be, though.
Prioritizing pages
Look at SEO in small, bite-size pieces. For example, instead of looking at your site as a whole, look
at each page on the site. Prioritize those pages, and then plan your SEO around each page’s priority.
Taking a single page into consideration helps to eliminate the “everything has to happen right now”
issue and makes it possible for you to create an SEO plan that will maximize your web site’s potential
in the minimum amount of time.
Top priority pages should be the ones that your visitors will most naturally gravitate to, such as
your home page, or pages that will generate the most in terms of traffic or revenue. When prioritizing
pages, you’re also creating a roadmap for your marketing efforts. If three of the pages on your
site are your top priority, those three will have the lion’s share of time, capital, and effort when it
comes to SEO and marketing.
Site assessment
After you have prioritized your site, you should assess where you stand and where you need to be
with your current SEO efforts. Again, assess each page individually, rather than the site as a whole.
In SEO, individual pages are equally important (if not more so) than the entire site. All of your
efforts are designed to rank one page above all others in search results. Which page is the most
important should be determined by your business needs.
Your SEO assessment should be a document that outlines the current standing of the main SEO
elements of each page. It should contain columns for the element of the site you’re assessing, the
current status of that element, what needs to be improved in that element, and the deadline for
improvement. It’s also helpful if you have a check box next to each item that can be marked when
improvements are completed and a column for follow-up, because SEO is a never-ending process.
The elements that should be considered during an assessment include:
Site/page tagging: The meta tags that are included in the coding of your web site are
essential to having that site listed properly in a search engine. Tags to which you should
pay specific attention are the title tags and description tags, because these are the most
important to a search engine.
Page content: How fresh is your content? How relevant is it? How often is it updated? And
how much content is there? Content is still important when it comes to search results. After
all, most people are looking for a specific piece of content, whether it’s information or a
product. If your content is stale, search engines could eventually begin to ignore your site in
favor of a site that has fresher content. There are exceptions to this generalization, however.
And one exception is if your content is, by nature, very rich but not very dynamic. Because
of the usefulness of the content, your site will probably continue to rank well. But it’s a difficult
case to determine. In most cases, fresh content is better.
Site links: Site links are essential in SEO. Crawlers and spiders look for the links into
and out of your site in order to traverse your site and collect data on each URL. However,
they also look for those links to be in-context, meaning the link must come from or lead
to a site that is relevant to the page that is being indexed. Broken links tend to be a large
problem when it comes to search engine ranking, so be sure to check that links are still
working during the assessment process.
Site map: Believe it or not, a site map will help your web site be more accurately linked.
But this is not the ordinary site map that you include to help users quickly navigate through
your site. This site map is an XML-based document, at the root of your HTML, that contains
information (URL, last updated, relevance to surrounding pages, and so on) about each
of the pages within a site. Using this XML site map will help to ensure that even the deep
pages within your site are indexed by search engines. If you don’t have a site map, you
should create one. If you do have one, make sure it’s accurate and up to date.
You can find an example SEO Assessment worksheet in Appendix D of this book. Use
this worksheet to create an accurate assessment of your web site.
Finishing the plan
With the site assessment out of the way, you should have a good idea of what areas need work and
what areas are in good shape. Don’t assume the areas that don’t currently need work will always be
perfect, however. That’s not how it works. At the least, changes to the pages will require changes to
the SEO efforts that you’re putting forth; at most they may require that you begin SEO efforts for
that page all over again.
You can now take the time to put together all of the information that you’ve gathered into a cohesive
picture of the SEO efforts you should be making. Your SEO plan is more than just a picture of
what’s there and what’s not, however. This is the document that you use to tie everything together:
current standing, marketing efforts, capital expenditures, time frames — all of it.
The document should look much like any other plan that you’ll create, for instance your business
plan. In this plan, you should have an area for background information, marketing information,
plans for growing the business, and plans for managing problems that may arise.
An SEO plan is very similar. You’ll have your current standings, the goals that you plan to hit, and
the marketing efforts that you plan to make for each page (or for the site as a whole). You’ll even
have the capital expenditures that you plan to encounter as you implement your SEO plan.
You’ll also want to include the strategies you plan to use. Those strategies can be efforts such as submitting
your site or pages from your site to directories manually and planning the content you’ll use
to draw search crawlers, or they can be keyword marketing plans or pay-per-click programs you
plan to use. Also be sure to include a time line for the testing and implementation of those efforts as
well as for regular follow-ups.Follow-up
Follow-up is also an essential part of your SEO plan. Many people believe they can develop and
implement an SEO plan and then just walk away from it. The truth is, however, that SEO is not just
a one-time event. It’s an ongoing process that requires testing, monitoring, and often re-building.
A good plan for conducting follow-ups is to plan for them quarterly. Some companies will choose to
follow up and reassess their SEO bi-annually, but to be truly effective quarterly is much better. One
thing to keep in mind, however, is that following up on your SEO efforts too soon is non-productive.
In many cases, it takes at least three months to get a clear picture of how successful your efforts are.
Conducting an evaluation before that three-month mark could have you chasing after an elusive SEO
goal that doesn’t really exist. Or worse, it could lead you away from a successful strategy.
Give your plan at least three months but no more than six between checkups. Once you create the
habit of re-evaluating your SEO efforts on that time schedule, it will be much less time consuming
than you assume.
Understanding Organic SEO
All this talk about planning for SEO is great, but what about organic SEO. You don’t have to put any
efforts into that, do you?
Don’t go foolin’ yourself. Organic SEO is just as much work as any other type of SEO. It’s just a
little different method of creating a site optimized for search ranking, without having to implement
any new technologies or spend a lot of time submitting your site to different primary and
secondary search engines. And really, the distinction here is a very general one. Only SEO purists
consider “real SEO” as being strictly organic — meaning you use no fee-based services whatever.
Most people are happy with “just plain SEO,” which usually means a combination of organic and
fee-based. It’s best if you just think of SEO as just SEO; then you don’t have to worry about distinctions
that aren’t really important in optimizing your web site.
The definitions of organic SEO vary a little, depending on whom you talk to. Some SEO experts think
it’s all about optimizing the content of your web site to catch the attention of the crawlers and spiders
that index sites. Others think it’s the number of quality links you can generate on your site. But in
truth, organic SEO is a combination of those and other elements, such as site tagging, that will naturally
place your web site in search engine rankings. How high in those rankings depends on how well
you design your site.
But before you go thinking that organic SEO is just the solution you’ve been looking for, take a step
back. What organic SEO is not is an easy way to land in a search engine. Basically, if you put a web
site online and spend a little time getting it ready for the world to see, you will have probably
achieved some measure of organic SEO without really trying.That’s because your site will probably end up listed in some search engine somewhere, without
too much time and effort from you. Elements that naturally occur on a web site — like the title of
the site, the URL, included web links, and even some of the content — will probably land you in
a search engine (unless those elements are black-hat SEO efforts, in which case the engine could
permanently exclude you). The question is where in the results will you land? Without attention
from you, that might not be as high in the rankings as you would like.
Organic SEO maximizes those naturally occurring elements, building upon each element to create
a site that will naturally fall near the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). One of the most
attractive features of organic SEO is that the methods used to achieve high SERPs rankings are of
no cost — other than the time it takes to implement these ideas.
However, there is a trade-off. Achieving organic SEO can take anywhere from three to six months.
For web site owners impatient to see results from their SEO efforts, this can seem like an eternity.
But it’s worth the extra time if the budget is an issue.
Achieving Organic SEO
Achieving organic SEO can take time, but it also takes targeting the right elements of your web site.
You can spend a lot of time tweaking aspects of your site, only to find that it still ranks below the
third page of search results. If your attention is focused on the right elements, however, you’ll find
that organic SEO can be a fairly effective method of achieving a higher search engine ranking.
Make no mistake, however; organic SEO alone is not as effective as organic SEO combined with some
form of pay-per-click or keyword advertising program. Though organic SEO is good, adding the extra,
more costly programs can be what you need to push your site right to the top of the SERPs.
A good first step in search engine optimization is to ensure that the organic elements of your site
are as optimized as possible. Although these elements are covered in detail in future chapters, here
is a look at some of the basics.
Web-site content
Web-site content is one of the most highly debated elements in search engine optimization, mostly
because many rather unethical SEO users have turned to black-hat SEO techniques, such as keyword
stuffing to try to artificially improve search engine ranking. Despite these less-than-honest approaches
to search engine optimization, however, web-site content is still an important part of any web-site
optimization strategy.
The content on your site is the main draw for visitors. Whether your site sells products or simply provides
information about services, what brings visitors to your site is the words on the page. Product
descriptions, articles, blog entries, and even advertisements are all scanned by spiders and crawlers as
they work to index the Web.One strategy of these crawlers and spiders is to examine just how the content of your page works
with all of the other elements (like links and meta tags) that are examined. To rank high in a selection
of search results, your content must be relevant to those other elements.
Some search engines will de-list your page or lower your page rank if the content of your site is not
unique. Especially since the advent of blogs, search engines now are examining how frequently the
content on pages is updated and looking for content that appears only on your web site. This doesn’t
mean you can’t have static content on your page. For e-commerce sites, the product descriptions may
rarely change.
But including other elements on the page, like reviews or product updates, will satisfy a crawler’s
requirement that content change regularly. Content is an important part of your site and the ranking
of your site in search engine results. To achieve organic SEO, take the time to develop a content
plan that not only outlines what should be included on each page of your site, but also how often
that content will be updated, and who will do the updates.
One other element you might want to consider when looking at your page content as part of SEO
is the keywords that you plan to use. Ideally, your chosen words should appear on the page several
times. But again, this is a balancing act that might take some time to accomplish.
Chapter 4 contains additional information about keywords and how to use them to
improve your search engine ranking.
Keywords are part of your site content, and as such require special attention. In fact, the selection
of the right keywords is a bit of an art form that takes some time to master. For example, if your
web site is dedicated to selling products for show dogs, you might assume that “show dogs” would
be a perfect keyword. You might be wrong. Selecting the right keywords requires a good understanding
of your audience and what they might be looking for when they want to find your web
site. People looking for products for show dogs could search for “grooming products,” “pedigree
training,” or just “dog supplies.” It could even be something entirely different, like the name of a
product that was featured at the most recent dog show.
Learning which keyword will be most effective for your site will require that you study your audience,
but it also requires some trial and error. Try using different keywords each quarter to learn
which ones work the best.
It’s also advised that you use a tracking program such as Google Analytics to monitor your web site
traffic and to track the keywords that most often lead users to your site.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web site statistics application that you can use to track your web site traffic.
You can access Google Analytics by going to http://www.google.com/analytics. You are
required to have a Google user name to access the program.If you do not have a Google user name, you can create one when you sign up for the application. It’s
simple. Provide your e-mail address and a password, type the verification word from the graphic provided,
and then read the Terms of Service and click “I accept. Create my account.”
Once you’ve created your user name and password, accessing the tracking capabilities of Google is
no problem. You’ll need to copy a snippet of text that Google provides into the coding of your web
site. Once you’ve added the code to your site it will take a few days for Google to gather enough
information to provide reports about your site, and as much as two months to gather enough data
to give you real insight into your site. But once there is enough data, you’ll have access to the keywords
that most often lead visitors to your site.
Google Analytics can also be combined with Google’s AdWords program to provide paid keyword
tracking and information. To learn more about Google Analytics, check out the book Google Analytics
2.0 by Mary Tyler and Jerri Ledford (Wiley, Aug 2007, ISBN: 978-0470175019). It should be noted
that Google Analytics doesn’t track spiders and crawlers at this time, however, so there may be some
limitations to its SEO functionality. Still, if you need a (free) tool to help you examine some of the
metrics surrounding your SEO efforts, Google Analytics is a good starting point.
Internal and external links
Another element of organic SEO that’s just as important as your web-site content is the links on your
pages. Links can be incoming, outgoing, or internal. And where those links lead or come from is as
important as the context in which the links are provided.
When links first became a criteria by which crawlers ranked web sites, many black-hat SEO users
rushed to create link farms. These were pages full of nothing but web links, some of which led to
relevant information and some of which led to sites in no way related to the topic of the web site. It
didn’t take long for search engine designers and programmers to catch on to these shady practices
and change the way that crawlers use links to rank sites.
Today, links must usually be related to the content of the page, and they must link to something
relevant to that content. In other words, if your links don’t go to or lead in from pages that match
the keywords that you’re using, they will be of little value to you.
The balance of links that are included on your page is also relevant. Too many links and your
site could be labeled as a link farm. Too few and you’ll lose out to sites that have more and
better-targeted links.
Your best option when including links on your web site is to link to the pages you know for sure
are relevant to your site content. Don’t include a link unless you’re sure it will have value to your
users, and then take the time to pursue links into your site from them as well.
One other type of link, the internal link, is also important. This is a navigational link that leads users
from one page to another on your site. The navigation of your site (which is what these links are,
essentially) should be intuitive, and natural in progression. And you should also include a site map.Your site map not only makes it easier for crawlers to index every page of your site, but it also makes
it easier for users to find their way around in it. Ideally, users will never have to rely on the site map;
however, it’s nice for it to be there in the event that they either need it or simply want to click directly
to the page they’re seeking.
How you design your site map is a matter of preference. Some organizations create site maps that
only include the top two levels of pages. Others include ones that go three levels down or deeper.
Whatever level of depth you think will be required by the majority of users is how deep your site
map should go. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that site maps can become just as overwhelming
as any other navigational structure if there are hundreds of pages in your site.
Design your site map so it’s easy to decipher and will take users to the pages they are seeking without
difficulty and confusion.
User experience
User experience is a little harder to quantify than other site-ranking elements. It’s easy to say that
users will find your site simple to use, that they will find the information or products that they’re
seeking, or that they will have reason to return to your site. But in practice, that’s a little more difficult
to achieve.
So, how in the world can a site gain search engine ranking by user experience? It’s fairly simple
really. Search engines today are smarter than they have ever been. They may not be able to make
you a grilled cheese sandwich, but they can certainly keep track of what results users click when
they run a search. Those result selections are essential to adding to the organic ranking of your site.
Here’s a scenario. Say you search for something like health-insurance information. When the search
results come up, how are you going to choose which results to look at? Most users read the small
descriptive lines that are included with the search engine ranking and select from those.
In most cases, the sites that are visited are those sites that are highest in the rankings. But search
engines also monitor which sites are actually clicked on, so let’s say you search through the results
and click a link on the fifth page. And suppose several other people do so as well.
That link on the fifth page is going to show more traffic than links that are higher in the results, so
smart search engines will move that page higher in the rankings. It may not jump right up to the number
one position, but it’s entirely possible for the site to move from the fifth page of rankings to the second
or third. This is part of the equation used when user experience is taken into consideration.
Another part of that experience might be how quickly the user jumps back to the search page. Maybe
when you click that link on the fifth page, you can tell when you hit the site that it’s not the page you
were looking for (or doesn’t contain the information or product that you were looking for). You click
the back button, and you’re taken back to the page of search results.
This is called bounce, and the rate at which users bounce off your site is an indicator of the usability
of the site in terms of how relevant it is to what users are searching for. This relates directly to the
keywords the user searched for, which relates directly to how your site matches those keywords.
To maximize the usability of your site, make sure the keywords you choose and the description of
your page are as accurate as possible.
It may take some time for you to learn how to make all of these elements work together, especially
when it comes to elements like descriptions and keywords. Be patient, and be willing to experiment
with different combinations of words or descriptions until you hit on the ones that combine to send
your site rank closer to the top search results. Just remember, it’s an art more than a science, and it
takes time (usually two to three months) to see the most accurate results.
Site interactivity
When the Internet first came into being, web sites were all about disclosing information. The only
interaction between a web site and a user was the reading the user did while on the site. Today, reading
is still important. Users search for web sites to learn more about products, services, or topics.
However, there’s much more to web sites today than just text on a screen.
We now live in the Interactive Age. Most of us want to interact with the web sites we’re visiting. That
interaction might take the form of a poll, the ability to comment on a blog post, the downloading of
a file, or even a game that relates to the site content. No matter what the type of interaction, users
expect it, and search crawlers look for it.
Site interactivity is essential to achieving a high SEO ranking. Sure, you can garner a high ranking
without interaction, bit it won’t happen nearly as fast, and the ranking will likely be lower than that
of a site that has some form of interaction with the user.
Why is interaction so important? Simple. If you can influence a user to interact with your site, you
have more of a chance of gaining a goal conversion. Goal conversions are the completion of some
form of activity designed to gather further information about your user. A goal conversion can be
something as simple as enticing users to sign up for a newsletter, or it can be more specific, like
persuading them to make purchases.
No matter what goal conversion you’re seeking, the way to achieve it is through interactivity. And
the more frequently the user interacts with your site, the more likely it is that this person will reach
that goal conversion page that you’re monitoring so closely.
Goal conversion is the purpose of many web sites. For example, the target goal conversion for an
e-commerce web site might be for the user to make a $25 purchase. If you can entice a user to purchase
from your site — that is, meet the goal conversion — you have more of a chance of getting
them back to your site for a future purchase, to find additional information, or simply to interact
with your site some more.
All of these are important aspects of your web site’s traffic patterns. And search engines will look for
elements of interactivity to judge the value of your site to users. One goal of search engines is to provide
value to users. Those users turn to the search engine for help in finding something specific.
Just as it’s important for your site to land high in the search results, it’s important for the search
engine to provide the information that a user seeks within the first page or two. Making the user
happy is one way search companies make their money. Another way is through the dollars that
advertisers will pay to have their pages ranked high in the search results or their advertisements
shown according to the keywords for which the user was searching.
In other words, search engine optimization is two-way street. It’s also a business, and search engine
companies are always trying to find ways to improve their business. For that reason, these elements,
and many others, are an essential part of search engine optimization.
Organic SEO is certainly not easy to achieve. One way to achieve it is to have a solid SEO plan that
outlines where you are and what needs to be added to your site design or content to make it more
visible to users. It also takes a lot of time and effort to create and implement the right SEO plan.
However, if you use your SEO plan as a stepping stone, even for organic SEO, you’ll stay focused
and eventually, you’ll achieve the search engine ranking that you’ve been working toward.

Search Engine Basics

What do you do when you need to find something on the Internet?
In most cases, you pop over to one of the major search engines
and type in the term or phrase that you’re looking for and then
click through the results, right? But of course search engines weren’t always
around.
In its infancy, the Internet wasn’t what you think of when you use it now. In
fact, it was nothing like the web of interconnected sites that’s become one of
the greatest business facilitators of our time. Instead, what was called the
Internet was actually a collection of FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites that
users could access to download (or upload) files.
To find a specific file in that collection, users had to navigate through each
file. Sure, there were shortcuts. If you knew the right people — that would be
the people who knew the exact address of the file you were looking for — you
could go straight to the file. That’s assuming you knew exactly what you were
looking for.
The whole process made finding files on the Internet a difficult, timeconsuming
exercise in patience. But that was before a student at McGill
University in Montreal decided there had to be an easier way. In 1990,
Alan Emtage created the first search tool used on the Internet. His creation,
an index of files on the Internet, was called Archie.
If you’re thinking Archie, the comic book character created in 1941, you’re
a little off track (at least for now). The name Archie was used because the
file name Archives was too long. Later, Archie’s pals from the comic book
series (Veronica and Jughead) came onto the search scene, too, but we’ll get
to that shortly.
Archie wasn’t actually a search engine like those that you use today. But at the time, it was a program
many Internet users were happy to have. The program basically downloaded directory listings for all
of the files that were stored on anonymous FTP sites in a given network of computers. Those listings
were then plugged into a searchable database of web sites.
The search capabilities of Archie weren’t as fancy as the natural language capabilities you’ll find in
most common search engines today, but at the time it got the job done. Archie indexed computer
files, making them easier to locate.
In 1991, however, another student named Mark McCahill, at the University of Minnesota, decided
that if you could search for files on the Internet, then surely you could also search plain text for
specific references in the files. Because no such application existed, he created Gopher, a program
that indexed the plain-text documents that later became the first web sites on the public Internet.
With the creation of Gopher, there also needed to be programs that could find references within
the indexes that Gopher created, and so Archie’s pals finally rejoined him. Veronica (Very Easy
Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) and Jughead (Jonzy’s Universal
Gopher Hierarchy Excavation and Display) were created to search the files that were stored in
the Gopher Index System.
Both of these programs worked in essentially the same way, allowing users to search the indexed
information by keyword.
From there, search as you know it began to mature. The first real search engine, in the form that we
know search engines today, didn’t come into being until 1993. It was developed by Matthew Gray,
and it was called Wandex. Wandex was the first program to both index and search the index of
pages on the Web. This technology was the first program to crawl the Web, and later became the
basis for all search crawlers. And from there, search engines took on a life of their own. From 1993
to 1998, the major search engines that you’re probably familiar with today were created:
Excite — 1993
Yahoo! — 1994
Web Crawler — 1994
Lycos — 1994
Infoseek — 1995
AltaVista — 1995
Inktomi — 1996
Ask Jeeves — 1997
Google — 1997
MSN Search — 1998


Today, search engines are sophisticated programs, many of which allow you to search all manner of
files and documents using the same words and phrases you would use in everyday conversations.
It’s hard to believe that the concept of a search engine is just over 15 years old. Especially considering
what you can use one to find these days!
What Is a Search Engine?
Okay, so you know the basic concept of a search engine. Type a word or phrase into a search box
and click a button. Wait a few seconds, and references to thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of
pages will appear. Then all you have to do is click through those pages to find what you want. But
what exactly is a search engine, beyond this general concept of “seek and ye shall find”?
It’s a little complicated. On the back end, a search engine is a piece of software that uses applications
to collect information about web pages. The information collected is usually key words or
phrases that are possible indicators of what is contained on the web page as a whole, the URL of
the page, the code that makes up the page, and links into and out of the page. That information
is then indexed and stored in a database.
On the front end, the software has a user interface where users enter a search term — a word or
phrase — in an attempt to find specific information. When the user clicks a search button, an
algorithm then examines the information stored in the back-end database and retrieves links to
web pages that appear to match the search term the user entered.
You can find more information about web crawlers, spiders, and robots in Chapter 14.
The process of collecting information about web pages is performed by an agent called a crawler,
spider, or robot. The crawler literally looks at every URL on the Web, and collects key words and
phrases on each page, which are then included in the database that powers a search engine.
Considering that the number of sites on the Web went over 100 million some time ago and
is increasing by more than 1.5 million sites each month, that’s like your brain cataloging every
single word you read, so that when you need to know something, you think of that word and
every reference to it comes to mind.
In a word . . . overwhelming.
Anatomy of a Search Engine
By now you probably have a fuzzy picture of how a search engine works. But there’s much more to it
than just the basic overview you’ve seen so far. In fact, search engines have several parts. Unfortunately,
it’s rare that you find an explanation for just how a search engine is made — and that information is
vitally important to succeeding with search engine optimization (SEO).
Query interface
The query interface is what most people are familiar with, and it’s probably what comes to mind
when you hear the term “search engine.” The query interface is the page that users see when they
navigate to a search engine to enter a search term.
There was a time when the search engine interface looked very much like the Ask.com page shown
in Figure 1-1. The interface was a simple page with a search box and a button to activate the search.
Today, many search engines on the Web have added much more personalized content in an attempt
to capitalize on the real estate available to them. For example, Yahoo! Search, shown in Figure 1-2,
allows users to personalize their pages with a free e-mail account, weather information, news, sports,
and many other elements designed to make users want to return to that site to conduct their web
searches.
One other option users have for customizing the interfaces of their search engines is a capability
like the one Google offers. The Google search engine has a customizable interface to which users
can add different gadgets. These gadgets allow users to add features to their customized Google
search home that meet their own personal needs or tastes.
When it comes to search engine optimization, Google’s user interface offers the most ability for you
to reach your target audience, because it does more than just optimize your site for search; if there
is a useful tool or feature available on your site, you can allow users to have access to this tool or
feature through the Application Programming Interface (API) made available by Google. This allows
you to have your name in front of users on a daily basis.
You can find more information about Google APIs in Appendix A in the section
“Optimization for Google.”
For example, a company called PDF24.org has a Google gadget that allows users to turn their documents
into PDF files, right from their Google home page once the gadget has been added. If the
point of search engine optimization is ultimately to get your name in front of as many people as
possible, as often as possible, then making a gadget available for addition to Google’s personalized
home page can only further that goal.
Crawlers, spiders, and robots
The query interface is the only part of a search engine that the user ever sees. Every other part of
the search engine is behind the scenes, out of view of the people who use it every day. That doesn’t
mean it’s not important, however. In fact, what’s in the back end is the most important part of the
search engine.
CROSS--REF There’s more in-depth information about crawlers, spiders, and robots in Chapter 14.
If you’ve spent any time on the Internet, you may have heard a little about spiders, crawlers, and
robots. These little creatures are programs that literally crawl around the Web, cataloging data so that
it can be searched. In the most basic sense all three programs — crawlers, spiders, and robots — are
essentially the same. They all “collect” information about each and every web URL.
This information is then cataloged according to the URL on which they’re located and are stored in
a database. Then, when a user uses a search engine to locate something on the Web, the references
in the database are searched and the search results are returned.
Databases
Every search engine contains or is connected to a system of databases, where data about each URL
on the Web (collected by crawlers, spiders, or robots) is stored. These databases are massive storage
areas that contain multiple data points about each URL.
The data might be arranged in any number of different ways, and will be ranked according to a
method of ranking and retrieval that is usually proprietary to the company that owns the search
engine.
Search algorithms
All of the parts of the search engine are important, but the search algorithm is the cog that makes
everything work. It might be more accurate to say that the search algorithm is the foundation on
which everything else is built. How a search engine works is based on the search algorithm, or the
way that data is discovered by the user.
In very general terms, a search algorithm is a problem-solving procedure that takes a problem, evaluates
a number of possible answers, and then returns the solution to that problem. A search algorithm
for a search engine takes the problem (the word or phrase being searched for), sifts through a database
that contains cataloged keywords and the URLs those words are related to, and then returns
pages that contain the word or phrase that was searched for, either in the body of the page or in a
URL that points to the page.
This neat little trick is accomplished differently according to the algorithm that’s being used. There are
several classifications of search algorithms, and each search engine uses algorithms that are slightly
different. That’s why a search for one word or phrase will yield different results from different search
engines. Some of the most common types of search algorithms include the following:
List search: A list search algorithm searches through specified data looking for a single
key. The data is searched in a very linear, list-style method. The result of a list search is
usually a single element, which means that searching through billions of web sites could
be very time-consuming, but would yield a smaller search result.
Tree search: Envision a tree in your mind. Now, examine that tree either from the roots out
or from the leaves in. This is how a tree search algorithm works. The algorithm searches a
data set from the broadest to the most narrow, or from the most narrow to the broadest.
Data sets are like trees; a single piece of data can branch to many other pieces of data, andthis is very much how the Web is set up. Tree searches, then, are more useful when conducting
searches on the Web, although they are not the only searches that can be successful.
SQL search: One of the difficulties with a tree search is that it’s conducted in a hierarchical
manner, meaning it’s conducted from one point to another, according to the
ranking of the data being searched. A SQL (pronounced See-Quel) search allows data
to be searched in a non-hierarchical manner, which means that data can be searched
from any subset of data.
Informed search: An informed search algorithm looks for a specific answer to a specific
problem in a tree-like data set. The informed search, despite its name, is not always the
best choice for web searches because of the general nature of the answers being sought.
Instead, informed search is better used for specific queries in specific data sets.
Adversarial search: An adversarial search algorithm looks for all possible solutions to a
problem, much like finding all the possible solutions in a game. This algorithm is difficult
to use with web searches, because the number of possible solutions to a word or phrase
search is nearly infinite on the Web.
Constraint satisfaction search: When you think of searching the Web for a word or
phrase, the constraint satisfaction search algorithm is most likely to satisfy your desire to
find something. In this type of search algorithm, the solution is discovered by meeting a
set of constraints, and the data set can be searched in a variety of different ways that do not
have to be linear. Constraint satisfaction searches can be very useful for searching the Web.
These are only a few of the various types of search algorithms that are used when creating search
engines. And very often, more than one type of search algorithm is used, or as happens in most
cases, some proprietary search algorithm is created. The key to maximizing your search engine
results is to understand a little about how each search engine you’re targeting works. Only when
you understand this can you know how to maximize your exposure to meet the search requirements
for that search engine.
Retrieval and ranking
For a web search engine, the retrieval of data is a combination activity of the crawler (or spider or
robot), the database, and the search algorithm. Those three elements work in concert to retrieve the
word or phrase that a user enters into the search engine’s user interface. And as noted earlier, how
that works can be a proprietary combination of technologies, theories, and coding whizbangery.
The really tricky part comes in the results ranking. Ranking is also what you’ll spend the most time
and effort trying to affect. Your ranking in a search engine determines how often people see your page,
which affects everything from revenue to your advertising budget. Unfortunately, how a search engine
ranks your page or pages is a tough science to pin down.
The most that you can hope for, in most cases, is to make an educated guess as to how a search
engine ranks its results, and then try to tailor your page to meet those results. But keep in mind
that, although retrieval and ranking are listed as separate subjects here, they’re actually part of the
search algorithm. The separation is to help you better understand how search engines work.
Ranking plays such a large part in search engine optimization that you’ll see it frequently in this book.
You’ll look at ranking from every possible facet before you reach the last page. But for now, let’s look
at just what affects ranking. Keep in mind, however, that different search engines use different ranking
criteria, so the importance each of these elements plays will vary.
Location: Location doesn’t refer here to the location (as in the URL) of a web page. Instead,
it refers to the location of key words and phrases on a web page. So, for example, if a user
searches for “puppies,” some search engines will rank the results according to where on the
page the word “puppies” appears. Obviously, the higher the word appears on the page, the
higher the rank might be. So a web site that contains the word “puppies” in the title tag will
likely appear higher than a web site that is about puppies but does not contain the word in
the title tag. What this means is that a web site that’s not designed with SEO in mind will
likely not rank where you would expect it to rank. The site www.puppies.com is a good
example of this. In a Google search, it appears ranked fifth rather than first, potentially
because it does not contain the key word in the title tag.
Frequency: The frequency with which the search term appears on the page may also affect
how a page is ranked in search results. So, for example, on a page about puppies, one that
uses the word five times might be ranked higher than one that uses the word only two or
three times. When word frequency became a factor, some web site designers began using
hidden words hundreds of times on pages, trying to artificially boost their page rankings.
Most search engines now recognize this as keyword spamming and ignore or even refuse to
list pages that use this technique.
Links: One of the more recent ranking factors is the type and number of links on a web
page. Links that come into the site, links that lead out of the site, and links within the site
are all taken into consideration. It would follow, then, that the more links you have on your
page or leading to your page the higher your rank would be, right? Again, it doesn’t necessarily
work that way. More accurately, the number of relevant links coming into your page,
versus the number of relevant links within the page, versus the number of relevant links
leading off the page will have a bearing on the rank that your page gets in the search results.
Click-throughs: One last element that might determine how your site ranks against others
in a search is the number of click-throughs your site has versus click-throughs for other
pages that are shown in page rankings. Because the search engine cannot monitor site
traffic for every site on the Web, some monitor the number of clicks each search result
receives. The rankings may then be repositioned in a future search, based on this interaction
with the users.
Page ranking is a very precise science. And it differs from search engine to search engine. To create
the best possible SEO for your site, it’s necessary to understand how these page rankings are made
for the search engines you plan to target. Those factors can then be taken into consideration and used
to your advantage when it’s time to create, change, or update the web site that you want to optimize.

Understanding SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is such a broad term. It
can be quite overwhelming if you try to take the whole
of it in a single bite. There are so many facets of search
engine optimization, from how search engines work (and they
all work a little differently) to how a web page is designed. There
are enough elements to worry about that you could spend far
more time than you can afford to invest in trying to achieve the
SEO you have in mind. However, search engine optimization
doesn’t have to be such an onerous task that it can’t be accomplished.
Not if you understand what it is and how it works.
Part I explains the basics of search engine optimization. This part
includes an explanation of what search engines are and how they
work. There is also an explanation of the concept of an SEO plan.
Together, these two elements will have you up to speed and ready
to begin implementing the right SEO strategies to build the web
site traffic that you need.