Search Engine Basics

Module 1
Search Engine Basics
The process of improving the websites in order to achieve
higher ranking in Search Engines in known as Search
Engine Optimization.
The main objective for creating a website by any company is to
make aware of about the company and its products / services. For
this, Internet marketing plays an important role in driving the
visitors to site using SEO techniques. Now, it becomes essential
that the site should be listed in the top pages of the search engines
and upbeat the competitor’s site. The process of getting search
engines to pay attention to your web site requires specific,
personalized service. To achieve this, proper SEO tools and
techniques are applied to the site to achieve higher rankings and
make site search engine friendly.
 What Does SEO Provides?
• To promote the business at an economical rate
• To increase the site traffic and hence increases the site
popularity
• To provide the needed information to the visitors in the best
possible time
• To upbeat the competitors site in term of Search Engine
Rankings
Algorithm-Based Ranking
Systems:
Crawling, Ranking and
Indexing
 Crawling and Indexing
• Imagine the World Wide Web as a network of stops
in a big city subway system.
• The link structure of the web serves to bind all of
the pages together
– Links allow the search engines' automated robots, called
"crawlers" or "spiders," to reach the many billions of
interconnected documents on the web
– finds the pages, decipher the code from them
– store selected pieces in massive databases (Datacenter)
to be recalled later when needed for a search query
• Search engines are answer machines
– it returns only those results that are relevant or useful to
the searcher's query, i.e, relevance
– it ranks those results according to the popularity of the
websites serving the information, i.e. popularity
How do search engines determine relevance and popularity?
• it’s more than finding a page with the right words
• hundreds of factors influence relevance
– Search engines typically assume that the more popular a
site, page, or document, the more valuable the
information it contains must be.
– Popularity and relevance are determined using
algorithms
– algorithms often comprise hundreds of variables, refered
to as “ranking factors”
 Evaluating content on web page
• Content of the webpage matters a lot to the
SE
• SE performs a details analysis of all words on
the web page and builds a map of the data,
called semantic map
“understands the intent of the searcher and
what the query means, rather than going
through the keywords such as a dictionary
would”
Semantic maps (or graphic organizers) are maps or webs of
words. The purpose of creating a map is to visually display the
meaning-based connections between a word or phrase and a set
of related words or concepts.

If no semantic match of the content of the webpage, lesser

possibility of showing up in SE listing
Search engine will break up the page
Determines the unique content on the page
 What content can the search engine
see on the web page?
• Search engines do not see Web pages like you do.
• A lot of Content and Links displayed on a webpage may
not actually be visible to the Search Engines, eg. Flash
based content, content generated through
javascript, content displayed as images etc
• Search engines crawl your website by reading the code
created with HTML, ASP, PHP and other code
languages.
• if your business model depends on being found by the
search engines, you should think about including a few
pages with descriptive text (such as "about" pages or
even adding a business weblog to your site). This
makes it much easier for the search engines to find and
rank your site.
 Search Engine can see….
• Page title
• Meta keywords
• Meta description tag
• alt attribute for image
• noscript tag
 Search Engine can’t interpret….
• Image
• Flash files
• Audio and video files
• Content within a program, js
• AJAX retrived data
• Iframes retiving
• data from other publishers
Determine User Search Intent and
Delivering Relevant, Fresh Content
 Determine User Search Intent
 Modern commercial search engines rely on the
science of information retrieval (IR).
 2 critical components comprised the majority of
search functionality:
• relevance
• Importance
 To measure these factors, search engines perform
•document analysis (semantic analysis of
concepts across documents)
• link analysis.( citation)
Document Analysis
• measure the quality of the document
• find the search terms in important areas of the
document—the title, the metadata, the heading tags,
and the body of the text
• only document analysis alone is not enough for search
engines, so they also look at semantic connectivity
Semantic connectivity
• refers to words or phrases that are commonly
associated with one another.
Link Analysis
Search engine measures who links to the site or pages,
what do they say about the site.
 Link Analysis
• search engines measure who is linking to a site or
page
• what they are saying about that site/page
• who is affiliated with whom
• who is worthy of being trusted based on the authority
of the sites linking to them
• contextual data about the site on which the page is
hosted
• Link analysis goes much deeper than counting the
number of links a web page or website has. Links from
a highly authoritative page on a highly authoritative
site will count more than other links of lesser authority
(linking patterns with semantic analysis).
Some common types of searches in the IR field
Proximity searches
•A proximity search uses the order of the search phrase to
find related documents.
•Eg: “sweet German mustard” here you are specifying only a
precise proximity match.
• If the quotes are removed, the proximity of the search
terms still matters to the search engine,but it will now show
documents whose contents don’t exactly match the order of
the search phrase
Fuzzy logic
• Fuzzy logic technically refers to logic that is not categorically
true or false.
• Eg: Whether a day is sunny (e.g., if there is 50% cloud cover,
is it still a sunny day)
• detect and process misspellings.
Boolean searches
• Boolean searches use Boolean terms such as AND, OR,
and NOT.
• This type of logic is used to expand or restrict which
documents are returned in a search.

Term weighting
• Term weighting refers to the importance of a particular
search term to the query.
• The idea is to weight particular terms more heavily than
others to produce superior search results.
• For example, the word the in a query will receive very
little weight in selecting the results because it appears in
nearly all English-language documents. There is nothing
unique about it, and it does not help in document
selection.
 Measuring Content Quality and User
Engagement
• Interaction with web search results
if a user clicks through on a SERP listing and comes
to your site, clicks the Back button, and then clicks
on another result in the same set of search results,
that could be seen as a negative ranking signal.
• Google Analytics
Bounce rate, Time on site, Page views per visitor
 Evaluating Social Media Signals
• Google+ and Twitter offer methods for sharing
content
• Content that is shared more times or has more
Likes can be considered more valuable by the
search engines
• If a recognized expert shares a piece of content,
this may be considered a stronger vote in its favor
than if the content is shared by a less well-known
person (Twitter- followers)
 Problem Words, Disambiguation, and
Diversity
• Certain words present an ongoing challenge for the
search engines
• jaguar may refer to a jungle cat, a car, a football team,
an operating system, or a guitar. Which one does the
user mean ?
How Search Engine deals with…….
• looking at prior queries by the same searcher, which
may provide additional clues to the user’s intent.
• offer diverse results
• Did you mean?
• See result for:------------ or Searches related to………..
 Where freshness matters
• Much of the time, it makes sense for the
search engines to deliver results from older
sources that have stood the test of time.
Eg: news of earthquake

• Sometimes the response should be from

newer sources of information.
 Analyzing Ranking Factors
ranking signals that search engines use to rank pages and
sites.

Some of the Ranking factors are

•Page Level Link Metrics
•Domain Level Link Authority Features
•Page Level Keyword Usage
•Domain Level Keyword Usage
•Page Level Social Metrics
•Domain Level Brand Metrics
•Page Level Keyword Agnostic Features
•Page Level Traffic/Query Data
•Domain Level Keyword Agnostic Features
Reference :https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/survey
Page Level Link Metrics
 This refers to the links as related to the specific page, such as
the number of links, the relevance of the links, and the trust
and authority of the links received by the page.
You improve the link popularity of your page by getting links to
it from high quality sites.
Sites like:
•Authority sites in your market/industry
•Well known journals for your market/industry
•Popular blogs for your market/industry
•High quality directories for your market/industry
•Well known general information sites (like Wikipedia)
•For local businesses, popular review sites (like Yelp)
Should You Buy Links?
Link Baiting
Domain Level Link Authority Features
Domain level link authority is based on a cumulative link
analysis of all the links to the domain.
Factors considered include the number of different domains
linking to the site, the trust/authority of those domains, the rate
at which new inbound links are added, the relevance of the
linking domains, and more.
Internal and External Links
Have link popularity!
Page Level Keyword Usage and Content-
Based Features
 This describes use of the keyword term/phrase in particular
parts of the HTML code on the page -H1 Headings tags, HTML
Page Titles, Meta Description, URLs, Images file names and ALT
tags
Have high quality content.
 primary keywords appear at the beginning of the title, meta
description and page headline.

meta keywords don’t much matter anymore, but meta

descriptions most certainly do.
 Meta tag
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Meta Tags Example</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="HTML, Meta Tags, Metadata" />
<meta name="description" content="Learning about Meta Tags." />
<meta name="author" content="Mahnaz Mohtashim" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=Big5" />

</head> <body> <p>Hello HTML5!</p> </body> </html>

Domain Level Keyword Usage
 This refers to how keywords are used in the root or subdomain
name, and how impactful that might be on search engine rankings.
When creating a new site you can make sure the keywords you wa
nt to rank for are at least partially contained in the domain name, if
not the entire keywords.
Avoid domain names with hyphens or numbers
people would just type keywords in as domain names to see what
came up - typein traffic
Tips - Register .COM whenever possible
- Keep it short
- Make it memorable
Your choice of domain names can play a key role in your ranking in
Google and the building of your brand, so be sure and choose wisely.
Page-Level Keyword-Agnostic Features
These elements describe non-keyword-usage, non-link-metrics
features of individual pages (such as length of the page, load
speed, etc.)
What matters ?
- Uniqueness of the content on the page
- Page is mobile friendly
- Page Load time
- bounce rate of the page
- return visitors to your page
- length of the content on the page
- age of the page
- supports HTTPS/SSL
- Use of rich media (video,slides)
- use of images on page
Page Level Traffic/Query Data
Are people sticking around and interacting with my site?
get a high click-through rate (CTR) from the search engine
result pages (SERPs)
Google will put your pages into the search results because
they appear to be good on a technical level, and watch to see
what people do after they click-through to your site.
A few ways to do this are:
•Use informational images: charts, graphs and infographics
•Use engaging video
•Use "related pages" links below the primary page content
•Encourage user participation with comments or feedback
•User interactive elements on the page (If your page is on
weight loss, give them a Body-Mass-Index (BMI) calculator)
Domain-Level Brand Metrics
all of the stuff you're doing to establish what people think of
when they think of your domain name.
What can I do to improve it?
-You can issue press releases (on and off-line)
- use video commercials (on and off-line)
- engage the news media (on and off-line)
- interact with your customers through social media. email
and forums.
What does all of this have to do with ranking in Google?
Domain-Level Keyword-Agnostic Features
Features covers everything about your site as a whole that is not
related to the keywords you're targeting in your domain name
your site should:
• Have unique content on all of its pages
• Be designed for desktop and mobile users
• Get good "query CTR" across all of the pages
• Have fresh content posted regularly
• Have fast-loading pages
• Have pages with low bounce rates
• Return few or no error pages when crawled
• Have all of the necessary trust signal pages ( Terms,
Contanct Us, About Us)
• Display your company's contact information
• Be hosted with other quality sites
• Have a short, memorable domain name
Page Level Social Metrics
all of the interactions that take place for that page across the major
social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.).
Quantity/quality of tweeted links, Facebook shares, Google + s,
etc. to the page
Though Google doesn’t really count it, but matters - The content
of your site shold be super engaging
Negative Ranking Factors

Malware being hosted on the site

Cloaking
Pages on the site that sell links
Content that advertises paid links on the site
SEO Ranking factors (different way of classification)
On page Criteria
Keyword Research
Content
Title Tags
Description Tags
Keywords Tags
Alt tags
Headers Tags
Internal link
Bold, Italics and Underline
Site Map
Off Page Criteria
Inbound Links
Blogs
Article and Press release submission
Syndicating Rss Feeds
 Using Advanced Search Techniques
They provide a rich array of commands that can be used to perform
advanced research, diagnosis, and competitive analysis.
Some of the more basic operators are:
-keyword
Excludes the keyword from the search results. For
example, loans -student shows results for all types of
loans except student loans.
+keyword
Allows for forcing the inclusion of a keyword. This is
particularly useful for including stopword
"key phrase“
Shows search results for the exact phrase—for example, "seo
company".
keyword1 OR keyword2
Shows results for at least one of the keywords—for
example, google OR Yahoo!.
Advanced Google Search Operators
 Vertical Search Engines

• specialty or niche search engines that focus on

a limited data set.
Eg: searching for image, video, news, map and
blog searches.
•High placement in these vertical search results
can equate to high placement in the web search
results, often above the traditional 10 blue links
presented by the search engines.
Vertical Search from the Major Search Engines
•Google
Google Maps, Google Images, Google Product
Search, Google Blog Search, Google Video, Google
News, Google Custom Search Engine, Google Book
Search, Google US Gov’t Search, etc.
•Yahoo
!Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Local, Yahoo! Images,
Yahoo! Video, Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Audio Search,
etc.
•Bing
Bing Image, Bing Video, Bing News, Bing Maps,
Bing Health, Bing Products, etc.
 More specialized vertical search engine

•Compare shopping engines eg: Jungle.com

•Travel search engine eg: Expedia
•Job search engine eg: CareerBuilder
•Music search engine eg: iTune Music Store
 Country-Specific Search Engines
•China – Baidu
•Russia - Yandex
•South Korea – Naver
•Czech Republic - Seznam
 Optimizing for Specific Countries
Owning the proper domain extension (e.g., .com.au,
.co.uk, .fr, .de, .nl) for the country that your business is
targeting
Hosting your website in the country you are targeting
(with a country-specific IP address)
Registering with local search engines
Having other sites from the same country link to you
Using the native language on the site (an absolute
requirement for usability)
Placing your relevant local address data (on every page of
the site)
Defining your preferred region in Google Search Console
(Google Webmaster Tools)
Determining Your SEO Objectives
and
Defining Your Site’s Audience
SEO is now a mainstream marketing activity…
This dramatic rise can be attributed to
• Search engines drive dramatic quantities of focused
traffic, comprising people intent on accomplishing
their research and purchasing goals. Businesses can
earn significant revenues by leveraging the quality
and relevance of this traffic for direct sales, customer
acquisition, and branding/awareness campaigns.

• Visibility in search engines creates an implied

endorsement effect, where searchers associate
quality, relevance, and trustworthiness with sites
that rank highly for their queries.
• Dramatic growth in the interaction between offline
and online marketing necessitates investment by
organizations of all kinds in a successful search
strategy. Consumers are increasingly turning to the
Web before making purchases in verticals such as
real estate, autos, furniture, and technology.
Organizations cannot afford to ignore their
customers’ needs as expressed through searches
conducted on the major search engines.
 Strategic Goals SEO Practitioners Can
Fulfill
 SEO is a marketing functionality
 SEO practitioners need to understand the company’s
services, products, overall business strategy,
competitive landscape, branding, future site
development goals, and related business components
 it is important to set specific goals and objectives—
measurable
 Although SEO is not a cure-all for businesses, it can fit into
a company’s overall business strategy in several critical
ways.
• Visibility ( Branding)
• Website traffic
• High ROI
Visibility ( Branding)
• Some interpret search engine results as implicit
endorsement
• Some business need more help
Website traffic
• SEO practitioner should be able to bring audience
who otherwise would have been not been
interested or aware of
High ROI
• Deliver not just traffic but relevant traffic

Mind that the SEO is ever changinig!

in 2009
 Developing an SEO Plan Prior to Site
Development

• from choosing a content management system

(CMS) and planning site architecture to
developing on-page content.
• many businesses learn about the need for SEO
only after they have built their sites!
Organizations should take many factors into account
when pursuing an SEO strategy, including:
• What the organization is trying to promote
• Target market
• Brand
• Website structure
• Current site content
• Ease with which the content and site structure can
be modified
• Any immediately available content
• Available resources for developing new content
• Competitive landscape
• So on……………………………..
 Understanding Search Engine Traffic
and Visitor Intent
Part of an SEO plan is to understand how the various
relevant types of searches relate to the content and
architecture of your website

There are 3 types of Search Queries

• Navigational: These are direct searches for a brand,
company, website, or a person (ie. Youtube, facebook
etc.)
• Informational: This is the largest category and typically
represents people looking for quick answers like phone
numbers, recipes, news, and sports scores.
• Transactional: These searches are largely for purchases
and completing a task (ie. signing up for a web service)
What to do?
• Make sure you own your own brand’s
navigational query.
• Ideally, your site will appear in both the top
organic spot and as the top sponsored result in a
search for your brand or company name.
• As Brad Geddes has pointed out, “in many cases,
it is worth buying keywords even if you rank
organically for them,” because your total profits
will end up higher.
• Branded keywords tend to drive clicks
What to do?
• Informational queries are hard to monetize
• best way to target informational searches is with high-
quality SEO content that genuinely provides helpful
information relevant to the query.
So,
• Write a blog post full of tips that would be useful for
your prospective customers.
• Create a how-to video that is relevant to your
• Write a detailed, step-by-step guide that elucidates a
process relevant to your business
• Design an infographic
• Give away free content
What to do?
• Sponsored ad/results take up a lot of the available
space on the SERP (search engine result page) for
commercial/transactional queries. If you want visibility
above the fold for transactional keywords, you should
consider PPC.
• Google offers lots of bells and whistles for sponsored
ads and product listings. For example, you can include
a picture of your product
• Use call tracking service
• If brick and mortar shop, make it easy locate
Business Factors That Affect the SEO Plan
• Revenue/business model
It makes a difference to the SEO practitioner if the
purpose of the site is to sell products, sell advertising,
or obtain leads.
• Target customers
Who are you trying to reach? This could be an age
group, a gender group, or as specific as people looking
to buy a house within a 25-mile radius of Orlando, FL.
• Competitor strategies
The competitive landscape is another big factor in your
SEO plan. Competition may be strongly entrenched in
one portion of the market online, and it may make
sense to focus on a different segment
• Branding goals
•What is it that you want your brand to do for your
company?
•What do you want others to know and say about your
products or services?
• Budget for content development
An important part of link building is ensuring the quality of
your content, as well as your capacity to commit to the
ongoing development of high-quality on-page site
content.
• How your potential customers search for products
like yours
This involves mapping the actual search queries your
target customers use when they go to a search engine to
solve their current problem.
 Understanding Your Audience and
Finding Your Niche
• Mapping Your Products and Services
– requires a thorough understanding of the business
itself
– who is searching for what you are trying to promote
– consider business development and the company’s
expansion strategy
• Content Is King
– determining who you want to reach, which requires
an understanding of what you have to offer visitors
to your site, both now and in the future.
– The content you have available to you will affect
your keyword research and site architecture
– site content is the major source of information that
search engines use to determine what your site is
about
– on-site content also affects your link-building efforts
• Segmenting Your Site’s Audience
– target audience
– Location, gender, age
 SEO for Raw Traffic
• Optimizing for search engines, creating keyword-
targeted content helps a site rank for key search terms,
which typically leads to direct traffic (inorganic
search), social sharing and referral traffic from links
as more and more people find, use, and enjoy the
content you’ve produced.
• sites on the Web leverage this traffic to serve
advertising, directly monetizing the traffic sent from
the engines.
• From banner ads to contextual services such as
Google’s AdSense, to affiliate and social media
marketing
• internet advertising spending has become a massive
industry.
Factors considering SEO for Raw Traffic
•When to employ SEO for raw traffic
Use it when you can monetize traffic without actions
or financial transactions taking place on your site

•Keyword targeting
goal here isn’t typically to not just to select specific
keywords
 but rather to create lots of high-quality content that
naturally targets interesting/searched-for terms.
Concentrate efforts on great content, and use
keyword-based optimization only as a secondary
method to confirm the titles/headline, filenames,
metadata of the works you create.
• Page and content creation/optimization
highly crawlable link structure is critical to getting all
of your content
good information architecture practices and use
intelligent, detailed category and subcategory
structures
employ good on-page optimization
make your articles easy to share
 SEO for Ecommerce Sales
•Search traffic is the best to drive relevant traffic to an
ecommerce shop to boost sales.
•conversion rates are often extremely high!!!
•An ecommerce website needs a solid, ongoing SEO
strategy that follows best practices not only to ensure
optimum performance, but also to inspire customers to
buy and keep coming back.
Factors considering SEO for Ecommerce Sales
• When to employ SEO for ecommerce sales
Use it when you have products/services that are
directly for sale on your website.
• Keyword targeting
 Paid search advertising is an excellent way: PPC
 Find keywords that have reasonable traffic and
convert well
 more specific the query is—brand-inclusive,
product-inclusive, and so on—the more likely the
visitors are to make the purchase.
• Page and content creation/optimization
do some serious link building
 internal optimization
for conversion-focused traffic.
– Manual link building is an option
 SEO for Mindshare/Branding
• powerful application of SEO is to use it for branding
purposes
• Bloggers, social media websites, content producers,
news outlets and dozens of other web publishing
archetypes have found tremendous value in appearing
atop search results and using the resulting exposure to
bolster their brand recognition and authority.
• Aim is online marketing, ranking high in SERP has a
positive impact on traffic, consideration and perceived
authority
Factors considering SEO for Mindshare/Branding
• When to employ SEO for mindshare/branding
business that's focused on attracting attention from a
market more so than any direct traffic or monetization
goals
• Keyword targeting
less critical
Focus on keywords that
are going to bring you visitors who are likely to be
interested in and remember your brand
long tail may help
• Page and content creation/optimization
Make your site content easily
intuitively navigable for users with intelligent
linking structures and also authoritative links
implement SEO best practices
 SEO for Lead Generation and Direct
Marketing
• lead acquisition via the web is an equally valuable and
important system for building customers and revenue
• legal consulting, contract construction, commercial loan
requests, alternative energy providers, or virtually any
service or product people source via the Web. ( non –
ecommerce)
Factors considering SEO for Lead Generation and
Direct Marketing
• When to employ SEO
When you have a non-ecommerce
product/service/goal that you want users to
accomplish on your site or are hoping to attract
inquiries/direct contact over the web.
• Keyword targeting
 Look for phrases that bring reasonable traffic
• Page and content creation/optimization
 on-site optimization
 external link building
 SEO for Reputation Management
• Is more a process for neutralizing negative mentions of
your name in the SERP using social media, major media,
bloggers, your own sites and subdomains, and various
other tactics.

Factors considering SEO for Reputation Management

• When to employ SEO for reputation management
You are trying to either protect your brand from having
negative results appear on page 1, or are attempting to
push down already existing negative content
• Keyword targeting
– keyword you are targeting is your personal name, your
brand name, or some common variant
– use keyword research tools just to see whether there
are popular variants you’re missing.
• Page and content creation/optimization
– social media profiles, public relations, press releases,
and links from networks of sites you might own or
control
– optimization of internal links
– on-page elements
 SEO for Ideological Influence
• seeking public opinion about a particular topic
Eg: Political groups
• By promoting your ideas/content in the search results
for queries likely to be made by those seeking
information about a topic, you can influence the
perception of even very large groups

Factors considering SEO for Ideological Influence

• When to employ SEO for ideological influence
 need to change minds or influence decisions/thinking
around a subject
• Keyword targeting
– Can be of help
• Page and content creation/optimization
– combined links, mind it they are short lived
– Content development
So, Choosing the Right SEO Objectives for Your
Business
• Before you invest in the long term SEO strategy for
your business, you should carefully consider which of
these can have a major impact on your goals.
• Putting time and energy towards a single goal, only to
later add on others can result in duplicated work and
effort
• As a business/organization, decide on what you need
to accomplish and ask yourself questions like:
Does the company need direct sales, traffic,
branding or some combination of these?
Are there influencers you're trying to reach with a
message?
Is the organization/brand subject to potentially
negative material that needs to be
controlled/mitigated?
Do you have products/services you sell, either
directly over the web or through leads established
online?
Once you have the answers, you can attack SEO with
the right list of goals in mind.