What should you know about site structure, content development, internal and external links to win at search engine optimization? How do you measure the success of an SEO campaign? Checkout the presentation by Navneet Kaushal, CEO PageTraffic.

1. Getting started
with SEO
Navneet Kaushal
CEO
PageTraffic
New Delhi
4–5 December

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WHO AM I?
Navneet Kaushal
Founder & CEO of PageTraffic
12 Years of SEO experience
Editor www.pagetrafficbuzz.com
Expert author on WebProNews, Search Newz, Website Notes, DevWebPronews, PromotionWorld.
Regularly quoted on ET Now, Seattle Times, Hindustan Times, Livemint, BenefitIT, India Digital Review
About PageTraffic
Established in 2002
95 people strong, with offices in New Delhi, Mumbai, Chicago & London
Offers SEO, PPC, Link Building, Web Design & Development services
More than 1500 clients worldwide
Ranking among the top SEO Companies of India
Winner of Red Herring Top 100 Asia Award 2011

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Some Of The Clients We Have Worked With

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LEADERSHIP AND AFFILIATIONS

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Why is SEO important?
Average Daily Queries on Google
3 Billion Searches/Day
(announced Aug. 2012)
Number of Searches/Day on Google

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Growth of Google Queries in Last 5 yrs
3 Billion Searches/Day
(announced Aug. 2012)
Number of Searches/Day on Google

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State of Search- India
Indian Search Engine Market Share
Bing Others
Yahoo
1% 1%
1%
Google
97%
Source: Netmarketshare and business-standard.com

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Organic vs. Paid Search
Paid
Organic

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Organic vs. Paid Search
~20% of Clicks
~80% of
Clicks

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Organic vs Paid
Organic Paid
• Time bound • Instant
• Higher entry cost (time / Rs.) • Lower entry cost (time / Rs.)
• Lower ongoing cost (time / Rs. • Dynamic cost over time
• Long term strategy • Targeted
• Measurable ROI
• Short-Mid Term Strategy

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Facebook ads < 1% CTR
Banner ads < 1% CTR

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SEO from a business perspective
 Helps you create a better website
 Brings in qualified traffic
 Helps you create better content
 Measurable/Actionable

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Get Your Things Straight

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Set Goals
Why do you need Search Marketing?

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Research Keywords
How & What do people search for?

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Onsite Optimization
Create a site that search engines will love
But create with humans in mind

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Offpage Optimization
Make your website trustworthy

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Reporting
Keep Track of Everything you do

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Choosing the Right Keywords
How to target competition better

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Choosing the Right Keywords
• It’s necessary to do some keyword analysis…
• What is the volume of traffic for the keyword combination?
• Have other websites optimized for those keywords? Would it
be hard to get a high ranking?
• Who sits in the No. 1 spot for those keywords?
• What keywords are my competitors targeting?
• What do the keywords say about the searcher’s
intent/mindset?
• Surfers
• Researchers
• Buyers

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Tools for Keyword Research
http://bit.ly/keywordtool2012

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Tools for Keyword Research
Use Google Keyword
Tools to create initial
list of related search
terms and search
volume
Select location and
language

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Tools for Keyword Research
http://www.google.com/insights/search/

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Other Keyword Research Tools
• Wordtracker
• Wordstream
• Keyword Discovery

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KEYWORD ORGANIZATION
• Organize your keywords
by: • Brand name
• Languages • Product name
• Locations • Model numbers, etc.
• Target audiences
• Purchase cycle
• Importance
• Legal requirements

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Keyword Advice
• Optimise each page for a different keyword combination
• Don’t choose single keywords – 3-5 word combinations
are best
• Don’t choose generic keywords - be specific
• Don’t choose hotly-contested keywords
• Use geographic qualifiers – i.e. India
• Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes
• Choose keywords that align with a ‘buying’ state of mind

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Onsite Optimization

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Onsite Optimization
• On-site factors play a big role in determining your
search engine rankings
• These are the things that you can do yourself or that
you can task your web developer to do on your behalf

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Use of multimedia platforms
Be careful when using multimedia platforms, such as Flash,
particularly as navigational elements
Your website must be ‘spiderable’, otherwise it won’t get good
search engine rankings
Text-based navigation can be ‘spidered’; links embedded within
a Flash element cannot.
Be careful also with Javascript, DHTML or other graphical
navigation elements
If you use these, provide a text based navigation bar elsewhere
on the page

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Onpage Navigation
Your navigation structure and accessibility is critical for search
engine rankings – search engines need to be able to access
your content in order to index it
KISS principle
Employ the 2 click rule (3 click rule at most)
Use textual links from your home page
Use a Sitemap which can be accessed from your home page
Employ inline / contextual links

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The TITLE Tag
The singularly
most important
on-site factor!

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Almost always the
heading that Google
chooses for its listings.
Therefore it needs to be
enticing or contain a call-
to-action
If you do one thing to your site, then this should be it!

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The TITLE Tag
• Include your chosen keywords within the TITLE
tag – preferably near the start of the tag
• Try to keep it to 70 characters
• Must be relevant to the page content
• Very important - each page should have a
different TITLE tag

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Metadata Tags
• Search engines also use a series of metadata tags
that reside in the header of the page to index
websites
• These tags can’t be seen by human visitors to
your website – but they’re still interrogated by
the search engines

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The Description Tag
• A textual description of
what the page is about
• Shows up in Google
search results

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The Description Tag
• Include keywords close to the start of the tag,
but don’t repeat more than 3 times
• Try to keep it to 150 characters
• Must be relevant to the page content
• Each page should have a different DESCRIPTION
tag

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The KEYWORD Tag
• No longer counts

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Body Text
• Google loves original, high quality textual content
• Body text is extremely important for search engine
rankings because this is what human users come to
see
• Keywords, synonyms and variations of the primary
keyword combination should be included in the body
text, but not so that it reads ‘artificially’. It should
read naturally.

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Keywords in URLs
• URLs that contain keywords are better than those that
don’t
• Quite easy to do if your website is static, a little more
difficult for database-driven sites
• Don’t make the URLs too long because this will be seen as
an attempt to manipulate the search results
• Good and bad:
• www.mysite.com//health-insurance
• www.mysite.com/search.asp?insuranceID=435&locID=32

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Heading Tags
• Heading tags – eg. <h1>, <h2> - within the HTML
identify headings within the page copy and break
up the text
• They are used by search engines to determine
page content
• Use keywords in these tags, but don’t overdo it.

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Link Anchor Text
• The ‘anchor’ text contained within hyperlinks
provides Google with an understanding of what the
linked content is about
• Every hyperlink on your site should have descriptive
anchor text, rather than ‘click here…’
• Inline links or contextual links are best
• eg.
• Blue Train Enterprises offers a free white paper on
how to optimise your website for the search
engines

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Link Anchor Text Diversification
A. Naked URLs: such as www.xyz.com
B. Generic/junk anchors: “click here”, “this website”
C. Brand keywords:PageTraffic becomes pagetraffic, page
traffic or pagetraffic SEO company

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Image ALT Text
• ALT is displayed if the image doesn’t load in the
user’s browser
• The ALT tag should describe the image
• Keep it short and to the point
• It also can have a positive effect
on your website rankings
• Don’t use ALT tags as a place to
stuff keywords

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A word on domain names…..
• Domain names no longer assist in search engine rankings
• If you are thinking of changing names, or planning a new
business, think carefully about the domain name you
choose
• Best to have .in for Indian market, but if possible secure
.com as well
• Try to keep it short, memorable
• Register the name for as long as possible

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Customer Assurance Factors
• It is recommended that your website contains:
• Business information –
• Telephone number – 1800 adds credibility
• A physical address
• Information about your business – ‘about us’
• Policies
• Privacy
• Security
• Terms of use / disclaimers
• A sitemap with links to major pages

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Getting Value from Links

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Getting Value from Links
• Links – both inbound and outbound – are
important factors for Google when assessing a
website’s importance

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Inbound Links
• These are links on other websites that link to your site
• Good quality inbound links serve as a ‘vote of confidence’
for your site – if a good site links to your site, then by
association, your site must be good, too
• Try and get links from ‘authority’ websites to your site
• Thematically-linked sites
• It’s not the volume of inbound links that is important – it’s
the quality

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Inbound Links
• When requesting a link, try and engineer it so
that your keywords are included in the anchor
text – eg. Compare Health Insurance Deals

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Caution….
• Reciprocal links – I’ll link to you, if you link to me
• You can get some value from these only if the two sites are thematically
aligned and are both high quality
• Most requests for reciprocal links should be deleted, particularly three-
way link swaps
• Paid Links
• Google frowns upon paid links – the Google algorithm is sophisticated
and can detect links which seek to artificially manipulate its rankings
• Link Farms & ‘Bad Neighbourhoods’
• These are sites that allow you to post your link for free alongside
thousands of other sites
• Being linked from these sites can damage your standing

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Getting listed in Directories
• Being listed in major directory-based websites can boost
your rankings considerably
• http://www.dmoz.org - a difficult one to get into
• http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
• http://www.google.com/local/add - a very important one
that will see your business plotted on Google Maps

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Other ways to get inbound links
• Articles / interviews published on other websites
• Press releases
• Forum posts
• Blog comments
• Guest Blogging
• ‘Link bait’ – controversial is best!

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Content is king
• Ever heard the saying?
• Search engines are simply a means to locate great
content
• Does your site have great content?
• Or is it ‘brochure-ware’?
• Does your site ‘do’ anything else that will bring visitors
back time and again?

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Content is king
• Add content that people want to read and will pass
on – top ten tips, ‘how to’ guides, free white papers
• Text should be in short sentences, compact
paragraphs, be well punctuated, and contain
headings to break up the text – time-poor people
don’t read, they scan
• Pages should not scroll and scroll and scroll…
• One page per theme (optimised for that theme) and
cross-link

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Content is king
• Text should be written from a WIIFM (What’s in
it for me?) perspective – no fluff, just tell the
customer what they want to hear.
• Add content regularly – if your site remains
static, then it will lose its prominence in the
search engines (and visitors won’t want to
come back)

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Add content regularly
• Some ideas for new content for your website:
• New products
• Company activities
• Special offers or discounts
• Achievements – awards
• New staff profiles
• Case studies about your products or services
• Testimonials from customers
• ‘How to’ guides
• General advice about products or services
• Observations about the market

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Blogs
• Blog = web log
• In essence, an online journal or diary, ordered by date
• An excellent way of adding content regularly to your website
• You can quickly establish yourself as an expert in your field via a blog
• Can be setup within minutes online:
• Wordpress.com
• Blogger.com
• TypePad.com
• But it takes dedication and patience!

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RSS
• RSS = ‘really simple syndication’
• A ‘push’ method of distribution for new content
• Allows users to receive automatic updates when
content is released
• RSS feeds generally viewed in RSS readers – inc.
browsers, Outlook
• Can also distribute to mobile devices and social
networking sites

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Video
• The biggest growth area on the web as broadband uptake and
bandwidth increases
• Over 20 hours of video every minute is uploaded to YouTube
• Video can be done cheaply with a handheld camcorder
• Viral impact can bring thousands of visitors to a website in a short space
of time
• Examples:
• Elf Yourself
• The Greatest Job in the World
• The World’s Greatest Business Mind

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Search and Social

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Social Networking
• Web based services that allow users to create online
communities based on shared interests and
activities – there are over 2,000 of them!

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Facebook
• Over 175 million users worldwide
• Has beaten MySpace in Australia – 41.88% of social
networking traffic goes to Facebook (Source:
Hitwise)
• Businesses can establish a Facebook Page or Group
• But many businesses still block access to Facebook
in the workplace…

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Twitter
• Fastest growing, hottest property right now – anybody using it?
• Micro-blogging; 140 character limit – basically ‘SMS on the web’
(but also can be done via mobile device)
• You follow people, they follow you; your ‘tweets’ are seen by
your followers, you see the ‘tweets’ of people you follow
• But who would be interested in this seemingly banal, nebulous
information?
• Business can use it as an information channel to ‘push’
information to prospects – and it helps with search engine
rankings!

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Bookmarking / Tagging Sites

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Bookmarking / Tagging Sites
• Consider implementing an AddThis or AddToAny
button on your pages
• www.addthis.com
• www.addtoany.com
• A simple piece of code that adds a button to your
page:

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SEO Best Practices

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MOST IMPORTANT ONPAGE FACTORS
WHICH WE USUALLY FORGET
• H Tag Distribution
• Footer Optimization
• Copyright (Keyword
Rich)
• Sitemap (Static & XML)
• Verification (google & bing)

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• Content is King
• Use relevant keywords or key-phrases with a density
of between 3% and 5%
• Bold helps
72

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• Inbound
• Higher ranking site
• Text in link important
• Outbound
• Less the better
• Crawler follows link
• Intra site
• Helps with navigation
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• JavaScript
• Some Crawlers can not navigate
• Commonly found in Menus
• Flash
• Crawlers can not view
• Use HTML version as option or SWFobject
• Images
• Should have alt tags
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• Inbound
• Higher ranking site
• Text in link important
• Outbound
• Less the better
• Crawler follows link
• Intra site
• Helps with navigation
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• JavaScript
• Some Crawlers can not navigate
• Commonly found in Menus
• Flash
• Crawlers can not view
• Use HTML version as option or SWFobject
• Images
• Should have alt tags
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More things that you should do…
• Monitor your server statistics – unique visitors is the key
metric to track (not ‘hits’)
• Set up Google Analytics on your site -
http://www.google.com/analytics/
• Set up Google Webmaster Tools -
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
• Set up Google Alerts for your business -
http://www.google.com/alerts
• Try out Google Adwords pay per click advertising using a trial
offer - http://www.google.com.au/contactadwords

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Other technical things to do…
• Remove multiple ‘instances’ of your site with a Permanent
301 redirect to eliminate dilution of your website standing
• Implement a robots.txt file
• Implement an XML sitemap
• Ensure that your pages load quickly by streamlining your
code and optimising your images
• Ensure that your site’s server has close to 100% uptime – if
it isn’t live when the spider arrives, your rankings may be
affected
• Make your site W3C compliant – http://validator.w3.org

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What you should NEVER DO
• Hidden text
• Keyword stuffing
• Display duplicate content
• Cloaking – displaying different content to visitors
and spiders
• Use Flash alone
• Use Frames

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A final thought
• If you employ one of the strategies mentioned in this
presentation, you will get some benefit in the search
engine results pages
• If you employ a couple, you will get much greater benefit
• If you employ all of them properly, then you will most
likely go to the top of the results
• The little things count and, when you employ them
together, they can make a big difference to your site
performance

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THANK YOU!
Website: www.pagetraffic.in
Email: nkaushal@pagetraffic.in
Twitter: @navneetkaushal
Blog: www.pagetrafficbuzz.com