This goal of this deck is to introduce a beginner-level audience to the field of search engine optimization (SEO). Topics covered include "What is SEO?", "Understanding Search Engines" and a framework for measuring a successful SEO program - "Indexation, Ranking, Traffic, Actions".

1. 10.01.2012
SEO 101
Overview
[Company
Logo]

2. Understanding Search Engines
• Search engines are trying to return the “best” set of
documents for a given query
• How do search engines measure “best”?
– Relevance
• Presence of machine-readable text containing keywords related to
the user’s query
• Having that text appear in “important” places on the page
• Using complex machine learning to rank content quality (Panda)
– Authority
• Evaluating the web’s link graph, social mentions, author and entity
data as “votes” for documents
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3. What is SEO?
• SEO is about aligning:
– Business goals with audience needs
– Web development best practices (On-page SEO)
– External marketing efforts (Off-page SEO)
• On-page SEO is concerned with presenting site content
in ways that are understandable to search engines, and
convey “importance”
– Providing the correct signals to search engines is critical to
earning organic search traffic
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4. Measuring a Successful SEO Program
• I.R.T.A.
– Indexation, Ranking, Traffic, Actions
– A waterfall where issues at a level higher up the chain cause will
reduce ability to realize value further down the chain
• A Successful SEO Program:
– Drives and continually grows non-branded keyword traffic (visits)
– Draws traffic that is relevant to your business and highly engaged
with your content / assets (PVPV, TOS, Bounce, etc)
– Measures and delivers incremental increases in the key
business goals of the website (data capture, RFPs, sales leads,
etc)
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5. I.R.T.A. - Indexation
• Indexation
– Indexation involves extracting the text from a page and putting it in
a searchable database
• Linearization – stripping machine-readable text out of the page
• Tokenization – removing punctuation
• Filtration – removing stop words (e.g. the, of, an)
• Stemming – removing suffixes
• Weighting – determining how “important” a word is in the document
– Crawling does not equal indexing – engines crawl far more pages
(discovery) than they index
– Engines look for signals indicating a URL is important enough to
keep in their index, as indexation has real overhead costs
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6. I.R.T.A. – Indexation (cont.)
• Indexation
– Goal is to get as many of your site’s valid, valuable URLs into
the index as possible
• E.g. if your site can render 10,000 valid URLs, and you have 9,000
of them in Google’s index, that’s very good
• High Indexation numbers are good because organic search is like
fishing with a drag net, where the size of your net is how many
pages you have in the index – bigger nets get more fish
– Indexation levels often closely tied to good Information
Architecture
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7. I.R.T.A. - Ranking
• Ranking
– Providing correct signals to search engines (through On-page &
Off-page SEO) influences where your site ranks for any given
keyword
• Ranking on page 1 of SERPs is important – 70% of searchers
don’t click beyond page 1
– Ranking reports are becoming less useful with personalization,
and are much less useful for enterprise sites (100K+ visits)
• Long-tail search (4+ keywords per query) are 70% of total search
volume is
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8. I.R.T.A. - Traffic
• Traffic
– Good SEO should drive increasing levels of non-branded search
traffic YoY
– Traffic is not dictated by ranking alone
• Good use of SERP marketing real estate
– Compelling titles, descriptions, and clean URLs drive click through rate
– User eye-path: 40% of time spent on title, 30% on description, 20% on
URL
– New signals and algorithm changes influence traffic
• Personalization
• Universal Search brings in diverse asset types (videos increase CTR)
8 • New technologies (microformats showing ratings, authorship)

9. I.R.T.A. - Actions
• Actions
– Getting traffic is not a good goal in and of itself, you need traffic
that is specifically relevant to the goal a user is trying to
accomplish, and the solution your business offers
• Make sure the right pages are ranking for the right queries
• Make sure that the keywords you rank for are the ones your audience
uses when speaking about your services
– 7 Second Rule : Ensure pages are designed to help users
determine
• Where am I?
• What can I do here?
9 • Why should I do it here as opposed to at a competitors’ site?