Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Prof. Rachida Amjoun

 Agenda
• Crawling , Indexing and Ranking
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Rankings
• Example of factors connected to ranking
• How to get Google to index a new site, faster
• Google Search Console
• How search engine find your pages
✔ Site: operator
✔ google index pages checker
✔ Sitemap
• Robot.txt
• Google Search Console Tutorial
• Who should use Search Console?

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 Review
▪ Search engines exist to find and organize
content across the web to deliver the most
relevant content to a user given their search
query. Think of a search engine as an
answering machine. A user asks a question,
and the search engine tries to find the content
that answers that question the best.
▪ Search engines find and rank. You can break
down content into three steps: crawl, index,
and rank.

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 Crawling, Indexing and Ranking
Crawling:
Team of bots (specialized
software) known as crawlers
or spiders, or Googlebots,
looks through the internet for
unorganized data from new
and existing websites, by
following hyperlinks from
websites already in their
database.
. Google then uses such data to
learn what the site and its pages
are about and assigns certain
keywords and phrases to the
crawled pages, storing them in a list
known as the index — this is
called indexing.
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 Ranking : The search
Crawling, Indexing and Ranking engine displays content that
it thinks will best answer the
As a result, when users enter a user’s query and orders the
search query, Google quickly results with what it believes
scans through the list of indexed to be the most helpful at the
sites, showing only appropriate, top.
relevant webpages in the SERP.

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 Problem
You have a store; you built a website.
You’ve got a problem. You want people to visit your
website; that’s the purpose, after all — to bring people
to your site to buy your product, or find out about
your service, or hear about the cause you support, or
for whatever other purpose you’ve built the site. So
you’ve decided you need to get traffic from the search
engines
Solution?
SEO

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 Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• It is the process of optimizing a website and creating
high-quality content in order to rank high on the
Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
• Websites that has a high rank for list of keywords
and topics will be displayed on the first page of the
search results. That will drive relevant traffic on a
daily basis( to those websites )
• In other words:
SEO is all about improving a site’s rankings in the
organic (non-paid) section of the search results.

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 Rankings
• Rankings in SEO refers to a website’s position in the
search engine results page.
• The point of good rankings in the search results is to
gain as much traffic as possible from the organic search
channel. The higher up a page ranks in the results for a
search query, the higher the chance is that the searcher
will click on this result. This explains the direct
connection between high rankings and increased traffic.
• There are various ranking factors that influence whether
a website appears higher on the SERP based on the
content relevance to the search term, or the quality
of backlinks pointing to the page

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 Rankings
Different search engines – different rankings. A domain
may rank for a certain keyword in the top 3 on Bing,
but not even be on the first page of the Google search
results for the same keyword.

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 Ranking Factors
The term “Ranking Factors” describes the criteria
applied by search engines when evaluating web
pages in order to compile the rankings of their
search results.

Ranking factors can relate to a website’s content,

technical implementation, user signals, backlink
profile or any other features the search engine
considers relevant.
Understanding ranking factors is a prerequisite
for effective search engine optimization.

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 Example of factors connected to rankings
• number of backlinks
• sitemap and internal linking
• usage of keywords in text elements like meta titles, meta
descriptions, text etc.
• term optimization of content, based on comparison with other
documents on the same topic (proof and relevant terms,
topic/content clusters, WDF*IDF)
• URL structure
• page load time (site speed)
• time on site and bounce rate (here: how long a visitor spends
on the page before they return to the SERP)
• CTR in the SERPs, i.e. how often searchers click on the result
• and presumably many other factors like page traffic,
authorship, how up-to-date a page is
etc.
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 How to get Google to index a new site, faster.

• Make the most of Google Search Console

• Submit an XML sitemap to Google
• Engage social media
• Gain inbound links
• Check the website speed
• Improve the Internal Link Structure
• Publish fresh content regularly
• Etc.

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 Google Search Console 
• GSC is a free tool from Google that can help anyone
with a website to understand how they are performing on
Google Search, and what they can do to improve their
appearance on search to bring more relevant traffic to
their websites.

• provides information on how Google crawls, indexes,

and serves websites. This can help website owners to
monitor and optimize Search performance.
• No need to log in to the tool every day. If new issues are
found by Google on your site, you'll receive an email
from Search Console alerting you. But you might want to
check your account around once every month, or when
you make changes to the site's content, to make sure
the Mohamed
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Note that You can sign up for a free Google Search Console
account if you don't currently have one.

See How_to_set up_Google_Search_Console.docx

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 what if you want to restrict data to a
if you want a complete view of specific URL path? (e.g.,
your website in Search Console domain.com/blog)

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 How to set up Google Search Console
To verify your domain in Search Console

Before you can see any data in Search Console, you first
need to verify ownership. This process differs according to
the property type you added.
• Verification for a Domain property
• Verification for a URL prefix property

For more details check the file:

How_to_set up_Google_Search_Console.docx

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 How search engines find your pages
If you want your site to show up in the search results at all,
then it needs to be indexed.
To check whether your pages are indexed or not, you have
three ways:

1. Using “site:” Operator in Google Search.

2. From Google Search Console (for your own
site).
3. Using XML Sitemap of a webpage.

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 1. “site:” Operator
Perform a simple site search in your Google search bar
with “site:yourdomain.com” (see Figure in next page)
If your site doesn’t appear, it means it may not be indexed,
and there may be something wrong.

This number of results

Google displays isn't exact,
but it does give you a solid
idea of which pages are
indexed on your site and
how they are currently
showing up in search
results [ref:moz]

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 google index pages checker

2. Google indexed pages checker in Google Search

Console
▪ We can use Google indexed pages checker to determine
whether your pages are indexed or not. This provide more
accurate results.
▪ Search Console allows us to :
✔ see how many pages Google has indexed over a given period of
time.
✔ track the increases and decreases of the indexed pages
✔ determine whether or not they are normal.

This is extremely useful for your SEO since you will be able to
see which pages have been blocked by search engine

For moreMohamed
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I Search Console see tutorial page:
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 google index pages checker

2. Google indexed pages checker in Google Search

Console

▪ Enter URL is the website that you are wishing to check about
its ranking or webpage content value.
▪ Click continue to receive the results of your scan.

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 2. Google indexed pages checker in Google Search
Console
Does Website Indexing Factors Matter?

You can check how often Google is crawling your pages

by logging into Search Console.
Note that you don’t want our site to be indexed just
once. We want the search engines to keep re-indexing
your site. Frequent indexing improves your search
results.

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 3. Sitemap
• This is a file where you provide information about the pages,
videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships
between them. Search engines like Google read this file to
more intelligently crawl your site.

• A sitemap tells Google which pages and files you think are
important in your site, and also provides valuable information
about these files: for example, for pages, when the page was
last updated, how often the page is changed, and any
alternate language versions of a page.

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 3. Sitemap
If your site's pages are properly linked, Google can usually
discover most of your site. Even so, a sitemap can
improve the crawling of larger or more complex sites, or
more specialized files.

Without a sitemap it’s possible your SEO could be

seriously underperforming.

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 3. Sitemap
Add a sitemap to Google Search Console

Additional resources:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/sitemaps/overview
https://raddinteractive.com/how-to-add-a-sitemap-to-google-search-console-step-by-step/
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 https://developers.google.co
m/search/docs/advanced/site
maps/build-sitemap

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 3. Sitemap
How To Submit A Sitemap To Google Search Console

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ24HuiolDs

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 How search engines find your pages
If you're not showing up anywhere in the search
results, there are a few possible reasons why:
✔ Your site is brand new and hasn't been crawled
yet.
✔ Your site isn't linked to from any external
websites.
✔ Your site's navigation makes it hard for a robot
to crawl it effectively.
✔ Your site contains some basic code called
crawler directives that is blocking search
engines.
✔ Your site has been penalized by Google for
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 Robot.txt
▪ This file tells search engine crawlers which pages or files
the crawler can or can't request from your site. In other
words, suggest which parts of your site search engines
should and shouldn't crawl.

▪ located in the root directory of websites:

(ex. yourdomain.com/robots.txt)

▪ A big part of doing SEO is about sending the right

signals to search engines, and the robots.txt is one of
the ways to communicate your crawling preferences to
search engines.

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 Robot.txt
• Why should you care about robots.txt?
• The robots.txt plays an essential role from a SEO
point of view. It tells search engines how they
can best crawl your website.
• Using the robots.txt file you can prevent search
engines from accessing certain parts of your
website, prevent duplicate content and give
search engines helpful tips on how they
can crawl your website more efficiently.
• Be careful when making changes to your
robots.txt though: this file has the potential to
make big parts of your website inaccessible for
search engines.
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 Robot.txt

• The user agent named "Googlebot" is not allowed to crawl the

http://example.com/nogooglebot/ directory or any subdirectories.
• All other user agents are allowed to crawl the entire site. This could
have been omitted and the result would be the same; the default
behavior is that user agents are allowed to crawl the entire site.
• The site's sitemap file is located at
http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml.

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 Robot.txt

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 Example
Let's look at an example to illustrate this:
You're running an eCommerce website and visitors
can use a filter to quickly search through your
products. This filter generates pages which
basically show the same content as other pages
do. This works great for users, but confuses search
engines because it creates duplicate content.

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 Google Search Console Tutorial 
Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools) is a free service
from Google that helps you monitor and troubleshoot your website’s
appearance in their search results.
Use it to find and fix technical errors, submit sitemaps, see backlinks,
and more

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 Who should use Search Console?

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