Presentation Transcript

1. Lecture 23E-Marketing

   Search Engine Marketing Instructor: HanniyaAbid Assistant Professor COMSATS Institute of Information Technology
2. Objectives After this lecture, you will be able to Know Search Engine Marketing Techniques review the main search engine marketing techniques for making a company and its products visible through search engines: 1 Search engine optimization (SEO) 2 Paid search marketing or Pay Per Click (PPC)
3. Search Engine Optimization In search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search, the natural listings are on the left. The position or ranking is dependent on an algorithm used by each search engine to match relevant site page content with the keyphrase entered. There is no charge for these listings to be displayed or when a link relevant to your site is clicked upon. However, you may need to pay a search engine optimization firm to advise or undertake optimization work to make your web pages appear higher in the rankings.
4. Search Engine Marketing Search engine marketing is arguably the most important digital marketing channel for customer acquisition. We all now naturally turn to a search engine when we are seeking a new product, service or entertainment. We also turn to search when we become familiar with a new brand either through offline advertising or direct mail or through other digital channels such as graphical display ads.
5. Search Engine Marketing Some transactional sites can generate over half of all their new business through search, although this will depend how well-known a brand is. For a well-known brand, users may navigate directly to a site via the URL, but they will often use the search engine to enter the brand name URL or brand and product (known as a navigational search).
6. Search Engine Optimization Search engine optimization (SEO) involves achieving the highest position or ranking practical in the natural or organic listings on the search engine results pages after a specific combination of keywords (or keyphrase) has been typed in.
7. How are search engine results produced To optimize your position in different search engines, it is essential to understand the basis on which SERPS are generated and ordered. Marketers who understand the ranking processes can boost their position higher than their competitors and so achieve higher levels of traffic. SEO is too important to just be left to an agency and success in search involves training content owners and editors within a company to create content which fits the criteria used by search engines to assess relevance.
8. Stages involved in search engine listing Source: econsultancy, 2007
9. Search Technology Processes Search technology involves these main processes: Crawling. The purpose of the crawl is to identify relevant pages for indexing and assess whether they have changed. Crawling is performed by robots (bots) which are also known as spiders. These access web pages and retrieve a reference URL of the page for later analysis and indexing. Indexing. An index is created to enable the search engine to rapidly find the most relevant pages containing the query typed by the searcher. Rather than searching each page for a query phrase, a search engine ‘ inverts ’ the index to produce a lookup table of the documents containing particular words.
10. Search Technology Processes 3. Ranking or scoring. The indexing process has produced a lookup of all the pages that contain particular words in a query, but they are not sorted in terms of relevance. Ranking of the document to assess the most relevant set of documents to return in the SERPs occurs in real-time for the search query entered. First, relevant documents will be retrieved from a runtime version of the index at a particular data centre, then a rank in the SERPs for each document will be computed based on many ranking factors, of which we highlight the main ones below.
11. Search Technology Processes 4 Query request and results serving. The familiar search engine interface accepts the searchers query. The users ’ location is assessed through their IP address and the query is then passed to a relevant data centre for processing. Ranking then occurs in real-time for a particular query to return a sorted list of relevant documents and these are then displayed on the Search Results Page.
12. Ranking Factors Google uses around 200 factors or signals within its search ranking algorithm. These include positive ranking factors which help boost position and negative factors or filters which are used to remove search engine spam from the index where SEOs have used unethical approaches to game the Google index. We will explore the most important ranking factors in a moment. Google’s 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List by Brian Dean | Last updated Apr. 16, 2014 http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors
13. Site submission How do you submit a new site? The good news is that registration with many search engines is free if you find the ‘Add a URL ’ page (e.g. www.google.com/addurl.html ) where you supply your home page URL and Google will then automatically index all the linked pages. It is recommended that automated submission tools are not used since these can be considered a search engine spamming technique. In fact, if you have links from other companies that are already indexed by a search engine, many search engines will automatically index your site without the need to submit a URL.
14. Key phrase Analysis The E-consultancy (2007) best practice guide recommends these stages for analysis and goal-setting: A. Demand analysis. The key to successful search engine optimization and pay per click is achieving keyphraserelevance since this is what the search engines strive for – to match the combination of keywords typed into the search box to the most relevant destination content page. Use keywords planning tools and traffic estimators Identifying the popularity of each search term, its relevance to the products or services qualified by the ‘intent of the searcher ’ indicated by the phrase and the competition on it.
15. Key phrase Analysis For example, this list of seven different types of keyphrases is taken from an Overture representative talking at Search Engine Strategies in 2004. Examples for ‘ car insurance ’ : 1 Comparison/quality – compare car insurance 2 Adjective (price/product qualifiers) – cheap car insurance, woman car insurance 3 Intended use – high mileage car insurance 4 Product type – holiday car insurance 5 Vendor or brand – Churchill car insurance 6 Location – car insuranceuk 7 Action request – buy car insurance 8 Provider type – car insurance company, car insurance supermarket .
16. Key phrase Analysis B.Performance analysis. This assesses how the company is currently performing for these phrases. With the right tracking tools and tags, it should be possible to report average position in natural or paid listings; Click volume referred from search; Click quality(conversion rates and ideally bounce rates to compare landing page effectiveness); Outcomes (sales, registrations or leads); Costs (CPC and CPA); profitability (based on cost of sale or lifetime value models).
17. Key phrase Analysis C. Gap analysis. Identifies for each phrase and product where the biggest potential for improvement is, so you can target your resources accordingly. D. Set goals and select keyphrases. You should identify the different types of keyphrase you want to be visible for. Particularly important are the strategic keyphrases which are critical to success.
18. Improving search engine ranking through SEO Fortunately there are common factors that influence search engine rankings. The challenge for SEOs is that there are many ranking factors. The most important factors which can be managed, these are: On-page optimization External linking Internal link-structures .
19. On-page optimization The most basic test of relevance by the search engines is the number of times the phrase appears on the page. However, there are many other factors that can also be applied. In its guidance for Webmasters, Google states: ‘ Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page ’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it ’ s a good match for your query ’ .
20. On-page optimization These other factors include: ● Frequency ● Occurrence in headings h1 , h2 ● Occurrence in anchor text of hyperlinks ● Markup such as bold ● Density (the number of times) ● Proximity of phrase to start of document and the gap between individual keywords ● Alternative image text ● Document meta data
21. On-page optimization Alternative Image Tag Graphical images can have hidden text associated with them that is not seen by the user (unless graphical images are turned off or the mouse is rolled-over the image), but will be seen and indexed by the search engine. For example text about a company name and products can be assigned to a company logo using the ‘ALT ’ tag or attribute of the image tag as follows: <IMG NAME ‘Logo’ SRC‘logo.gif ’ ALT‘Car insurance’>.
22. On-page optimization Document meta data The three most important types of meta data are the document title tag, the document ‘ descriptions ’ meta tag and the document ‘ keywords ’ meta tag. You should try to makethese unique for each page on your site(s) since otherwise Google may assess the content as duplicate and some pages may be down-weighted in importance.
23. External Linking Boosting externals links is vital to your SEO efforts although it is less easy to control and often neglected. The founders of Google realized that the number of links into a page and their quality was a great way of determining the relevance of a page to searchers, especially when combined with the keyphrases on that page. Google algorithm has been upgraded and refined continuously since then, the number and quality of external links is still the most important ranking factor.
24. External Linking While natural links will be generated if content is useful, a proactive approach to link-building is required in competitive markets. 1. Identify and create popular content and services . The starting point for both natural and proactive link-building has to be to think of the value of your site and different types of content or services on different pages. The acid test is whether your visitors will bookmark a page of your content or tell a friend about it. Think not only about the home page, but also other pages within the site
25. External Linking ii Identify potential partner sites . There are several options to find partner sites. It is helpful to try to identify the types of sites that you may be able to link with, for example: ● Directories of links (often less valuable) ● Traditional media sites ● Niche online-only media sites ● Trade associations ● Manufacturers, suppliers and other business partners ● Press release distribution sites ● Bloggers including customers and partners ● Social networks.
26. iii Contact partner sites: A typical sequence is: ● Step 1. Write e-mail encouraging link (or phone call to discuss from someone inside the company will often work best). ● Step 2. Follow-up link . ● Step 3. Setup links. THINK LINK-QUALITY NOT LINK-POPULARITY
27. Internal links structure Many of the principles of external link building can also be applied on your own sites. Benefit is that you have control of the linking although impact is less than from links from external sites. It is important to consider how you can increase the number of internal links to pages.
28. Summary Search Engine Optimization Search Technology Processes KeyphraseAnalysis External Links Internal Links