Search Engine

Optimization
Tuan Truong
Table of Content
• Introduction to SEO
• SEO techniques
• PPC
• Google Ads
Why SEO
Because users rarely click on links beyond the first search results
page, boosting search-engine ranking has become essential to
business success. With a deeper knowledge of search-engine
optimization best practices, organizations can avoid unethical
practices and effectively monitor strategies approved by popular
search engines.
 Indexing
• Search-engine results page (SERP) presented in response to a user’s
request contains a series of snippets—clickable links
• Based on complex algorithm with more than 200 factors.
• Facts:
• 61 percent of global Internet users research products online
• 44 percent of online shoppers begin their experience with a search
engine.
• 75 percent of online shoppers never scroll past the first SERP
• 60 percent going to the top three links
• To achieve a high SERP ranking, webmaster use SEO
 SEO and Search Engine
A search engine enables Web searching by creating an
index, a process transparent to the user, and responding to
queries, a process that requires the user’s active
participation.
1. A webcrawler, also known as a robot or bot, scours the
Web to retrieve HTML pages
2. The webcrawler stores these pages in their original
form in its search engine’s document database.
3. The pages go through transformations, such as HTML
tag and stop-word removal and stemming. The
transformation, conducted by the search engine, extracts
significant textual content and information about links
for indexing.
4. The search engine creates indexes by generating direct
and surrogate page representations, such as single words
or phrases and their positional information on the page.
It also notes information about incoming and outgoing
links and generates a snippet.
5. The search engine stores indexes in its index database.
 Conceptual schematic of the querying
and document- retrieval process.
1. The user employs a search engine’s
browser to enter a search query—
typically a single keyword or short phrase.
2. The search engine’s query ranking
algorithm generates a ranked list of URLs
for documents it deems relevant on the
basis of the index database and
contextual information in the user query.
3. The user browses the snippets and
clicks on certain ones to retrieve the
corresponding full documents in their
original form from the document
database.
4. The user browses the snippets and clicks on certain ones to retrieve the corresponding
full documents in their original form from the document database.
5. Using the relevance feedback, the search engine might reformulate the user query and
re- execute it.
6. The search engine stores meta information such as user queries, relevance feedback,
and clicked snippets in the log data-base, which it uses to improve its search
performance.
Black-hat SEO - Spamdexing
• Automatic page generation - generate webpages using algorithms that
intersperse random text with desired keywords.
• Redirecting - facilitating a website’s move to a new address.
• Cloaking – different view of bots and users
• Link spam - buying and selling links, excessively exchanging links as in
mutually linking partner pages
• Hidden text and links - keywords are hidden from a user but visible to search
engines.
• Doorway pages - poor-quality content but are optimized to rank high for
specific keywords
• Spam from affiliate programs - rewards affiliates for applying various
marketing schemes to bring customers to the company’s website.
• Embedded malicious behavior - add a malicious action when the user clicks
on a link, such as to install advertisements, viruses, malware, Trojans…
• User-generated spam - generate comment spam—comments that include
advertisements and links to unrelated pages.
Penalization
White-hat SEO practices
White-hat SEO practices
On-page optimization
• Word choices & keyword.
• Anchor text – meaningful URL
• Semantic indexing - calculates a page’s relevance not only on the basis of keywords but also on the page’s overall topic.
• Non-HTML content – alt attribute, transcript for audio and video.
• Title and meta description tags - search engines do not use the meta description tag’s keywords and phrases in calculating the
page’s ranking, they can use them to generate snippets.
• Navigational search
• Privacy policy - website’s trustworthiness
• Custom 404 page.
• Restricted page indexing - use the robots.txt file to inform webcrawlers which pages are accessible for indexing
Useful Link
• Web Audit: https://ahrefs.com/site-audit , https://www.mywebaudit.com/template
• Google webmaster guidelines (best practices to help Googlebot find, crawl, and index websites):
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en
• Google analytics for identifying SEO opportunities in websites: www.google.com/analytics
• Generating a sitemap automatically: www.xml-sitemaps.com
• Generating a robots.txt file: www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/robots-txt-generator
• Creating .htaccess and .htpasswd files for protecting special directories on webservers:
www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/htaccess_generator/index.php
• Analyzing websites for organic SEO: www.semrush.com, www.webseoanalytics.com; https://www.dotcom-
tools.com
• Webpage load speed test: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt
• Checking domain history: www.domaintools.com
• Internal link analysis: http://tools.seochat.com/tools/page-link-analyzer-seo
• Building backlinks through press releases: www.free-press-release.com
• Open Site Explorer: The Search Engine for Links (performing competitive link research, exploring backlinks, and
evaluating anchor text): www.opensiteexplorer.org
• Generating a website privacy policy: www.easyriver.com/myprivacy.htm, www.freeprivacypolicy.com
CONTENT AND COMPLIANCE EVALUATION TOOLS
• Tools for checking website content for duplication and plagiarism: http://copyscape.com,
www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker, http://plagiarismdetect.com, www.plagtracker.com,
www.comparemyfiles.com
• Analyzing keyword density: www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/keyword-density
• Fetch as Bingbot (see page exactly the way it appears to Bingbot): www.bing.com /webmaster/help/etch-as-
bingbot-fe18fa0d
White-hat SEO Practices
Off-page optimization
• Breadcrumbs
• Sitemaps
• Text links
• Backlinks
• Robots meta tag.
Long-term and sustainable
high rank for web -> high-
quality authentic content
authored naturally.
Exercise
• Go to:
https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/exam-preparation-resou
rces/practice-exam-questions/certified-digital-marketing-profe
ssional-v8/cdmp8-04-seo-quiz1-01

• Take all 5 SEO quiz – remember to take screenshot when you

finish.
On-page SEO in actions
• Use the description meta tag
• Accurately summarize the page content
• Use unique descriptions for each page
• Avoid:
• Writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page.
• Using generic descriptions like "This is a web page" or "Page about baseball cards".
• Filling the description with only keywords.
• Copying and pasting the entire content of the document into the description meta tag.
• Using a single description meta tag across all of your site's pages or a large group of
pages.
• Example:
• <html>
<head>
<title>Brandon's Baseball Cards - Buy Cards, Baseball News, Card Prices</title>
<meta name="description" content="Brandon's Baseball Cards provides a large
selection of vintage and modern baseball cards for sale. We also offer daily
baseball news and events.">
</head>
<body>
On-page SEO in actions
• Create unique, accurate page titles
• Choose a title that reads naturally and effectively communicates
the topic of the page's content.
• Avoid:
• Title has no relation to content of the page
• A single title across all of your site's pages or a large group of pages
• Long titles are unhelpful to users.
• Example:
<html>
<head>
<title>Brandon's Baseball Cards - Buy Cards, Baseball News,
Card Prices</title>
<meta name="description" content="Brandon's Baseball Cards
provides a large selection of vintage and modern baseball cards for
sale. We also offer daily baseball news and events.">
</head>
<body>
On-page SEO in actions
• Use heading tags to emphasize important text
• Imagine you're writing an outline
• Use headings sparingly across the page
• Avoid:
• Placing text in heading tags that wouldn't be helpful in defining the
structure of the page.
• Using heading tags where other tags like <em> and <strong> may be
more appropriate.
• Erratically moving from one heading tag size to another.
• Excessive use of heading tags on a page.
• Very long headings.
• Using heading tags only for styling text and not presenting structure.
 On-page SEO in actions
• Add structured data markup
• What to markup:
• Products you're selling
• Business location
• Videos about your products or business
• Opening hours
• Events listings
• Recipes
• Your company logo…
On-page SEO in actions
• Organize your site hierarchy
• Plan your navigation based on your homepage
• Using breadcrumb lists

• Create a simple navigational page for users:

• Create a naturally flowing hierarchy
• Use text for navigation
• Create a navigational page for users, a sitemap for search engines
• Show useful 404 pages
• Simple URLs convey content information
• https://www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/folder1/22447478/x2/1403201
5.html
• https://www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/article/ten-rarest-baseball-card
s.html
• Learn about Google Search Console and Google Analytics, Optimize
SEO guidelines
• Beginner SEO:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/beginner/get-star
ted
• Advanced SEO:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideli
nes/get-started
PPC and Google Ads
Overview of PPC
• PPC is Pay Per Click / Search Engine Marketing/ Keyword Ads/
Target Paid Listing
• How does PPC work?
• Read more about PPC and paid search advertising
• https://www.nibusinessinfo.co.uk/content/pay-click-and-paid-sea
rch-advertising
• Search engine marketing
• Keyword advertising
• Target Paid Listing
• A/B Testing
Advantages
• Cost effective - because you only pay when a user actually reaches
your website, it can be good value for money. You can choose to
spend as much or as little as you like.
• Targeted - you can choose your audience according to demographics
like location, language and device
• Measurable - PPC campaigns can be set up to carefully measure
effectiveness. You can determine exactly how much your return on
investment is.
• Customizable - as you run your campaigns, you can make many
small adjustments to improve based on what works best.
• Training resources - there are many (often free) online courses and
training materials to help you develop your skills.
• Fast - you will see the impact of your PPC efforts almost
immediately. Organic search engine optimization (SEO) tactics can
take months to make a difference.
Disadvantages
• Time investment - you can't just set up your PPC campaigns
and leave them. You need to invest time into optimizing and
improving to get the best results.
• Skills required - it can take some practice to set up effective
campaigns. Many businesses choose to use a specialist agency.
• Costs can quickly add up - if you aren't monitoring and
optimizing your campaigns to make sure you get a return on
investment, money could be wasted. You will need to allocate
budget for PPC campaigns, unlike SEO tactics where the
investment is time and skills.
• Clicks and visits don't always lead to sales - you will need to
convince the user to 'convert' once they reach your website.
Next class presentation
Tools for Web Communication
• Blogs (A)
• E-newsletter (B)
• Multimedia (C)
• Discussion Groups/Forum (D)
• Chats/Instant Messaging (E)
• Social media (F)
• Customer education (G)
• Social marketing (H)
• Chatbot (I)
• Social Listening (J)
• Social Monitoring (K)
• Mobile Ads (L)
• ChatGPT (M)
Google Ads
• Create a simple campaign in Google Ads