MMP1: SEO to the Max: Beginning Your Journey

Zachary Vineyard: As Laurie said, my name is Zachary Vineyard and I'm from Northwest Nazarene University and that's in Nampa, Idaho. That is a state. I'm glad you guys can make it here this morning. It's 8:30, 6:30 where I am from. I got a little coffee and we're ready to start the day.

Today I'm going to talk to you guys about SEO. Really, what I wanted to cover in the session was some practical things you could do more from the technical side that will really get you into a good SEO position. Some of you out there might be thinking that SEO is an old topic. It really has been around for a long time. I don't even think Conan O'Brien potentially would have thought we'd still be talking about SEO in 2010.

When blogging was really popular, I mean, we all probably remember this talk about SEO exploding on the Internet and everybody is thinking, "Oh, how do I get indexed? How do I get my content to the top of search engine results? Where do we take this information? What do we do with it? What does Google do with it?" Those are all big questions. It really started right around the turn of the century.

SEO is still important today. Things have changed a little bit. Search engines are different. They're smarter. They're operating in different ways. There's new tricks. So, what I want to do is really give you some advice, some practical things you can take back to your desk that will really help you get into a really good SEO situation.

There's a few other tracks here that I encourage you to also check out about SEO because what I'm going to cover here is just part of the picture, which is really a framework, which is really the underlying framework for SEO that gets you in a good situation. But we'll probably still have work to do after this.

Anybody remember the theme song from this skit? Can anybody sing it? [Laughter] Did you just sing it?

OK. Few questions to answer. Why is this so important? It's 2010, why do we need to be looking at SEO still? What's changed in that game? How are higher ed sites different? Where do they fit in to this whole picture? I also say slash-people there because I want to talk a little bit about how people are part of the SEO game now. It's a little bit different than what we would expect, I think, from SEO talk from 2000 or 2002.

What are search engines looking for? Some of you might know part of that answer. You might understand what part of that picture looks like. Hopefully, I'll give you something new to think about when it comes to that question. How do I know how well my site is doing? This is such a great way of thinking about your site. Am I being indexed? Am I being looked at? Are things accurate? Is there a way to tell what my SEO picture looks like right now?

I'm going to just point out a really easy tool you guys can use online that gives you a really just overview, a blanket overview or SEO picture of what your website is like now today. And then, the final question here, what are some easy ways to make an SEO different? And those are really going to be more of the practical examples that I'm going to give you or practical advice that you could take back to your desk and work on for your particular sites.

First question here is why is this important. I've got a picture here of traffic from Northwest Nazarene University. This is a one-month picture of traffic. You'll notice that almost 40% of our traffic is still coming organic just right off the search engines. And then, it does not right now do any type of paid SEO. We don't do an AdWords campaign. We're not the type of university that has really adopted that yet.

And so, for us to see that 40% of our traffic is coming off of search engines is encouraging to us. We look at that and think that we're doing something OK. We're doing something right. We're in the right direction here. We're doing something that's effective online. People are able to find information about us through search engines.

Does anybody else have a radically different picture than this when it comes to traffic? Does this look about the same?

Audience 2: We have 25%.

Zachary Vineyard: Twenty-five percent search engines? Does anybody else have like a really high level? Or lower level maybe?

Audience 3: Thirty-three...

Zachary Vineyard: Thirty-three? You're right at 33 all the way around? That's cool. Well, that's good for me to hear. I was curious to see what the average number was. I think we're right at 35%, 30-35%, something like that. If yours is radically different than this, then I definitely want to talk to you after the session because it's good, I think, for us to see this. I'm not so surprised to hear that number. I'll talk about why that is in a little bit.

But why is this important? A large number of results are still coming organically off of search engines. The second one here I'll say is the customer's reputation is superhigh to be able to find information, right? And this is part of the reason that I'm talking more on the marketing track and not so much on the technical track here because of those two words, "customer expectation".

And I say 30 milliseconds high. That 30 milliseconds number comes out of the justification for Google Instant. If you read the information about Google and then launching Google Instant, they say that it takes about 300 milliseconds for us to punch a key and then there's a time lapse, which is about 300 milliseconds, and we punch another key when we're typing in a query.

But it only takes us 30 milliseconds to glance at another part of the page and comprehend something. And that was part of the reason that they were saying, "OK, we need to justify building Google Instant because people could get those quicker, fast results, right?" We know what's going on. We're typing in a query. Live results are coming up. We can potentially be comprehending something at 30 milliseconds, right?

Now, of course, it takes a few seconds to get that query going and really find what you're looking for. But that customer expectation is higher than ever, right? People are a little smarter when it comes to typing in search queries. We're not using Web crawler. We're not using Excite search engine anymore.

Search engines have really gotten much, much smarter. But at the same time, people are getting smarter, right? They're not typing in a query that's "tuition". They're typing "best colleges in Boise, Idaho", right? They're not typing in, I don't know what's a good example. They're not typing in "Cincinnati Reds". Oh, wait, maybe they are. Ha-ha.

OK. But we're really operating in a different mode here. I'm talking about brand. I mentioned this already, those two big keywords, "customer expectation", right? Is the customer expectation to be able to find information about us now and to find it ultrafast? We need to make sure that we're doing a good job from the SEO position here, not necessarily to say "Are we indexed?" or "How are we doing in this indexing realm?" Those are all good things. We want to be at the top of the listing because, of course, the customers are looking at us first. They're reading down the page.

But at the same time, we want to make sure that we're giving them a good customer experience, right? We're fulfilling every expectation they have of us in the search realm. There's definitely ways of doing that. I'm going to talk about both sides of that, which parts of our Web content are really for the people, the customer expectation, which parts are there for Google, which parts can we hand to them and help get our SEO picture up and moving.

I've already mentioned a little bit of what's changed in the world of SEO. Search engines are much smarter now. Google Instant is changing the way we're thinking about using search engines. Does anybody even use anything other than Google anymore? Yahoo! I mean, we get results from Yahoo! and Bing but that picture is really small. Everybody else is majority Google, right? Unless you live in Seattle maybe and Microsoft is turning Google off somehow. I don't know.

It's not necessarily whether you're indexed. I mean, most of us, I think, universities, unless you're a brand-new university, have had a website for 5 years or 10 years or 15 years or 20 years, right? You've been out there. You've been out there for more than your site doing these things. So, it's not so much whether you're indexed anymore. It's about how fast you can be found online. What I'll also say to that is, it's also about how accurate your search results really are. I'll show you an example of that in a minute.

Meta tags are much less important now than they ever have been. Google pretty much ignores them. But we still need to use them. I'll talk about why here in a minute. But we still get this toss around a meta tag keyword information. Well, yeah, that's important. Google is pretty much ignoring keywords and meta tags now. They just look at page text. They look at editor tags. They look at your page title. They look at your URL. They're looking at other things, not so much just at this meta tag information. The meta description, for example, is another example that we could say is in that boat. That's another thing they're going to use. But they're not using it in that equation. They're not using it to boost you in the rankings. They do display it, however. I'll talk about that in a minute.

Simplicity is king. This is so important when we talk about SEO here. How many of you guys have actually Googled the word "SEO" or "search engine optimization"? What did you get?

Audience 4: I don't remember. I think mostly spam.

Zachary Vineyard: It's awful. Yes, spam sites. It's just like pages that are just loaded with keywords that really have nothing to do with each other. Anybody else have a similar experience?

Audience 5: It's like eyewear.

Zachary Vineyard: Yeah. Who knows what? It's even worse when you Google "real estate". Real estate is this industry that's using SEO to help people buy houses because there's millions of houses out there. If you ever get into that realm, it's awful when you look at their websites. I have a really good friend who's a realtor in Boise, Idaho. I pull up their website but it's too ugly to show you guys. I mean, it's just awful.

But it's a different environment in 2010. Simplicity is really king. When we talk about customer expectation here, the idea is to find information, not get in there and be swamped by a ton of spam messages. What tends to happen is those sites get to the top of search engine results because, yeah, they're definitely keyword-heavy.

But that isn't so important too much anymore. We don't necessarily have to compete with those sites because people are smarter. They're typing in those smarter queries. A perfect example I have here is at NNU, at Northwest Nazarene University, we have this spam quarantine software. You get an email and it's spam and it goes to quarantine and it's a Web application. You have to go out there. Just go to this Web application. You log in and then you can say, "Oh, if it's spam, delete it. If it's not, send it back to my inbox." Nobody knows where this application is. It's like hidden. It's just totally under the weather.

But it sends you this weekly email like, "Oh, here is your spam report. You've got 15 new spam messages." People are asking me, "Where is this thing at?" They'll call me, "Where do I check my spam box?" I can never really explain to them on campus how to get there. It has got some crazy server. I don't really understand it.

But what I tell them to do is just go to Google and type in the words and then you spam. The first thing that comes up is this spam quarantine software. It's just like this really easy way to find this information. Once they started adopting this, now they're using Google to search for everything. And they've been doing it all along because we use Google as a search provider on our website. Maybe they're a little confused at what they're using there.

But simplicity is really now the king in 2010. Paying attention to how your site is organized, paying attention to your content, keeping it short, keeping it simple, keeping it concise. Then, maybe you probably work on websites that have just organically grown over the last 5-10 years and now have just gotten to this large size, that can negatively affect your SEO because now you've got just tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of text and other content out there that might not be giving search engines the most accurate and picture-perfect result. We'll talk more about that in a little bit.

We are a higher ed websites. We're not blogs. I can't emphasize this enough. If you Google "search engine optimization" and you really start talking about it and looking at it online, you're going to get tons of advice. Most of it is really focused toward the professional blogger. In 2000, that really started to ramp up. People blogging really started to take on. There's this massive influx of content and text online. Higher ed websites are not blogs. We're building a different type of content online than a blogger really is. We're not necessarily out there to teach somebody something like a blog does. We're not highly opinionated, maybe your school is. We're not doing the same type of work that a blog is.

There is a recent article on webdesignerdepot.com that was called "Create Websites Without Any SEO". I read it, I was curious. But it was all really about blogs. It was an interview with the owner of WooThemes, which is this WordPress Themes site, Premium WordPress Themes. You can buy them online. He is the owner of it.

He said basically what they did is they focused on what they could control, great products and awesome content. That's OK for a blog because it's focused. What we're doing is marketing to 8- to 80-year-olds. We're marketing a variety of programs. So, the competition we have for our content is ultrastiff.

In this situation, it's better to just do a good job with what we have, instead of just going out there and just putting information online and saying, "Oh, this is good content," because it might not be. Remember those sites that have organically grown over the last 20 years? If they're really large and they're non-focused, then it's worth the time to come back and revisit those and try to pare them down, make them work in size. We're not blogs.

So, what are search engines and people looking for? I like to say slash-people here because in a way they're search engines, too. I broke this roughly into two columns, some of this interchange. When we talk about search engines, then we talk about people. Really, search engines are looking for keywords, that's a big one right there, looking at your page text for keywords in order to rank you. That's really the Google method. That has really how most search engines work today.

They're going to look at your page title. They're going to look at the number of incoming links that you have from other websites. That's one of the hardest ones to cure. Part of the relevancy ranking there is based on how many people are actually linking back to you. So, we would say "link backs", what does that look like? Is it a good picture? That's hard to cure.

They're also going to look at header tags, so your H1 through H6 tags on a page, because that's usually where you're going to find a lot of rich keywords that summarize what your page is about. Roughly, these are broken into two columns, search engines on the left there and people on the right.

What we're really giving the search engines for people is a little bit different. The description, which is the meta tag description, that's actually what gets displayed in this listing. If you go to Google and you type in "NNU", this is the search result that comes up. The text there in black is actually our meta description tag. But Google is pretty much ignoring that when they talk about our relevancy ranking. What they're doing is taking that and displaying it on the page for the user. This goes back to our customer expectation part of the speech here.

The same situation goes for friendly URLs. Google is going to index none from the URLs, that is, URLs that are readable and easy to understand. But really, when you go to Google something and you get a URL that is humanly comprehendible, you're going to be in a little bit of situation when we talk about those customer expectations. A URL that says nnu.edu/about/history says a lot more than nnu.edu/index.php?id=1239\. It could go on forever that way. Google is also displaying those URLs. So, if your friendly keywords are in those URLs, well, guess what? That gives your customer something a little bit more to lean on when they're making a decision about which pages to visit when they're searching for something.

I see accuracy here as a big point. In 2010, when we talk about pages being displayed on a website, we really don't want people to see a 404. There's tools out there that allow you to manage this in a really easy way so that you don't have those people ending up on a 404 destination. Google is going to index those. And then, later you might potentially take something down, creating this 404 hole on your website.

One of the easiest ways to cure that is to send in an XML site map to search engines because it gives them an accurate picture of really what your website looks like. This is just plain and simple practical advice. Maintenance of your 404 URLs. Make sure they're not broken. Where you can, use redirects to point people to other destinations. If you can't do that, make sure you regenerate an XML site map, resubmit it to Google because that just gives them an accurate picture of what your site is really looking like.

I also see simple navigation here. The more pressure we have to be concise in terms of our content on websites, the more likely we are to cram keywords together. I recently had to edit some text for the school of theology at NNU. We're redoing a part of their website, this really long page, it was probably 1500 words. I look at that and think, "Man, nobody has got the attention span to read this."

So, we edited it down to about two paragraphs, to about 250 words. We said the same message, said the same basic thing. But we just took out all the fluff. Really, that's what the Internet in 2010 is about today, checking out the fluff, being concise, making sure your keyword is still there so that search engines can use them but just getting to the point.

This is where we're going to turn the title a little bit and go to more of the practical side of things. If you have a laptop, you can actually do this right now. If you're connected to the Internet, you go to woorank.com. You can type in your school's domain name and generate a really basic overview of what your website SEO picture looks like right now.

I'm going to do that really quickly so I can just give you guys an example here. Here we go. So, if you go to woorank.com and type in your website, it's going to generate a report. What you're going to see is a report that starts being generated here that talks about a number of things. My resolution is so small because the projector is like 640. It's like crunching it. Plus I have a netbook and so my monitor is only this big, anyway.

It takes 30 seconds to generate this report. Now, this isn't a cure-all. It's not 100% accurate here. But it just gives you a really general look at really how your site is doing. What's my traffic estimation here? What's my Alexa rank, right? As you go down here, things get more specific and more important. How many pages are we actually indexing with Google? Six thousand forty right here. Am I using different page titles on every page? Yes, we are.

And what you'll see is this little green light that gives you a good thumbs up. If it's yellow, it's like, "Hey, you should probably work on this." And if it's red, you might want to pay attention to it. As you go down here, it starts to talk more and more in depth about what's important for your particular page.

Am I using meta keywords? I am. The reason I am here is because some search engines still use them. Google doesn't. Most people use Google. Keywords have a really low impact when we talk about SEO now. You might still want to use them but you don't necessarily have to use them. Keep your meta descriptions short. Keep your title on your home page short. Make sure you're using multiple header tags here. I used both H1s and H2s because search engines are going to be looking at those.

I'm making a boo-boo here. Make sure your right validated code, meaning putting all your tags on your images. I have four images that are not doing that right now. You can fire me if you want. We call this the text-to-HTML ratio, meaning that you want to make sure that in relation to the amount of HTML, you have a certain amount of text being displayed on a page.

Woorank thinks this is a pretty high impact. I'm going to say not so much because really, once a user gets to a page and sees the images and sees other things that are interacting with your text, it isn't the only thing that is building a relationship with the user. I'm not using frames. Don't use frames. That's so 1998. I'm not using Flash. Right now, Google doesn't have the ability to index anything that's in Flash. So, if you got a full Flash website, you might want to change that, although Google is working on that, I've heard.

What do your inside pages look like? Are they separate? Are they different? Do they have different titles? Do they have different descriptions? This is where it gets a little more technical about two-thirds down the page. I'm not talking about something called the WWW resolve. I'm not talking about something called robots.txt file, an XML site map and a page encoding and whether or not you're using Google Analytics.

A WWW resolve is making sure that you're redirecting all of your traffic to either www.nnu.edu or nnu.edu. Search engines read those as two different destinations. So, when you're in Google Webmaster Tools, you have the choice of saying, "Are people going to www.nnu.edu or are they going to nnu.edu?" You can resolve that using service ID configuration files.

If you're on a patchy server, for example, you can fix that by writing just a couple of lines in an .htaccess configuration file. If you have questions about this, just bug me. I'll show you how to do it. You can look it up online. If you're on an IIS server, does anybody know if that's possible? I don't use IIS. Is it? OK, it is possible. Talk to this guy, he's the pro.

A robots.txt file is important because it's the file on your server that makes directions to a search engine, meaning you can tell them not to index things. This is important. We don't need to be indexing things like a privacy policy. We don't need to be indexing things like sensitive information, if you have any out there.

A perfect example at NNU, we have a missionary who works in China, who is in a venue and works in an underground church there. We had written a story about her. We put it up on the Internet. About two weeks later, I got an email from somebody who works with her in China, who said, "We need to take this offline because it could potentially endanger her." And so, I said, "Scary, OK." First thing I did, I went to a robots.txt file and disallowed search engines from indexing that particular file. It's an easy way for us to say, "Hey, Google, don't look at this."

You can do this in blanket mode. You can say, "Don't look at any of my PDF files. Don't look at any of my Word files. Don't look at anything in a certain directory. Don't look at et cetera." I mean, obviously, they want to see the bulk of your site. But a privacy policy, there's no keyword in that. Keep them out of that. We want to stay focused. We want to keep that accuracy rate up high. Woorank keeps on going here. If you have questions about what else is on this page, let me know. I'd be happy to talk more about it after the session.

The other tool you can use here, Google Webmaster Tools. If you're not familiar with it, it's free. Go out and check it out online. You can go to google.com/webmasters. It will take you right there. You'll notice I have a domain just set up in there. I'm not going to tell you how to necessarily set up Google Webmaster Tools, it's quite easy.

But really, what this does, it tells you some of the top things that people are typing in that bring you there. I know I saw that dodgeball. I was like, "What? Google? What are you talking about?" I have a hard time believing that and I really don't know what's causing that. So, if you find any dodgeball information on any new site, let me know because somehow people are typing in "dodgeball" and seeing our site, the big one, NNU.

This is the best thing about higher ed Web, as most of you are already shortened like this, you have a short name. What are some other universities out here?

Audience 6: SouthWest U.

Zachary Vineyard: What's that?

Audience 7: UC.

Zachary Vineyard: UC? I mean, we all know UC, right? Maybe. What's that?

Audience 8: WM, William & Mary.

Zachary Vineyard: William & Mary's College, WM. I think the bigger one is UT. We don't say University of Texas, right? We say UT. BSU, Boise state, right? Go Broncos. We already have this going for us. Most people are going to type that in, NNU something, WM or maybe William & Mary or UT Department of English. They're already working in this mode and that's such a great thing.

If you keep looking here, Google Webmaster Tools can do much more for you. This is a huge one for us. Nampa, Idaho, that's where we're located. People are going to type in "colleges, Idaho". We want to be in there. People are typing in "colleges, Boston", they're going to have a harder time because there's like 400 universities in a three-block radius there. This is good news for me. I wouldn't know this picture unless I was using Google Webmaster Tools and I could see what Google is doing for us. That's good news for me right there.

What this also shows you is a lot of other things, the big one being crawl errors. We tried to go to URL. It was a 404. We don't know what's going on. It's going to keep tracking this for you. So, you can click on something not found. I've discovered that I have a programming here that is causing a lot of these. They're really nasty-looking URLs. It's a programming error. You see that dot-external in there? It's trying to do something to JavaScript that it shouldn't. It's a long story.

But what you could see here is it's keeping track of everything that it's finding on my site that's broken. We need to be repairing that because the customer expectation here is to say, "I'm not supposed to see anything broken. I'm supposed to see the information I'm searching for." So, make sure of your maintenance to keep track of your 404 URLs.

Any questions about Woorank or Google Webmaster Tools? Yeah.

Audience 9: Did you prepare your top pages with Woorank instead of top pages with Analytics?

Zachary Vineyard: Good question.

Audience 9: [30:15 Unintelligible]?

Zachary Vineyard: Yeah. Don't trust Woorank too much. I think it's a good site to show you an overview. It's not 100% accurate. It's just like a simple tool that says, "Am I in the green? Am I in the yellow? Am I in the red?" Google Webmaster Tools here is going to do a much better picture of saying, "What are my focused results really look like? Which URLs are really broken? Are they able to find stuff? Is my robots.txt file keeping them out of something I really want them to be in? Did I make a programming error?" Stuff like that that's much more focused. Woorank is really just surface level. I just wanted to show it to you because I think it's an easy tool to say, "Am I doing OK?"

Audience 9: Yeah, cool?

Zachary Vineyard: Yeah.

Audience 9: What do you think is the text-to-HTML ratio when you're...?

Zachary Vineyard: They say 15%. Excuse me, mine is a little low.

Audience 9: Which is low?

Zachary Vineyard: Yeah. They say 15%. So, you're going to have a large chunk of HTML sitting on a page. Fifteen percent of what should be there is actually text. That's hard to achieve. That's hard to really do especially if you have like a really image-heavy website or if your homepage is really image-heavy.

What they're saying there as a percentage is really just your homepage. I mean, you could imagine, we had a catalog that's online. I'd say it's 90% text. It's awful. It's just text and more text and more text. If Woorank was looking at that, it would say the exact opposite. It's 90% text and it's way too high. "Fix this, jerk," you know, but you can't really.

Audience 9: Is that just for you or can it be...?

Zachary Vineyard: It can. It really just doesn't surface in all the tests. It's really good for making sure your pages are loading in appropriate time, looking to make sure you're using H1 and H2 tags. It looks to see if you're writing a valid code, for example. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. But yeah, that is really just surface level. There are other tools out there that are good. Woorank is just a part of this.

One of the resources I like to talk about here is called Xenu. It's a link sleuth. This is for Windows only. There's also one on Mac. Does anybody know the one for Mac? Basically, it just scans your website and tells you what's broken. You can use Xenu to generate an XML site map You literally can download it, type in your domain. It runs a scan, tells you every link that's broken. After you fix every link that's broken, you can rerun a scan, click on the file, click "Generate Google XML site map". Boom, you have an XML site map that you could cement back to Google through Google Webmaster Tools. So, it's a great little tool.

There's another one on Mac. I can't remember what name it is. I run Windows at work. So, look for the Mac equivalent of that. I'm sure you'll be able to find it. It's called a link sleuth.

OK. So, this is really nearing the end of the presentation here. Simple steps you can take. This is just an overview. Fix that WWW resolve if your site is pointing to both directions each way. Make sure you can resolve that because we want to just make sure Google is just seeing one side of our site, just the Jeckyll.

Write valid code. Make sure you write valid HTML and CSS because this is just going to mean Google is going to have a little bit easier time getting around inside your code there. It's going to be better customer experience a little bit. Browsers are going to have an easier time displaying your information correctly. Maybe not IE6, we all hate that so ignore IE6. Maybe we'll move beyond that.

Cement your XML site maps to search engines. Go out there and generate that XML site map and cement it to Google. I say this one time right now but this is something you're going to want to redo and redo because things change. Links change. If you've got 100,000 pages, you bet that picture is probably going to be different every 30 days. Go out there, run a link sleuth. Fix your broken 404s and re-cement that XML site map to Google.

Link to an RSS feed in your header. You can link to an RSS feed or an XML feed in your header just like you can to a CSS file. This is a big deal. It just leads search engines to more content about your site. It generally is a little more keyword-rich and most of that is usually news about an institution or place. This is something that you should definitely pay attention to. If you go to nnu.edu and you look at the source code, there is an example in there. Just link right away just to an XML or RSS feed. It's a great way to just give search engines more stuff without them having to dig too hard.

Fix and continue to fix broken links. Where possible, use 301 redirects. You can do this in Apache, again in an .htaccess file, which is just a configuration file that goes along with your server, to point people away from broken links. You can imagine you have a project online that you have to take down. For whatever reason, the president calls and says, "We can't have that online." But you just started promoting it. You might want to push people into a different location or a different place. This is a way to do that without them experiencing a 404. It's a little bit better situation but it's not great.

More for the people side of things, use friendly URLs, nnu.edu/about/history. If you have questions about that or you potentially are running software that isn't doing that for you, there are ways of figuring that out. But that one can tend to be a little bit harder one to solve.

Organize content with simplicity in mind. Keep it short. Keep your keywords in your text content. Keep your site organized in a concise manner. Search engines are just going to respect that.

Adopt social media. This is a big one for backlinking. If you got a Twitter account, this is associated with your university. If you are using Facebook, it's just an easy way to push your potential customers to content on your website. What a great way to get URLs out there in front of people. That's really what search engines are about. That's what we're really trying to do. Get people to the website. Adopt social media. A lot of that is just going to help this whole SEO situation. If you'll notice, Woorank pays attention to whether or not you have a Twitter account and whether or not there is recent backlinks on Twitter to your website. As that service continues to grow, we want to make sure that we're continuing to put content about your particular website on the service.

Finally, ask for raise. I just gave you 10 things to do. If your boss is here, just hit elbow right now a little bit. We do need to pay attention to this stuff as Web developers, as Web people. It doesn't hurt. My boss is in the audience. So, I'm glad to hear me say that.

We still got a few minutes, about six, maybe seven minutes. At this time, I'd love a few questions from you guys about SEO. I was only able really to cover just the framework, the base of what it takes here. Do you guys have questions? Yeah?

Audience 10: For site maps, how much of your site should be in there? You just have like two, three levels or like everything? What do you think?

Zachary Vineyard: I guess I'd go for broke with everything. That goes back to having a really accurate picture in Google for people who are potentially searching for something that's more focused. Top two or three levels aren't necessarily going to get to your departments. They aren't necessarily get to maybe your faculty listing. I'm not sure. That's just in particular for your site. But at nnu.edu, that wouldn't get us very far. I think that would only really get some poor content but not all of it.

Make sure you're using that robots.txt file or make sure you're keeping information you don't want indexed out of your site map because you don't necessarily want to be paying attention to stuff that isn't going to be doing you any help or isn't going to be giving you any help in that situation.

Audience 10: Related to that, is it your site map still, Google still indexes there?

Zachary Vineyard: It's going to be in their interests to do that. That's how they make money, by having a very comprehensive search listing, so yes. That's why it's important to have that robots.txt file. But at the same time, you want to try and control it a little bit. You want to make sure your maintenance of 404s is keeping up on it.

I say "maintenance" here. That's a big keyword for us because it's going to continue to just flux. You're never going to get to that point where you say, "Oh, we're 100% done with SEO." This is really giving you just a good foundation for getting better results. I think about it like a piece of art. You can add a bunch of paint to your site. You're adding content. You're doing it. But then, in a way also, you want to make sure that you can take away some of that paint from search engines so that they can see an accurate picture of what's really there. It's always in flux. It's never just stuck.

But you're right. Google is going to continue to index and search and find things. Somebody is going to link to something that they found. They do look at PDF files, for example. They're going to look at your Web server file structure and pay attention to what's in there. They're going to index stuff out of those files. So, if you don't want them to see it, you got to make sure you block it. Yeah?

Audience 11: Do you trust, I mean do you feel like you can say yes to Google for their code? Remember what text file...?

Zachary Vineyard: Yes. Webmaster Tools does give you a way of testing URLs against the Googlebot. So, make sure you pay attention to it now.

Audience 11: OK.

Zachary Vineyard: Good question. There are other bots that don't. What you can do, and there is a way to trick them, is you want to make sure that you're excluding potential bots that are dangerous. They do exist on the Internet but it's hard to know where they're coming from. So, the way that most programmers handle that is they program in a honeypot, meaning that if a bot looks at something that it's not supposed to, then it automatically adds an exclusion into the robots.txt file. It says, "You're not supposed to go there. I'm going to block you immediately."

So, there's ways of doing that. Google, I think, is a very trusted source in this realm. I mean, they definitely the tools for you to test what they can and can't see and what they will and will not index. It does take a little while for them to react. It's not immediate. It takes a couple of weeks for them to catch up. So, when you upload a site map, it's going to take them a little bit to catch up to it.

You can also request to remove URLs out of Google. They do have a really good customer service experience with that. I had to remove those sensitive URLs about our missionary in China from search list things. In fact, the best experience I had with that was with Bing. They called me and said, "Hey, we remove your URLs." I was like, "You guys seriously call people up like this?" I was like, "That's awesome. Thanks, Microsoft. You did one good thing in this world." [Laughter] Sorry, I can't help it. I'm a Linux user.

Any other questions I can answer for you guys? Feel free to catch up with me. I'll be on Twitter. This is my email address. You guys are more than welcome to email me, get in touch with me. I'd be happy to answer more questions about this. We can talk more about the server side stuff, too, about how to keep people out of things, how to set up .htaccess configuration files on Apache, the whole deal. I'm really open to communication. I'd be happy to answer emails and talk with you guys after this session, whatever you want to do.

Thank you very much for listening to our presentation. It was nice meeting you.

[Applause]