1. What kinds of links matters to Search Engine?
1.1. External links matters more than internal links
1.2. Links from more important, popular, trusted sites get more value
1.3. Anchor Text
1.4. If your website is linked to a spam site, SE will treat your website as a likely spam site too.
1.5. Be careful and selective which sites you link to.
1.6. Sites that earns additional links over time score well with SE.
1.7. A sign of Freshness of website
2. Need to first understand visitors’ search intent
2.1. Types of Search Intent
2.1.1. Transactional Searches
2.1.2. Navigational Searches
2.1.3. Informational Searches
2.2. Understanding the intents will help you to be more creative in fulfilling the visitors’ intention.
2.3. Your aim is to satisfy searchers and give them a positive experience through engaged activity on your site.
2.4. If done well, increase engagement metrics.
2.4.1. Average Visit Duration
2.4.2. Unique Visits
2.4.3. Frequency of Visits
2.4.4. Recency of Visits
3. Strategies
3.1. Optimizing for Traffic
3.1.1. Usually for publishing and advertising businesses
3.1.2. Revenue primarily based on pageviews and visitors number.
3.2. Optimizing for Conversion
3.2.1. Usually for e-commerce / service webstores
3.2.2. Revenue based on sales and subscriptions
4. Page Ranking Factors
4.1. Keyword density
4.2. Keyword selection
4.3. Inbound links
4.4. Inbound anchor texts
4.5. HTML page title
4.6. Age of Domain Name
4.7. Site Authority
4.8. Page URL & Meta Tags
4.9. Image ALT tags
5. Keyword Research
5.1. Why?
5.1.1. Helps you understand visitors’ intentions.
5.1.2. Enables you to reach not just any visitors but the right kind of visitors
5.1.3. Enables you to predict shift in demand and respond to changing market conditions
5.2. What?
5.2.1. It is the practice of identifying which phrases are used on search engines when people are looking for information.
5.2.2. Usually includes finding both the search volume and relative competitiveness of the terms.
5.3. How to choose keywords right
5.3.1. Go for long-tailed keywords with High popularity / Lower Competition / High Relevance
5.3.2. Using AdWords keyword tool
5.3.2.1. Suggests keywords
5.3.2.2. Provides estimated search volume
5.3.3. Find keywords that are :
5.3.3.1. Heavily searched by visitors (Popularity)
5.3.3.2. Closely related to your conversion goals (Relevance)
5.3.3.3. Reasonable targeted by competitors (Competition)
5.3.4. From webstores:
5.3.4.1. Use terms like buy, prices, compare in the keyword phrase.
5.3.4.2. Lower traffic but more targeted to visitor looking to buy
5.3.5. Match keywords and landing pages content
6. Popularity and relevance aren’t determined manually.
6.1. Search Algorithm
6.1.1. referred as "ranking factors"
6.1.2. mathematical equations – algorithms – to sort the wheat from the chaff and to then rank the wheat in order of tastiness (or however it is that farmers determine wheat’s value).
7. Functions that Search Engines operate
7.1. Crawling and Building
7.1.1. known as a crawler or robot, to find and crawl web pages
7.2. Providing Answers by calculating relevancy
7.2.1. processes your pages based on SE specific algorithms for indexing into large database
7.3. Serving Results
7.3.1. using complex weighting algorithms, it matches and retrieves search results based on the keywords entered by users
8. Main purpose of the Search Engine
8.1. to serve relevant results to their users
8.2. Achieve top ranking
8.3. Increase web traffic
8.4. Increase revenue
9. 3 types of search queries users generally perform
9.1. "Do" Transactional Queries - Action queries such as buy a plane ticket or listen to a song.
9.2. "Know" Informational Queries - When a user seeks information, such as the name of the band or the best restaurant in New York City.
9.3. "Go" Navigation Queries - Search queries that seek a particular online destination, such as Facebook or the homepage of the NFL.
10. What must we look out for in a Search Engine
10.1. Relevance
10.1.1. simply finding a page with the right words
10.1.2. find valuable results that searchers would appreciate and enjoy
10.2. Importance
10.2.1. Popularity
10.2.1.1. the more popular a site, page or document, the more valuable the information contained therein must be