Dipartimento di Scienze Umane COMMUNICATIONS METRICS, WEB ANALYTICS & DATA MINING A.A. 2017/2018 Take your time with a PRO in Comms @LUMSA Rome, 15 december 2017
Francesco Malmignati Chief Technical Officer
Software Development - We covers all the different aspects of Software Development: from Web and Mobile Development, to User Experience and User Interface Design, delivering all its products at the highest market standards. Business & Innovation - Support and consulting in the Start Up environment is part of Simul Tech DNA, which covers all the aspects of the path from the basic idea to its delivery to the market. Marketing & Communication - Digital Marketing, SEM, SEO, AdWords, Analytics and Social Media are the fields where Simul Tech can support and give its input to any subject willing to be found in the ocean of information spread on the internet. Training - Training Classes, Stages and Internships are the way Simul Tech takes its part in creating a team more and more oriented towards excellence.
SEO Search Engine Optimization
AGENDA Search Engine Introduction Search Engine Optimization How to make your website indexable How to make your website relevant Make your website popular! Penalties SEO Monitoring
Search Engine
What happens when we open a website? 1. A client (a browser on PC, Tablet, Smartphone) sends a request to open the web site. 2. This request is routed among several different servers until it reaches the final "server" that hosts the website html pages. 3. The server sends the html pages to the browser that "reads" and then visualizes them on the user's computer
Web page definition A web page or web page is a document commonly written in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) that is accessible through the Internet or other network using an Internet browser. It is usually composed of: 1. An HTML file that describes the structure of Web pages using a markup language. HTML elements are the building blocks of HTML pages and are represented by tags 2. The web page content like images, text, videos, animations, etc. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML+RDFa 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/markup/dtd/xhtml-rdfa-1.dtd"> <html lang="en" dir="ltr"> <head profile="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab"> <meta charset="utf-8"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image.ico" /> <title>title of the webpage</title> <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/css/style.css" media="all" /> <script src="/script.js"></script> </head> <body> </body> </html>
Search Engine - What is it? A web search engine is an automatic software system that searches web pages, documents and files for keywords and returns the results of any files containing those keywords
Available channels to find information Source: Eurisko New Media Search engines are the preferred channel
Why so good? Provide always updated information Provide more detailed information that includes different POW and opinions Definitely easy to use
Let's take a (brief) look inside a Search Engine A Search Engine is composed of the following parts: A spider (crawler ) that crawls the web reading the html files of the visisted web pages. It uses links to move from one page to another. A program that creates an index of all the "crawled" pages A program that reads the searched keywords inserted by the user, compares them to the index and returns the Result Pages (called SERP - Search Engine Result Pages)
SERP The results obtained in the SERP are ordered according to very sophisticated "ranking" algorithms that uses hundreds of parameters and factors to calculate the pages order. These algorithms are secret so nobody (apart from few Google engineers) knows how they actually work The results are in a descending order to let users seeing the most relevant results as first.
Google pipeline
Search Engine Optimization
What does it mean? Search Engine Optimization is the process of affecting and enhancing the online visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine's organic (unpaid) results (SERP) SEO activities are carried out by 3 different teams: Tech: web site development Marketing: website promotion Communications/Publisher: website content management
The Golden Triangle The Golden Triangle in internet marketing depicts the triangular viewing pattern on a webpage which is created by tracking eye activity of users. This area contains: the organic unpaid results (SEO) the paid results (SEM)
The Golden Triangle It is not just important to be detectable by search engines but for a good visibility it is crucial to end up on higher positions of the SERP
The Golden Triangle evolution Golden Triangle phenomenon has declined as search engine results pages and user behavior, have shifted and evolved since 2005. Thanks to the rise in mobile usage, search patterns have become more and more vertical, and less horizontal. It is not crucial anymore to be on the first 3 positions.
SEM Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising.
SEM SEO
3 Golden Rules of SEO 1. Be Honest 2. Write for People - Not Robots 3. Content is King
How to make a website indexable
Indexable elements Check that all the website elements are indexable and readable by the Search Engine crawler Avoid using: Text on images Flash sites
Robots exclusion standard Standard used by websites to communicate with web crawlers. It specifies how to inform the web crawler about which areas of the website should not be processed or scanned. A robots.txt file is placed in the root of the web site hierarchy (e.g. https://www.example.com/robots.txt). This text file contains the instructions in a specific format: User-agent: * Disallow: /directory/file.html
Image indexing Not easily interpreted by the web crawler. HTML <alt> tag must be used to describe the image content Use the "right" keywords to describe the image All the website images should be put in the same folder Filename should be coherent with the image
Website domain Name: it is important to find the "right" website name for your website Age: a website with an "old" domain is considered more trustworthy by the Search Engine alghoritms
Sitemap XML The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. Take a look at: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html
How to make a website relevant
Users satisfaction As said before... write for People and not Robots! The first aim of Search Engine is to provide users the most relevant and high-quality sites available on the web. Their algorithms continuosly evolve to find the best quality websites indicators and to identify the best matching pattern websites compared to the users query.
Relevant website, how? A website can be considered relevant by the Search Engine if the information it provides is: useful well-made high quality original rich-content
On page elements All the following elements should contain relevant keywords to be better "seen" by search engines: Domain name Page titles URL Meta-description Text Other important elements: Outgoing links to other important content-related websites Inbound links that highlight the most relevant pages Blog/news inside the website that should be frequently updated
Most visible elements Title Url Description
Title One of the most important SEO element Max 66/70 cc allowed Not more than 7/8 words. Find an attractive title! With 1/2 keywords would be better A different and specific title for each page
URL Simple to read Short Add kewords if possibile URL without parameters (www.examplesite.com¶meter=1) Use a dash to sepate words www.examplesite.com/this-is-an-example
Meta = "description" Not more than 150 cc It must be attractive! It should include 1/2 keywords A different and specific description for each page
Rich Snippets is the term used to describe structured data markup that site operators can add to their existing HTML, which in turn allow search engines to better understand what information is contained on each web page They can be related to: Reviews People Products Business & Organisations Recipes Events Music Rich snippets
Website content text It should be really focused on the argument of the page It should contain at least 2 relevant keywords repeated more than 2 times It should include synonims and related words Do not include too many keywords, the website could be penalized!
Keywords analysis Analysis of the most common keywords used Analysis of the competition
Keywords analysis Analysis of the most common keywords used Analysis of the competition
HTML Headings The <h1> to <h6> tags are used to define HTML headings. <h1> defines the most important heading. <h6> defines the least important heading. <h1> (Title) should contain at least one relevant keyword <hx> (Subtitle) should contain relevant keywords
Alt Tag It is used to describe the image content It can be used to contain relevant keywords
Bold It is a good practice (but must be used with moderation) to highlight the keywords with a bold character The HTML Tag is <strong>
Website loading time If the pages take too much to load the user will immediately leave the website. The website will be penalized by the Search Engine.
Make your website popular!
Link Popularity Link popularity is a measure of the number of hyperlinks referencing a website. More links refer to a website, the higher is its weighting or link popularity. This produces a result in search engines where links to important web pages with high link popularity will be displayed higher up in the SERPs.
Link Popularity Links from irrelevant blogs are viewed very critically. Buying links is frowned upon and penalties will be levied on the relevant pages once uncovered. Ideally, links should result from content with added value to which other site operators will gladly link.
Link Disavowing Google s link disavowal tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main Allows publishers to tell Google that they don t want certain links from external sites to be considered as part of Google s system of counting links to rank web sites
Penalties
Google Penalties Google's job is to provide the most relevant search results. From Google's point of view, any website that tries to manipulate the search results is harming the Google product. A Google penalty is the result of a highly evolved, constantly changing algorithm that Google utilizes to crawl and inspect websites. Penalties are triggered by any action a website takes to fool a search engine or harm the user experience in some way.
Google Penalty Triggers spyware, adware, or viruses hidden links or text cloaking (displaying a different version of a webpage to the search engine robots) deceptive redirects (when a visitor is automatically taken to another page without clicking anything) pages loaded with irrelevant keywords keyword stuffing (increase the keyword relevancy artificially) a substantial amount of duplicate content
SEO Monitoring
Marketing Rates Click Through Rate (CTR) - is the ratio of users who click on a specific link of the SERP to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement (called impression). The higher the CTR the more effective a marketing campaign has been at bringing people to a website. Bounce Rate - it represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave ("bounce") rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site. It is a measure of the effectiveness of a website in encouraging visitors to continue with their visit. It is expressed as a percentage and represents the proportion of visits that end on the first page of the website that the visitor sees
Google Analytics Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Analysis of the: organic traffic keywords that produced traffic
Google Search Console It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites. Submit and check a sitemap. Check and set the crawl rate, and view statistics about when Googlebot accesses a particular site. Write and check a robots.txt file to help discover pages that are blocked in robots.txt accidentally. List internal and external pages that link to the site. Get a list of links which Googlebot had difficulty crawling, including the error that Googlebot received when accessing the URLs in question. See what keyword searches on Google led to the site being listed in the SERPs,
Keyword position monitoring 1. Define a list of keywords 2. Monitor them 3. Monthly verify the keywords position
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