Week 3

Search engine marketing (SEM)

Search engine marketing (SEM) is the process of improving a website or web page's performance in paid search results.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving a website or web page's rank in "organic" or unpaid search results.

Crawling

What a spider does

How does a search engine "read" a website

html code - how many key words are present and are they relevant

Back link

hyperlink that links from a Web page, back to your own Web page or Web site. Also called an Inbound Link (IBL) these links are important in determining the popularity (or importance) of your Web site

Basics of how search engines work

- spiders index webpages - after you search, they search all indexes - results are chosen by several variable eg. how many times your keywords are mentioned, if it's a quality site, do your keywords appear in the title/url/body, what is the pagerank? - search results shown as they are ranked

Key factors to optimize a website for search

- timely, relevant content - search-friendly URL's - full image descriptions - link to other reputable sites - be conscious of placing appropriate keywords throughout every aspect of your site: your titles, content, URLs, and image names

Why does SEO matter?

90% of information-seekers start with a search engine 70% click on organic search results 60% of all organic search clicks go to the top 3 results 33% of people research products and services online before purchasing offline

SERP

A search engine results page (SERP) is the listing of results returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of items with titles, a reference to the full version, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page.

Title tag

A title tag is the main text that describes an online document. Title elements have long been considered one of the most important on-page SEO elements (the most important being overall content), and appear in three key places: browsers, search engine results pages, and external websites. eg. Title tags often show up in both the top of a browser's chrome and in tabs. (65-75 characters)

Indexing

Google essentially gathers pages during the crawl process and then creates an index, so we know exactly how to look things up. Much like the index in the back of a book, the Google index includes information about words and their locations. When you search, at the most basic level, our algorithms look up your search terms in the index to find the appropriate pages.

PageRank

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by Google to help determine the relative importance of a website. Every website is given a Google PageRank score between 0 and 10 on an exponential scale

PPC

Pay per click (PPC), also called cost per click, is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which advertisers pay the publisher (typically a website owner) when the ad is clicked. It is defined simply as "the amount spent to get an advertisement clicked."

Spider

a program that visits Web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index

Search engines find it hard to index content on a web page when:

it is built entirely by Flash because there is no text associated with it

Longtail

longer and more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they're closer to a point-of-purchase

How do search engines provide answers?

relevance and popularity