SEO 6th Edition SEO 6th Edition by Peter Kent SEO For Dummies®, 6th Edition Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030‐5774, www.wiley.com Copyright © 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Media and software compilation copyright © 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc All rights reserved Published simultaneously in Canada No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the Publisher Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748‐6011, fax (201) 748‐6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions Trademarks: Wiley, For Dummies, the Dummies Man logo, 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print‐on‐demand If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com Library of Congress Control Number: 2015951276 ISBN 978‐1‐119‐12955‐4 (pbk); 978‐1‐119‐12960‐8 (epub); 9‐781‐119‐12974‐5 (epdf) Manufactured in the United States of America 10 Contents at a Glance Introduction Part I: Getting Started with SEO Chapter 1: Surveying the Search Engine Landscape Chapter 2: Search Results, Deconstructed 23 Chapter 3: Your One-Hour, Search Engine–Friendly Web Site Makeover 31 Chapter 4: Beating the Competition — Planning a Powerful Search Engine Strategy 49 Chapter 5: Making Your Site Useful and Visible 67 Part II: Building Search Engine‐Friendly Sites 83 Chapter 6: Picking Powerful Keywords 85 Chapter 7: Creating Pages That Search Engines Love 107 Chapter 8: Using Structured Data Markup 135 Chapter 9: Avoiding Things That Search Engines Hate 143 Chapter 10: Dirty Deeds, Done Dirt Cheap 163 Chapter 11: Bulking Up Your Site — Competing with Content 179 Chapter 12: Finding Traffic Through Local-Search Marketing 203 Part III: Adding Your Site to the Indexes and Directories 229 Chapter 13: Getting Your Pages into the Search Engines 231 Chapter 14: Submitting to the Directories 247 Chapter 15: Product Search: Remember the Shopping Directories and Retailers 257 Part IV: After You’ve Submitted Your Site 283 Chapter 16: Using Link Popularity to Boost Your Position 285 Chapter 17: Finding Sites to Link to Yours 309 Chapter 18: Even More Great Places to Get Links 331 Chapter 19: Social Networking — Driven by Drivel 343 Chapter 20: Video: Putting Your Best Face Forward 351 Chapter 21: When Google Bites Back: A Guide to Catastrophe 357 vi SEO For Dummies Part V: The Part of Tens 377 Chapter 22: Ten-Plus Myths and Mistakes 379 Chapter 23: Ten-Plus Ways to Stay Updated 387 Chapter 24: Ten-Plus Useful Things to Know 393 Index 409 Table of Contents Introduction About This Book Foolish Assumptions Icons Used in This Book Beyond the Book Part I: Getting Started with SEO Chapter 1: Surveying the Search Engine Landscape Investigating Search Engines and Directories Search sites, indexes, & engines Search directories 10 Spidered Directories 11 Pay-per-click systems 11 Keeping the terms straight 12 Why bother with search engines? 13 Where Do People Search? 15 Search Engine Magic 18 How they it? 18 Stepping into the programmers’ shoes 19 Gathering Your Tools 20 Chapter 2: Search Results, Deconstructed 23 The Big Two: Organic and PPC 23 Looking at Local Results 25 Checking Out Shopping Results 26 Staying Current with News Results 27 Viewing Video and Image Results 28 Getting Friendly with Social Results 29 Collecting Bits n’ Pieces 29 Chapter 3: Your One-Hour, Search Engine–Friendly Web Site Makeover 31 Is Your Site Indexed? 31 Google 32 Yahoo! and Bing 34 Open Directory Project 34 Taking Action If You’re Not Listed 34 No links 35 Unreliable Web Server 35 viii SEO For Dummies robots.txt is blocking your site 36 robots meta tags are blocking pages 36 Bad domain name 37 Unreadable navigation 37 Dealing with dynamic pages 39 The Canonical tag 40 Picking Good Keywords 40 Examining Your Pages 41 Using frames 42 Looking at the TITLE tags 43 Examining the DESCRIPTION tag 44 Giving search engines something to read 45 Getting Your Site Indexed 48 Chapter 4: Beating the Competition — Planning a Powerful Search Engine Strategy 49 Don’t Trust Your Web Designer 50 Understanding the Limitations 51 Eyeing the Competition 52 Getting a “gut feel” for the competition 52 Why is my competitor ranking so high? 55 Going Beyond Getting to #1 55 Highly targeted keyword phrases 56 Understanding the search tail 56 Controlling Search Engine Variables 58 Keywords 59 Content 59 Page optimization 60 Submissions 60 Links 60 Time and the Google sandbox 61 Determining Your Plan of Attack 62 Look Away a Few Minutes 64 Two Things to Remember 65 Chapter 5: Making Your Site Useful and Visible 67 Learning from Amazon 67 Revealing the Secret But Essential Rule of Web Success 69 The evolving, incorrect “secret” 70 Uncovering the real secret 71 Showing a bias for content 71 Making Your Site Work Well 72 Limiting multimedia 73 Using text, not graphics 73 Don’t be cute 74 Making it easy to move around 74 Providing different routes 75 Using long link text 75 Notes Notes Notes Notes About the Author Peter Kent is an e-commerce consultant who specializes in search-engine optimization (SEO) He has provided consulting services to hundreds of companies large and small, including Amazon, Zillow, Avvo, Lonely Planet, and TowerRecords.com He has worked online since 1984, w ritten about the Internet since 1993, and authored almost 50 books (including dozens of Internet-related books) and hundreds of periodical articles and columns Dedication For Chris We miss you terribly Author’s Acknowledgments I’d like to thank all my clients, who have given me an opportunity to play with search-engine optimization in a wide variety of businesses I’d also like to thank Amy Fandrei, my Acquisitions Editor, and my editor, Pat O’Brien, for making the process quick and easy And, of course, the multitude of Wiley staff involved in editing, proofreading, and laying out the book Publisher’s Acknowledgments Project Manager: Pat O’Brien Technical Editor: Tyler LeCompte Sr Editorial Assistant: Cherie Case Production Editor: Kumar Chellappan WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT Go to www.wiley.com/go/eula to access Wiley’s ebook EULA [...]... there are online articles that provide more information about the world of search engine optimization You’ll find them at www .dummies. com/extras /seo Occasionally, Wiley has updates to its technology books If this book does have technical updates, they will be posted at www .dummies. com/extras /seo Part I Getting Started with SEO Visit www .dummies. com for great Dummies content online In this part . ✓✓... search system for any given search term, “giving them what they want to see”) But I can explain the general concept When Google searches for your search term, it begins by looking for pages containing the exact phrase Then it starts looking for pages containing the words close together, and for synonyms; search for dog and Google knows you may be interested in pages with the word canine, for instance... look at Beginning HTML5 and CSS3 For Dummies, 5th Edition, by Ed Tittel and Chris Minnick (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) Icons Used in This Book This book, like all For Dummies books, uses icons to highlight certain paragraphs and to alert you to particularly useful information Here’s a rundown of what those icons mean: A Tip icon means I’m giving you an extra snippet of information that may help you on your... where you can search for information on the Web ✓✓ Search Engine: A system that collects pages from the Web, saves them in a massive database, indexes the information, and provides a mechanism for people to search through the data ✓✓ Search Index: The index containing all the information that the engine collected and searches ✓✓ Search Directory: A system that contains some basic information about Web... 404 Getting Multiple Results on the Search Results Page 404 You Need an Attractive Site 406 Finding More SEO Tools 407 Fixing Your Reputation 407 Index 409 Introduction W elcome to SEO For Dummies, 6th Edition What on earth would you want this book for? After all, can’t you just build a Web site and let your Web designer get the site into the search engines? Can’t... Mistake: Too Many Pages with Database Parameters and Session IDs 381 xv xvi SEO For Dummies Mistake: Building the Site and Then Bringing in the SEO Expert 382 Myth: $25 Can Get Your Site a #1 Position 382 Myth: Google Partners Get You #1 Positions 383 Mistake: You Don’t Have Pages Optimized for Specific Keywords 383 Mistake: Your Pages Are Empty 384 Myth: Pay Per Click... information stored in them These systems use complex algorithms — calculations based on complicated formulae — to index that information and rank it in search results when people search Google, shown in Figure 1‑1, is the world’s most popular search site Figure 1-1: Google, the world’s most popular search engine, produced these results 9 10 Part I: Getting Started with SEO Search directories Before... Google gave up on its own directory; until then, http://dir.google.com led to a Google directory based on the Open Directory Project data And just weeks before I began work on this edition of SEO For Dummies, Yahoo! closed down its directory, barely informing the world Can DMOZ be far behind? Especially as it’s been a decade since one of its founders suggested that it really served no purpose? Probably... this information comes from the meta tags pulled off the pages in the index (I tell you about meta tags in Chapter 3.) In other cases, the person who enters the site into the index provides this information These are a form of directory, but they are generally created programmatically rather than by site owners requesting inclusion (Yahoo! Directory was, and DMOZ still is, perhaps, “hand built” by using... opportunities For example, Northern Light, a system well known in the late 1990s, now sells search software And in the cases in which the search sites are still running, they’re generally fed by other search systems WebCrawler, for instance, gets search results from Google and Yahoo!, which means, in effect, from Google and Bing AltaVista, the Web’s first big search index, has been owned by Yahoo! for years,