Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

What are three basic types of link acquisition?

"Natural" editorial links (links given naturally by sites and pages that want to link to your content), manual "outreach" link building (SEO emailing bloggers for links) and self-created, non-editorial (website visitor creates)

What are the 3 types of queries people generally make?

1) "Do" ie transactional queries - I want to do something like buy a plane ticket or listen to a song 2) "Know" ie informational queries - I need information 3) "Go" ie navigation queries - I want to go to a particular place on the Internet

What are search engines' two major functions?

1) Crawling and indexing the billions of documents, pages, files, news, videos and media on the World Wide Web 2) Providing ansers to user quereis

What is a crawlable link structure?

A crawlable link structure lets crawlers browse the pathways of a website.

What are best practices for the title tag?

Be mindful of length (search engines only display the first 65-75 characters of title tag), place important keywords close to front, include branding and consider readability and emotional impact.

Why is being listed at the top of results important?

Being listed at the top not only provides the greatest amount of traffic but also instills trust in consumers as to worthiness and importance.

What is canonicalization?

Canonicalization is the practice of organizing content in such a way that every unique piece has one, and only one, URL. The link attribute rel="canonical" tells search engines that the page in question should be treated as a copy of the URL.

What is cloaking?

Cloaking is presenting different content to search engines than you display to users. Google advises against this.

What are common best practices for URL construction?

Employ empathy, shorter is better, keyword use is important, go static (no numbers and symbols) and use hyphens to separate words.

What is indexable content, why is it important and what are ways to increase it on a site.

Flash files, Java applets, etc are often ignored or devalued by search engine crawlers. Provide alt text for images, supplement search boxes with navigation and crawlable links, supplement Flash/Java plug-ins with text on page and provide a transcript for video and audio content. This is indexable content.

How do search engines assign value to links?

In no order, global popularity, local/topic-specific popularity, anchor text, trust rank, link neighborhood, freshness and social sharing.

What are common ways to use keywords to optimize page rankings?

Keywords you want to rank prominently need to be used in titles, text and metadata. The more specific the keyword, the narrower the competition for search results ie the higher chances for a high ranking. One approach: title tag, near top of page, 2-3 times in body, once in alt attribute of an image, once in URL, once in meta description tag.

What purpose do links serve to search engines?

Links allow search engines' automated robots, crawlers or spiders, to reach the many billions of interconnected documents on the web.

What are common challenges for crawling and indexing?

Online forms, duplicate pages, blocked in code, poor link structures and non-text content.

What metrics help build a rating scale of link value?

Ranking for relevant search terms, competitor's backlinks, MozRank, number of links on a page (fewer is better), domain authority and potential referral traffic.

On what basis does a search engine return its results and how are these determined?

Relevance and popularity, which are determined via algorithms.

What are common search engine protocols?

Sitemaps (XML or Extensible Markup Language which is the recommended format, RSS or Really Simple Syndication/Rich Site Summary and txt), robots.txt, meta robots, rel="nofollow" and rel="canonical"

What are common reasons a page may not be reachable by a search engine?

Submission-required forms, links in unparseable JavaScript, links pointing to pages blocked by the Meta Robots, frames/iframes, links in Flash, Java or other plug-ins and links on pages with hundreds/thousands of links.

What does the meta description tag do?

The meta description tag is a short description of the page's content.

What does the meta robots tag do?

The meta robots tag can be used to control search engine crawler activity on a per-page level.

What happens when a search engine finds a page?

They decipher the code from it and store selected pieces in databases, to be recalled later when needed for a search query.

What are common challenges for matching queries to content?

Uncommon terms, language and internalization subtleties, incongruous location targeting and mixed contextual signals.

What is the purpose of the rel="nofollow" attribute?

rel="nofollow" tells search engines that site owners don't want this link to be interpreted as an endorsement of the target page.