UNTANGLING THE WEB

WEEK 2 – SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

AGENDA

• Quick review of class 1 – go over homework from last week

• Why do SEO?

• History of search engines

• The mechanics of current SEO practices

• Lab exercises

• Homework and discuss the upcoming project 1

CLASS 1 REVIEW

• Slideshare.net/derekja has the class audio and slides

• Particularly if you missed last week, review that material

• Homework 1 due date has been delayed until next week

• Due by the start of class on Sept 21st

• Record a video of yourself answering the “what happens when you type facebook.com into the address bar” question. Before answering it describe your ideal web job and how that effects how you answer.

• Create a youtube channel for yourself and add the video, leave it unlisted or public as you prefer (can host elsewhere, or even bring a usb stick to class, if you need to)

• Send the link to Derek at derekja@gmail.com

WHY DO SEARCH ENGINE

OPTIMIZATION?

FINDING CUSTOMERS

• At one point, finding customers was a non-issue

• Towns were small, customers were local

• If you sold something people wanted, they’d find you

• But with such a small customer base you need to sell only things everyone wants

• “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it!”

SALES

SALES OUTSIDE YOUR IMMEDIATE NETWORK• If people don’t find you, you have to find them

• Outbound sales

• Cold Calling

• This is not fun!!!

PAID ADS AS OUTBOUND SALES

• Today’s topic is organic search results, also known as natural search results

• But automated outbound methods are still important

• Next week we’ll talk all about paid advertising and pay-per-click

• It’s all about “qualifying” the customer. Making sure that they are a good target for your ads before you spend money on reaching them

INBOUND IS BETTER

• When your customers find you, they do the work

• By the time they reach your site they have qualified themselves

THE LONG TAIL

• The book is getting a little bit dated

• It was one of the first systematic analyses of why the web enables specialty products to dominate

• Since a website has very little marginal cost to add a new product, and storage of that product is in a warehouse not an expensive storefront, consumers can suddenly get exactly what they want

WHY IS SEO THE FIRST MODULE ON

CREATING WEBSITES?

GOOGLE KNOWS!

• They know what people are searching for

• They know what kind of content people want

• It’s in their interest to tell you

• But they also know when you’re cheating!• So since you eventually want a page that searches well and has the content you users are looking for, it’s

just easier to start with SEO

HISTORY OF WEB SEARCHING

CURRENT MARKET SHARE

MECHANICAL ASPECTS OF SEO

ON THE PAGE

• Content quality

• Is there enough content? Is it relevant?

• Site architecture• Crawlable? Robots.txt? Sitemap?

• HTML

• Tags well-formed? Titles relevant? Keywords?

• http://blog.halfabubbleout.com/blog/bid/263765/SEO-Basics-How-to-Add-Keywords-to-a-Website

OFF THE PAGE

• Trust• Reputable site, not brand new, well=known

• Links

• Particularly from trusted sites

• Personal

• Location, browsing history

• Social• Social media. Youtube is huge.

TOOLS FOR SEO

CATEGORIES OF TOOL

• Keyword tools• https://serps.com/tools/rank-checker/

• Traffic analysis• analytics.google.com

• Paid dashboards

• Majestic

• Moz

GOOGLE ANALYTICS EXERCISE

• In this exercise we’ll be creating a web page on nitrous.io and adding it to our google analytics dashboard

CREATE A NITROUS.IO ACCOUNT AND YOUR FIRST WEBPAGE

• This can be a free account which will give you 50 hours per month of website hosting

• This means that you must turn off your site when you’re done with it!!!

CONNECT TO GOOGLE ANALYTICS

CLEANING UP

• (do this at your leisure, but don’t forget or you’ll run through your free hours!)

DEEPER INTO ANALYTICS

• Let’s look at the test account for some more interesting examples than a new website

• Instructions are at https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6367342

HOMEWORK

• Using the SEO periodic table, find 5 things that could be improved about my pancakes in Victoria website at https://derekja.github.io/pancakes/

• This is also due on Sept 21st at the start of class, along with homework number 1 (which was originally due today but was extended due to some students missing the first class)

• Submit homeworks to me by email at derekja@gmail.com

GETTING READY FOR NEXT WEEK

• Main topic for next week is advertising. We have a couple guests as well.

• But getting ready for the html class is going to take a bit of time. You already have a nitrous.io account, but that can only run 50 hours per month

• You already have a github account, so try making your first page on github pages https://pages.github.com/

• If you like, start editing html. There are lots of editors, but a nice graphical site is https://html-online.com/

• Finally, only a handful of you are on the slack channel. Send me email at derekja@gmail.com to be added.

• Slack is the main place to ask questions and start discussions. You’ll also want to be on there to start finding group members for the project. By classtime on the 28th, if you have not found people you want to work with you will be assigned randomly to a group