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Slide 1: Welcome First in Google! Myths and Best Practices Sound check… You can listen to this webinar by dialling: + 1 650 429 3300 Of course… The slides will be available The session will be recorded We’ll email you links to these resources To get the most… Ask questions anytime via the WebEx Q&A window 1 ©2005 GS1
Slide 2: Welcome Joe Horwood Webmaster GS1 Global Office joe.horwood@gs1.org Frederik Van Outryve Search Expert DotProjects frederik.vanoutryve@dotprojects.be 2 ©2005 GS1
Slide 3: Goals SEO means Search Engine Optimisation Creating your web pages so that they are ranked highly by search engines • Inspire you that SEO is important • Give you the tools to start doing SEO • Help you to participate in the "Winning on the Web" project 3 ©2005 GS1
Slide 4: Overview • Why SEO? Business reasons • What is SEO? Scope • How do you do SEO? Tools 4 ©2005 GS1
Slide 5: Why SEO? • People use search engines to find information • 400m search queries on Google per day • Key players: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft • • Bad for our business if we are not found Good for our business if we are found • Site visitors = value • Acquisition and retention • Search engine visitors are pre-qualified leads, they are already searching for our products & services! Remember: quality of visits is more important than quantity ©2005 GS1 • 5
Slide 6: What is SEO? • Search Engine Marketing • Search Engine Optimisation: creating your website so that it is • • ranked highly by search engines Search Engine Advertising (e.g. Google Adwords) Black hat SEO: making changes to a website that only improve search engine ranking, not user experience White hat SEO: making changes to a website that only improve search engine ranking and user experience • 6 ©2005 GS1
Slide 7: Myths about SEO • • • • • • You can pay to get to the top positions in Google Repeating a keyword many times will increase your ranking Resubmitting pages will increase your ranking Automated submission can improve your ranking Link farms help you to get a lot of incoming links White text on a white background allows you to add a lot of keywords to one page 7 ©2005 GS1
Slide 8: What is not allowed • • • • Doorway pages Cloaking Content duplication Take care with SEO agencies • e.g. BMW case in Germany last year 8 ©2005 GS1
Slide 9: How do search engines work? Spider finds new sites and downloads the pages Indexer analyses the page content and ranks in a database Google visitors search the database “A search engine is like a blind surfer” Spidering process Google index Google website GS1 websites 9 ©2005 GS1
Slide 10: Where are you now? • • • • What pages of our site are indexed in Google? • site:www.gs1.org How many of my visitors come from search engines? • Site metrics system (search engine referrals) How many links are there to my site? • link:www.gs1.org How does the site rank on certain keywords? • Check manually • Tools to check automatically 10 ©2005 GS1
Slide 11: How to do SEO? Content level Page level Site level External …the text/images/other media you use …how your pages are built/designed/structured …how your website are built/designed/structured …how your website relates to other websites 11 ©2005 GS1
Slide 12: Content level • Write for the web • visitors scan pages • use the keywords that your target audience uses • • • Repeat important keywords in the body text Focus on one subject/keyword per page Quality content is vital • Most popular pages on www.gs1.org (Worldwide sites, Check digit calculator, GTIN Rules) 12 ©2005 GS1
Slide 13: Content level (2) Valuable content is… • • • • • Relevant Useful and usable Original Up-to-date (or timeless) Recommendable … for your target audience 13 ©2005 GS1
Slide 14: Page level • • • • • • • Use meta tags <meta> (keywords & description) Use page titles <title> Use headings <h1> … <h7> Use keywords in anchor text <a> Use alt tags in all images Use clean HTML-, or better, XHTML-code • XHTML adds “structure” to your webpages Design fast-loading pages 14 ©2005 GS1
Slide 15: Page level (2) 15 ©2005 GS1
Slide 16: Site level • • Don’t duplicate content across multiple sub domains Human readable URLs • Keywords in page names • Keywords in folder names • • Frames can cause problems for search engines Use plain links for navigation & sitemap • Javascript vs <a href=“”> • Use sitemap or static links at bottom of page • Improve the “findability” of your webpages for search engine spiders 16 ©2005 GS1
Slide 17: Site level (2) • Robots.txt file • Tells search engine spiders which pages not to index on the site • See: http://www.robotstxt.org/ • Sitemap • Helps the spider to find all the pages • Plain HTML sitemap • Google XML sitemap - http://www.sitemaps.org/ 17 ©2005 GS1
Slide 18: External • Google uses “PageRank” to rank results • Incoming links are “votes” of confidence from other webmasters • More incoming links = better site = higher ranking by Google • See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank • “Link building” is vital • Basis of the Winning on the Web project • Work with partners/other key sources to build links • Tell people about your website • Test number in Google by • Type “link:www.gs1.org” in the search box 18 ©2005 GS1
Slide 19: What next? • Define where you are now • Number of pages indexed by Google (site:www.gs1.org) • Number of incoming links (link:www.gs1.org) • Number of visitors “referred” by search engines (visitor tracking) • Define where you want to be • How you can improve: content, HTML-coding, site-level, link • building Key measures: how many pages indexed, how are certain keywords ranked, how many people referred by search engines 19 ©2005 GS1
Slide 20: 3 lessons • Search engine marketing is a long-term process. What you • • do today will have effects over months and years not days and weeks. Small incremental changes work well Measure what you do and tie in to higher business goals Feel free to contact joe.horwood@gs1.org to: • ask for help • share your successes 20 ©2005 GS1
Slide 21: Thank you! • • • • Further links at http://del.icio.us/gs1web/ A recorded version of this webinar available soon Web Marketing Blog at http://online.gs1.org/wmb/ Next webinar: what do you want? 21 ©2005 GS1