SEOMoz - The Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization

1. Crawling and Indexing
Crawling and indexing the billions of
documents, pages, files, news,
calculating relevancy & rankings and serving results. videos and media on the world wide
web.

2. Providing Answers
Providing answers to user queries,
most frequently through lists of
relevant pages through retrieval and
rankings.

Imagine the World Wide Web as a network of stops in a big city subway
system.
Each stop is its own unique document (usually a web page, but sometimes a PDF, JPG or other

Once the engines find these pages, their next job is to parse the code from them and store selected
pieces of the pages in massive hard drives, to be recalled when needed in a query. To accomplish
the monumental task of holding billions of pages that can be accessed in a fraction of a second, the
search engines have constructed massive datacenters in cities all over the world.

These monstrous storage facilities hold thousands of machines processing unimaginably large
quantities of information. After all, when a person performs a search at any of the major engines,

engines work hard to provide answers as fast as possible.

When a person searches for something online, it requires the search engines to scour their corpus

optimization is meant to influence.

To the search engines, relevance means more than simply having a page with the words you

further than this simplistic step, and found that their results suffered as a consequence. Thus,
through iterative evolution, smart engineers at the various engines devised better ways to find
valuable results that searchers would appreciate and enjoy. Today, hundreds of factors influence

Importance is an equally tough concept to quantify, but Search engines must
do their best.

site, page or document, the more valuable the information contained therein must be. This
assumption has proven fairly successful in practice, as the engines have continued to increase

You can surmise that search engines
algorithms are often comprised of hundreds of components. In the search marketing field, we believe that Ohio State is the most
relevant and popular page for the query
Search Engine Ranking Factors.
is less relevant/popular.

or How Search Marketers Study & Learn How to Succeed in the Engines
The complicated algorithms of search engines may appear at first glance to be impenetrable, and
the engines themselves provide little insight into how to achieve better results or garner more
traffic. What little information on optimization and best practices that the engines themselves do
provide is listed below:

provide is listed below:

Many factors influence whether a particular web site appears in Web
Search results and where it falls in the ranking.

These factors can include:

The number of other sites linking to it

The content of the pages

The updates made to indicies

The testing of new product versions

The discovery of additional sites

Bing engineers at Microsoft recommend the following to get better
rankings in their search engine:

In the visible page text, include words users might choose as
search query terms to find the information on your site.

Limit all pages to a reasonable size. We recommend one topic
per page. An HTML page with no pictures should be under 150
KB.

Make sure that each page is accessible by at least one static text
link.

example, if you want your company name or address to be
indexed, make sure it is not displayed inside a company logo.

Googlers recommend the following to get better rankings in their
search engine:

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't
deceive your users or present different content to search engines
than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as
cloaking.

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page
should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that
clearly and accurately describe your content. Make sure that
your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and
accurate.

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer
than 100).

Over the 12 plus years that web search has existed online, search
marketers have found methodologies to extract information
about how the search engines rank pages and use that data to
help their sites and their clients achieve better positioning.

Surprisingly, the engines do support many of these efforts, though the public visibility is
frequently low. Conferences on search marketing, such as the Search Marketing Expo,

engineers and representatives from all of the major engines. Search representatives also assist
webmasters by occasionally participating online in blogs, forums & groups.

There is perhaps no greater tool available to webmasters researching the activities of the engines than the freedom to use the search
engines to perform experiments, test theories and form opinions. It is through this iterative, sometimes painstaking process, that a
considerable amount of knowledge about the functions of the engines has been gleaned.

1. Register a new website with nonsense keywords (e.g. 5.
ishkabibbell.com) pages

2. Create multiple pages on that website, all targeting a similarly 6. Make small alterations to the identically targeting pages to
ludicrous term (e.g. yoogewgally) determine what factors might push a result up or down against
its peers
3. Test the use of different placement of text, formatting, use of

keywords, link structures, etc. by making the pages as uniform 7. Record any results that appear to be effective and re-test on

as possible with only a singular difference

4. Point links at the domain from indexed, well-spidered pages on
pattern that is used by the search engines.
other domains

weight than a page lower down in the code. We tested this by creating a nonsense domain linking
out to three pages, all carrying the same nonsense word exactly once. After the engines spidered
the pages, we found that the page linked to from the highest link on the home page ranked first
and continued our iterations of testing.

This process is certainly not alone in helping to educate search marketers.
Competitive intelligence about signals the engines might use and how they might order results is
also available through patent applications made by the major engines to the United States Patent

Patent #6285999
Anatomy of a
Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
and edification. To those whose comfort level with complex mathematics falls short, never fear.
Although the actual equations can be academically interesting, complete understanding evades

practice search engine optimization.

Through methods like patent analysis, experiments, and live
testing and tweaking, search marketers as a community have
come to understand many of the basic operations of search
engines and the critical components of creating websites and
pages that garner high rankings and significant traffic.

The rest of this guide is devoted to explaining these practices clearly and
concisely. Enjoy!

One of the most important elements to building an online
marketing strategy around SEO and search rankings is feeling Search engine usage has evolved over

empathy for your audience. Once you grasp how the average the years but the primary principles of
conducting a search remain largely
searcher, and more specifically, your target market, uses search, unchanged. Listed here is the steps
you can more effectively reach and keep those users. that comprise most search processes:

1. Experience the need for an answer,
solution or piece of information.

2. Formulate that need in a string of words

3. Execute the query at a search engine.

4. Browse through the results for a match.

When this process results in the satisfactory completion of a task, a positive experience is created,
both with the search engine and the site providing the information or result. Since the inception of
web search, the activity has grown to heights of great popularity, such that in December of 2005, 5. Click on a result.

the Pew Internet & American Life Project (PDF Study in Conjunction with ComScore) found that
90% of online men and 91% of online women used search engines. Of these, 42% of the men and
39% of the women reported using search engines every day and more than 85% of both groups say 6. Scan for a solution, or a link to that
solution.

7. If unsatisfied, return to the search results

8. Perform a new search with refinements to
the query.

When looking at the broad picture of search engine usage, fascinating data is available from a

understanding how users search, but in presenting a compelling argument about the power of
search (which we suspect many readers of this guide may need to do for their managers):

An April 2010 study by comScore found: An August 2008 PEW Internet Study revealed:
Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in April with 64.4 The percentage of Internet users who use search engines on a
percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites (up typical day has been steadily rising from about one-third of all
0.8 percentage points to 17.7 percent), and Microsoft Sites (up users in 2002, to a new high of just under one-half (49 percent).
0.1 percentage points to 11.8 percent).
With this increase, the number of those using a search engine on
Americans conducted 15.5 billion searches in April, up slightly a typical day is pulling ever closer to the 60 percent of Internet
from March. Google Sites accounted for 10 billion searches,
followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.8 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.8 on a typical day.
billion), Ask Network (574 million) and AOL LLC (371 million).

In the April analysis of the top properties where search activity
is observed, Google Sites led the search market with 14.0 billion A EightFoldLogic (formally Enquisite) report from
search queries, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.8 billion queries 2009 on click-through traffic in the US showed:
and Microsoft Sites with 1.9 billion. Amazon Sites experienced Google sends 78.43% of traffic.
sizeable growth during the month with an 8-percent increase to
245 million searches, rounding off the top 10 ranking. Yahoo! sends 9.73% of traffic.

Bing sends 7.86% of traffic.

A July 2009 Forrester report remarked:
Interactive marketing will near $55 billion in 2014. A Yahoo! study from 2007 showed:

This spend will represent 21% of all marketing budgets. Online advertising drives in-store sales at a 6:1 ratio to online
sales.

Consumers in the study spent $16 offline (in stores) to every $1
Webvisible & Nielsen produced a 2007 report on local spent online.
search that noted:

74% of respondents used search engines to find local business
information vs. 65% who turned to print yellow pages, 50% who
used Internet yellow pages, and 44% who used traditional
newspapers. reveals:
86% surveyed said they have used the Internet to find a local The first ranking position in the search results receives 42.25%
business, a rise from the 70% figure reported last year (2006.) of all click-through traffic

80% reported researching a product or service online, then The second position receives 11.94%, the third 8.47%, the fourth
making that purchase offline from a local business. 6.05%, and all others are under 5%

The first ten results received 89.71% of all click-through traffic,
the next 10 results (normally listed on the second page of results)

other pages of results received less than 1% of total search traffic
clicks.

All of this impressive research data leads us to some important
conclusions about web search and marketing through search engines.

relative surety:

Search is very, very popular. It reaches nearly every online
American, and billions of people around the world.

Being listed in the first few results is critical to visibility.

Being listed at the top of the results not only provides the
greatest amount of traffic, but instills trust in consumers as to
the worthiness and relative importance of the company/website.

An incredible amount of offline economic activity is driven by
searches on the web

Search Engine Optimization is the process of taking a page built
by humans and making it easily consumable for both other
humans and for search engine robots. This sections details some
of the compromises you will need to make in order to satisfy
these two very important kinds of user.

One of the most common issues we hear from folks on both the business and
technology sides of a company goes something like this:

rules or principles in order to be ranked or indexed. Anyone with half a brain would want a
system that can crawl through any architecture, parse any amount of complex or imperfect code
and still find a way to return the best and most relevant results, not the ones that have been

explain details and examine the inner-workings of the engines, the less powerful this argument
becomes.

Limitations of Search Engine Technology
The major search engines all operate on the same principles, as explained in Chapter 1. Automated search
bots crawl the web, following links and indexing content in massive databases. But, modern search technology
is not all-powerful. There are technical limitations of all kinds that can cause immense problems in both

Search engines cannot fill out online forms, and thus any content Text that is not written in terms that users use to search in the
contained behind them will remain hidden. major search engines. For example, writing about refrigerators

Poor link structures can lead to search engines failing to reach
all of the content contained on a website, or allow them to spider
Warming.

Language and internationalization subtleties. For example, color
vs colour. When in doubt, check what people are searching for
Web pages that use Flash, frames, Java applets, plug-in content,
and use exact matches in your content.
audio files & video have content that search engines cannot
access. Language. For example, writing content in Polish when the
majority of the people who would visit your website are from
Interpreting Non-Text Content Japan.

Text that is not in HTML format in the parse-able code of a web
page is inherently invisible to search engines.

This can include text in Flash files, images, photos, video, audio &
plug-in content.

This is perhaps the most important concept to grasp about the functionality of search engines &
the importance of search marketers. Even when the technical details of search-engine friendly web
development are correct, content can remain virtually invisible to search engines. This is due to
the inherent nature of modern search technology, which rely on the aforementioned metrics of
relevance and importance to display results.

have no inherent gauge of quality or notability and no potential way to discover and make visible

discover, react, comment and (most important for search engines) link. Thus, it is only natural

great job of promoting high quality content on popular websites or on individual web pages that
have become popular, but they cannot generate
talented Internet marketers.

marketing, as a practice, has a long, healthy life ahead.

10 positions, ordered by rank, with click-through traffic based on their relative position & ability to
attract searchers. The fact that so much traffic goes to so few listings for any given search means that
there will always be a financial incentive for search engine rankings. No matter what variables may
make up the algorithms of the future, websites and businesses will contend with one another for this
traffic, branding, marketing & sales goals it provides.

submission, the meta keywords tag and keyword stuffing were all
regular parts of the tactics necessary to rank well. In 2004, link
bombing with anchor text, buying hordes of links from automated
blog comment spam injectors and the construction of inter-linking
farms of websites could all be leveraged for traffic. In 2010, social
media marketing and vertical search inclusion are mainstream
methods for conducting search engine optimization.

The future may be uncertain, but in the world of search, change is a
constant. For this reason, along with all the many others listed above,
search marketing will remain a steadfast need in the diet of those
who wish to remain competitive on the web. Others have mounted an
effective defense of search engine optimization in the past, but as we

websites and pages compete for attention and placement in the
search engines, and those with the best knowledge and experience
with these rankings will receive the benefits of increased traffic and
visibility.

Search engines are limited in how they crawl the web and
interpret content to retrieve and display in the results. In this

structured for search engines and human visitors. This is an
excellent part of the guide to share with your programmers,
information architects, and designers, so that all parties involved

friendly site.

is virtually invisible to search engine spiders, despite advances in crawling technology. The easiest
way to ensure that the words and phrases you display to your visitors are visible to search engines
is to place it in the HTML text on the page. However, more advanced methods are available for
those who demand greater formatting or visual display styles:

1. Images in gif, jpg, or png format can be 3. Flash or Java plug-in contained content
can be repeated in text on the page.
providing search engines a text
4. Video & audio content should have an
description of the visual content.
accompanying transcript if the words
2. Images can also be shown to visitors as and phrases used are meant to be
replacement for text by using CSS indexed by the engines.
styles.

Most sites do not have significant problems with indexable content, but double-checking is
SEO-browser.com, the mozBar or Yellowpipe you
can see what elements of your content are visible and indexable to the engines.

Whoa!

homepage is simply a link to another page. This is bad because it makes it difficult to interpret
relevancy.

Hey, where did the fun go?

telling us that the page contains the Axe Battling Monkeys. The site is entirely built in Flash, but
sadly, this means that search engines cannot index any of the text content, or even the links to the
individual games.

Term Extractor

Search engines need to see content in order to list pages in their
massive keyword-based indices. They also need to have access to a

Hundreds of thousands of sites make the critical mistake of hiding or
obsfucating their navigation in ways that search engines cannot
access, thus impacting their ability to get pages listed in the search

happen:

important pages on the site, the spider has no way to reach them (or
even know they exist) because no direct, crawlable links point to
those pages. As far as Google is concerned, they might as well not

in the first place.

attribute applied to them.

index the contents of the referenced page.

Links in submission-required forms Links only accessible through search
Forms can include something as basic as a drop down menu or as
complex as a full-blown survey. In either case, search spiders will not a common problem that it bears mentioning. Spiders will not attempt

be accessible via a form are invisible to the engines. millions of pages are hidden behind completely inaccessible walls,
doomed to anonymity until a spidered page links to it.
Links in un-parseable javascript
If you use Javascript for links, you may find that search engines Links in flash, java, or other plug-ins
either do not crawl or give very little weight to the links embedded The links embedded inside the Panda site (from our above example)
within. Standard HTML links should replace Javascript (or is a perfect illustration of this phenomenon. Although dozens of
padnas are listed and linked to on the Panda page, no spider can

Links pointing to pages blocked by the meta robots to the engines (and un-retrievable by searchers performing a query).
tag or robots.txt
The Meta Robots tag and the Robots.txt file (full description here) Links on pages with many hundreds or thousands of
both allow a site owner to restrict spider access to a page. Just be
links
warned that many a webmaster has unintentionally used these Search engines tend to only crawl about 100 links on any given page.
directives as an attempt to block access by rogue bots, only to This loose restriction is necessary to keep down on spam and
discover that search engines cease their crawl. conserve rankings.

Links in frames or I-frames
Technically, links in both frames and I-Frames are crawlable, but
both present structural issues for the engines in terms of

good technical understanding of how search engines index and

Google
nofollowed links carry no weight or
can be used with the following syntax:
impact and are interpreted as HTML
<a href=http://www.seomoz.org rel="nofollow">Lousy Punks!</a> text (as though the link did not exist).
Links can have lots of attributes applied to them, but the engines ignore nearly all of these, with
they will not count those links in their
link graph of the web at all.

Yahoo! & Bing
to help stop automated blog comment, guestbook, and link injection spam (read more about the
Both of these engines say that
launch here), but has morphed over time into a way of telling the engines to discount any link
nofollowed links do not impact search
value that would ordinarily be passed. Links tagged with nofollow are interpreted slightly
results or rankings, but may be used by
differently by each of the engines. You can read more about the affect of this and PageRank
their crawlers as a way to discover
sculpting on this blog post.
new pages. That is to say that while

not count them as a method for
positively impacting rankings.

Ask.com
Ask is unique in its position, claiming
that nofollowed links will not be treated
any differently than any other kind of

algorithms (based on local, rather than
global popularity) are already immune
to most of the problems that nofollow is
intended to solve.

building blocks of language and of search. In fact, the entire science
of information retrieval (including web-based search engines like
Google) is based on keywords. As the engines crawl and index the
contents of pages around the web, they keep track of those pages in
keyword-based indices. Thus, rather than storing 25 billion web
pages all in one database (which would get pretty big), the engines
have millions and millions of smaller databases, each centered on a
particular keyword term or phrase. This makes it much faster for the
engines to retrieve the data they need in a mere fraction of a second.

Obviously, if you want your page to have a chance of being listed in

Keywords also dominate our search intent and interaction with the
engines. For example, a common search query pattern might go
something like this.

When a search is performed, the engine knows which pages to
retrieve based on the words entered into the search box. Other data,

spelling, punctuation, and capitalization of those terms provide
additional information that the engines can use to help retrieve the
right pages and rank them.

For obvious reasons, search engines measure the ways keywords are

rankings is, therefore, to ensure that keywords are prominently used
in titles, text, and meta data.

The map graphic to the left shows the relevance of the broad term
books to the specific title, Tale of Two Cities. Notice that while there
are a lot of results (size of country) for the broad term, there is a lot
less results and thus competition for the specific result.

Keyword Density Myth
Whenever the topic of keyword usage and search engines come
Example
This is tragic. Keyword density is, without question, NOT a part of If two documents, D1 and D2, consist of 1000 terms (l =
modern web search engine ranking algorithms for the simple reason 1000) and repeat a term 20 times (tf = 20), then a
that it provides far worse results than many other, more advanced keyword density analyzer will tell you that for both
methods of keyword analysis. Rather than cover this logical fallacy in documents Keyword Density (KD) KD = 20/1000 =
0.020 (or 2%) for that term. Identical values are
The Keyword Density of Non-Sense. obtained when tf = 10 and l = 500. Evidently, a keyword
density analyzer does not establish which document is
The notion of keyword density value predates all commercial search
more relevant. A density analysis or keyword density
engines and the Internet and can hardly be considered an
ratio tells us nothing about:
information retrieval concept. What is worse, keyword density plays
no role on how commercial search engines process text, index 1. The relative distance between keywords in documents
documents, or assign weights to terms. Why then do many (proximity)
optimizers still believe in keyword density values? The answer is 2. Where in a document the terms occur (distribution)
simple: misinformation.
3. The co-citation frequency between terms (co-
occurance)

mathematical proofs should debunk any notion that keyword density 4. The main theme, topic, and sub-topics (on-topic issues)
of the documents

this same document illustrates the unfortunate truth about keyword The Conclusion:
Keyword density is divorced from content, quality,
semantics, and relevancy.
collected documents (to help build a semantic library), we have little
chance to create formulas that would be helpful for true optimization.
What should optimal page density look like then? An optimal page

That said, keyword usage and targeting are only a small part of the

testing and get to see a huge number of search results and shifts
based on keyword usage tactics. When working with one of your own
sites, this is the process we recommend:

Use the keyword in the title tag at least once, and possibly twice
(or as a variation) if it makes sense and sounds good (this is
subjective, but necessary). Try to keep the keyword as close to
the beginning of the title tag as possible. More detail on title tags
follows later in this section.

Once in the H1 header tag of the page.

At least 3X in the body copy on the page (sometimes a few more You can read more information about On-Page Optimization at this
post.
value in adding the keyword more than 3X, but in our
experience, adding more instances of a term or phrase tends to
have little to no impact on rankings.

At least once in bold. You can use either the <strong> or <b> tag,
as search engines consider them equivalent.

At least once in the alt attribute of an image on the page. This
not only helps with web search, but also image search, which can
occasionally bring valuable traffic.

Once in the URL. Additional rules for URLs and keywords are
discussed later on in this section.

At least once (sometimes 2X when it makes sense) in the meta
description tag. Note that the meta description tag does NOT get
used by the engines for rankings, but rather helps to attract

text used by the search engines).

Generally not in link anchor text on the page itself that points to
other pages on your site or different domains (this is a bit
blog post for details).

The title element of a page is meant to be an accurate, concise

(covered to the left) and is critical to both user experience and search
engine optimization.

As title tags are such an important part of search engine
optimization, following best practices for title tag creation makes for
terrific low-hanging SEO fruit. The recommendations below cover
the critical parts of optimizing title tags for search engine and
usability goals:

The title tag of any page appears at the top of Internet browsing Be mindful of length
software, but this location has been noted to receive a relatively 70 characters is the maximum amount that will display in the search
small amount of attention from users, making it the least important
of the three. title tag has been cut off), and sticking to this limit is generally wise.

keyword phrase) and having them in the title tag is essential to
ranking, it may be advisable to go longer.

Place important keywords close to the front
The closer to the start of the title tag your keywords are, the more

testing and experience).

Leverage branding
At SEOmoz, we love to start every title tag with a brand name
mention, as these help to increase brand awareness, and create a
Using keywords in the title tag means that search engines will higher click-through rate for people who like and are familiar with a
brand. Many SEO firms recommend using the brand name at the end
has performed a query with those terms. This helps garner a of a title tag instead, and there are times when this can be a better
greater visibility and a higher click-through rate.
site) and how strong the brand is.

Consider readability and emotional impact
Creating a compelling title tag will pull in more visits from the search

important to not only think about optimization and keyword usage,

interaction with your brand and should convey the most positive
impression possible.

The final important reason to create descriptive, keyword-laden
title tags is for ranking at the search engines. The above screenshot

practitioners in the SEO industry on the search engine ranking
factors. In that survey, 35 of the 37 participants said that keyword
use in the title tag was the most important place to use keywords to
achieve high rankings.

Each of the basic meta tags are listed below, along with a description of their use.

The Meta Robots tag can be used to control search engine spider activity (for all of the major
engines) on a page level. There are several ways to use meta robots to control how search engines
treat a page:

generally unnecessary.

Follow/NoFollow tells the engines whether links on the page should be crawled. If you elect to

Noarchive is used to restrict search engines from saving a cached copy of the page. By
default, the engines will maintain visible copies of all pages they indexed, accessible to

Nosnippet informs the engines that they should refrain from displaying a descriptive block of

NoODP is a specialized tag telling the engines not to grab a descriptive snippet about a page
from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) for display in the search results.

NoYDir, like NoODP, is specific to Yahoo!, informing that engine not to use the Yahoo!
Directory description of a page/site in the search results

The meta description
use the keywords or phrases in this tag for rankings, but meta descriptions are the primary source
for the snippet of text displayed beneath a listing in the results.

The meta description tag serves the function of advertising copy, drawing readers to your site from
the results and thus, is an extremely important part of search marketing. Crafting a readable,

keywords in the description) can draw a much higher click-through rate of searchers to your page.

Meta descriptions can be any length, but search engines generally will cut snippets longer than

limits.

Meta Keywords
The meta keywords tag had value at one time, but is no longer valuable or important to search
engine optimization. For more on the history and a full account of why meta keywords has fallen
in disuse, read Meta Keywords Tag 101 from SearchEngineLand.

Meta refresh, meta revisit-after, meta content type, etc.
Although these tags can have uses for search engine optimization, they are less critical to the

Meta Tags & Web Search.

URLs, the web address for a particular document, are of great value from a search perspective.
They appear in multiple important locations.

Above, the green text shows the url for The URL above is used as the link anchor text
address bar, and while this generally has little pointing to the referenced page in this blog post.
engines display URLs in the results, they can impact on search engines, poor URL structure
impact clickthrough and visibility. URLs are also and design can result in negative user
used in ranking documents, and those pages experiences.
whose names include the queried search terms
receive some benefit from proper, descriptive
use of keywords.

Employ Empathy
Place yourself in the mind of a user and look at your URL. If you can

spell out every last detail in the URL, but a rough idea is a good
starting point.

Shorter is better
While a descriptive URL is important, minimizing length and trailing
slashes will make your URLs easier to copy and paste (into emails,
blog posts, text messages, etc) and will be fully visible in the search
results.

Keyword use is important(by overuse is dangerous)
If your page is targeting a specific term or phrase, make sure to

usable URLs and can trip spam filters (from email clients, search
engines, and even people!).

Go static

Go static
With technologies like mod_rewrite for Apache and ISAPI_rewrite

Even single dynamic parameters in a URL can result in lower overall

www.seomoz.org/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls, in 2007 and saw a
15% rise in search traffic over the following 6 weeks).

Choose descriptives whenever possible
Rather than selecting numbers or meaningless figures to categorize
information, use real words. For example, a URL like
www.thestore.com/hardware/screwdrivers is far more usable and
valuable than www.thestore.com/cat33/item4326.

Use hyphens to separate words
Not all of the search engines accurately interpret separators like

character to separate words in a URL, as in the SEOmoz 11 Best
Practices for URLs example above.

Canonicalization

entire page of content will appear in multiple locations on a website, or even on multiple websites.

to searchers? In SEO circles, this issue often referred to as duplicate content
greater detail here.

The engines are picky about duplicate versions of a single
piece of material. To provide the best searcher experience,
they will rarely show multiple, duplicate pieces of content
and thus, are forced to choose which version is most likely
to be the original (or best).

Canonicalization is the practice of organizing your content
in such a way that every unique piece has one and only
one URL. By following this process, you can ensure that
the search engines will find a singular version of your
content and assign it the highest achievable rankings
based on your domain strength, trust, relevance, and other
factors. If you leave multiple versions of content on a
website (or websites), you might end up with a scenario
like that to the right.

If, instead, the site owner took those three pages and 301-
redirected them, the search engines would have only one,
stronger page to show in the listings from that site:

You say you want another option though?
Canonical URL Tag
reduce instances of duplicate content on a single site and canonicalize to an individual URL. (This
can also be used from one URL on one domain to a different URL on a different domain.)

Title element
and Meta Description tag. This simply uses a new rel parameter.

This would tell Yahoo!, Bing & Google that the page in question
should be treated as though it were a copy of the URL
www.seomoz.org/blog and that all of the link & content
metrics the engines apply should technically flow back to that
URL.

The Canonical URL tag attribute is similar in many ways to a 301 redirect from an SEO

(which a 301 does), without actually redirecting visitors to the new URL (often saving your
development staff considerable heartache).

How we do it
SEOmoz has worked on several campaigns where two versions of every content page existed in

linked to both versions, and many external links pointed to both as well (this is a common
phenomenon, as bloggers & social media types like to link to print-friendly versions to avoid
advertising). We worked to individually 301 re-direct all of the print-friendly versions of the
content back to the originals and created a CSS option to show the page in printer-friendly format
(on the same URL). This resulted in a boost of more than 20% in search engine traffic within 60
days. Not bad for a project that only required an hour to identify and a few clever rules in the
htaccess file to fix.

How scrapers like your rankings
Unfortunately, the web is filled with hundreds of thousands (if not
millions) of unscrupulous websites whose business and traffic
models depend on plucking the content of other sites and re-using
them (sometimes in strangely modified ways) on their own domains.
This practice of fetching your content and re-publishing is called

outranking sites for their own content and displaying ads (ironically,

services (like Google, Technorati, Yahoo!, etc.). You can find
instructions for how to ping services like Google and Technorati
directly from their sites, or use a service like Pingomatic to automate

wise for the developer(s) to include auto-pinging upon publishing.

scrapers on the web will re-publish content without editing, and thus,

authored, you can ensure that the search engines see most of the
copies linking back to you (indicating that your source is probably the

links in your internal linking structure. Thus, rather than linking to
your home page using:

<a href="../>Home</a>

You would instead use:

<a href="http://www.seomoz.org">Home</a>

This way, when a scraper picks up and copies the content, the link
remains pointing to your site.

There are more advanced ways to protect against scraping, and for
WordPress users Joost de Valk has a useful plugin, but none of them
are entirely foolproof. You should expect that the more popular and

and re-published. Many times, you can ignore this problem, but if it
gets very severe, and you find the scrapers taking away your rankings
and traffic, you may consider using a legal process called a DMCA

Four Ways

Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return
activities in the search marketing field. Through the detective work of

terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn more about your
customers as a whole. The usefulness of this intelligence cannot be

respond to changing market conditions, and produce the products,
services, and content that web searchers are already actively seeking. In
the history of marketing, there has never been such a low barrier to entry

not taking advantage is practically criminal.

way or another, and keyword research tools like those described
below allow us to retrieve this information. However, those tools
cannot show us (directly) how valuable or important it might be to
rank for and receive traffic from those searches. To understand the
value of a keyword, we need to research further, make some

The following is a basic, but valuable process for

Ask yourself
Is the keyword relevant to the content your website offers?
Will searchers who find your site through this term find the
likely answer to their implied question(s)? And will this
traffic result in financial rewards (or other organizational
goals) directly or indirectly? If the answer to all of these

Search for the term/phrase in the major engines
Are there search advertisements running along the top and
right-hand side of the organic results? Typically, many
search ads means a high value keyword, and multiple Of course, even the best estimates of value fall flat against
search ads above the organic results often means a highly
the hands-on process of optimizing and calculating ROI.
lucrative and directly conversion-prone keyword.
Remember that the time and money you invest in a search
Buy a sample campaign for the keyword at marketing campaign must be weighed against any
Google AdWords and/or Bing Adcenter
returns, and even though SEO is typically one of the
In Google Adwords
highest return marketing investments, measuring success
traffic to the most relevant page on your website. Measure
the traffic to your site, and track impressions and is still critical to the process.
conversion rate over the course of at least 2-300 clicks (this
may take only a day or two with highly trafficked terms, or
several weeks with keyword in lesser demand).

educated guess about the value of a single visitor
to your site with the given search term or
phrase.
For example, if, in the past 24 hours, your search ad has
generated 5,000 impressions, of which 100 visitors have
come to your site and 3 have converted for total profit (not
revenue!) of $300, then a single visitor for that keyword is
worth approx. $3 to your business. Those 5,000 impressions
in 24 hours could probably generate a click-through rate of
between 30-40% with a #1 ranking (see the leaked AOL
data mining for more on potential click-through-rates),
which would mean 1500-2000 visits per day, at $3 each, or
~$1.75 million dollars per year. No wonder businesses love
search marketing!

terms actually make up less than 30% of the overall searches

millions of unique searches that might be conducted a few times in
any given day (or even only once, ever!), but, when taken together,

through search engines.

Understanding the search demand curve is critical, because it

information not directed at any particular single, popular query, but
rather simply exposing the myriad of human thought, research, and
opinion to the spiders of the search engines. As an example, below

small number of queries sending larger amounts of traffic alongside
the plethora of rarely-searched terms and phrases that bring the bulk
of our search referrals:

Resources
Where do we get all of this knowledge about keyword demand and
keyword referrals? From research sources like these listed here:

Google Insights for Search

Google Trends Keyword Demand Prediction

Microsoft AdCenter Keyword Forecasting

We can see that Google is predicting both the cost of running
campaigns for these terms as well as estimates of the number of
clicks a campaign might receive. You can use these latter numbers

popular a particular keyword or phrase is in comparison to another.

p p p y p p

help to show comparative estimates of demand.

Other, less popular sources for keyword information exist, as do tools
with more advanced data, and these are covered excellently in the
.

In order to know which keywords to target now (and which to pursue

term or phrase, but the work required to achieve those rankings. If

out on the web, the uphill battle for rankings can take months or

understand keyword difficulty.

Keyword Difficulty Tool does a good job collecting all of
these metrics and providing a comparative score for any
given search term or phrase.

The search engines are in a constant quest to improve their

subjective, the engines have a very good idea of the kinds of
pages and sites that satisfy their searchers. Generally, these sites
have several traits in common:

Easy to use, navigate, and understand.

Provide direct, actionable information relevant to the query.

Professionally designed and accessible to modern browsers.

Deliver high quality, legitimate, credible content.

can, and thus they rely on meta information (not necessary meta tags) about sites and pages in
order to rank content. The engines discovered early on that the link structure of the web could

than their less useful, lower quality peers. Today, link analysis algorithms have advanced
considerably, but these principles hold true.

All of that positive attention and excitement around the content offered by the
new site translates into a machine parseable (and algorithmically valuable)
collection of links. The timing, source, anchor text, and number of links to the anything unique or impressive.
new site are all factored into its potential performance (i.e., ranking) for
relevant queries at the engines.

on Search Engine Rankings
There are a limited number of variables that search engines can take into account directly,
including keyword placement, links, and site structure. However, through linking patterns, the
engines make a considerable number of intuitions about a given site. Usability and user

phenomenon.

Crafting a thoughtful, empathetic user experience can ensure that your site is perceived positively

down to the search engines and contribute to high rankings.

for Search Engine Success

understand. Search engines place web pages in their results in order to satisfy that intent in the

needs provides an excellent chance to earn top rankings.

Visiting a pre-determined destination and sourcing the

Navigational searches are performed with the intent of surfing
directly to a specific website. In some cases, the user may not know

passing along the (hopefully) correct location.

Researching non-transactional information, getting quick
answers, and ego-searching.
Informational searches involve a huge range of queries from
finding out the local weather, getting a map and directions, to

movie or checking on just how long that trip to Mars really takes.
The common thread here is that the searches are primarily non-
commercial and non-transaction-oriented in nature; the
information itself is the goal, and no interaction beyond clicking
and reading is required.

Researching sources for a story, uncovering potential
clients/partners, acquiring competitive intelligence,
discovering options for future transactions.
A commercial investigation search straddles the line between pure
research and commercial intent. For example, sourcing potential
partners for distribution of your new t-shirts in Albuquerque,
determining what companies make laptop bags for sale in the
United Kingdom, or researching the best brand of digital cameras

transactional, and may never result in an exchange of goods,

Identifying a local business, making a purchase online,
and completing a task.

Illustrated, creating a Gmail account, or finding the best local

transactional queries.

writing, use of examples, images, and multimedia all help in

reward is satisfied searchers who find their queries fulfilled and
reward that positive experience through activity on your site or
with links to it.

For search engines that crawl the web, links are the streets
between pages. Using link analysis, the engines can discover how
pages are related to other pages and in what ways. Since the late

pages are important and popular. (Some refer to this as the
reasonable surfer model). The engines themselves have refined
the use of link data to a fine art, and incredibly sophisticated
algorithms create nuanced evaluations of site and pages based on
this information.

factors (see Search Engine Ranking Factors). Through links, engines analyze the popularity of a
site & page based on the number and popularity of pages linking to them, as well as metrics like
trust, spam, & authority. Trustworthy sites tend to link to other trusted sites, while spammy sites
receive very few links from trusted sources (see mozTrust). Authority models, like those
postulated in the Hilltop Algorithm, suggest that links are a very good way of identifying expert
documents in a given space.

used by search engines

the elements of a link used by the search engines as well as how
those elements factor into the weighting of links in the algorithms.

through analysis of patent applications, papers submitted to
information retrieval conferences, and hands-on experience &
testing, we can draw some intelligent assumptions. Below is a list of
notable factors worthy of consideration. All of these issues, and many
more, are considered by professional SEOs when measuring link

Global Popularity
The more popular and important a site is, the more links from that
site matter to the search engines. Getting lots of local, topic-specific
links is great, too, but to earn trust and authority with the engines,

Local/Topic-Specific Popularity

search engine) suggests that links from sites within a topic-specific
community matters more than links from general or off-topic sites.

Anchor Text
One of the strongest signals the engines use in rankings is anchor
text. If dozens of links point to a page with the right keywords, that
page has a very good probability of ranking well for the targeted
phrase in that anchor text. You can see examples of this in action

solely due to the anchor text of inbound links.

TrustRank
In order to weed out massive amounts of spam (some estimate as

systems for measuring trust, many of which are based on the link
graph. Earning links from highly trusted domains can, thus, result in
a significant boost to this scoring metric.

Link Neighborhood
In many papers on spam detection and information retrieval, using
the sites that link to a domain as well as the sites that domain links to

wise to choose those sites you link to carefully and be equally
selective with the sites you attempt to earn links from.

many sites, the one most critical to achieving long term success. Many companies can afford to
hire SEOs to help make their websites search friendly and search optimized, but a robust backlink
profile is an extremely high barrier to competition.

Editorial Accumulation
Links that are given naturally by sites and pages that want
to reference your content or company. These links require
no specific action from the SEO, other than the creation of
citation-worthy material and the ability to create
awareness about it to relevant communities.

Manual Suggestion & Approval
Emailing bloggers with links, submitting sites to
directories, or paying for listings of any kind fit into this
group. The SEO must create a value proposition with the
link target and complete that transaction manually
(whether it be filling our forms for submissions to a
website award program or convincing a professor that your
resource is worthy of inclusion on the public syllabus).

Self-Created, Non-Editorial
Hundreds of thousands of websites offer any visitor the
opportunity to create links through guestbook signings,
forum signatures, blog comments, or user profiles. These
links are typically quite low in value, but can, in aggregate,
have a significant impact. However, automatic methods of
generating these links is certainly spamming, and even the
manual creation of such links is frowned upon by many
site owners and search engines. Exceptions abound, and

opportunity.

As with any marketing activity, the first process undertaken in a link building campaign must be
the creation of goals and strategies. Sadly, link building is one of the most difficult activities to
measure, particularly from a search engine optimization perspective. Although the engines

the engineering teams at these companies to extract this data. Thus, as SEOs, we rely on a number
of signals to help build a rating scale of link value. Along with the less-measurable data from the
link signals mentioned above, these metrics include the following:

Page Ranking for Relevant Search Terms Yahoo! Site Explorer Reported Inlinks
One of the best ways to determine how well a search engine values a Yahoo! Site Explorer is a valuable tool for seeing the links that point
given page is to search for some of the keywords and phrases that to a given site or page. Using this tool, you can make estimates about
page targets (particularly those in the title tag and headline). Pages the relative link popularity and importance a page has based on who
that rank well for relevant queries tend to be more valuable than links to it. Typically those pages/sites with more powerful and
important links will pass on greater value through their links.

Google PageRank Number of Links on a Page
Despite much maligning over the years for accuracy and freshness According to the original PageRank formula, the value that a link
problems (Google only updates their toolbar PageRank data every 3- passes is diluted by the presence of other links on a page. Thus,
5 months and sometimes manipulates the values intentionally to getting linked-to by a page with few links is better than being linked-
discourage spam and over-analysis), there is still value to looking at to by the same page with many links on it (all other things being
the number reported. This is discussed more in this blog post on equal). The degree to which this is relevant is unknowable (and in
PageRank Correlation. Pages with high PageRank do tend to pass on our testing, it appears to be important, but not overwhelmingly so),
more link value than those with little or none. Be careful with those
acquisition.

the last update. Potential Referral Traffic
Link building should never be solely about search engines. Links that
SEOmoz mozRank send high amounts of direct click-through traffic not only tend to
mozRank (mR) shows how popular a given web page is on the web. provide better search engine value for rankings, but also send
Pages with high mozRank (popular) scores tend to rank better. The targeted, valuable visitors to your site (the basic goal of all Internet
more links to a given page, the more popular it becomes. Links from marketing). This is something you can estimate based on the
important pages (like www.cnn.com or www.irs.gov) increase a
get access to these, services like Google Trends for Websites,
unpopular websites. Compete, Quantcast, & Alexa can give you a rough idea of at least
domain-wide traffic, from which you can estimate page-specific
popularity.
semi-popular pages or a few links from very popular pages.

SEOmoz Domain Authority
Domain authority (or DA) is a query independent measure of how
likely a domain is likely to rank for any given query. It is calculated

thousands of queries in Google.

Google blogsearch
Google Blog Search is the only property controlled by the search
giant that offers accurate backlink information. While this only

which sites/pages have earned authority and attention in the

pass.

It takes time, practice, and experience to build comfort with these variables as they

be able to determine whether your campaign is successful. Increases in search
traffic when accompanied by more frequent search engine crawling and increases
in referring link traffic correlates with a well-managed, intelligently structured
campaign. If you see traffic from engines like Bing and Yahoo! are rising while

evaluation).

The link building activities you engage
in depend largely on the type of site
Many sites offer directories or listings of relevant resources

manual link building, including
themselves to find lists of pages that offer outbound links in this fashion (for example, try
directories, link requests, and link
searching for allintitle: resources directory at Google and notice the millions of results).
exchanges may be a part of the
equation, but with larger sites, these
Get your customers to link to you tactics tend to fall flat and more
If you have partners you work with regularly or loyal customers that love your brand, you scalable solutions are required. Sample
strategies are listed here, though this is
back to your site (like Microsoft often does with their partner certification program). Just as by no means an exhaustive list (see

best way to accomplish the same feat on the web. Check out this post on link requests in order Building for a more comprehensive
confirmation emails for more. overview).

Search for sites like yours in the search
Build a company blog and make it a valuable, informative and entertaining
engines by using keywords and
resource
phrases directly relevant to your
business. When you locate sites that
recommended personally by the engineers at Google (source: USA Today & Stone Temple).
Blogs have the unique ability to contribute fresh material on a consistent basis, participate in
email them, use their online forms, call
conversations across the web, and earn listings and links from other blogs, including
them on the phone, or even send them a
blogrolls and blog directories.
letter by mail to start a conversation
about getting a link. Check out this blog
Create content that inspires viral sharing and natural linking post on email link requests for more
Peak Season detail.
Ingredient Map from Epicurious, this Interactive Graphic Explaining Hand Signals Used on
Stock Market Trading Floors from the New York Times, or this Video of an iPod in a Blender
from Blendtec. Each leverages aspects of usefulness, information dissemination, or humor to

savvy webmasters who see it will often do so through links. This high quality, editorially
earned votes are invaluable to building trust, authority, and rankings potential.

Build content that can be shared through a citation-based licensing
agreement
If you have photos, videos, graphics, charts, raw data, or text content that can be licensed out
Attribution (or Attribution-ShareAlike), you can

to your originals and your site each time someone uses your material.

An Aside on Buying Links
Google, Yahoo!, and Bing all seek to discount the influence of paid links on their search results.
While it is impossible for them to detect and discredit all paid links, the search engines put a lot of
time and resources into finding ways to detect these. This includes sending anonymous
representatives to search conferences and joining link networks so they can see who else is
involved.

As such, we at SEOmoz recommend spending your time on long term link building strategies that
focus on building links naturally. You can read more about this at this blog post.

To encourage webmasters to create sites and content in accessible ways,
each of the major search engines have built support and guidance-focused
services. Each provides varying levels of value to search marketers, but all
of them are worthy of understanding. These tools provide data points and
opportunities for exchanging information with the engines that are not
provided anywhere else.

The sections below explain the common interactive elements that each of the major search engines
support and identify why they are useful. There are enough details on each of these elements to
warrant their own articles, but for the purposes of this guide, only the most crucial and valuable
components will be discussed.

Sitemaps are a tool that enable you to give hints to the search engines
on how they can crawl your website. You can read the full details of
the protocols at Sitemaps.org. In addition, you can build your own
sitemaps at XML-Sitemaps.com. Sitemaps come in three varieties:

XML
Extensible Markup Language (Recommended Format)

This is the most widely accepted format for sitemaps. It is
extremely easy for search engines to parse and can be
produced by a plethora of sitemap generators. Additionally, it
allows for the most granular control of page parameters.

Relatively large file sizes. Since XML requires an open tag and
a close tag around each element, files sizes can get very large.

RSS Txt
Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary Text File

Easy to maintain. RSS sitemaps can easily be coded to Extremely easy. The text sitemap format is one URL per line
automatically update when new content is added. up to 50,000 lines.

Harder to manage. Although RSS is a dialect of XML, it is Does not provide the ability to add meta data to pages.
actually much harder to manage due to its updating
properties.

The robots.txt file (a product of the Robots Exclusion Protocol)

www.google.com/robots.txt). The file serves as an access guide for
automated visitors (web robots). By using robots.txt, webmasters can
indicate which areas of a site they would like to disallow bots from
crawling as well as indicate the locations of sitemaps files (discussed
below) and crawl-delay parameters. You can read more details about
this at the robots.txt Knowledge Center page.

The following commands are available:

Disallow
Prevents compliant robots from accessing specific pages or folders.

Sitemap

Crawl Delay
Indicates the speed (in milliseconds) at which a robot can crawl a
server.

An Example of Robots.txt

#Robots.txt www.example.com/robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow:

User-agent: spambot
disallow: /

sitemap:www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Warning: It is very important to realize that not all web
robots follow robots.txt. People with bad intentions (e.g., e-

protocol and in extreme cases can use it to identify the
location of private information. For this reason, it is
recommended that the location of administration sections
and other private sections of publicly accessible websites
not be included in the robots.txt. Instead, these pages can
utilize the meta robots tag (discussed next) to keep the
major search engines from indexing their high risk
content.

The meta robots tag creates page-level instructions for search engine
bots.

The meta robots tag should be included in the head section of the
HTML document.

An Example of Meta Robots

<html>
<head>
<title>The Best Webpage on the Internet</title>

</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello World</h1>
</body>
</html>

a specific web robot (ex. Googlebot) or an asterisk to

listed in the diagram to the right.

The rel=nofollow attribute creates link-level instructions for search
engine bots that suggest how the given link should be treated. While
the search engines claim to not nofollow links, tests show that they
actually do follow them for discovery new pages. These links certainly
pass less juice (and in most cases no juice) than their non-nofollowed
counterparts and as such are still a recommend for SEO purposes.

An Example of nofollow

In the example above, the value of the link would not be
passed to example.com as the rel=nofollow attribute has
been added.

Google Webmasters Tools

Settings
Geographic Target
location, webmasters can provide Google with information that will
help determine how that site appears in our country-specific search
results, and also improve Google search results for geographic
queries.

Preferred Domain

specifies a preferred domain as http://www.example.com and
Google finds a link to that site that is formatted as
Statistics
http://example.com, Google will treat that link as if it were pointing
at http://www.example.com. These statistics are a window into how Google sees a given website.
Specifically, it identifies top search queries, crawl stats, subscriber
Image Search
image search, Google may use tools such as Google Image Labeler to
associate the images included in their site with labels that will Link Data
improve indexing and search quality of those images.
This section provides details on links. Specifically, it outlines,
Crawl Rate external links, internal links and sitelinks. Sitelinks are section links
requests during the crawl process. It has no effect on how often that sometimes appear under websites when they are especially
Googlebot crawls a given site. Google determines the recommended applicable to a given query.
rate based on the number of pages on a website.
Sitemaps
Diagnostics
This is the interface for submitting and managing sitemaps directly
Web Crawl with Google
encountered when it crawls a given website. Specifically, it lists
Sitemap errors, HTTP errors, nofollowed URLs, URLs restircted by
robots.txt and URLs that time out.

Mobile Crawl
websites.

Content Analysis
unfriendly HTML elements. Specifically, it lists meta description
issues, title tag issues and non-indexable content issues.

Yahoo! Site Explorer

Features
Statistics
title tag of a homepage and number of indexed pages for the given
site.

Feeds
Yahoo! for inclusion into its index. This is mostly useful for websites
with frequently updated blogs.

Actions

especially important because Yahoo! traditionally has a lot of
difficulty differentiating dynamic URLs.

Bing Webmaster Center

Features
Profile
location of sitemaps and a form to provide contact information so
Bing can contact them if it encounters problems while crawling their
website.

Crawl Issues
errors, Robots.txt problems, long dynamic URLs, unsupported
content type and, most importantly, pages infected with malware.

Backlinks
webpages (including their own) are linking to a given website.

Outbound Links
interface allows webmasters to view all outbound pages on a given
webpage.

Keywords
their webpages are deemed relevant to specific queries.

Sitemaps
sitemaps directly to Microsoft.

Open Site Explorer
does provide similar data.

Features
Identify Powerful Links
inbound links by their metrics that help you determine which links
are most important.

Find the Strongest Linking Domains
strongest domains linking to your domain.

Analyze Link Anchor Text Distribution
show you the distribution of the text people used when linking to
you.

Head to Head Comparison View
compare two websites to see why one is outranking the other.

For more information, click below:

It is a relatively recent occurrence that search engines have
started to provide tools that allow webmasters to interact with
their search results. This is a big step forward in SEO and the
webmaster/Search Engine relationship. That said, the engines
can only go so far with helping webmaster. It is true today, and
will likely be true in the future that the ultimate responsibility of
SEO is on the marketers and webmasters. It is for this reason
that learning SEO is so important.

Unfortunately, over the past 12 years, a great number of misconceptions

these, and explain the real story behind the myths.

the optimization process. Webmasters & site owners would tag their sites & pages with
information (this would sometimes even include the keywords they wanted to rank for), and

index. For obvious reasons (manipulation, reliance on submitters, etc.), this practice was
unscalable and eventually gave way to purely crawl-based engines. Since 2001, search engine
submission has not only not been required, but is actually virtually useless. The engines have all

links from other sites, as this will expose the engines to your content naturally.

You can still see submission pages (for Yahoo!, Google, Bing), but these are remnants of time long
past, and are essentially useless to the practice of modern SEO. If you hear a pitch from an SEO

be included in their indices or rank competitively for search queries.

Once upon a time, much like search engine submission, meta tags (in Not surprisingly, a persistent myth in SEO revolves around the
particular, the meta keywords tag) were an important part of the SEO
process. You would include the keywords you wanted your site to the number of words on a page by the number of instances of a given
rank for and when users typed in those terms, your page could come
up in a query. This process was quickly spammed to death, and calculations and should therefore be a focus of SEO efforts. Despite
today, only Yahoo! among the major engines will even index content being proven untrue time and again, this farce has legs, and indeed,
from the meta keywords tag, and even they claim not to use those many SEO tools feed on the concept that keyword density is an
terms for ranking, but merely content discovery.
and with usability in mind. The value from an extra 10 instances of
It is true that other meta tags, namely the title tag and meta
your keyword on the page is far less than earning one good editorial

critical importance to SEO best practices. And, certainly, the meta
robots tag is an important tool for controlling spider access.

PPC spend will improve your organic SEO rankings (or, likewise, that lowering that spend can

been proven nor has it ever been a probable explanation for effects in the organic results. Google,
Yahoo! & Bing all have very effective walls in their organizations to prevent precisely this type of
crossover. At Google in particular, advertisers spending tens of millions of dollars each month
have noted that even they cannot get special access of consideration from the search quality or web
spam teams. So long as the existing barriers are in place and the search engines cultures maintain
their separation, we believe that this will remain a myth.

Personalization seems to primarily affect areas in which we devote Reciprocal links are of dubious value: they are easy for an algorithm
tons of time, energy and repeated queries. This means for many/most to catch and to discount. Having your own version of the Yahoo
"discovery" and early funnel searches, we're going to get very
standardized search results. It's true that it can influence some SEO.
searches significantly, but it's also true that, 90%+ of queries we
We wouldn't be concerned at all with a technically "reciprocated"
perform are unaffected (and that goes for what we hear from other
link, but we would watch out for schemes and directories that
SEOs, too). This post helps to validate this, showing that while
leverage this logic to earn their own links and promise value back to
rankings changes can be dramatic, they only happen when there's
your site in exchange. Also, watch out for those who've evolved to
substantive query volume from a user around a specific topic.
build "three-way" or "four-way" reciprocal directories such that you

attempted manipulation and there's so many relevant directories out
there; why bother!?

two reasons.

First,
Search engines have learned that users hate spam. This may seem a trivial and
obvious lesson, but in fact, many who study the field of search from a macro

advantage over the last 10 years has been their ability to control and remove spam

SEOmoz loathe to ever recommend search spam as a winnable endeavor in the long
term.

Second
Search engines have done a remarkable job identifying scalable, intelligent
methodologies for fighting manipulation and making it dramatically more difficult to
adversely impact their intended algorithms. Concepts like TrustRank (which

more, along with specific implementations like the Google Sandbox, penalties for
directories, reduction of value for paid links, combating footer links, etc. have all

This guide is not intended to show off specific spam tactics (either those that no longer
work or are still practiced), but, due to the large number of sites that get penalized,
banned or flagged and seek help, we will cover the various factors the engines use to
identify spam so as to help SEO practitioners avoid problems. For additional details
about spam from the engines, see ,
Content Quality Guidelines & .

Search engines perform spam analysis across individual pages and entire websites (domains).
URL level.

One of the most obvious and unfortunate spamming techniques, keyword stuffing, involves
littering numerous repetitions of keyword terms or phrases into a page in order to make it appear

looking at thousands of the top search results across different queries have found that keyword
repetitions (or keyword density) appear to play an extremely limited role in boosting rankings,
and have a low overall correlation with top placement.

The engines have very obvious and effective ways of fighting this. Scanning a page for stuffed

their web spam team - SEO Tip: Avoid Keyword Stuffing.

One of the most popular forms of web spam, manipulative link acquisition relies on the search

metrics and improve visibility. This is one of the most difficult forms of spamming for the search
engines to overcome because it can come in so many forms. A few of the many ways manipulative
links can appear include:

Reciprocal link exchange programs, wherein sites create link pages that point back and forth
to one another in an attempt to inflate link popularity. The engines are very good at spotting
and devaluing these as they fit a very particular pattern.

low value websites are built or maintained purely as link sources to artificially inflate
popularity. The engines combat these through numerous methods of detecting connections
between site registrations, link overlap or other common factors.

Paid links, where those seeking to earn higher rankings buy links from sites and pages willing
to place a link in exchange for funds. These sometimes evolve into larger networks of link
buyers and sellers, and although the engines work hard to stop them (and Google in
particular has taken dramatic actions), they persist in providing value to many buyers &
sellers (see this post on paid links for more on that perspective and this post from Search
Engine Land on the official word from Google & other engines).

Low quality directory links are a frequent source of manipulation for many in the SEO field.
A large number of pay-for-placement web directories exist to serve this market and pass
themselves off as legitimate with varying degrees of success. Google often takes action
against these sites by removing the PageRank score from the toolbar (or reducing it

There are many more manipulative link building tactics that the search engines have identified
and, in most cases, found algorithmic methods of reducing their impact. As new spam systems
(like this new reciprocal link cloaking scheme uncovered by Avvo Marketing Manager Conrad
Saam) emerge, engineers will continue to fight them with targeted algorithms, human reviews and
the collection of spam reports from webmasters & SEOs.

accomplished in any number of ways and for a variety of reasons, both positive and negative. In

positive user experience reasons. For more on the subject of cloaking and the levels of risks
associated with various tactics and intents, see this post, White Hat Cloaking, from Rand Fishkin.

including it in their web indices and search results. The most commonly filtered types of pages are
affiliate content (pages whose material is used on dozens or hundreds of other sites promoting the
same product/service), duplicate content (pages whose content is a copy of or extremely similar to
other pages already in the index), and dynamically generated content pages that provide very little
unique text or value (this frequently occurs on pages where the same products/services are
described for many different geographies with little content segmentation). The engines are
generally against including these pages and use a variety of content and link analysis algorithms to

In addition to watching individual pages for spam, engines can also identify traits and properties
across entire root domains or subdomains that could flag them as spam signals. Obviously,

greater scalability is required.

Just as with individual pages, the engines can monitor the kinds of links and quality of referrals
sent to a website. Sites that are clearly engaging in the manipulative activities described above on a
consistent or seriously impacting way may see their search traffic suffer, or even have their sites
Widgetbait
Gone Wild, What Makes a Good Directory and Why Google Penalized Dozens of Bad Ones,
, and
And, an Example from the Field of Real Estate.

Websites that earn trusted status are often treated differently from
those who have not. In fact, many SEOs have commented on the uniqueness and the experience it provides to search visitors, so too
does this principle apply to entire domains. Sites that primarily serve
importance sites vs. newer, independent sites. For the search non-unique, non-valuable content may find themselves unable to
engines, trust most likely has a lot to do with the links your domain rank, even if classic on and off page factors are performed acceptably.
has earned (see these videos on Using Trust Rank to Guide Your Link
Building and How the Link Graph Works for more). Thus, if you Amazon affiliate websites filling up their index, and thus take
publish low quality, duplicate content on your personal blog, then algorithmic and manual review methods to prevent this.

considerable ranking problems. However, if you were to post that
same content to a page on Wikipedia and get those same spammy
links to point to that URL, it would likely still rank tremendously well

Trust built through links is also a great methodology for the engines
to employ in considering new domains and analyzing the activities of
a site. A little duplicate content and a few suspicious links are far
more likely to be overlooked if your site has earned hundreds of links
from high quality, editorial sources like CNN.com, LII.org,
Cornell.edu, and similarly reputable players. On the flip side, if you
have yet to earn high quality links, judgments may be far stricter
from an algorithmic view.

It can be tough to know if your site/page actually has a penalty or if things have changed, either in

Before you assume a penalty, check for the following:

advice.

Errors
Errors on your site that may have inhibited or prevented crawling.

Changes
Changes to your site or pages that may have changed the way search engines view your content.
(on-page changes, internal link structure changes, content moves, etc.)

Similarity

engines update ranking algorithms, link valuation and importance can shift, causing ranking
movements.

uncanny in helping us identify spam penalties or mistaken flagging for spam by the
engines and separating those from basic ranking drops. This page from Google
(and the embedded Youtube video) may also provide value on this topic.

The task of requesting re-consideration or re-inclusion in the engines is painful and often

However, it is important to know what to do in the event of a penalty or banning.

Hence, the following recommendations:

Webmaster Tools service ( , , ). This manipulation on your own site (over-optimized internal
registration creates an additional layer of trust and linking, keyword stuffing, etc.), get it off before you
connection between your site and the webmaster teams. submit your request.

Make sure to thoroughly review the data in your
Webmaster Tools accounts, from broken pages to server months, and re-inclusion itself, if it happens, is a lengthy
or crawl errors to warnings or spam alert messages. process. Hundreds (maybe thousands) of sites are
penalized every week, so you can imagine the backlog the
penalty is, in fact, related to accessibility issues. webmaster teams encounter.

Send your re-consideration/re-inclusion request through If you run a large, powerful brand on the web, re-
inclusion can be faster by going directly to an individual
source at a conference or event. Engineers from all of the
better chance of hearing back. engines regularly participate in search industry
conferences (SMX, SES, Pubcon, etc.), and the cost of a
Full disclosure is critical to getting consideration. If ticket can easily outweigh the value of being re-included
more quickly than a standard request might take.

to you, etc. The engines, particularly Google, want the

view you as dishonest, corrupt or simply incorrigible
(and fail to ever respond).

Be aware that with the search engines, lifting a penalty is not
their obligation or responsibility. Legally (at least, so far), they
have the right to include or reject any site/page for any reason
(or no reason at all). Inclusion is a privilege, not a right, so be

That which can be measured can be improved, and in search engine
optimization, measurement is critical to success. Professional SEOs track
data about rankings, referrals, links and more to help analyze their
campaigns and create road maps for success.

Although every business is unique and every website has different metrics that matter, the

may not be included. For a more comprehensive look at web analytics overall, check out Choosing
Web Analytics Key Performance Indicators Web Analytics Blog.

traffic source for your site. Broadly, these include:

Direct Navigation (type in traffic, bookmarks, email links
without tracking codes, etc.)

Referral Traffic (from links across the web or in trackable email,
promotion & branding campaign links)

Search Engines (queries that sent traffic from any major or
minor web search engine)

Knowing the percentage and exact numbers will help you identify
strengths and weaknesses and serve as a comparison over time for
trend data. If, for example, you see that traffic has spiked
dramatically but it comes from referral links with low relevance while

much more trouble than the raw numbers would suggest. You should
use this data to track your marketing efforts and to serve as a broad
measurement for your traffic acquisition efforts.

Three major engines make up 95%+ of all search traffic in the US
(Yahoo!, Bing & Google), and for most countries outside the US (with
the notable exceptions of Russia, China, Japan, Korea & the Czech
Republic) 80%+ of search traffic comes solely from Google.
Measuring the contribution of your search traffic from each engine is
critical for several reasons:

Compare Performance vs. Market Share

able to see exactly the contribution level of each engine in accordance
with its estimated market share. Keep in mind that in sectors like
technology and Internet services, demand is likely to be higher on
Google (given its younger, more tech-savvy demographic) than in
arenas like cooking, sports or real estate (where the percentages
might be closer to the estimates from firms like Comscore).

Get Visibility Into Potential Drops
If your search traffic should drop significantly at any point, knowing
the relative and exact contributions from each engine will be
essential to diagnosing the issue. If all the engines drop off equally,
the problem is almost certainly one of accessibility. If Google drops

penalty or devaluation of your SEO efforts by that singular engine.

Uncover Strategic Value

greater positive results on some engines than others. For example,
we frequently notice that on-page optimization tactics like better
keyword inclusion and targeting has more benefit with Bing & Yahoo!
than Google, while gaining specific anchor text links from a large
number of domains has a more positive impact on Google than the
others. If you can identify the tactics that are having success with one

how to focus your efforts.

If you find your site underperforming at one of the engines (based on

that search engines have demographics and biases just like any other

worked with (and those reported by our friends and colleagues in the
search marketing industry) show that 80-85% of traffic share from
Google is actually far more common. 1.
more informational

2. Many experts believe (and some have private data to
suggest that) Yahoo! has a preference for sites
participating in their paid inclusion program

3.
properties (Google, meanwhile, seems to have a similar
love affair with Wikipedia)
investigate. You can do this by running PPC ads on the various
engines (and comparing impression data), checking rankings across
the engines (if your Yahoo! rankings are just as good or better than

listings at Google, but forgetting to use NOYDIR at Yahoo!, etc.).

The terms & phrases that send traffic are another important piece of

basis to help identify new trends in keyword demand, gauge your
performance on key terms and find terms that are bringing

accomplish their goal).

You may also find value in tracking search referral counts for terms

valuable to your business. If the trend lines are pointing in the wrong
direction, you know efforts need to be undertaken to course correct.
Search traffic worldwide has consistently risen over the past 15 years,

seasonality issues (keywords that are only in demand certain times of
the week/month/year) and rankings (have you dropped, or has
search volume ebbed).

When it comes to the bottom line for your organization, few metrics
matter as much as conversion. However, analytics often misstates the
impact of conversion rates from the last referral, clouding the true

the graphic to the right, 4.46% of visitors who reached SEOmoz with

how many of those visitors had already signed up, how many signed
up during a later visit, or even what percentage of those visits were
first-time visitors.

The real value from this sort of simplistic tracking comes from the

visitors who convert and increasing focus on both rankings and
traffic from that keyword referral as well as improving the landing
pages that visitors reach. While conversion rate tracking from

story. Dig deeper and you can often uncover far more interesting and
applicable data about how conversion starts and ends on your site.

Knowing the number of pages that receive search engine traffic is an
essential metric for monitoring overall SEO performance. From this
number, we can get a glimpse into indexation (how many pages the
engines are keeping in their indices from our site), and, more
importantly, watch trends over time. For most large websites
(50,000+ pages), mere inclusion is essential to earning traffic, and

failure. As you work on issues like site architecture, link acquisition,
XML Sitemaps, uniqueness of content and meta data, etc. the trend
line should rise, showing that more and more pages are earning their

possibly, the best long tail metric around.

While other analytics data points are also of great importance, those
mentioned above should be universally applied to get the maximum
value from your SEO campaigns.

Additional Sources:

SEO Metrics that matter
NetConcepts)

Advanced Google Analytics Tips for SEO, Part I, II,
and III (from Huomah)

The Right Tools for the Job

Omniture Yahoo! Web Analytics
(formerly Indextools)
Fireclick
Google Analytics
Mint
Clicky Web Analytics
Sawmill Analytics
Piwik Open Source Analysis
Clicktale
Woopra Website Tracking
Enquisite
AWStates
Coremetrics

Lyris / Clicktracks
While choosing can be tough, at the time of publication, our top
Unica Affinium NetInsight recommendation is for Google Analytics (so long as you have few

closely by Clicky. Yahoo! Web Analytics also has a solution worth
Additional Sources: considering. If you cannot use tracking code on your web pages and
How to choose a Web Analytics Solution need a log-file based solution, AWStats is our top recommendation,
Eisenberg way back in 2003 (but still a relevant and quality though any log file based tracking will suffer from the inability to
piece) track clickstream paths, first time vs. referring and other important
metrics as accurately as cookie/session based software.
A Complete Guide to Web Analytics Solutions
ConversionRater.com in 2006 (some data, such as seperation of
Omniture vs. WebSideStory, is less relevant today)

No matter which analytics software you decide is right for you, we also strongly
recommend testing different versions of pages on your site and making conversion
rate improvements based on the results. Testing pages on your site can be as
simple as using a free tool to test two versions of a page header or as complex as
using an expensive multivariate software to simultaneously test hundreds of

to put a first toe in the testing waters, one free, easy to use solution we recommend

inform powerful conversion rate improvements.

Search Engine Optimization
In organic SEO, it can be difficult to track the specific elements of the

is it even well-researched. However, a combination of tactics have
become best practices, and new data is constantly emerging to help
track direct ranking elements and positive/negative ranking signals.
The data points covered below are ones that we will occasionally
recommend to track campaigns and have proven to add value when
used in concert with analytics.

provide some insight through publicly available queries and
competitive intelligence. Below is a list of queries/tools /metrics
from the engines, along with their respective applications.

Employing these queries & tools effectively requires that you have an

valuable unless you have a plan of what to change/build/do once you
learn what you need to know (this holds true for competitive analysis
as well).

Google Site Query
e.g., site:seomoz.org
indexed on a particular domain. You can expand the value by adding

fluctuates, its is still a good rough measurement. You can read more
about this on this blog post.

Google Trends
Available at Google.com/Trends

account, you can also get specific numbers on the charts, rather than
just trend lines.

Google Trends for Websites
Available at Trends.Google.com/websites

data, analytics and others may be part of this). A logged in user
account will show numbers in the chart to indicate estimated traffic
levels.

Google Insights for Search
Available at google.com/insights/search
data about regional usage, popularity and related queries for
keywords.

Yahoo! Site Query Bing Site Query

e.g., site:seomoz.org e.g., site:seomoz.org
queries to show the number and list of pages in their index from a
queries that include additional parameters such as site:seomoz.org
and massive inaccuracy, often rendering the counts themselves
these much in the same way as the Google site query to see the useless.
number and list of pages Yahoo! has in their index for a particular
site. Bing IP Query
e.g., ip:216.176.191.233
Yahoo! Link & Linkdomain Queries
e.g., linkdomain:seomoz.org useful in identifying shared hosting and seeing what other sites are
redirect to Yahoo! Site Explorer unless additional parameters are hosted on a given IP address.
employed. For example, to see only links to SEOmoz.org that have
Microsoft AdCenter Labs
Available at adlab.microsoft.com/alltools.aspx
most robust and accurate of the major engines, but do include variety of keyword research and audience intelligence tools are
provided by Microsoft, primarily for search and display advertising.
trouble separate value-passing links).
they are worth investigating and many can be applied to SEO.

Ask Site Query Blog Search Link Query

e.g., site:seomoz.org inurl:www e.g., link:www.seomoz.org/blog
requirements around use of the site query operator. To function web search link command is not always useful, their blog search link
properly, an additional query must be used (although generic queries query shows generally high quality data and can be sorted by date
range and relevance. You can read more about this on this blog post.
would normally return).

Page Specific Metrics Domain Specific Metrics
Page Authority Domain Authority
page to rank well, regardless of its content. The higher the Page page will rank on a domain. The higher the Domain Authority, the
Authority, the greater the potential for that individual page to rank. greater the potential for an individual page on that domain to rank
well.
mozRank mozRank
scaled 10-point measure of global link authority (or popularity). Domain mozRank
mozRank is very similar in purpose to the measures of static popularity of a given domain compared to all other domains on the
importance (which means importance independent of a specific web. DmR is computed for both subdomains and root domains. This
metric uses the same algorithm as mozRank but applies it to the

global link authority ahead of pages with lower authority. Because domains as a whole and ignores individual pages) Viewing the web
measures like mozRank are global and static, this ranking power form this perspective offers additional insight about the general
applies to a broad range of search queries, rather than pages authority of a domain. Just as pages can endorse other pages, a link
optimized specifically for a particular keyword. which crosses domain boundaries (e.g., from a page on
searchengineland.com to a page on www.seomoz.org) can be seen as
mozTrust mozTrust is distributed through links.
endorsement by one domain for another.

metric. (These include the homepages of major international Domain mozTrust
university, media and governmental websites.) Websites that earn domain level (Domain-level mozRank), so can mozTrust. Domain-
links from the seed set are than able to cast (lesser) trust-votes level mozTrust is like mozTrust but instead of being calculated
through their links. This process continues across the web and the between web pages, it calculated between entire domains. New or
poorly linked-to pages on highly trusted domains may inherit some
from the original trusted seed site. natural trust by virtue of being hosted on the trusted domain.
Domain-Level mozTrust is expressed on a 10-point logarithmic
# of Links
scale.
to this page. For example, if the Library of Congress homepage
# of Links
homepage (http://www.whitehouse.gov) in both the page content the domain. For example, if http://www.loc.gov/index.html and

homepage (http://www.whitehouse.gov) in both the page content the domain. For example, if http://www.loc.gov/index.html and
and the footer, this would still be counted as only a single link. http://www.loc.gov/about both contained links to
http://www.nasa.gov, this would count as two links to the domain.
# of Linking Root Domains
domains that contain a link to this page. For example, if # of Linking Root Domains
topics.nytimes.com and www.nytimes.com both linked to the that contain at least one page with a link to any page on this site. For
homepage of SEOmoz (http://www.seomoz.org), this would count as example, if http://www.loc.gov/index.html and
only a single linking root domain. http://www.loc.gov/about both contained links to
http://www.nasa.gov, this would count as only a single linking root
External mozRank
domain to nasa.gov.
(ranking power) of both internal and external links, external
mozRank measures only the amount of mozRank flowing through
external links (links located on a separate domain). Because external
links can play an important role as independent endorsements,
external mozRank is an important metric for predicting search
engine rankings.

To Your Campaign

sample of some of the most common directional signals provided by
tracking data points and how to respond with actions to improve or
execute on opportunities.

In Search Engine Page and Link Count Numbers

and thus we strongly recommend not getting too worried about
fluctuations showing massive increases or decreases unless they are
accompanied by traffic drops. For example, on any given day, Yahoo!
reports between 800,000 and 2 million links to the SEOmoz.org

these numbers reports provide little guidance about our actual link
growth or shrinkage.

If you do see significant drops in links or pages indexed accompanied
by similar traffic referral drops from the search engines, you may be
experiencing a real loss of link juice (check to see if important links
that were previously sending traffic/rankings boosts still exist) or a
loss of indexation due to penalties, hacking, malware, etc. A
thorough analysis using your own web analytics and
Webmaster Tools can help to identify potential problems.

1.
quality or terms of service guidelines. Check out this post
Search Traffic from a Single Engine on how to identify/handle a search engine penalty.

2.
crawler. Double-check your robots.txt file and meta
robots tags and review the Webmaster Tools for that
engine to see if any issues exist.

3. That engine has changed their ranking algorithm in a
fashion that no longer favors your site. Most frequently,
this happens because links pointing to your site have
been devalued in some way, and is especially prevalent
for sites that engage in manual link building campaigns
of low-moderate quality links.

Search Traffic from Multiple Engines

This could be something in the robots.txt or meta robots tags, a problem with hosting/uptime, a
DNS resolution issue or a number of other technical breakdowns. Talk to your system
administrator, developers and/or hosting provider and carefully review your Webmaster Tools
accounts and analytics to help determine potential causes.

Ranking Fluctuations
Gaining or losing rankings for a particular term/phrase or even several happens millions of times
a day to millions of pages and is generally nothing to be concerned about. Ranking algorithms With large drops, be wary against
fluctuate, competitors gain and lose links (and on-page optimization tactics) and search engines
making a judgment call until at least a
even flux between indices (and may sometimes even make mistakes in their crawling, inclusion or
few days have past. If you run a new site
ranking processes). When a dramatic rankings decrease occurs, you might want to carefully review
on-page elements for any signs of over-optimization or violation of guidelines (cloaking, keyword or are in the process of link acquisition
stuffing, etc.) and check to see if links have recently been gained or lost. Note that with sudden and active marketing, these sudden
spikes in rankings for new content, a temporary period of high visibility followed by a dramatic spikes and drops are even more
common, so simply be prepared and

Increases in Link Metrics Without Rankings Increases

acquisition, etc. they can expect instant results. This, sadly, is not the case. Particularly for new

earning lots of great links is not a sure recipe to instantly reach the top. Remember that the

Contributors
We would like to extend a very heartfelt thank you to all of the people who contributed to this guide:

Urban Influence (Seattle Brand Studio)

Linda Jenkinson

Tom Critchlow

Will Critchlow

Dr. Pete

Hamlet Batista

chuckallied

lorisa

identity

Pat Sexton

SeoCatfish

David LaFerney

Kimber

g1smd

Steph Woods

robbothan

RandyP

bookworm seo

Sam Niccolls

Danny Dover

and Rand Fishkin

SEOMoz - The Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization

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