Table of contents

1. Introduction

1.1. Why search engine optimization?
1.2. What will you learn in this book?
1.3. Who might be interested in this book?
1.4. Sources and tools

2. Search engine optimization, the star of digital marketing

2.1. The need to promote our Website
2.1.1. Horizontal portals of the main Internet access providers
2.1.2. B2C oriented vertical portals: offer from the company to the end customer
2.1.3. B2B business models
2.1.4. Information explosion
2.1.5. Survivors of the dotcom crisis

2.2. Digital marketing tools
2.2.1. Online advertising
2.2.2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
2.2.3. Search Engine Optimization: detailing the meaning of search engine optimization
2.2.4. Non-intrusive marketing through e-mail: E-mail permission marketing
2.2.5. Viral marketing
2.2.6. Social networks

2.3. The complete digital marketing cycle
2.3.1. Traffic attraction: SEO, SEM and banner ads
2.3.2. Converting traffic into customers: the moment of usability
2.3.3. Customer loyalty or permission marketing
2.3.4. Conversion of loyal customers into prescribers
2.3.5. Establishing a virtuous circle

2.4. But first things first

3. Why invest in search engines

3.1. The need to evaluate the opportunities of different Internet marketing strategies
3.2. Search engines: users’ preferred way of searching for information
3.3. Growth in search engine investment: our competitors are already investing
3.4. Return on investment: search engine optimization is the cheapest way to acquire profitable customers
3.5. Search engine optimization as an ideal complement to offline campaigns
3.7. Search engine promotion: a land of opportunities

4. Defining your market niche: what is the objective of your Website?

4.1. Do we all fit on the first page of search engine results?
4.1.1. Identify your exact market niche
4.1.2. Recapping

4.2. Keys to a high-performance Website
4.2.1. Definition of target audiences
4.2.2. Definition of tactical objectives
4.2.3. Definition of resources and deadlines
4.2.4. Websites as a performance-focused business unit

4.3. How to measure and improve Web performance
4.3.1. Check that your Web is aligned with your strategic objectives
4.3.2. Your Website must have tactical objectives to be met and a way to evaluate them.
4.3.3. Identifying Key Performance Indicators
4.3.4. Measuring Web performance
4.3.5. Improve Web performance

4.4. How does positioning help to achieve objectives?
4.4.1. When traffic is the target: steady traffic versus a spike in traffic over time.

4.5. The starting point of my Internet business plan

5. Seducing search engines

5.1. Search engines: gateway to the Internet
5.2. How Google finds a needle in a haystack… thousands of times per second
5.2.1. How a search engine works

5.3. What do search engines look for?
5.3.1. The calculation of relevance
5.3.2. Calculation of popularity

5.4. Relevance and popularity, a guarantee of good search engine positioning

6. Keywords: the beginning of the strategy

6.1. Definition and importance of keywords
6.1.1. What are keywords?
6.1.2. Keywords: the most important part of a search engine optimization campaign
6.1.3. How do search engine users search?

6.2. Making the initial keyword list: sources and tools for inspiration
6.2.1. Make a list of keywords with which you think your potential customers would search for you: the personal list.
6.2.2. Research, with the help of search engine keyword suggestion tools, what other keywords are available in the marketplace
6.2.3. Research your competitors’ keywords

6.3. Choosing keywords
6.3.1. Popular keywords
6.3.2. Keywords with low competition
6.3.3. Keywords with high visitor-customer conversion
6.3.4. Keywords similar to my content

6.4. Keyword distribution strategy on your Website
6.5. Yes, but… how is all this applied in practice?

7. Choosing the optimal mix of search engines

7.1. The search engine sector after the merger process
7.2. Why choose search engines?
7.3. Getting to know the search engines
7.3.1. Yahoo!: the directory that turned into a search engine
7.3.2. Lycos: a pioneering search engine that ended up as a portal
7.3.3. Inktomi: a great player in hiding
7.3.4. AltaVista: another pioneer killed in action
7.3.5. Ask: a search engine with an innovative spirit
7.3.6. A European search engine: All the Web (FAST)
7.3.7. Google: almost everyone’s homepage
7.3.8. Bing: a contender that does not quite take off
7.3.9. Attempts to challenge Google’s hegemony
7.3.10. Countries where Google is not the predominant search engine

7.4. So, which search engine is right for me?
7.5. All the big ones… and then some
7.6. I already know all the market players

8. Indexable Web: the starting point

8.1. Indexabili… what?
8.2. What color is your hat?
8.3. The pages search engines see: when a word is worth a thousand images
8.4. How to choose a good domain
8.5. Domain and hosting: where do you want to geolocate your website?
8.5.1. So… where is my Web?

8.6. Information architecture in a Website
8.6.1. Types of structure for a Website
8.6.2. Content organization on the server
8.6.3. Navigation: how to leave the doors open to search engines
8.6.4. Static pages and dynamic pages
8.6.5. Internal search engines

8.7. Code validation
8.8. How to take advantage of your content management system to position your Website
8.8.1. Make the content management system the best SEO tool

8.9. What we want to hide: the Robot Exclusion Standard
8.10. Ensuring the indexability of our Website: 15 points to take into account
8.11. How to apply Webmaster Tools to improve indexability
8.11.1. Domain in Google Webmasters Tools
8.11.2. Tracking errors
8.11.3. HTML suggestions
8.11.4. Tracking statistics
8.11.5. Sitemap Statistics
8.11.6. Set tracking frequency
8.11.7. Establish geographic orientation of the domain
8.11.8. Set preferred domain

8.12. With everything in sight

9. How to submit your website to search engines

9.1. Understanding indexing and saturation
9.2. Achieving the robot’s first visit
9.2.1. Entering search engines the slow way: search engine submission forms
9.2.2. Fast-tracking search engines: how to play the finders’ game

9.3. Making the robot aware of all the pages of our Website
9.3.1. Google Sitemaps
9.3.2. Other types of sitemaps for Google
9.3.3. Sitemaps for Yahoo!
9.3.4. Sitemaps for Bing
9.3.5. Sitemaps upload from the Robots.txt file.
9.3.6. Registration of sitemaps by other means

9.4. Google Places
9.5. Where else should I want to be?

10. Web Relevance

10.1. What is Web Relevance?
10.2. Factors that improve Web relevancy in page design
10.2.1. Page structure
10.2.2. The page title: the Title tag
10.2.3. The metatags: the description metatag and the keywords metatag
10.2.4. Hierarchy tags: h1, h2 and h2 headings
10.2.5. Page structure: text and contents.
10.2.6. Page structure: images
10.2.7. Internal links
10.2.8. Semantic or friendly URLs
10.2.9. Domains with keywords
10.2.10. Powering Rich Snippets with microformats
10.2.11. Sitelinks
10.2.12. Positioning of embedded PDF files on the Web
10.2.13. Content difficult for search engines to crawl: Flash content and other animations

10.3. Creation of new content to be positioned
10.3.1. Creation of a News section
10.3.2. Creation of a Tips section
10.3.3. Creation of a blog or forum
10.3.4. Avoid duplicate content

10.4. Web relevancy optimization on dynamic pages
10.5. Ensuring the relevance of our Web: the 10 points to keep in mind

11. Web Popularity

11.1. First I think, I get links, then I exist
11.2. How do search engines view links?
11.3. Defining the way to measure the popularity of a Web page, according to Google: the PageRank
11.4. Sources of quality links: what type of pages should they come from?
11.4.1. Links from pages with high popularity
11.4.2. Links from pages of different origins
11.4.3. Links from pages with antiquity
11.4.4. Related subject pages

11.5. Link format: how do search engines like links?
11.5.1. The importance of anchor text
11.5.2. Links that Google does not follow: NOFOLLOW links
11.5.3. Other factors that add value to a link

11.6. Popularity juice transmission
11.6.1. Use of the Nofollow attribute to improve the transmission of popularity juice.

11.7. Active link building: linkbuilding
11.7.1. Directory listings
11.7.2. Forum link additions
11.7.3. Blog Link Submissions
11.7.4. Link submissions to press release portals and article directories
11.7.5.Link exchange
11.7.6. Social media link submissions: factors affecting search engine rankings
11.7.7. Penalty for buying links

11.8. Passive link building: linkbaiting
11.8.1. First step: write good content. Which contents are linked to the most?
11.8.2. Second step: applying copyleft to our content
11.8.3. Third step: distributing our content

11.9. Increasing Web popularity, but at a slow and natural pace

12. Limits in search engine positioning

12.1. The fight for the top spots: is anything goes?
12.2. The rules of the indexing game
12.3. Look ahead… but keep an eye on your rearview mirror.
12.4. When to use the turbo
12.4.1. Hidden text
12.4.2. Fictitious or hidden links
12.4.3. Irrelevant words
12.4.4. Concealment or elusive redirects
12.4.5. Door Pages

12.5. But… what is this Website talking about?
12.6. So… where do we stand?

13. How to measure an SEO campaign

13.1. The need to measure results
13.2. Measuring indexation: do search engines know all my pages?
13.2.1. How is the number of indexed pages calculated?
13.2.2. Measuring indexing with Google Webmaster Tools
13.2.3. Indexing: a game of patience

13.3. Measuring search engine visibility or ranking positions
13.3.1. How many keywords do I measure?
13.3.2. How do we measure the ranking of keyword positions?
13.3.3. On how many search engines do I measure visibility?

13.4. Measuring Web popularity: how many links point to my Website?
13.4.1. Measuring popularity through search engine commands
13.4.2. Measuring external links with Google Webmaster Tools
13.4.3. Measuring external links with online tools or specialized programs

13.5. Measuring Web traffic
13.5.1. What effects does search engine optimization have on Web traffic?
13.5.3. Measuring keyword opportunities

13.6. Evaluating SEO companies’ promises: search engine optimization or qualified Web traffic?
13.7. Calculating the return on investment in a natural search engine optimization strategy
13.8. Towards a quality measurement system

14. Search engine positioning for other media: blogs, local search, mobile, video and news.

14.1. How to position a blog in search engines
14.1.1. Optimization of blog code and content
14.1.2. Content creation in comments
14.1.3. Updating functionality
14.1.4. Beware of excessive advertising
14.1.5. Improving the popularity of my blog

14.2.Positioning in Google Places
14.3. Positioning of videos on YouTube
14.3.1. Positioning on YouTube’s internal search engine
14.3.2. Positioning in the YouTube search results
14.3.3. YouTube channel creation
14.3.4. Identification of the themes for the videos
14.3.5. Writing the title of the video
14.3.6. Writing the video description
14.3.7. Tag wording
14.3.8. Get external links to the video
14.3.9. Enhancing video popularity factors

14.4. Positioning in Google News
14.5. Search engine optimization for mobile devices