UNTANGLING THE WEB

WEEK 2 – SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

AGENDA

• Quick review of class 1 – go over homework from last week

• Presentation on project ideas from CanAssist

• Discussion of project 1, IP agreements, etc

• Why do SEO?

• History of search engines

• The mechanics of current SEO practices

• Lab exercises

• Homework and discuss the upcoming project 1

CLASS 1 REVIEW

• Slideshare.net/derekja has the class slides

• Particularly if you missed last week, please review that material

• We looked in the homework at your laptop to make sure that you have enough hard disk space and RAM to install the software we need

• You should also have installed git bash to get ready for today’s class. Anyone run into problems with that?

CANASSIST

• Uvic-based organization to provide assistive technologies

• Invited them in to pitch some project ideas so that the thing you build can be more than an exercise!

PROJECT 1• If you choose one of the CanAssist topics:

• You’ll need to sign an IP agreement so that they can use it

• You’ll form a group with those others that are interested in that topic, or if larger than 3-4 people break into smaller groups. More than one group on the same topic is fine since you’ll come up with different designs.

• Presentation on Jan 25th will be graded (out of 15) as

• 3 points for analysis of users and showing fit to the proposal requirements (does it match the requirements?)

• 5 points for presentation of compelling user stories (will people want to use it?)

• 5 points for website design and usability (will they be able to use it?)

• 2 points for presenting a scoped-down subset of the full design that is achievable for projects 2 and 3 (will you be able to build it?)

PROJECT 1

• If you choose a project of your own rather than a CanAssist project• No IP agreement, obviously. The work is yours, but do be aware of disclosure.

• Groups should be 3-4 people. 2 in a pinch, 5 if necessary. No 1 person projects will be allowed.

• Grading (out of 15) for the Jan 25th presentation:

• 3 points for a compelling idea, supported by market analysis (will it be viable?)

• 5 points for compelling user stories (will people want to use it?)

• 5 points for website design and usability (will they be able to use it?)

• 2 points for a scoped-down subset for projects 2 and 3 (will you be able to build it?)

WHY DO SEARCH ENGINE

OPTIMIZATION?

FINDING CUSTOMERS

• At one point, finding customers was a non-issue

• Towns were small, customers were local

• If you sold something people wanted, they’d find you

• But with such a small customer base you need to sell only things everyone wants

• “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it!”

SALES

SALES OUTSIDE YOUR IMMEDIATE NETWORK• If people don’t find you, you have to find them

• Outbound sales

• Cold Calling

• This is not fun!!!

PAID ADS AS OUTBOUND SALES

• Today’s topic is organic search results, also known as natural search results

• But automated outbound methods are still important

• Next week we’ll talk all about paid advertising and pay-per-click

• It’s all about “qualifying” the customer. Making sure that they are a good target for your ads before you spend money on reaching them

INBOUND IS BETTER

• When your customers find you, they do the work

• By the time they reach your site they have qualified themselves

THE LONG TAIL

• The book is getting a little bit dated

• It was one of the first systematic analyses of why the web enables specialty products to dominate

• Since a website has very little marginal cost to add a new product, and storage of that product is in a warehouse not an expensive storefront, consumers can suddenly get exactly what they want

WHY IS SEO THE FIRST MODULE ON

CREATING WEBSITES?

GOOGLE KNOWS!

• They know what people are searching for

• They know what kind of content people want

• It’s in their interest to tell you

• But they also know when you’re cheating!• So since you eventually want a page that searches well and has the content you users are looking for, it’s

just easier to start with SEO

• http://searchengineland.com/seotable

HISTORY OF WEB SEARCHING

CURRENT MARKET SHARE

MECHANICAL ASPECTS OF SEO

ON THE PAGE

• Content quality

• Is there enough content? Is it relevant?

• Site architecture• Crawlable? Robots.txt? Sitemap?

• HTML

• Tags well-formed? Titles relevant? Keywords?

• http://blog.halfabubbleout.com/blog/bid/263765/SEO-Basics-How-to-Add-Keywords-to-a-Website

OFF THE PAGE

• Trust• Reputable site, not brand new, well=known

• Links

• Particularly from trusted sites

• Personal

• Location, browsing history

• Social• Social media. Youtube is huge.

TOOLS FOR SEO

CATEGORIES OF TOOL

• Keyword tools• https://serps.com/tools/rank-checker/

• Traffic analysis• analytics.google.com

• Paid dashboards

• Majestic

• Moz

ANALYTICS

• Let’s look at the test account for some interesting examples

• Instructions are at https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6367342

ANALYTICS EXERCISE

• Using the demo account explore google analytics and report back to the group on a surprising thing you found

GOOD VERSUS BAD WEBSITES

• Huge field. This is just scratching the surface, we’ll go into more detail later

• Essence is that the website is tuned to the intended user

• But there are some general principles:

• Make it simple (but not too simple)

• Know your user

• More detail at https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/bad-design-vs-good-design-5-examples-we-can-learn-frombad-design-vs-good-design-5-examples-we-can-learn-from-130706 (and many other places, of course)

GITHUB AND GITHUB PAGES

• Source code control is the essence of modern website development

• Never develop anything that is not in a repository• Safer – can track changes and prevent accidental loss

• Portable – can develop on multiple machines

• Workflow – can share development with other people

• Portfolio – employers look at github

INSTALLING GIT AND GIT BASH• Windows

• Download from https://git-scm.com/download/win

• Run to install

• Open the “git bash” desktop app

• Mac• Might already be there ($ git –version)

• If not, you can get an installed from https://sourceforge.net/projects/git-osx-installer/files/

• Or use homebrew, “brew install git” then check the version

SOURCE CODE CONTROL

• Github, Gitlab, SVN +many, many proprietary solutions that you’ll never use (if you’re lucky!)

• We will focus on github

• Gitlab is very similar, based on GIT

• “Global Information Tracker”? Other less savory acronyms

• May not stand for anything other than not having a UNIX command named git previously and kind of sounding like “get”

• Written by Linus Torvalds (of Linux fame) to manage linux sources

USING GIT

• Avoid most of the GUI tools!

• They may be easier initially but they will eventually get in your way

• Technically called a “BASH” terminal in the version I’ll be having you install

THE GIT BASH TERMINAL

• Demo of git in a bash terminal (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQUcmNO4diQ we’ll probably do this live, but if you want a refresher later this video is decent. Longer one at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVsySz-h9r4 is even better)

ESSENTIAL GIT COMMANDS• In a bash shell, create a new directory (mkdir untangling)

• Create a new repository in the github.com website (or use git init if you want to do it locally)

• Clone that repository to your local machine (git clone $projectpath)

• Edit or add a file using an editor (I like visual studio code - http://code.visualstudio.com/)

• Make sure git picked up the change (git status)

• Add the file (git add $filename)

• Commit the add (git commit –m “message”)

• Push the commit to github (git push origin master)

SHORT GIT TUTORIAL WALKTHROUGH

• May or may not have time to walk through this in class

• https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/using-branches

GITHUB PAGES

• Just an easy way to use a webserver for free!

• That is driven from a source-code controlled environment

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiOgz3nKpgk (again, we’ll probably go through this live, but this if you don’t remember what we did here’s a run-through)

• Personal and project pages, we’ll mostly use project pages

• Use by cloning or forking a project and then turning on github pages. Whatever is in index.html will get served up!

• Few extra steps for a custom URL

HOMEWORK

• Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, was lambasted for poor website design http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/worst-websites-of-2014.html

• Find the 5 most important things that could be improved about Paul Graham’s website at http://paulgraham.com/

• Base your suggestions on https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/bad-design-vs-good-design-5-examples-we-can-learn-frombad-design-vs-good-design-5-examples-we-can-learn-from-130706 and the SEO periodic table

• Create a github project, from the command line put a newly edited text file into it, and send me a link

• Submit homeworks to me by email at derekja@gmail.com by the start of next week’s class

GETTING READY FOR NEXT WEEK• Main topic for next week is advertising. We have a guest as well to expand on SEO.

• But getting ready for the html classes is going to take a bit of time.

• You already have a github account, so try making your first page on github pages https://pages.github.com/

• If you like, start editing html. There are lots of editors, but a nice graphical site is https://html-online.com/

• Finally, not all of you are on the slack channel. Send me email at derekja@gmail.com to be added.

• Slack is the main place to ask questions and start discussions. You’ll also want to be on there to start finding group members for the project.