Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Guide

Search engine best practices are also good for the customer experience. Easy to read = easy to index.

Whether you are creating a new page or editing an existing one, remember these five key points:

• Use your audience’s language.

  • Use simple, everyday language aligned to search intent.
  • If we don’t use the terms and phrases our customers search for, they won’t find our content (localize!).
  • Avoid unpopular internal Dell acronyms and jargon.

• Write for people, not bots.

  • Write naturally, not forced—don’t spam.
  • Focus on readability and marketability.

• Be unique.

  • Keep titles, descriptions and content unique per page.
  • Duplicated content hampers search engine indexing and creates a poor customer experience.

• Be focused.

  • Tightly focused content better enables search engines to match pages to search queries.

• Be indexable.

  • Ensure key messages can be crawled as basic HTML.
  • Content embedded in images, videos, AJAX & Flash generally won’t be indexed. If necessary, use an alternative crawlable path.

Not all pages are suitable landing pages from a search engine perspective. The best ones are:

• Useful and relevant to queried terms.

• Focused to a topic.

• Built around a search intent:

  • Calling out clear customer benefits.
  • Featuring a prominent call to action.
  • With an obvious learn, purchase or support navigation path.

Successful landing pages also have:

• Low bounce rates.

• High conversation rates with clicks to a store/purchase path, subscriptions, PDF downloads, and chat.

Purpose:

• To align keywords on landing pages with searcher queries.

• For a given topic, both most descriptive and commonly searched for terms.

• To localize by region/language.

• Used to populate all on-page/search engine results page elements, as well as "hidden" elements.

Benefit:

• Aligning regional content with local target audience’s queried terms improves relevance through:

  • Better indexing and search engine results page ranking.
  • Driving more NS traffic and revenue.

Guidelines:

• Each page should be built around 1-3 common, locally searched terms or phrases that are most descriptive of the topic (generic and/or branded).

• Avoid diluting rankings by overlapping primary keywords across many pages.

• Optimize for most common word forms and spellings while occasionally using other forms.

Purpose:

• 1-2 sentences describing the page.
• Displayed below Search Engine Results Page title link if “sufficiently relevant” (i.e. contains queried terms).
• Compels a click-through.
• <meta =="" “description”=""> in source code’s meta section

Benefit:

• When keywords matching queried terms are emphasized they grab searcher’s attention.
• Compelling, well written and relevant descriptions increase the click-through rate.
• More NS traffic and revenue.

Structure/Guidelines:

• Min. 50 char.; max. 155 (100 for in CN)

  • Ignored by Google if too short.
  • Truncated if longer.

• 1-2 easy to scan sentence(s).

• Within first 65 char. include:

  • Page’s 1-3 primary keywords.

  • Search intent call-to-action. This should be:

    • Unique to a page.
    • Clearly and succinctly descriptive of product/key customer benefit.
    • Only letters or words and standard punctuation; no symbols.

To boost search engine rankings of pages, prompt stakeholders and partners to link to your pages through:

• Social media, such as Twitter and Facebook
• Blogs
• Forums
• Social bookmarking, such as Stumbleupon & Delicious
• Business partner sites (just ask!)
• Press releases

Include in your request:

• Destination URL.
• Link anchor text. Ensure it's properly descriptive and select words from the browser title.

For new or updated pages, one of the fastest ways to get the new pages noticed by customers as well as search engines is to Tweet about it. Leverage business unit Social Media & Community representatives.

Search engines cannot crawl JavaScript. Avoid using it for content that should be indexed.

For JavaScript links to content that should be indexed, you must provide alternative basic HTML links to content, including pop-up windows.

Search engines generally cannot view or navigate Flash and AJAX content or links.

If AJAX or Flash must be used, provide alternative basic HTML content that is crawlable, along with navigational links.

For Flash, populate below search engine indexable fields (displayed if Flash cannot load):

• Use descriptive keywords in title and ample description fields.
• For description, consider a compelling, soft call to action.

• Set display to false to prevent text from being displayed. For example:

  • <xdb:flashseotitle> Dell Brand Model Category </xdb:flashseotitle> <xdb:flashseodescription> Customize your new Dell Brand Model Category </xdb:flashseodescription> <xdb:flashseodisplay> false </xdb:flashseodisplay>

All search elements should:

• Front load search elements with page’s primary keywords.
• Use popular terms and variations; no uncommon internal Dell acronyms and jargon.
• Be easy to scan/read.
• Be unique to each element.
• Not use symbols (e.g. TM, ©, ®) except for the first instance in content (as per legal, symbols only required after the first non-titular usage of a legally protected term in main content).
• Not include “Dell” with every mention of brand or system name unless part of brand name (e.g. “Dell Precision”, “Dell Studio”).

Write for your target audience:

• Describe key benefits in customer-centric terms (e.g. “lightweight” or “portable” qualifies dimension & weight more than “small form factor”).

• Use the most commonly searched terms for each local market. Note variations like ...

  • Regional language variation:

    • Spain= “portátiles”
    • Mexico = “laptops”
    • Argentina = “notebooks”

  • Colloquialism vs. dictionary:

    • Germany = “beamer” vs. “projektor”
      

  • EN often in non-EN markets:

    • Japan = EN “laptop” & “PC” are okay
      

Search engines are able to read all source code.

Text-to-code ratio should be at a minimum 25-42% (higher = better).

Put scripts and related code at end of source code.

Remove/minimize unnecessary code and tags (e.g. comment tags).

Use primary keywords.

Separate with hyphens.

Only ASCII letters or numbers.

Automatically displayed (pulled from category tree and structure file).

Must use primary targeted keywords of a page.

Add key links for search engines to crawl.

Of very little weighting; can ignore with impunity.

Minimally important for site search (e.g. for S&P products).

Potentially can add primary keywords (for audit purposes).

Search engines may downgrade rankings of slow pages due to poor customer experience and high bounce rate.

Maintain reasonable page sizes by:

• Formatting images for web use.
• Trimming unnecessary code.