Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies

By Bruce Clay

The most comprehensive coverage of search engine optimization

In Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition, Bruce Clay—whose search engine consultancy predates Google—shares everything you need to know about SEO. In minibooks that cover the entire topic, you'll discover how search engines work, how to apply effective keyword strategies, ways to use SEO to position yourself competitively, the latest on international SEO practices, and more.

If SEO makes your head spin, this no-nonsense guide makes it easier. You'll get the lowdown on how to use search engine optimization to improve the quality and volume of traffic on your website via search engine results. Cutting through technical jargon, it gets you up to speed quickly on how to use SEO to get your website in the top of the rankings, target different kinds of searches, and win more industry-specific vertical search engine results!

• Includes new and updated material, featuring the latest on Bing!, Google instant search, image search, and much more
• Covers SEO and optimizing servers for SEO
• Provides important information on SEO web design
• Shows you how to use SEO to stay "above the fold"

If you're a website owner, developer, marketer, or SEO consultant, Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies, Third Edition is the only resource you need to beat the competition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Sep 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781118921760

Book preview

Introduction

Internet marketing is a dynamic marketing channel because of its accuracy and ease in tracking traffic. It also generates new opportunities for communication and marketing at breakneck speeds.

In the early days of the Internet, search engines evolved to bring the web to users who were looking for sites, products, and like-minded users. These days, savvy marketers know that showing up on search engine results pages is a fruitful way to reach potential new customers. But landing your business’s website in that precious spot high on the results pages is far from guaranteed. Search engine optimization (SEO) grew out of the need to persuade search engines that your site offers the best content for a particular topic.

Search engine optimization isn’t a difficult discipline, but it is complex because of its many different parts that you need to tweak and adjust so that they work in harmony. And as far as marketing disciplines go, SEO is a wildly moving target. This latter quality makes a book on search engine optimization a challenging undertaking, often requiring a focus on broad concepts rather than specifics. Many of those specifics change or even fade away so often that they can need to be replaced or updated a hundred times just while this book is being updated for the newest edition.

To keep pace with the unavoidably fluctuating nature of SEO recommendations and search engine guidelines, your business needs to avoid chasing search engine algorithms. Instead, your goal should be simply to present your pages as the most relevant for a given search query. Resist the urge to assume that one aspect of search engine optimization is more important than another. Keep in mind that to succeed, all the various aspects of your SEO endeavors need to work together.

About This Book

Throughout this book, we reference tools as well as experts (ourselves and others) in the field. Search engine marketing (SEM), as an industry, is very active and excels at knowledge sharing. Although we cover the basics here, we strongly urge you to take advantage of the community that has developed since search engine marketing began. Truly, without the SEM community, we couldn’t have written this book.

We hope that you keep this book near at hand, picking it up when you need to check for answers. For that reason, we attempt to make each minibook stand on its own. If something falls outside the scope of a particular minibook, or requires a mention in one but more detail in another, we refer you to the correct chapter or minibook for more information.

Search engine optimization has grown and changed over the years, along with the search engines themselves, and it continues to change at such a fast pace that sometimes the tools and features of the search engines become outdated even soon after this book’s publication. For example, over the course of writing this book, Google changed the name of its webmaster tools platform from Google Webmaster Tools to Google Search Console, and modified the layout of local search results pages multiple times. This changeability means that you may have to research the most current tools and features available to you at at any given moment.

This book uses the following conventions, as follows:

Text appears in brackets when it represents a search query that an Internet user might type into a search engine’s search box, like this: [when is Mother’s Day].

Web addresses and programming code appear in monofont. If you’re reading a digital version of this book on a device connected to the Internet, you can click or tap the web address to visit that website, like this: www.dummies.com.

Foolish Assumptions

We wrote this book for a particular sort of person. We assume that you, the one holding this book, are a small-business owner who’s pretty new to Internet marketing. You might have a website, or maybe you’re thinking about finally diving into this online thing; either way, we presume that you’ve already figured out how to turn on your computer and connect to the Internet.

We also assume that you’re either somewhat familiar with the technologies that power websites or that you have access to someone who is. HTML, JavaScript, Flash, and other technologies are broad topics on their own. We don’t expect you to know everything there is to know about JavaScript programming or Flash, but we also don’t spend time explaining them to you. If you don’t know how to program in these technologies, find a super-smart programmer to help you in your journey of developing your business’s online presence. For a primer, you may want to seek out the For Dummies titles devoted to these topics.

Icons Used in This Book

tip This icon calls out suggestions that help you work more effectively and save time.

remember Try to keep items marked with this icon in mind while you optimize your website. Sometimes we offer a random tidbit of information, but more often than not, we talk about something that you’ll run into repeatedly, so you should remember it.

technicalstuff SEO can get pretty technical pretty fast. If you’re not familiar with the terminology, it can start to sound like gibberish. We marked the sections where we get extra-nerdy with this icon so that you can be prepared. If these sections go over your head, don’t worry: You can move on without understanding every nuance.

warning If you see a Warning, take extra care. This icon denotes the times when getting something wrong can nuke your site, tank your rankings, and just generally devastate your online marketing campaign.

Beyond the Book

Because SEO and the Internet are always growing and changing, we encourage you to keep your knowledge of Internet marketing fresh through reading and research beyond these pages. We have written a lot of extra content that you won’t find in this book, and that we will update as strategies and tactics change. Go online to find the following:

The Cheat Sheet at

www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/searchengineoptimizationaio

Bookmark this Cheat Sheet in your web browser so that you can easily access server status codes, advanced search operators, and an SEO checklist while you’re tuning up your website. The SEO checklist is a quick-hits guide to making sure that every element on a web page helps your page rank. Use the advanced search operators to search Google, Bing, and Yahoo like a power user, filtering results to just the websites or types of pages you’re looking for. And have the server status codes handy as you check that your web server is behaving.

Online articles covering additional topics at

www.dummies.com/extras/searchengineoptimizationaio

In the online Web Extras, we expand on some of the tools and how-to steps that we mention in the book. You’ll find in-depth instructions on using the free Keyword Suggestion tool to capture new search traffic; how to use the SEO Multi-Page Information tool, another free tool created by Bruce Clay, Inc.; use a checklist for making sure that your website is optimized to be mobile friendly; find some tips for enlivening content that could otherwise be boring; how to use the Free Link Analysis Report tool; explore new options for top-level domains; and find out how to set goals in Google Analytics. And finally, if you’ve read about international SEO and business opportunities in Asia, Latin America, and Europe but need some more help deciding if it’s right for your business, you can get some help with that decision here.

Updates to this book, if we have any, are at

www.dummies.com/extras/searchengineoptimizationaio

Where to Go from Here

The best thing about this book is that you can go anywhere from here. Although we’ve written it like a regular instruction manual that you can read from beginning to end, we also want you to be able to use it as a reference or a go-to guide for tricky problems. So, start anywhere you want. Jump into mobile website design or take a crack at creating great content for blogs and social media.

If you’re brand new to SEO, we recommend that you start at the beginning. After that, it’s up to you. Good luck and have fun. Just because this is business doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy the ride.

Book I

How Search Engines Work

webextra Visit www.dummies.com for great Dummies content online.

Contents at a Glance

Chapter 1: Putting Search Engines in Context

Identifying Search Engine Users

Figuring Out Why People Use Search Engines

Discovering the Necessary Elements for Getting High Keyword Rankings

Understanding the Search Engines: They're a Community

Chapter 2: Meeting the Search Engines

Finding the Common Threads among the Engines

Getting to Know the Major Engines

Checking Out the Rest of the Field:AOL and Ask.com

Finding Your Niche: Vertical Engines

Discovering Internal Site Search

Understanding Metasearch Engines

Chapter 3: Recognizing and Reading Search Results

Reading the Search Engine Results Page

Understanding How People Look at Search Results

Identifying Mobile Users’ Search Patterns

Discovering the Features of a Search Results Page

Chapter 4: Getting Your Site to Appear in the Right Results

Seeking Traffic, Not Ranking

Avoiding Spam

Understanding Personalized Search’s Impact on Ranking

Using News, Images, Books, and Other Search Verticals to Rank

Showing Up in Local Search Results

Making the Most of Paid Search Results

Chapter 5: Knowing What Drives Search Results

Using Advanced Search Operators

Understanding Long-Tail Queries

Using Predictive Search as a Research Assistant

Chapter 6: Spam Issues: When Search Engines Get Fooled

Understanding What Spam Is

Discovering the Types of Spam

Reporting Spam

Avoiding Being Evil: Ethical Search Marketing

Realizing That There Are No Promises or Guarantees

Following the SEO Code of Ethics

Chapter 1

Putting Search Engines in Context

In This Chapter

Identifying search engine users

Discovering why people use search engines

Pinpointing elements for getting high keyword rankings

Defining relationships between search engines

The Internet offers a world of information, both good and bad. Almost anything a person could want is merely a few taps on a screen or a couple clicks of a mouse away. A good rule of thumb for the Internet is if you want to know about something or purchase something, there’s probably already a website just for that. The catch is actually finding it. This is what brings you to this book. You have a website. You have hired what you hope is a crack team of designers and have unleashed your slick, shiny, new site upon the web, ready to start making money. However, there is a bit of a problem: Nobody knows that your site exists. How will people find your website? The most common way that new visitors will find your site is through a search engine. A search engine is a web application designed to hunt for specific keywords and group them according to relevance. It used to be, in the stone age of the 1990s, that most websites were found via directories or word-of-mouth. Somebody linked to your website from his website, or maybe somebody posted about it on one of his newsgroups, and people found their way to you. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing were created to cut out the middleman and bring your user to you with little hassle and fuss.

In this chapter, we show you how to find your audience by giving you the tools to differentiate between types of users, helping you sort out search engines, identifying the necessary elements to make your site prominent in those engines, and giving you an insider look at how all the search engines work together.

Identifying Search Engine Users

Who is using search engines? Well, everyone. A significant amount of all visitor traffic to websites comes from search engines. Unless you are a household name like eBay or Amazon.com, chances are people won’t know where you are unless they turn to a search engine and hunt you down. In fact, even the big brands get most of their traffic from search engines. Search engines are the biggest driver of traffic on the web, and their influence only continues to grow.

But although search engines drive traffic to websites, you have to remember that your website is only one of a half trillion websites out there. Chances are, if someone does a search, even for a product that you sell, your website won’t automatically pop up in the first page of results. If you're lucky and the query is targeted enough, you might end up somewhere in the top 100 of the millions of results returned. That might be okay if you're only trying to share your vacation photos with your family, but if you need to sell a product, you need to appear higher in the results. In most cases, you want the number one spot on the first page because that’s the result everyone looks at and that most people click.

In the following sections, you find out a bit more about the audience available to you and how to reach them.

Figuring out how much people spend

The fact of the matter is that people spend money on the Internet in increasing numbers. It’s frightfully easy: All you need is a credit card, a computer with an Internet connection, and something that you've been thinking about buying. The U.S. Commerce Department reports that in 2014, e-commerce spending in the United States was over $300 billion (https://www.internetretailer.com/2015/02/17/us-annual-e-retail-sales-surpass-300-billion-first-ti). Combine that with the fact that Americans spend an average of 5 to 6 minutes of every hour online doing online shopping, and you’re looking at a viable means of moving your product. To put it simply, There’s gold in them thar hills!

So, now you need to get people to your website. In real estate, the most important thing is location, location, location. On the web, instead of having a prime piece of property, you need a high listing on the search engine results page (SERP). Your placement in these results is referred to as your ranking. You have a few options when it comes to achieving good rankings. One, you can make your page the best it can be and hope that people will find it in the section of the search results normally referred to as the organic rankings; or two, you can pay to appear in one of the advertising slots, identified on the search results page as ads. In the middle of 2014, it was projected that by the end of the year, marketers would spend more than $135 billion on Internet ads worldwide (http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Digital-Ad-Spending-Worldwide-Hit-3613753-Billion-2014/1010736).

While paying for ads is one way to get your business in front of Internet users, search engine optimization (SEO), when properly done, helps you to design your website in such a way that when a user does a search, your pages appear in the unpaid (that is, organic) results, in a top spot, you hope. Your main focus in this book is finding out about SEO, but because there is some overlap, you pick up a bit of paid search marketing knowledge here and there along the way.

Knowing your demographics

In order to get the most bang for your SEO buck, you need to know the demographics of your web visitors. You need to know who’s looking for you, because you need to know how best to promote yourself. For example, if you’re selling dog sweaters, advertising in biker bars is probably not a great idea. Sure, there might be a few Billy Bob Skullcrushers with a cute little Chihuahua in need of a cashmere shrug, but statistically, your ad would probably do much better in a beauty salon. The same goes for your website in a search engine. Gender, age, and income are just a few of the metrics that you want to track in terms of identifying your audience. Search engine users include slightly more male than female users across the board. Of the major search engines, Bing attracts the smallest percentage of users over the age of 55. Search engines even feed their results into other search engines, as you can see in our handy-dandy Search Engine Relationship Chart in the section "Understanding the Search Engines: They’re a Community," later in this chapter. Table 1-1 breaks down user demographics across the three most popular search engines for your reference.

Table 1-1 User Demographics Across Major Search Engines

For the month of July 2013 (via Compete.com)

These broad statistics are just a start. You need to know who your search engine visitors are, because demographic data helps you effectively target your desired market. This demographic distribution is often associated with search query keywords. Think of your keywords as the words that best indicate what your website content is about and that search engine visitors might use to search for what your website offers. A search engine looks for these keywords when figuring out which web pages to show on the SERP. (For an in-depth look at choosing keywords, check out Book II, Chapter 2.) Basically, your keywords are the words searchers might actually use in a search query — what they type (or speak) into a search engine — or what the engine thinks the searcher intended to search for. If you are searching for something like information on customizing classic cars, for example, you might type [classic custom cars] into the search field. (Note: Throughout the book, we use square brackets to show the search query. You don’t actually type the brackets into the search field.) Figure 1-1 displays a typical search engine results page for the query [classic custom cars].

Figure 1-1: Keyword query in a search engine: [classic custom cars].

Simply put, the search engine goes to work combing its index for web pages about these keywords and returns with the results it thinks will best satisfy you. As a website creator, therefore, if you have a product that’s geared toward a certain age bracket, toward women more than men, or toward any other demographic, you can tailor your keywords accordingly. You want to choose keywords that appeal to the right audience. For example, on the classic custom cars website, you might say convertible, open-air, top-down, roadster, drop top, or rag top (all synonyms for convertible), depending on which terms people in your target demographic use. It may seem inconsequential, but trust us, this is important if you want to be ranked well for targeted searches.

Figuring Out Why People Use Search Engines

We’ve already established that a lot of people use search engines. But what are people looking for when they use them? Are they doing research on how to restore their classic car? Are they looking for a place that sells parts for classic cars? Or are they just wanting to kill time watching videos that show custom cars racing? The answer is yes to all the above. A search engine is there to scour the billions upon billions of websites out there in order to get you where you need to go, whether you’re doing research, going shopping, or just plain wasting time.

Research

remember Most people who use a search engine for research purposes. They are generally looking for answers, or at least for data with which to make a decision. They're looking to find a site to fulfill a specific purpose. Someone doing a term paper on classic cars for his or her Automotive History 101 class would use a search engine to find websites with statistics on the number of cars sold in the United States, instructions for restoring and customizing old cars, and possibly communities of classic car fanatics out there. Companies would use a search engine to find websites their clients commonly visit and even to find out who their competition is.

Search engines are naturally drawn to information-rich, research-oriented sites and usually consider them more relevant than shopping-oriented sites, which is why a lot of the time the highest listing for the average query is a Wikipedia page. Wikipedia.com is an open-source online reference site that has a lot of searchable information, tightly cross-linked with millions of links from other websites (backlinks). Open source means that anyone can have access to the text and edit it. Wikipedia is practically guaranteed to have a high ranking on the strength of its site architecture alone. (We go over site architecture in depth in Book IV.) Wikipedia is an open-source project; thus, information should be taken with a grain of salt as there is no guarantee of accuracy. This brings us to an important lesson of search engines — they base authority on the quality of your content and the quality, relevance, and quantity of other sites linking to your site — that's what positions your site as an authority in the eyes of the search engine. Accuracy of information is not one of their criteria; notability is. Search engines are prone to confusing popularity with expertise, though they are improving in this area.

tip In order to take advantage of research queries, you need to gear your site content toward things that would be of interest to a researcher. In-depth how-to articles, product comparisons and reviews, and free information are all things that attract researchers to your site.

Shopping

Many people use a search engine to shop. After the research cycle is over, search queries change to terms that reflect a buying mindset. Phrases like best price and free shipping signal a searcher in need of a point of purchase. Optimizing your web page to meet the needs of that type of visitor results in higher conversions (actions taken by a user who meets a sales or business goal) for your site. As we mention in the preceding section, global search engines such as Google tend to reward research-oriented sites, so your pages have to strike a balance between sales-oriented terms and research-oriented terms.

Although Google and Bing do integrate products right into their regular search results, shopping is where specialized engines also come into the picture. Although you can use a regular search engine to find what it is you’re shopping for, some people find it more efficient to use a search engine geared directly toward buying products. Some websites out there are actually search engines just for shopping. Amazon.com, eBay, Alibaba, and Shopping.com are all examples of shopping-only engines. And Google has its own shopping platform called Google Shopping. When you type in a query for the particular item you are looking for, your results include the actual item instead of websites where the item is sold. For example, say you’re buying a book on Amazon.com. You type the title into the search bar, and it returns a page of results. Now, you have the option of either buying it directly from Amazon.com, or, if you’re on a budget, clicking over to the used book section. Booksellers provide Amazon.com with a list of their used stock, and Amazon.com handles all the purchasing, shipping, and ordering info. With shopping searches on Bing and Google, all those results can also be shown, mixed in with ads, so you can jump to Amazon.com, eBay, or Mike’s Bookshop just as easily. And as with all things on the Internet, odds are that somebody, somewhere, has exactly what you’re looking for. Figure 1-2 displays a results page from a Google Shopping search.

Figure 1-2: A typical Google Shopping search results page.

Entertainment

Research and shopping aren't the only reasons to visit a search engine. The Internet is a vast, addictive, reliable resource for consuming your entire afternoon, and lots of users out there start with the search engines to find ways of entertaining themselves. They look up things like videos, movie trailers, games, and social networking sites. Technically, it’s also research, but it’s research used strictly for entertainment purposes. A child of the ’80s might want to download an old-school version of the Oregon Trail video game onto her computer so she can recall the heady days of third grade. It's a quest made easy with a quick search on Google. Or if you want to find out what those wacky young Hollywood starlets are up to, you can turn to a search engine to bring you what you need.

If you’re looking for a video, odds are it’s going to be something from YouTube, much like your research results are going to include a Wikipedia page. YouTube is another excellent example of a site that achieves high listings on results pages, especially in Google (which owns YouTube). This immensely popular video-sharing website enables people with a camera and a working email address to upload videos of themselves doing just about anything, from talking about their day to shaving their cats. The videos themselves have keyword-rich listings in order to be easily located in video searches, plus videos show up in regular web search results as well, so videos provide lots of ranking opportunities. Many major companies have jumped on the YouTube bandwagon, creating channels for their companies (a YouTube channel is a specific account housing many videos). Record companies use channels to promote bands, production companies use them to unleash the official trailers for their upcoming movies, and even your business can produce videos that can be seen by searchers everywhere (not just in a theater near you).

Discovering the Necessary Elements for Getting High Keyword Rankings

If the mantra of real estate is location, location, location, and the very best location on the web is on page one of the search engines, you need to know the SEO elements that can get you there. A good place to start is with keywords.

Search engines use advanced processes to categorize and analyze keyword usage and other factors in order to figure out what each website is about and bring searchers the web pages they’re looking for. The more relevant your keywords and content are to the user's query and intent, the better chance your page has of ranking in a search engine's results. Keeping the keywords clear, precise, and simple helps the search engines do their job a whole lot faster. If you’re selling something like customized classic cars, you should probably make sure your text includes keywords like classic cars, customized cars, custom classic Mustangs, and so forth, as well as clarifying words like antique, vintage, automobile, and restored. You can read more about how to choose your keywords in Book II.

In the following sections, you get a broad, brief overview on how you get a higher rank than the other guy who’s selling restored used cars. You need to know the basics, or you can't do targeted SEO.

The advantage of an SEO-compliant site

Having an SEO-compliant website entails tailoring your website so that it follows search engine guidelines and communicates clearly what it’s about and in a way search engines can understand. Basically, you want search engine spiders to easily digest all the juicy content in your website and not find any red flags along the way. Communicating well with search engines includes optimizing your page titles and metadata (the page title, description tag and keywords tag are collectively known as metadata) so that they contain (but aren’t stuffed with) relevant keywords for your subject. Also, make sure that your web pages contain searchable text and not just pretty Flash animations and images (because search engines have limited capability to understand non-text content), and that all your images contain an Alt attribute (a description of an image) with brief text that describes the content of the image. You also need to be sure that all your internal content as well as your links are organized in a hierarchical manner that allows both search engines and users to easily understand what a site is about. You want to be sure to optimize every single one of these elements. Use this list (individual items are covered later in this book) to get yourself organized:

Title tag

Meta Description tag

Meta Keywords tag

Heading tag(s)

Textual content

Alt attributes on all images

Fully qualified links

Sitemaps (both XML and HTML, as explained in Book VI)

Text navigation

Canonical elements

Structured data markup

URL structure (file naming, limiting parameters)

Ordered and unordered lists

JavaScript/CSS externalized

Robots text (.txt) file

Web analytics

Keyword research (technically a process — see Book II)

Link development

Image names

Privacy statement

Contact information

Dedicated IP address

Defining a clear subject theme

Another way of getting a high keyword ranking is having a clear subject-matter theme to the site. If you’re selling kits to customize classic cars, keeping your website focused on the topic of classic car customization not only makes it easier for users to navigate your site and research or purchase what they need, but it also increases your credibility and your chances of ranking for related keyword queries. Search engine spiders are programs that crawl the World Wide Web to search for and index data. The more similarly themed keywords you have on your pages, the better. It’s the nature of a search engine to break up a site into subjects that add up to an overall theme for easy categorization, and the more obvious your site theme is, the higher your results will be.

It’s kind of like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet and deciding you want to get a salad. You, the search engine, immediately go to the salad corner of the buffet because it’s been clearly labeled, and from there, you can do your breakdowns. You want romaine lettuce, croutons, parmesan cheese, and Caesar dressing, so you go to where they keep the lettuce, the trimmings, and the dressings in the salad bar section. It’s easy to find what you want if everything is grouped accordingly. But if the restaurant stuck the dressing over with the mashed potatoes, you’d have trouble finding it because salad dressing and potatoes don’t normally go together. Similarly, when you keep your website content organized with everything in its proper place, the search engine views your content with clarity, understanding what you're about — which in turn improves your credibility as an expert and gives you a better chance to rank. Siloing is a way of structuring your content and navigational links in order to present a clear subject-matter theme to the search engines. For more on this technique, refer to Book II, Chapter 4 as well as the entirety of Book VI.

Focusing on consistency

Methodical consistent implementation is the principle that says that when you update your website, you should do it the same way every time. Your site should have a consistent look and feel over time without massive reorganizations at every update. In order for a search engine to maintain efficiency, you need to keep related content all placed in the same area.

It is confusing to customers to have things constantly changing around. Search engines and visitors to your website face the same challenge as a restaurant patron. Getting back to our salad bar analogy from the preceding section, the restaurant owner shouldn’t scatter the salad dressings according to the whims of his buffet designer, randomly moving things every time he gets in a new topping or someone discontinues one of the old dressings.

tip You also need to keep all your updating processes consistent. That way, if something goes wrong during your next update, you can pinpoint what went wrong where without too much hassle, since you update things the same way every time.

Building for the long term

You need to consider your persistence for the long term. How long will your website be sticking around? Ideally, as with any business, you want to build it to last without letting it fall behind and look dated. Relevancy to the current market is a big part of this, and if your site is behind the times, it’s probably behind your competitors. The technology that you use to build your website is inevitably going to change as the Internet advances, but your approach to relevancy should remain the same, incorporating new technologies as they arise. In the early days of the web, for example, frames were used to build sites, but that looks very outdated now. A few years ago, splash pages (introductory pages, mostly built in Flash and providing little content or value to the user) were very popular. Today, they are discouraged because the search engines cannot typically see much of the content behind the Flash programming and therefore don't know what the page is about. Web developers and designers should use code that is compatible with the search engines. The Internet is an ever-changing entity, and if you’re not persistent about keeping up with the times, you might fall by the wayside.

Understanding the Search Engines: They're a Community

You’ll be happy to hear there are really only a few search engines that you need to consider in your SEO planning. Each search engine appears to be a unique company with its own unique service. When people choose to run a search using Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask.com, or any of the others, they might think they’ve made a choice between competing services and expect to get varying results. But they’d be surprised to find out that under the surface, these seeming competitors are often actually working together — at least on the data level.

Google’s stated purpose is to organize the world’s information. When you think about the trillions of web pages that exist, multiplying and morphing every day, it’s hard to imagine a more ambitious undertaking. It makes sense, then, that not every search engine attempts such a daunting task itself. Instead, the different search engines share the wealth when it comes to indexed data, much like a community.

You can see at a glance how this community works. Figure 1-3 shows how the major players in the search engine field interact.

Chart courtesy of Bruce Clay, Inc.

Figure 1-3: The Search Engine Relationship Chart depicts the connections between search engines.

The Search Engine Relationship Chart (subject to change; the current chart is at www.bruceclay.com/serc/) includes all the major players in the United States. The arrows depict search results data flowing from supplying sites to receiving sites. Only two players — Google and Bing — are suppliers. They actually gather and provide search results data, both organic and paid. Ask.com maintains its own organic data but receives paid listings from Google. Yahoo, on the other hand, receives its organic data but generates its own paid ads. The chart makes it clear that when you do a search on Yahoo, for instance, the order of the results is determined by Yahoo, but the indexed results are supplied by Bing.

A look back: Search engines in the beginning

Bruce Clay first published his Search Engine Relationship Chart® in 2000. Back then, more major players were in the search game, and things were, to say the least, somewhat cluttered. The chart had 26 companies on it: everyone from Yahoo to Magellan to that upstart Google. Fifteen of those companies took their primary results from their own indexes; five of those supplied secondary results to other engines. Without a road map, it was an impossible task to keep it all straight. But over the years, things changed. What was once a cluttered mess is now a tidy interplay of a select group of companies. This figure shows what the very first Search Engine Relationship Chart looked like.

Note: To see an interactive view of how the search engine landscape changed over time, check out www.bruceclay.com/serc_histogram/histogram.htm.

Looking at search results: Apples and oranges

One more thing to know about search results: There are two main types. Figure 1-4 points out that a search engine can show these two different types of results simultaneously:

Organic search results are the web page listings that search engines find most relevant to the user’s search query and perceived intent. SEO focuses on getting your website ranked high in the organic search results (also called natural results).

Paid results are basically advertisements. — the website owners have paid to have their web pages and products display for certain keywords, so these listings show up when someone runs a search containing those keywords. (For more on the whys and hows of paid results, you can read about pay per click advertising in Chapter 4 of this minibook.)

Figure 1-4: A results page from Google with organic and paid results highlighted.

On a search results page, you can tell paid results from organic search results because search engines set apart the paid listings, putting them above or to the right of the primary results, giving them a shaded background or border lines, labeling the column as ads or sponsored, or providing other visual clues. Figure 1-4 shows the difference between paid listings and organic results.

Typical web users might not realize they’re looking at apples and oranges when they get their search results. Knowing the difference enables a searcher to make a better informed decision about the relevancy of a result. Additionally, because the paid results are advertising, they may actually be more useful to a shopping searcher than a researcher (remembering that search engines favor research results).

How do they get all that data?

Okay, so how do they do it? How do search engines keep track of everything and pop up results so fast? Behold the wonder of technology!

Gathering the data is the first step. An automated process (known as spidering) constantly crawls the Internet, gathering web-page data into servers. Google calls its spider Googlebot; you could refer to the data-gathering software processes as spiders, robots, bots, or crawlers, but they’re all the same thing. Whatever you call them, they pull in masses of raw data and do so repeatedly. This is why changes to your website might be seen within a day or might take up to a few weeks to be reflected in search engine results.

In the second step, search engines have to index the data to make it usable. Indexing is the process of taking the raw data and categorizing it, removing duplicate information, and generally organizing it all into an accessible structure (think filing cabinet versus paper pile).

For each query performed by a user, the search engines apply an algorithm — basically a math equation (formula) that weighs various criteria about a web page and generates a ranking result — to decide which listings to display and in what order. The algorithms might be fairly simple or multilayered and complex.

At industry conferences, Google representatives have said that their algorithm analyzes more than 200 variables to determine a web page’s search ranking to a given query. You’re probably thinking, What are their variables? Google won’t say exactly (and neither will the other engines), and that’s what makes SEO a challenge. But we can make educated guesses.

So, can you design a website that gets the attention of all the search engines? The answer is yes, to an extent, but it’s a bit of an art. This is the nuts and bolts of SEO, and what we attempt to explain in this book.

Chapter 2

Meeting the Search Engines

In This Chapter

Finding common threads among the engines

Meeting the major and minor search engines

Finding your niche in the vertical engines

Understanding metasearch engines

All search engines try to make their results the most relevant. They want to make you happy, because when you get what you want, you’re more likely to use that search engine again. The more you use them, the more money they make. It’s a win/win situation. So when you do your search on classic car customization and find what you’re looking for right away instead of having to click through five different pages, you’ll probably come back and use the same search engine again.

In this chapter, you meet the major search engines and discover their similarities and differences, get familiar with the difference between organic and paid results, and gain a better understanding of how the search engines get their organic results. Plus, you find out about the search engines’ paid search programs and get help deciding whether metasearch engines have a place in your SEO campaign.

Finding the Common Threads among the Engines

To keep their results relevant, all search engines need to understand the main subject of a website. You can help the search engines find your website by keeping in mind the three major factors they’re looking for:

Content: Content is the meat and bones of your website. It’s all the information your website contains, not just the words but also the Engagement Objects (the images, videos, audio, interactive technologies, and so on that make up the visual space). Your page's relevancy increases based upon your perceived expertise. And expertise is based on useful, keyword-containing content. The spiders, the software the search engines use to read your website, also measure whether you have enough content that suggests you know what it is you’re talking about. A website with ten pages of content is going to rank lower than a website with ten thousand pages of content, assuming that they are equally relevant.

Popularity: The Internet is a little like high school in that you are popular as long as a lot of people know you exist and are talking about you. Search engine spiders are looking for how many people are linking to your website, along with the number of outgoing links you have on your own site. Google really loves this factor.

Architecture: If you walk into a grocery store and find everything stacked haphazardly on the shelves, it’s going to be harder to find things, and you might just give up and go to another store that’s better organized. Spiders do the same thing. As we mention in Chapter 1 of this minibook, search engines love Wikipedia because of how it’s built. It’s full of searchable text, Alt attribute text, and keyword-containing hyperlinks that support terms used on the page.

You also have some control over two variables that search engines are looking at when they set the spiders on you. One is your site’s response time, which is how fast your server is and how long it takes to load a page. If you’re on a server that loads one page per second, the bots request pages at a very slow rate. A second seems fast to us, but it's an eternity for a bot that wants five to seven pages per second. If the server can't handle one page per second, imagine how long it would take the bots to go through 10,000 pages. In order not to crash the server, spiders request fewer pages; this puts a slow site at a disadvantage to sites with faster load times. Chances are bots will index sites on a fast server more frequently and thoroughly than sites on a slow server. Page speed has become very important to Google in particular and so deserves some attention. We discuss improving page and site speed in depth in Book VII, Chapter 1.

The second variable is somewhat contested. Some SEOs believe that your rank could be affected by something called bounce rate, which measures how often someone clicks on a page and immediately hits the Back button. The search engines can detect when a user clicks on a result and then clicks on another result in a short time. If a website constantly has people loading the first page for only a few seconds before hitting the Back button to return to the search results, it’s a good bet that the website is probably not very satisfying. Remember, engines strive for relevancy and user experience in their results, so they most likely consider bounce rate when they're determining rankings.

remember So if all search engines are looking at these things, does it matter if you’re looking at Bing versus Google versus Yahoo? Yes, it does, because all search engines evaluate subject relevance differently. The big players have their own algorithms that measure things in a different way than their competition. So something that Google thinks belongs on Page 1 of listings may or may not pop up in the Top Ten over on Bing.

Getting to Know the Major Engines

It’s time to meet the three major search engines: Google, Bing, and Yahoo. As we said earlier, they all measure relevancy a bit differently. Google might rank a page of content as more relevant than Bing does, so Google’s results pages could look quite different from Bing’s results pages for the same search query. Meanwhile, Yahoo uses Bing’s index of the web and ranking algorithm to serve organic and much of its paid search listings. For this reason, deciding which search engine is best is often subjective. It all depends on whether you find what you’re looking for.

Organic versus paid results

One of the major ways search engines are differentiated is how they handle their organic versus paid results. Organic results are the web pages that the search engines find on their own using their spiders. Paid results (also called sponsored listings) are the listings that the site owners have paid for. In web searches, paid results usually appear as ads along the top or right side of the window, but they also can appear lower on the page, among or below organic listings. Paid results don’t necessarily match your search query either. Here’s how this happens.

Companies can bid on almost any keyword for which they want to get traffic (with some legal exceptions). The bid price needed to have an ad show in the SERP is based on many factors, including competition for the keyword, traffic on the keyword, and, at least in Google's case, the quality of the landing page. The better-constructed the landing page (the web page that a visitor receives after clicking an ad), the lower the minimum bid price. This doesn't have to be an exact match. Businesses often bid on keywords that are related to their products in hopes of catching more visitors. For example, if a visitor searches for tickets to Sports Team A, a sponsored (paid) link might show up advertising Sports Team B. This is what's happening below in Figure 2-1. Ticketmaster has bid on [Lakers tickets] as a keyword in order to advertise tickets for a different team, the LA Clippers, and clicking the sponsored link takes you to a page for buying Clippers tickets. The ad for Boston Celtics Tickets operates the same way. The organic links, however, should all take you to sites related to Lakers tickets.

Figure 2-1: The web search results for [Lakers tickets] include ads for two other sports teams’ tickets (outlined above).

remember Paid results are quite different from organic results. Generally, people click on organic results rather than paid results. You can't buy your way to the top of organic results. You can only earn your way there through effective search engine optimization.

Table 2-1 lists the major search engine players (in order of their appearance) and the attributes of each, for comparison. The following sections introduce you to each search engine in more detail and talk about its organic results and paid advertising services.

Table 2-1 U.S. Search Engine Comparison Table

Yahoo

In 1994, two electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University, David Filo and Jerry Yang, created Yahoo, a search engine and network of properties that has undergone much change in its 20-year history. For many years, Yahoo has outsourced its search function to other providers like Google and, today, Bing.

Organic results

In 2010, Yahoo made a deal with Bing to power its search engine and pay per click program. That means that the organic search results in Yahoo use Bing’s ranking algorithm and Bing’s index of the web.

Paid results

Because Yahoo no longer provides its own paid results for desktop searches, in order to advertise on Yahoo's network, you must use Microsoft Bing Ads (and get two-for-one exposure).

Mobile advertising is a different story. In 2014, Yahoo migrated to Yahoo Gemini, its own mobile ad marketplace. The strategy appears to be paying off; its third-quarter earnings place Yahoo in third place for total mobile ad revenue, behind Google and Facebook but, surprisingly, ahead of Twitter.

Google

Google began as a research project by two other Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in January 1996. They officially incorporated as Google in September 1998.

Organic results

Over time, Google has developed into the powerhouse of the search engine realm. Here are just some of the reasons why Google is the king of search engines and shows no signs of giving up the crown:

Highly relevant: Google's relevancy is one of its strongest suits thanks to its analysis of site backlinks and on-site content on the one hand, and its understanding of user intent on the other.

PageRank: PageRank is a famous part of Google’s search algorithm. PR is a numerical weight assigned to a website in order to measure its importance, based on backlinks.

Enormous index: Google has indexed billions of pages on the Internet. In addition, Google search’s semantic-based algorithm and integration with other Google products (such as Gmail, Google+, YouTube, and Google Drive) give it a wide vantage point for seeing the connections between concepts, people, and other entities on the web.

Advanced technology: Google is the undisputed leader, technologically speaking. Its algorithms aggressively weed out spam from its results, and its Knowledge Graph far outpaces the other engines’ capability to understand a searcher’s intent. You learn more about the Knowledge Graph and how it affects search results in Chapter 3 of this minibook.

Brand recognition: Google is so recognized for search that the brand name is used as a verb and listed in dictionaries (as in, I Googled this the other day …).

Most-visited web property: Google is the number one search engine worldwide (except in China, where Baidu reigns, and Russia, where Yandex tops the list). In the United States, Google has more of the search market than all the other search engines combined, netting more than two-thirds of all search engine traffic (see Table 2-2; http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2014/3/comScore_Releases_February_2014_U.S._Search_Engine_).

Table 2-2 comScore Explicit Core Search Share Report, U.S. (August versus July 2014)*

*Explicit Core Search excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results.

Paid results

Google has a service called Google AdWords that regulates its paid results for desktop and mobile. It’s a pay per click advertising model that lets you create your own ads, choose the keyword phrases you want your ad to appear for, and set your bid price and budget. Google ranks its ads based on the ad’s bid amount and Quality Score — a combined measure of the ad’s relevance, landing-page experience, and expected click-through rates, or how often the ad is clicked. Google AdWords can also help you create your ads if you’re stuck on how to do so.

After your AdWords ads are set up, Google matches your ads to the right audience within its network, and you pay only when your ad is clicked. Google provides gives an ever-increasing number of ways to target your ad audience, such as by demographics like gender, age group, annual household income, ethnicity, and number of children in the household. AdWords also allows you to do location-based targeting and day-parting, which limits the display of your advertisement to certain times of the day. Recently, Google introduced In-market audiences targeting, which lets you leverage Google’s understanding of consumer behavior patterns and find people who are actively researching products like yours.

You can potentially get a lot of exposure for your paid ads. The Google AdWords distribution network lets you advertise on Google search sites and affiliates like AOL and Ask.com. Mobile and tablet ads are also centrally managed through AdWords.

tip Google also offers the ability to publish ads on the Google Display Network. Consisting of more than two million websites, videos, and mobile apps, the Display Network also includes Google sites such as Gmail, YouTube, and Blogger. Owners can earn money by enrolling in Google’s AdSense program to allow advertisements on their sites, apps, or video content. AdSense ads generate revenue for the site owners based on factors such as clicks or impressions.

Bing

Bing (previously named MSN Search and Microsoft Live Search) is a search engine designed by Microsoft that competes with Google and Yahoo. It’s currently the second-most-used general search engine in the United States.

Organic results

In addition to providing rich, blended SERP results on par with Google’s, Bing differentiates itself through features like its daily full-screen home page image, a longer list of search results per page, and a rewards program that lets people earn points that can be redeemed for gift cards just for using Bing. Bing Search also lets users easily modify the search results based upon any location they would like the search to appear from.

Paid results

Microsoft’s paid program is called Bing Ads, and reports are that it offers advertisers an extremely good return on investment (ROI). Like Google, Bing ranks its ads based on keyword bid price and ad quality. Microsoft also lets you place adjustable bids based on demographic details. For example, a mortgage lead from an adult with a higher income might be worth more than an equivalent search by someone who is young and still in college.

Checking Out the Rest of the Field:AOL and Ask.com

The five biggest search engines worldwide right now are Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu (a Chinese search engine), and Yandex (a Russian search engine — see Book IX, Chapter 2 for more information on Baidu and Yandex), with Google taking home the lion’s share. But other smaller engines that draw a pretty respectable number of hits are still operating.

AOL

AOL has been around in some form or another since 1983. Today AOL provides some services such as email, chat, and its own search engine. AOL gets all its search engine results from Google, both organic and paid.

tip If you want to appear in an AOL search, you must focus on Google. AOL uses the Google index results in its search engine.

Ask.com

Ask.com (some of you may remember it as Ask Jeeves) pioneered blended search (the integration of different content types, such as images, videos, news, blogs, books, maps, and so on, onto the search results page) but failed to gain any significant market share from the larger three engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo). Ask.com changed its market strategy and now considers itself an answer engine, rather than a search engine. Ask.com generates comprehensive results answering question-focused search queries, pulling information from third-party directories, feeds, Q&A forums, and Google’s organic results.

Ask.com gets most of its paid search ads from Google AdWords. Ask.com does have its own internal ad service, but it places internal ads above the Google AdWords ads only if it feels the internal ads will bring in more revenue.

Finding Your Niche: Vertical Engines

We’ve been talking mostly about general search engines, whose specific purpose is to scour everyone and everything on the web and return results to you. But there’s also another type of search engine known as a vertical search engine. Vertical search engines are search engines that restrict their search either by industry, geographic area, or file type. Google has several vertical search engines listed in the upper-left corner of its home page for images, apps, and so forth. So when you type [jam] into Google’s Images search, it only returns pictures of jam instead of web pages. The three main types of vertical search engines are detailed in the following sections.

Industry-specific

Industry-specific vertical search engines serve particular types of businesses. The real estate industry has its own search engines like Realtor.com (www.realtor.com) and Zillow.com (www.zillow.com), which provide housing listings, and companion sites like HomeAdvisor.com, which is for home improvement contractors. If you want to conduct searches related to the medical industry, you can use WebMD.com (www.webmd.com), a search engine devoted entirely to medical questions and services. Questions about Hollywood stars and anyone ever connected with movie-making can be answered at IMDB.com, which stands for Internet Movie Database. If you are searching for legal services, FindLaw.com (www.findlaw.com) and Lawyers.com (www.lawyers.com) can help you search for an attorney by location and practice.

tip Niche engines like these deliver less traffic but make up for it in the targeted nature of traffic. Visitors who access your site using niche engines are prequalified because they're looking for exactly your type of site.

Local

A local search engine is an engine specializing in websites that are tied to a limited physical area also known as a geotargeted area. Basically, this type of engine is looking for things in your general neck of the woods. In addition to their main indexes, the major search engines have local-only indexes that they integrate into their main results, like Google My Business and Bing Places. Businesses submit a local listing to the search engines, which includes information about the local business such as its name, address, city, phone number, categories the business may be searched under, and so on. That means the site could pop up if someone’s looking for that type of business within its geographic area.

A searcher might specify a ZIP code, city, or other geographic qualifier in a search query to find geotargeted results, such as [Milwaukee chiropractor]. However, Google and Bing can pretty reliably understand the intent of a search. If the engine thinks the searcher wants to find a nearby business, it displays local listings right in the search results. For example, a search for [dry cleaners] brings up website links to businesses near the searcher, even though no location was specified in the query.

Local results take up a lot of SERP space and often rank above the organic results. To be clear, these local results are still served up organically by the local search algorithm, but the local results may take precedence over what we have come to know in the past as the top organic results. Searches performed on a smartphone or other mobile device tend to have even more local results, since the majority of queries people speak or type into mobile devices are thought to have local intent. See Chapter 4 of this minibook for examples of several types of local results.

remember Many large cities have their own local search engines. Yahoo Local and Local.com are the most well known local-only engines. Internet directories like YellowPages.com, SuperPages.com, DexKnows.com, and YellowBook.com are also out there clamoring for your local search queries.

File type-specific