This document provides an overview of search engine optimization (SEO) including definitions, key concepts, and best practices. It defines SEO as improving website visibility in organic search results. Major points covered include: - The top factors search engines like Google consider in rankings are speed, mobile friendliness, high quality content, and links from other relevant sites. - On-page techniques like optimizing titles, meta descriptions and images can boost rankings. - Engagement with social media and multimedia content creates backlinks and awareness. - Analytics tools like Google Analytics and search console help measure SEO performance and identify issues.

2. Search Engine Optimization
and Analytics
Bryan Campbell
ORAU Communications & Marketing

3. Where We’re Going
• What is SEO?
• How do you do it?
• How do you measure it?

4. What is SEO?

5. SEO Definitions
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the science
of increasing traffic to your Website by
improving the internal and external factors
influencing ranking in search results.
--Bruce Clay

6. SEO Definitions
It is the process of getting traffic from the
“free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” listings
on search engines. All major search engines such
as Google, Yahoo and Bing have such results,
where web pages and other content such as
videos or local listings are shown and ranked
based on what the search engine considers most
relevant to users.
--Search Engine Land

7. SEO Definitions
82% of all the clicks on search results in engines
like Google & Bing go to the unpaid, organic
results. Only 18% go to paid listings. SEO is the
practice of attracting traffic from those unpaid
results and involves a massive array of strategies
and tactics.
--Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOMoz

8. Search Engine Popularity
• 18.7 billion explicit core searches were
conducted in the U.S. in September 2013
• Google Sites ranked first with 12.5 billion
• Microsoft Sites ranked second with 3.4 billion
• Yahoo! Sites with 2.1 billion
• Ask Network with 474 million
• AOL, Inc. with 249 million
Data from ComScore

9. The 900-lb Gorilla
• Google’s ownership of the search market is
well known…but underreported?
• FTC investigated and determined that Google
does not have “search bias” (Jan. 2013)
• ComScore Data – 66%?
• What percentages are you seeing?

10. Google 88.5%
Bing 6.3%

11. Google 88.9%
Bing 7.3%

12. The Process – Behind the Scenes
• Website is created
• Googlebots crawl the site
– Sitemap.xml
– Robots.txt
• Google adds site’s contents to their Index and
Archive

13. The Process - Searching
• Searchers enter keywords into Google
– How many ways do people search??
• Google returns search engine result pages
(SERPs) based on 200 algorithm criteria

14. The Process – Clicking (tapping)
• SERP attention spans
– Formerly Page 1 (first 10 results) was the goal
• Now it’s top 3 or you’re out*
– Top organic link gets 36% of clicks
– Number 2 gets 12.5%
– Number 3 gets 9.5%
• Web page attention spans < 10 seconds
*CTR data courtesy of Bruce Clay, Inc.

15. What You Can’t Control
(but you need to know)
• Page Rank
• Inbound Links
• Competition
• Algorithm Changes
• SERP Evolution

17. What is Page Rank?
• Named after Larry Page, Google founder and
current CEO
• Mathematical formula comparing all the
elements in a set (all the known pages on the
Web)
• 10-point scale
• Do your know your site’s PR?

18. Page Rank “Page Rank is the
number
and
importance
of links pointing to you.”
–Matt Cutts

19. Why is Page Rank important?
• Google crawls (roughly) in order of Page Rank
• The Higher your page rank:
– the faster you’re likely to be found
– the deeper they’ll crawl on your site
– the more often they’ll visit your pages to see if
they’ve been refreshed

20. Inbound Links
• Alexa
• Google Webmasters
• Majestic SEO

21. Competition
• Who is least imperfect?
• You, me and the bear
• SEO tools to compare

22. Constant Change
• Google’s Algorithm changes automatically
every 14 hours
• Much larger manual changes:
– Panda – Quality Content
– Penguin – Quality Links
– Hummingbird - Looks at context and intent of
search

23. Google SERP Evolution
• Google Changes
– Organic vs. Paid
– Multimedia results
– Autocomplete (still manipulable?)
– Knowledge Graph
– Personalized/Localized Results
– Google+

24. Google SERPs over time

30. How do you do it?

31. Do what Google tells you to do
1. Speed up your site
2. Make sure you’re mobile/social friendly
3. Fix your pages
4. Have good content

32. 1. Speed up your site
• Combine CSS and Javascript files
• Minify
• Image optimize

33. 2. Be Mobile/Social Friendly
• Responsive Design
– Google Recommends
• Shareable content on your site
• Presence on the social platforms
• Social presence allows for “buzz”
• “We’re everywhere you want to be”

34. Smart Phone Growth

35. 3. Fix Your Pages
• Keywords
• Title Tag
• Meta Tags
• Headlines
• Image Alt Tags
• Links
• Content

36. Keywords
• 58% of all queries are 3 or more words
• 87% of all clicks are organic
• 100% of all statistics are debatable

37. Exercises…
http://flic.kr/p/83dMSW

38. …or exercises
http://flic.kr/p/6Vt94T

39. Keywords
• Research and decide which words to use
BEFORE
– You write your news release
– You write your Web copy
– You write your blog post

40. Keywords
• Think like a searcher, not yourself
• Who do you want to find your site?
• Why would they want to find you?

41. Title Tag
• Every page
• Unique
• Use keywords (but none more than twice)
• 60-72 Characters

43. Meta Tags
• Meta Description
– 12 to 24 words
– Include keywords
– Should read like a sentence
• Meta Keywords
– No benefit from using
– Google claims to ignore it
– BUT it is included in the Google Archive

45. Headlines
• H1
– Have one on every page
– Should read like a newspaper headline
– Use Keywords

47. Headlines
• H2
– Should read like a sentence
– Should always appear below H1 and above H3

48. Headlines
• H3, H4, H5…
– Use them where necessary for organization
– No SEO benefit past H3

49. Images
• Alt attribute should be on every image
• SEO benefit for important images
• Section 508 requirement for all images

50. Links
• Links should use keywords or helpful words
– Not “Click Here” or “More”

51. 4. Have Good Content
• Quality Content
– Gets Shared
– Gets Linked
– Gets Crawled
– Gets Ranked

52. Content
• Have keywords throughout
– But don’t “keyword stuff”
– Distribute widely on the page
– Multiple forms of keywords
• Be Interesting
• Be Relevant

53. A Word about Word Count
• Let the content dictate the length, not a
formula.
• Short pages can rank well.

55. 159 Words

56. Case Study

57. Volkswagen Internships
• ORAU manages Volkswagen Distinguished
Scholars Program at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory
• Microsite to support the program did not rank
at all for months after launch
• Made subtle changes

58. Volkswagen cont’d
• Turned paragraph heads into H1 and H2
• Added better titles and meta description
• Added links from the accompanying YouTube
video and from 1 other popular site

60. Engagement Objects™
• Multimedia content
– Videos
– Podcasts
– Images
– Graphs/Charts
– Maps
– Polls

61. Engagement Objects
• Create links back to your site
• Create “buzz”
• Increase reputation

62. Engagement Objects
• SEO Periodic Table
• Search Engine Relationship Chart

66. YouTube
• Second most popular search engine
• Tagged content
• Link back to your site
• Stats!
• Channel pages
• Playlists
• Closed Captioning

68. SlideShare
• "SlideShare’s mission is to build the world’s
largest social content network”
• Fully Owned Subsidiary of LinkedIn
• Allows sharing of presentations and
documents
• Everyone can view presentations
• Logged in users can download files

69. SlideShare
• Benefits
– Take payload off your server
– Content Discovery
– SEO
– Analytics

70. WordPress
• “WordPress takes care of 80-90% of SEO”
--Matt Cutts
• But don’t leave money on the table

71. WordPress
• Meta Tag Plugins
– Simple Meta Tags

73. WordPress Posts and Pages
• Text vs. Tags

74. WordPress Authorship
• Requires a plug-in
• Connect WordPress to Google+ Account
• SERPS show you as author of results with your
Google+ Profile pic displayed

75. WordPress Categories
• These work like keywords
• Can be part of a page/post even where there
is not another mention in the text
• Allow dynamic pages where all your content
in a category is grouped for you

76. SEO Lab
• Sample Web page
• Find the areas to improve
• Code Warriors can open HTML in a text editor
and mark it up
• Wordsmiths can mark it up with a pen

78. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta name="keywords" content="Exercise, Monday, Fairgrounds" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>
<body>
<p><strong><em>Upcoming Exercise</em></strong></p><p>The Smith County Division of Emergency
Management will be conducting an emergency response drill this Friday, Nov. 29, at the Smith County
Fairgrounds, which could impact your morning commute.</p>
<p>Agencies involved in the drill will include the Smith County Sheriff&rsquo;s Department (<a
href="http://www.scsd.smithco.tn.us/">website</a>), Smithville EMS Services, Smithville Fire Department, the
Tennessee Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.</p>
<p>SCSD spokesperson Olivia Jones said that the event will impact traffic flow around the Fairgrounds and
drivers should choose alternate routes for their morning drive if their destination is on the west side of the
Fairgrounds.</p>
<div style="float:right"> <img src="drill.jpg" width="300" height="178" alt=" " />
<p>Pretend &ldquo;victims&rdquo; will stand in for actual disaster victims during Friday&rsquo;s drill. </p>
</div>
&ldquo;We will have a brief period where streets will be closed to allow emergency vehicles to access the
Fairgrounds,&rdquo; Jones said. &ldquo;Drivers may experience delays of 15 minutes or more during these
closures, so alternate routes should be used when possible.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Jones said the drill will allow the first responders and emergency management personnel to practice how they
will coordinate their efforts in the event of a disaster in the Smith County area.
<p>&ldquo;In the past 10 years, our state has experienced catastrophic floods and tornados, which thankfully did
not impact our area,&rdquo; Jones said. &ldquo;But in the event that another of these disasters should impact
Smith County, this drill helps us know how to coordinate efforts to get emergency services to local citizens as
efficiently as possible.&rdquo;
<p>Jones added that sounds of helicopters and sirens will be heard in the area during the drill which should not
alarm residents in the area.<p>&ldquo;We try to simulate our response to a disaster as closely as possible so it
may seem real to those who aren&rsquo;t aware of what&rsquo;s happening,&rdquo; Jones said. &ldquo;That is
why we want to get out the word early so that no is alarmed or frightened by the sounds and activity at the
Fairgrounds.&quot;<p>To see a map of the traffic closures click <a href="map.pdf">here</a>.<p>
</body></html>

79. How do You Measure it?

80. Google Analytics
• Pros
– Free!
– One line of code on every page
• Build into templates or CMS
– Live data
– See user paths through site
– Bounce Rate data
– Annotate events

81. Google Analytics
• Cons
– Format/Features Change FREQUENTLY
– (Not Provided)
– Oriented toward marketing sites

82. Google Webmasters
• Connect it to Google Analytics
• See actual keyword searches
• Submit sitemaps
• Find crawl errors

83. Ranking Reports
• Increasingly devalued

84. YOURLS
• Your Own URL Shortener
• You pick your own domain
– Many .us domains available
– Inexpensive but not free
• Shorten your own site links or anyone else’s
• Basic stats available
• You own it unlike goo.gl, bit.ly, etc.

86. Social Media Statistics
• Facebook Admin Panel

88. Social Media Metrics
• Twitter Analytics
http://analytics.twitter.com

90. Social Media Metrics
• Pinterest Web Analytics
http://business.pinterest.com/analytics/

92. Discussion

93. Thanks
• Bryan.Campbell@orau.org
• @heybeecee