On March 19, 4/5ths of the Finn Digital
team attended the latest Milwaukee
Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) event
featuring Brent Payne, director of search engine
optimization for Tribune Interactive.
Brent provided an overview of what search engine optimization
(SEO) entails, statistics on how Googlebot calculates its search
algorithm for the powerhouse search engine Google, and useful tools
we can all use to evaluate how our websites measure up.
Some Key Takeaways:
- There are roughy 2,000 queries made per
second on Google. While that number may seem impressive,
it's key to remember that 87% of people don't go past the first
page of Google's search results, which is why it's so important to
rank in that first page.
- Google's search listings automatically refreshes
every 30 days, so your updated content will appear in the
search refreshed at a bare minimum once a month. But if Google
deems your site "important" enough, it's web crawlers--known as
spiders--will review your page and update your listings more
often.
- How do you get your site to be "spidered" or "crawled" more
often? Update your content and make sure it's relevant. Google
looks for three things, particularly for inbound and outbound links
for your website: popularity, authority, and
relevance. It's not just about the number of links coming
in and out (popularity) but where the links come
from (e.g., links from .gov and .edu will have greater "authority"
than links from John Doe's blog) and how relevant both the links
and the associated content are.
- GoogleBot is the search "robot" that crawls the millions of
websites on the Internet for links/code and has 3 key attributes
that need to be kept in mind:it's literal, it needs
context, and it's blind. GoogleBot only crawls the
information it finds on the website, and doesn't understand jokes
or "clever" content. It sees the text/code and that's what it uses
for its calculations (again proving that relevance is key). It uses
the links as jumping points to build context for its search, so if
all of your links are about X product and they link to other
websites about X product, it increases the context being created.
Finally, it's blind: GoogleBot cannot see iFrame content (HTML
content inside HTML content), JavaScript, Flash elements, or images
(so sites that are all Flash, like some of the larger companies,
can be "blank" to GoogleBot). It only reads text and links, so good
web developers (like the ones we have here at Finn Digital) update
the code to allow for crawlers to recognize Flash and images. It's
more work, but a small effort in boosting SEO.
- When doing searches, Google hits your home
page most often, so keep your newest, updated, relevant
content here.
- Keywords are vital to increasing your SEO. The
URLs, content, and links on your website pages should have key
phrases in them to boost relevance. Remember that Google doesn't
find possessives, acronyms (unless popularly known within your
industry), or plurals to be very important as long as the rest of
the key word/phrase is intact. A great tool for checking your
keywords: Google Keyword Research Tool.
- GoogleTrends: to keep up with all of the changes on Google,
check out GoogleTrends. This will provide
the top 100 queries in the last hour by percentage of
increase, making it easier to track just what's "hot" and
what's not. To review search terms within vertical markets,
try Google Insights for Search.
- Don't delete your content! It's possible to repurpose your
content to boost SEO. If you need to remove content, use a 301
redirect to keep all of those SEO power already built up to
transfer to your new page (a good web developer can help with
this!).
Most importantly, have a web analytics program
like Google Analytics or Omniture
installed for your website so you can keep track of your own
traffic and be able to boost SEO yourself.
You can also view the entire presentation here.