Sumeet Kaur Chadha
The Best Guide to SEARCH
ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
(SEO)
*

Content Table
• Introduction to SEO and SERP
• What are Search Engines and how they work.
• On Page Optimization
• Off Page Optimization and Link Building
• What are Keywords ?
• Local SEO
• Duplicate Content
• SEO Design and layout best practices
• Google Penguin & Panda
• Over optimization hurts
• White hat vs. black hat SEO
• Mobile SEO

What is SEO?
SEO is short for search engine optimization, and it is a part
of SEM(Search engine marketing).
As the term implies, SEO is all about optimizing a website
to gain maximum visibility within the search engine results.
As we will see, SEO takes time and effort.
Do not be fooled by e-mails turning up unannounced in
your inbox, promising instant SEO results.
If you want to get more customers the obvious way to do it
is by getting your website found easily in Google.

TIP TIME
You do not need heaps of technical experience in order
to promote your website. What you do need is common
sense, attention to detail and the time to actually do
your SEO properly.
Good SEO takes effort and good SEO takes time

What is SERP?
What is SERP?
A search engine results page (SERP) is the listing of results
returned by a search engine in response to a keyword
query.
A SERP may refer to a single page of links returned, or to
the set of all links returned for a search query.

Is Good SEO possible, Why not
Good SEO is a combination of common sense, solid
technical knowledge and careful attention to detail.
There is no magic to SEO and there are no
guaranteed results. It is important to realize that
Google makes changes to the way that websites are
displayed within the SERP and that it makes these
changes on a daily basis.

Different search engines
 There are many different search engines available today
the most famous of which is Google. Other examples
include Bing from Microsoft and Yahoo.
 It is important that if you are promoting a website you
make sure that each individual search engine is aware
of your particular website.
 The easiest way to do this is to search each search
engine using your company name and see if you can
find the website.

How search engines work?
The first thing to realize about search engines is
that they only know about websites that are
submitted to them directly or that they have found
when searching the web.
Search engines use automated software called
spiders or crawlers to search through websites on
the web and then indexes the results in giant
databases.

The Popular search engines
•Google: most popular search engine in most countries
•Yahoo: dominant search engine in the United States
•Bing: popular search engine in the United States, owned
by Microsoft.
•Baidu: dominant search engine in China
•Yandex: dominant search engine in Russia
•Naver: dominant search engine in Korea
•Wolfram Alpha: search engine for computational
knowledge

Robots, spiders and crawlers
A search engine such as Google has automated software referred to
as robots, spiders or crawlers, which will search the Web looking for
new websites, or new pages within websites. The search engines will
also search for pages that have been updated and modified since the
last time they were crawled by the search engines. For this reason it
is a good idea to update your website with new content every so
often, because this is exactly what the search engines are looking for.
Crawling: This task is completed by Crawler, Spider ( GoogleBot in
case of Google).
Indexing: Creating index for all the fetched web pages and keeping
them into a giant database.
Processing: Search engine compares the search string in the search
request with the indexed pages in the database.
Check Relevancy: Search engine calculates the relevancy of page to
display as per various algorithms.

SEO Search Results
Retrieving Results: This is the last step where the result is displayed
for the best matched result.
What is Search Engine Rank?
SEO is the process of designing and developing a website to attain a
high rank in search engine results.
A page rank is calculated by the position of web pages displayed in
the search engine results.
If a search engine is putting your webpage on the position one, then
your web page rank will be number 1 which is the highest.

Organic vs. Inorganic Search
Organic Search Inorganic Search
The organic results, also referred to as
natural results, are displayed beneath the
paid for results. There is no charge for
having your web pages displayed within
the organic results section. The order in
which web pages are displayed within the
organic section is determined by a series
of complex algorithms used by Google to
rank websites. Search engine optimization
is all about getting your website to be
displayed as high as possible within the
organic results section of the search
engine results.
When Google displays the search results,
you will normally see what are called
‘paid for’ or inorganic results displayed at
the top of the page and sometimes down
the side of the page. The ‘paid for’ results
section is normally lightly shaded and is
frequently labeled as ‘sponsored’ links or
advertisement. If you want your company
to be displayed within the ‘paid for’
results section, then you need to register
with Google, and take part in a global
auction.

On Page Optimization
On-Page optimization refers to any changes that you make to the
actual content of the website. This on-site optimization may relate to
the text that your visitors can see when they visit your website or it
may relate to the code behind the website that the search engine
will see, but that your visitors will not necessarily view. For example,
as we will see elsewhere, within the ‘head’ section of the HTML code
for each page of the website, you may optimize the title,
meta-description and Image Alt Tags. There are also many other on-
site optimization opportunities, such as using header tags, URL
Structure, Internal links, Keyword Usage and Sitemaps.
Most on-page optimization factors are related to "Relevancy"

On Page Optimization
•Title Tags: Shown as the headline in search results.
•META descriptions: This description is shown in search results.
•Header tags: Break the information of a page into hierarchical
order.(H1 directly influence rankings)
•URLs: Very important for relevancy and for users, Keep them short
and include keywords in them.
•Alt Text: To derive meaning from images.
•Internal links: Help search engines understand the sections of a
website.
•Sitemaps: Tell users and search engines the structure and hierarchy
of a website.
•HTML sitemaps – for humans
•XML sitemaps – for search engines

On Page Optimization
•NLP - "Natural Language Processing"aims to understand the
meaning behind website copy.
Use synonyms and related or common words when writing online
•Robot Meta tag: The important metatag that you may need at
times.
Eg : <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">, you can
tell a spider or a robot that you do not want some of your pages
indexed, or that you do not want your links followed.

On Page Optimization - DO'S
DO'S:
•Effective content structure.
•Pages must be bot accessible for search
engines to be understandable.(Avoid Flash
etc)
• Make content social and sharable
•Ensure your website is multi-device
compatible

On Page Optimization -DONT'S
DONT'S:
•Keyword stuffing and meta tag stuffing is no
longer an effective SEO tactic.
•Hidden text intended only for search engines is
easily detected as a spam tactic, and will have a
negative impact on rankings.
•Say No to cloaking : Showing one thing to search
engines and other to users.
•No Repetitive anchor text (highlighted text) in the
content and links.

On Page Optimization - DONT'S
Page Hijacking: This means Creating a rough copy
of a popular website which shows contents similar
to the original and when the user comes on that
website, he is redirected to unrelated or malicious
websites.
Creating Mirror websites by hosting multiple
websites all with same content but different URL's.

Off Page Optimization & Link Building
Offsite search engine optimization takes place outside of
your website and consists of numerous activities, such as
requesting links from other websites to your website. In
addition this now includes activities ranging from posting
videos on YouTube through to setting up Facebook and
Twitter accounts. The single most important offsite activity
is the acquiring of links from other websites, to your
website.
There is as such no one size fits all concept of link building.
Most of the off-page optimization factors are related to
"Popularity".

Off Page Optimization & Link Building
Principles of Link Building:
•Always Create Link worthy content: Make content
that real people will want to read, share and reference in
link.
•Do some Proactive offsite engagement: Engage on
other websites with people involved in the same topic.
•Use your Offline Relationships: Use your real-world
network to find link-building opportunities.
•When looking for link opportunities make sure the source
of links are reputable.

You Should Know Them
•Link Equity: It is the value of the link.
•Inbound Links: The Links that come to your site,
they are very useful.
•Outbound links: The Links that go from your site,
always be very careful and link to the sources you
trust.
What is Rel = "no follow" ?
Links with this attribute do not impact search
rankings.
eg: < a rel = "no follow" href =
"http://www.abc.com"></a>

What about the Quality of the back links
A very important factor within your SEO efforts is
securing as many back links as possible to your
website. Ideally these back links should be one way
links from other websites to your website.
Reciprocal links are where you share links with
another website so that they will link to your
website in exchange for a link from your website to
their website.

What about the Quality of the back links
Reciprocal links are far less valuable than one way
links. Even more important than the number of
links, is the quality of the links from other websites,
to your website. A link from a website with a high
PageRank is much more valuable than many links
from websites with a PageRank of one or two.
Cross Linking: Is considered as one of the best
known practice that can come handy to yield high
search engine rankings, by leveraging several
domains owned by you.

Link Building - Dont's
•SPAM : Do not build spammy links which are not
legitimate. They will definitely add a negative value.
•DON'T BUY LINKS: Search engines don't approve
of buying links and it is very difficult to calculate
ROI.
•DON'T ACQUIRE RECIPROCAL LINKS: Links should
happen naturally, and unnatural links are not worth
the time. One way links usually perform better.

Thinking about keywords
When you first design a website you
need to sit down and draw up a list of
keywords and phrases that you expect
your visitors to use when searching for
your website.
It is important that you involve non-
experts in the creation of your keyword
list. For instance, if you have a technical
understanding of your particular product
or service, you may be tempted to use a
technical term within the search phrase.
Many of your customers may use search
phrases you did not expect them to use.

Google Keyword Planner Tool:
Google provides a free research tool as part of a Google AdWords service. You can use
this to help investigate which keywords are important for your website. Best of all the
service is totally free. To use the service, simply search Google using a phrase such as
‘Google keyword tool’ and you should see the relevant pages displayed. It is worth
creating a Google account, which again is free, and will make the use of the Google
keyword tool easier for you.
Example: Keyword ideas for : "handbags noida"

Thinking about keywords
Using keyword phrases within a website :
The domain name or URL is the address of your website. For instance
the URL for Microsoft’s home page is: http://www.microsoft.com
The URL is an opportunity to include an important key word or
phrase.
Keep two to three words in your domain name that will be easy to
memorize and remember not to use dashes or hyphens in the name.
Use local place names in the keywords:
If you are interested in attracting local customers you should make
sure that your website pages display the name of your town, city or
local suburb that you’re interested in. If you are interested in state-
wide business , make sure the name of the state is listed within the
website.

Best Places to put Keywords
•<title> tag - between 50-68 characters
•<meta name="description"> tag - 140 – 150 characters.
•<meta name="keyword"> tag approx. 200 characters
•<h1> header tag
•<a href="http://abc.com">keyword</a> link tags
•<body> tag
•<alt> tag
•URL or website address
•Comments tag

Word Stemming
Word stemming is a feature used by google, which
allows all forms of a word like verb, singular,
plurals, or similar words returned for a given search
query.
if someone types in "EMI plans", not only the pages
that are optimized for that phrase but the pages
that contain all variations of that phrase are
returned. For example, "EMI plan", "EMI planning",
"EMI planner".

TIP TIME
Useful Tip :
Having keywords in the first heading and in the first
paragraph (first 20 words or so) on a page are the
best.
Hope you have some understanding on keywords
now and are ready to brainstorming to identify
correct keywords for your site.

Local SEO
A facility that many companies
overlook is the creation of the
Google places page for your
business. When people perform
local searches within Google, it
will display a small number of
localized results that Google
believes matches the search
criteria.In many cases the local
search results are shown at the
top of the page ahead of the rest
of the organic search results. It is
vitally important that you
optimize your company so that it
shows up in local search results.

Local SEO
Mobile devices and location technologies have enabled search
engines to provide personalized location-based search results.
Mobile devices account for over 50% of searches online.
Name, Address, Phone Number:
•On your website, specify one name, one address, and one phone
number
•On every citation online, make sure the name, address, and phone
number is identical
•Consistency with spelling and formatting is crucial
•Be very careful to format everything exactly the same, letter for
letter
Directories are helpful for local SEO.
o Citations from legitimate directories such as Yelp, Yellow Pages,
and others are valuable

Avoid Duplicate Content
Most common problem is SEO is duplicate content. When a piece of
content lives in two places online, search engines have trouble
figuring out which to rank highest.
For Eg: similar blog posts, linking a product page from email, social
media etc .The search engine gets confused.
Fixing Dupilcate content can be very technical.
Possible solutions:
Remove and redirect : Remove unnecessary version and redirect
traffic to the version you would like to rank.Redirect link equity to
single version. Eg: 301 redirect - to redirect the user from an old
page URL to a new page URL.
•Use Rel = "Canonical": This is the best way to solve this problem as
this code points the search engines to the original source.
•"Noindex follow": noindex means the page will not be indexed.
“follow” means the links to this page will still count

Design and Layout Best Practices
A good design is a part of website algorithm, and effects all our SEO efforts. If you
make your site too complicated, then the search engine would not be able to
parse the content of your site properly, and finally indexing would not be efficient,
which results in a low rank. Here are some design best practices:
1. Clickable logo : This is a human expectation and Search engines can follow it.
2. Click worthy links: usually blue colored and underlined.
3. Standard location of navigation:Top or vertical throughout.
4. The actual page content should have a keyword density of about 10% and
should weigh in at about 200 words.
(Keyword density is the percentage density of a particular phrase or keyword
available on a website compared to the total number of words on the particular
page.)
5. Use a column based layout
6. Goal oriented design
8. Say No to Frames : They are search engine enemies.
7. Multi device friendly

The Sandbox
What is Google Sandbox ?
This is the place where the fresh and less
authoritative sites were kept for a certain time
period, till their establishment in the search results.
This may happens due to the building of so many
links within a short time span.

LSI - Latent Semantic Indexing
LSI : This technique is established to obtain the data by relating the
word to its closest counterparts or to its similar context. For
example, if you are searching something with a keyword “CAR” it will
show all the related things like classic cars, car auctions, Bentley car,
car race etc.
Looking for articles about “Sachin Tendulkar" in the same database
brings up many stories about the cricketer, followed by articles about
major cricket matches that don't mention his name. Constraining the
search to days when no articles were written about him still brings
up stories about cricket matches and well-known players.
LSI is 'smart' enough to see that that Sachin Tedulkar plays cricket.

Webmaster tools
Webmaster tool is a service
provided by Google from where
you can get backlink
information, crawl errors, search
queries, Indexing data, CTR etc.
It is now called as "Search
Console" .

Toxic Backlinks
Toxic backlinks are the unnatural links that harm the search rankings
of a website. Google’s Penguin update focuses on penalizing the
websites that have a bad backlinks profile. You may get a Google
Webmasters warning related to toxic backlinks profile of the website
.
Can I neutralize a toxic backlink to my site?
Through Backlink Quality Checker you can know who links to your
website.
Now, you have to go to ‘ Toxic link’ report, where you will find all the
links, that are harmful to your websites. If there is any link in ‘ Toxic
link report’ that matches with the link on your website, then you can
remove it by using ‘Google Disavov tool’.
Lot of Other tools to check toxic backlinks are : Ahrefs, Majestic SEO
or SEOmoz to get a complete list of backlinks.

Have you heard about Penguin and
Panda
Again if you do some research, you will find there are a lot of
unhappy website owners out there, who suffered badly when
Google Penguin and Google Panda were released. The reason
for this is that these particular modifications to the way
Google works were aimed at low quality websites many of
which did not adhere to the basic standards for website
promotion specified by Google.
There are no shortcuts when it comes to search engine
optimization. If you want to be well-positioned in the Google
search engine results then you have to play by Google’s rules.

Penguin and Panda
 Google representatives have gone on record stating that
they change the search algorithms on average more
than once a day.
 The Panda update identified websites with low-quality
content and removed some of these sites from Google’s
index.
 The Penguin update focused on penalizing sites with
low-quality links. Websites who had bought links or
participated in link farms or link schemes were penalized
or removed from the index.
 Keyword research is now more guesswork than science.

Over optimization will do more harm
Google is getting smarter by the day and will look at how your
website is put together and it will look at the code behind the
scenes. Whichever route you take there is always the danger of
over optimizing your website.
Google expects you and in fact encourages you to perform a
sensible amount of SEO, however if you overdo it Google will
actually penalizes the website.
Where that line is, is something of a moving target but basically
you can use common sense and this will normally keep you in
good stead with Google.
An example of overdoing it might be to have exactly the same
keyword used as your title and description on every single page,
and then repeating this word over and over again within the text
displayed within your website.

Over optimization hurts Just like Overeating
Example :
Hi, our new fashion site is all about fashion because we are masters
in fashion including all types of fashion. We believe we are the best
fashion company in India. You will not find a fashion company
offering a better fashion anywhere over the web.
Okay so maybe the paragraph above was a slight exaggeration but
you get the idea.
Be subtle when trying to promote your website.
SEO is still an incredibly powerful free channel.

White hat vs. black hat SEO
White hat SEO uses techniques that are acceptable to Google and
other search engines, while Black hat SEO ( Spamdexing) uses
techniques that go against the terms of service published by Google
and other major search engines.
If you employ an SEO company that uses black hat techniques you
may find that instead of being easy to find, your website may
disappear from search engines altogether as search engines such as
Google, will lay a penalty on websites that use techniques that they
consider attempts to spam their listings.
There are numerous examples of companies who have been de-
listed by Google or have had the search engine results moved down
the page compared to their competitors. Even large well-known
companies such as BMW have had their details removed altogether
from Google when they use techniques that Google disapproved of.

SEO – This can Harm you
Here is a brief review of activities that can harm your SEO:
✓Buying in links
✓Using excessive keywords within picture ‘alt’ tags or in your text
✓Excessive doorway pages (Gateway pages)
✓Duplicate content
✓Broken links
✓Links to, or from ‘bad’ websites
✓Reciprocal links
✓Spelling Mistakes
✓Poor content
✓No freshness
✓Poor loading Speed

What is Mobile SEO?
Mobile Search Engine Optimization is the process of designing a
website to make it suitable for viewing on mobile devices of different
screen sizes which have a low bandwidth.
A mobile friendly website has the following features :
•A very Responsive design.
•Use of appropriate fonts, colors and layout and easy to read on a
mobile device without having to zoom.
•An easy navigation using links and buttons easy to operate using a
finger.
•Very lightweight and takes less bandwidth and time to load on
mobile network.
•The most important links are displayed on the Home Page so that
they get enough visibility.

You can do the Best SEO
Since now you have realized the simple truth that the best
person to promote your website is YOU as know all about
your business.
You know what your clients want.
All you need are right skills to actually make this happen.
Don’t let anyone tell you that search engine optimization is
difficult because it is not. You just have to make sure you do it
in the right way, using the right techniques and soon enough
you will get the right results that you are looking for.

•Thank You !!!!!!!!