Figuring out how much people spend

The fact of the matter is that people spend money on the Internet in increasing numbers. It’s frightfully easy: All you need is a credit card, a computer with an Internet connection, and something that you've been thinking about buying. The U.S. Commerce Department reports that in 2014, e-commerce spending in the United States was over $300 billion (https://www.internetretailer.com/2015/02/17/us-annual-e-retail-sales-surpass-300-billion-first-ti). Combine that with the fact that Americans spend an average of 5 to 6 minutes of every hour online doing online shopping, and you’re looking at a viable means of moving your product. To put it simply, “There’s gold in them thar hills!”

So, now you need to get people to your website. In real estate, the most important thing is location, location, location. On the web, instead of having a prime piece of property, you need a high listing on the search engine results page (SERP). Your placement in these results is referred to as your ranking. You have a few options when it comes to achieving good rankings. One, you can make your page the best it can be and hope that people will find it in the section of the search results normally referred to as the organic rankings; or two, you can pay to appear in one of the advertising slots, identified on the search results page as ads. In the middle of 2014, it was projected that by the end of the year, marketers would spend more than $135 billion on Internet ads worldwide (http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Digital-Ad-Spending-Worldwide-Hit-3613753-Billion-2014/1010736).

While paying for ads is one way to get your business in front of Internet users, search engine optimization (SEO), when properly done, helps you to design your website in such a way that when a user does a search, your pages appear in the unpaid (that is, organic) results, in a top spot, you hope. Your main focus in this book is finding out about SEO, but because there is some overlap, you pick up a bit of paid search marketing knowledge here and there along the way.

Knowing your demographics

In order to get the most bang for your SEO buck, you need to know the demographics of your web visitors. You need to know who’s looking for you, because you need to know how best to promote yourself. For example, if you’re selling dog sweaters, advertising in biker bars is probably not a great idea. Sure, there might be a few Billy Bob Skullcrushers with a cute little Chihuahua in need of a cashmere shrug, but statistically, your ad would probably do much better in a beauty salon. The same goes for your website in a search engine. Gender, age, and income are just a few of the metrics that you want to track in terms of identifying your audience. Search engine users include slightly more male than female users across the board. Of the major search engines, Bing attracts the smallest percentage of users over the age of 55. Search engines even feed their results into other search engines, as you can see in our handy-dandy Search Engine Relationship Chart in the section “Understanding the Search Engines: They’re a Community,” later in this chapter. Table 1-1 breaks down user demographics across the three most popular search engines for your reference.

These broad statistics are just a start. You need to know who your search engine visitors are, because demographic data helps you effectively target your desired market. This demographic distribution is often associated with search query keywords. Think of your keywords as the words that best indicate what your website content is about and that search engine visitors might use to search for what your website offers. A search engine looks for these keywords when figuring out which web pages to show on the SERP. (For an in-depth look at choosing keywords, check out Book II, Chapter 2.) Basically, your keywords are the words searchers might actually use in a search query — what they type (or speak) into a search engine — or what the engine thinks the searcher intended to search for. If you are searching for something like information on customizing classic cars, for example, you might type [classic custom cars] into the search field. (Note: Throughout the book, we use square brackets to show the search query. You don’t actually type the brackets into the search field.) Figure 1-1 displays a typical search engine results page for the query [classic custom cars].

Simply put, the search engine goes to work combing its index for web pages about these keywords and returns with the results it thinks will best satisfy you. As a website creator, therefore, if you have a product that’s geared toward a certain age bracket, toward women more than men, or toward any other demographic, you can tailor your keywords accordingly. You want to choose keywords that appeal to the right audience. For example, on the classic custom cars website, you might say convertible, open-air, top-down, roadster, drop top, or rag top (all synonyms for convertible), depending on which terms people in your target demographic use. It may seem inconsequential, but trust us, this is important if you want to be ranked well for targeted searches.

Research

Most people who use a search engine for research purposes. They are generally looking for answers, or at least for data with which to make a decision. They're looking to find a site to fulfill a specific purpose. Someone doing a term paper on classic cars for his or her Automotive History 101 class would use a search engine to find websites with statistics on the number of cars sold in the United States, instructions for restoring and customizing old cars, and possibly communities of classic car fanatics out there. Companies would use a search engine to find websites their clients commonly visit and even to find out who their competition is.

Search engines are naturally drawn to information-rich, research-oriented sites and usually consider them more relevant than shopping-oriented sites, which is why a lot of the time the highest listing for the average query is a Wikipedia page. Wikipedia.com is an open-source online reference site that has a lot of searchable information, tightly cross-linked with millions of links from other websites (backlinks). Open source means that anyone can have access to the text and edit it. Wikipedia is practically guaranteed to have a high ranking on the strength of its site architecture alone. (We go over site architecture in depth in Book IV.) Wikipedia is an open-source project; thus, information should be taken with a grain of salt as there is no guarantee of accuracy. This brings us to an important lesson of search engines — they base “authority” on the quality of your content and the quality, relevance, and quantity of other sites linking to your site — that's what positions your site as an authority in the eyes of the search engine. Accuracy of information is not one of their criteria; notability is. Search engines are prone to confusing popularity with expertise, though they are improving in this area.

In order to take advantage of research queries, you need to gear your site content toward things that would be of interest to a researcher. In-depth how-to articles, product comparisons and reviews, and free information are all things that attract researchers to your site.

Shopping

Many people use a search engine to shop. After the research cycle is over, search queries change to terms that reflect a buying mindset. Phrases like “best price” and “free shipping” signal a searcher in need of a point of purchase. Optimizing your web page to meet the needs of that type of visitor results in higher conversions (actions taken by a user who meets a sales or business goal) for your site. As we mention in the preceding section, global search engines such as Google tend to reward research-oriented sites, so your pages have to strike a balance between sales-oriented terms and research-oriented terms.

Although Google and Bing do integrate products right into their regular search results, shopping is where specialized engines also come into the picture. Although you can use a regular search engine to find what it is you’re shopping for, some people find it more efficient to use a search engine geared directly toward buying products. Some websites out there are actually search engines just for shopping. Amazon.com, eBay, Alibaba, and Shopping.com are all examples of shopping-only engines. And Google has its own shopping platform called Google Shopping. When you type in a query for the particular item you are looking for, your results include the actual item instead of websites where the item is sold. For example, say you’re buying a book on Amazon.com. You type the title into the search bar, and it returns a page of results. Now, you have the option of either buying it directly from Amazon.com, or, if you’re on a budget, clicking over to the used book section. Booksellers provide Amazon.com with a list of their used stock, and Amazon.com handles all the purchasing, shipping, and ordering info. With shopping searches on Bing and Google, all those results can also be shown, mixed in with ads, so you can jump to Amazon.com, eBay, or Mike’s Bookshop just as easily. And as with all things on the Internet, odds are that somebody, somewhere, has exactly what you’re looking for. Figure 1-2 displays a results page from a Google Shopping search.

Entertainment

Research and shopping aren't the only reasons to visit a search engine. The Internet is a vast, addictive, reliable resource for consuming your entire afternoon, and lots of users out there start with the search engines to find ways of entertaining themselves. They look up things like videos, movie trailers, games, and social networking sites. Technically, it’s also research, but it’s research used strictly for entertainment purposes. A child of the ’80s might want to download an old-school version of the Oregon Trail video game onto her computer so she can recall the heady days of third grade. It's a quest made easy with a quick search on Google. Or if you want to find out what those wacky young Hollywood starlets are up to, you can turn to a search engine to bring you what you need.

If you’re looking for a video, odds are it’s going to be something from YouTube, much like your research results are going to include a Wikipedia page. YouTube is another excellent example of a site that achieves high listings on results pages, especially in Google (which owns YouTube). This immensely popular video-sharing website enables people with a camera and a working email address to upload videos of themselves doing just about anything, from talking about their day to shaving their cats. The videos themselves have keyword-rich listings in order to be easily located in video searches, plus videos show up in regular web search results as well, so videos provide lots of ranking opportunities. Many major companies have jumped on the YouTube bandwagon, creating channels for their companies (a YouTube channel is a specific account housing many videos). Record companies use channels to promote bands, production companies use them to unleash the official trailers for their upcoming movies, and even your business can produce videos that can be seen by searchers everywhere (not just in a theater near you).

The advantage of an SEO-compliant site

Having an SEO-compliant website entails tailoring your website so that it follows search engine guidelines and communicates clearly what it’s about and in a way search engines can understand. Basically, you want search engine spiders to easily digest all the juicy content in your website and not find any red flags along the way. Communicating well with search engines includes optimizing your page titles and metadata (the page title, description tag and keywords tag are collectively known as metadata) so that they contain (but aren’t stuffed with) relevant keywords for your subject. Also, make sure that your web pages contain searchable text and not just pretty Flash animations and images (because search engines have limited capability to understand non-text content), and that all your images contain an Alt attribute (a description of an image) with brief text that describes the content of the image. You also need to be sure that all your internal content as well as your links are organized in a hierarchical manner that allows both search engines and users to easily understand what a site is about. You want to be sure to optimize every single one of these elements. Use this list (individual items are covered later in this book) to get yourself organized:

• Title tag
• Meta Description tag
• Meta Keywords tag
• Heading tag(s)
• Textual content
• Alt attributes on all images
• Fully qualified links
• Sitemaps (both XML and HTML, as explained in Book VI)
• Text navigation
• Canonical elements
• Structured data markup
• URL structure (file naming, limiting parameters)
• Ordered and unordered lists
• JavaScript/CSS externalized
• Robots text (.txt) file
• Web analytics
• Keyword research (technically a process — see Book II)
• Link development
• Image names
• Privacy statement
• Contact information
• Dedicated IP address

Defining a clear subject theme

Another way of getting a high keyword ranking is having a clear subject-matter theme to the site. If you’re selling kits to customize classic cars, keeping your website focused on the topic of classic car customization not only makes it easier for users to navigate your site and research or purchase what they need, but it also increases your credibility and your chances of ranking for related keyword queries. Search engine spiders are programs that crawl the World Wide Web to search for and index data. The more similarly themed keywords you have on your pages, the better. It’s the nature of a search engine to break up a site into subjects that add up to an overall theme for easy categorization, and the more obvious your site theme is, the higher your results will be.

It’s kind of like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet and deciding you want to get a salad. You, the search engine, immediately go to the salad corner of the buffet because it’s been clearly labeled, and from there, you can do your breakdowns. You want romaine lettuce, croutons, parmesan cheese, and Caesar dressing, so you go to where they keep the lettuce, the trimmings, and the dressings in the salad bar section. It’s easy to find what you want if everything is grouped accordingly. But if the restaurant stuck the dressing over with the mashed potatoes, you’d have trouble finding it because salad dressing and potatoes don’t normally go together. Similarly, when you keep your website content organized with everything in its proper place, the search engine views your content with clarity, understanding what you're about — which in turn improves your credibility as an expert and gives you a better chance to rank. Siloing is a way of structuring your content and navigational links in order to present a clear subject-matter theme to the search engines. For more on this technique, refer to Book II, Chapter 4 as well as the entirety of Book VI.

Focusing on consistency

Methodical consistent implementation is the principle that says that when you update your website, you should do it the same way every time. Your site should have a consistent look and feel over time without massive reorganizations at every update. In order for a search engine to maintain efficiency, you need to keep related content all placed in the same area.

It is confusing to customers to have things constantly changing around. Search engines and visitors to your website face the same challenge as a restaurant patron. Getting back to our salad bar analogy from the preceding section, the restaurant owner shouldn’t scatter the salad dressings according to the whims of his buffet designer, randomly moving things every time he gets in a new topping or someone discontinues one of the old dressings.

You also need to keep all your updating processes consistent. That way, if something goes wrong during your next update, you can pinpoint what went wrong where without too much hassle, since you update things the same way every time.

Building for the long term

You need to consider your persistence for the long term. How long will your website be sticking around? Ideally, as with any business, you want to build it to last without letting it fall behind and look dated. Relevancy to the current market is a big part of this, and if your site is behind the times, it’s probably behind your competitors. The technology that you use to build your website is inevitably going to change as the Internet advances, but your approach to relevancy should remain the same, incorporating new technologies as they arise. In the early days of the web, for example, frames were used to build sites, but that looks very outdated now. A few years ago, splash pages (introductory pages, mostly built in Flash and providing little content or value to the user) were very popular. Today, they are discouraged because the search engines cannot typically see much of the content behind the Flash programming and therefore don't know what the page is about. Web developers and designers should use code that is compatible with the search engines. The Internet is an ever-changing entity, and if you’re not persistent about keeping up with the times, you might fall by the wayside.

Looking at search results: Apples and oranges

One more thing to know about search results: There are two main types. Figure 1-4 points out that a search engine can show these two different types of results simultaneously:

• Organic search results are the web page listings that search engines find most relevant to the user’s search query and perceived intent. SEO focuses on getting your website ranked high in the organic search results (also called natural results).
• Paid results are basically advertisements. — the website owners have paid to have their web pages and products display for certain keywords, so these listings show up when someone runs a search containing those keywords. (For more on the whys and hows of paid results, you can read about pay per click advertising in Chapter 4 of this minibook.)

On a search results page, you can tell paid results from organic search results because search engines set apart the paid listings, putting them above or to the right of the primary results, giving them a shaded background or border lines, labeling the column as “ads” or “sponsored,” or providing other visual clues. Figure 1-4 shows the difference between paid listings and organic results.

Typical web users might not realize they’re looking at apples and oranges when they get their search results. Knowing the difference enables a searcher to make a better informed decision about the relevancy of a result. Additionally, because the paid results are advertising, they may actually be more useful to a shopping searcher than a researcher (remembering that search engines favor research results).

How do they get all that data?

Okay, so how do they do it? How do search engines keep track of everything and pop up results so fast? Behold the wonder of technology!

Gathering the data is the first step. An automated process (known as spidering) constantly crawls the Internet, gathering web-page data into servers. Google calls its spider Googlebot; you could refer to the data-gathering software processes as spiders, robots, bots, or crawlers, but they’re all the same thing. Whatever you call them, they pull in masses of raw data and do so repeatedly. This is why changes to your website might be seen within a day or might take up to a few weeks to be reflected in search engine results.

In the second step, search engines have to index the data to make it usable. Indexing is the process of taking the raw data and categorizing it, removing duplicate information, and generally organizing it all into an accessible structure (think filing cabinet versus paper pile).

For each query performed by a user, the search engines apply an algorithm — basically a math equation (formula) that weighs various criteria about a web page and generates a ranking result — to decide which listings to display and in what order. The algorithms might be fairly simple or multilayered and complex.

At industry conferences, Google representatives have said that their algorithm analyzes more than 200 variables to determine a web page’s search ranking to a given query. You’re probably thinking, “What are their variables?” Google won’t say exactly (and neither will the other engines), and that’s what makes SEO a challenge. But we can make educated guesses.

So, can you design a website that gets the attention of all the search engines? The answer is yes, to an extent, but it’s a bit of an art. This is the nuts and bolts of SEO, and what we attempt to explain in this book.