technical seo - presentation from london affiliate conference 2014
DESCRIPTION
My presentation on the most common and easiest to fix technical SEO issues from the London Affiliate Conference 2014TRANSCRIPT
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Technical SEO.
Alec BertramSenior SEO Engineer, Fresh Egg
@KiwiAlec
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Senior SEO Engineer at Fresh Egg
Passion for technical SEO
New Zealander (sorry for the accent)
Industry standard tool for monitoring usage of brand images across the web
New tool for discretely tracking who sees offsite content
I’m an affiliate too
Alec Bertram
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Technical SEO is the foundation of organic marketing
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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• A quick run through of how your website’s architecture affects your organic search performance
• A broad look at the most important aspects of technical SEO
• Five things you can do to improve your website’s organic visibility through technical SEO
• Hopefully time for questions and to run through some of your questions
Today.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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• Not going to give you code examples (too basic)• Not going to go in depth or solve all of your problems (too
advanced)
• Website and URL structure• Site speed• Robots directives• Basic and essential on-page elements• Microdata and semantic markup• Reclaiming lost link equity• Basic website audit• Internationalisation• Setting up mobile websites• Tools you need to be using
Today.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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How search engines find your website.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Crawling Indexing Post-Index Analysis
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How search engines rank your webpages.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
User Search Query
Information Retrieval
Ranking + Alternates
More? Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and indexing documents and images
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Crawling.How a search engine sees your website
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Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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• “disallow” blocks access to URLs. Will not stop a URL from being indexed
• Never block images, javascript, stylesheets, or other elements
• Don’t get it wrong
Robots.txt
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
More? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156449
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Website structureYour site’s architecture affects it’s performance
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Site structure and the flow of link equity.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
100100
135
40.5 40.5 40.532.9
36.5 14.8 14.8
45
135*0.9/3
100*0.9/2
100*0.9/1
40.5*0.9/1
36.5*0.9/132.9*0.9/2
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URL Structure.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
• Vertical not horizontal
/poker/learn/what-is-a-flopNot/learn-poker-what-is-a-flop
• Site architecture should make sense to users and group similar pages in the same directory
More? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76329
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• Sub directory?www.yoursite.com/blog
• Sub domain?blog.yoursite.com
• Separate domain?www.yourblog.com
• Google says subdomains are treated the same as subdirectories
In general, try to use sub directories
Where should you put a new website section?
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
More? http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/
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• “Just One Second Delay In Page-Load Can Cause 7% Loss In Customer Conversions” - Amazon
• “1 second above the fold rendering goal for mobiles” - Google
• Compression• Conditional GET• Minimise use of, and optimise images and script files• Implement SPDY
• Benchmark your speed against competitors using GTMetrix
Site Speed is critical.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
More? 1 Second target: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/mobileSPDY: http://www.chromium.org/spdyGTMetrix: http://gtmetrix.com/
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Technical on-page basicsThe things that you need to always get right
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http://moz.com/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet-2013-edition
The important (but completely mundane) bits.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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Why it’s important to eliminate:
• Search engines rank webpages from a pool of eligible documents
• When it finds two identical documents, how does it decide which to rank? It uses authority and relevancy signals
• It’s better to merge all authority and relevancy signals into one document
• Having one strong document is better than many weak duplicates
Let’s talk about duplicate content.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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• Canonical is the postcode of your website
• Every unique page needs a unique canonical
• If the page is served from a “wrong” URL, canonical ensures authority and relevance signals go to correct URL
• HTML tag or HTTP header
Canonical URL.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
More? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394
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Giving meaning to your content.The case for semantic mark up
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• Tells robots the meaning behind a piece of content
• Schema.org, RDFa, Microformats
• Use Schema.org
• Do dishonest implementations, get a penalty
• Social microdata
Microdata.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
More? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/176035
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• Location microdata sends a strong signal that the page is suited to local search queries
Schema.org Places.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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• Review microdata tells search engines that text is a user review
• Has obviously been spammed (now penalised)
Schema.org Reviews.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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• This page has a strong “purchase” intent
• More likely to be returned to an “in-market” user
Schema.org Product.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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• Get into a user’s email and predictive search (Google Now)
Schema.org for Email.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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Social Microdata.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Twitter Cards Facebook OpenGraph
• OpenGraph markup turns a page into a semantic entity (potentially eligible to appear in Facebook graph search).
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• Give Google a semantic understanding of your pages without implementing any code
Google Data Highlighter.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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• “Giving Google too much information will kill your market”
The argument against using microdata.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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Reclaim lost link equityFinding your city of gold.
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Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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Reclaim Lost Link Equity.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
BBC.com
Pokerstars.com
Yoursite.com/old-poker
404 Error!
Dmoz.org
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Industry convention states that link equity does not flow through a 302 redirect
(there is some empirical evidence to dispute this)
Reclaim Lost Link Equity.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
BBC.com
Pokerstars.com
Yoursite.com/old-poker
Dmoz.org
Yoursite.com/new-poker
302 / 307Redirect
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Reclaim lost link equity by implementing a 301 redirect
Reclaim Lost Link Equity.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
BBC.com
Pokerstars.com
Yoursite.com/old-poker
Dmoz.org
Yoursite.com/new-poker
301Redirect
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• Find all pages with inbound links on your website
• Google Analytics landing pages• Google Webmaster Tools • Commercial Link Graphs
• Ahrefs.com• MajesticSEO.com• OpenSiteExplorer.com
• Free Link Graphs• Openlinkprofiler.org• Webmeup.com
Reclaim Lost Link Equity.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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http://fortseo.com/bulk-website-response-checker/
Reclaim Lost Link Equity.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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Audit Your Website.Common problems that you probably have.
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http://www.deepcrawl.co.uk
• Enterprise level website auditor and monitoring tool
• Free 10, 000 credits when you signup before Monday:
URL: [redacted]Password: [redacted]
• I’m not affiliated with DeepCrawl, it’s just great.
Audit your website.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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Audit your website.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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• Eliminate links to broken pages or which redirect
• Identify spidertraps and block with robots.txt
• Identify pages which are disallowed
Audit your website.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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• Identify pages which do not have “the basics”
• Find pages which have duplicated content
• If thin pages are key organic landing pages, ensure they provide good value
Audit your website.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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• Google some page titles and description snippets – if the same page is in more than one result, you have a problem
• Find cases where the same text has been duplicated across your site (or other sites)
Audit your website.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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• This is what happens when you remove pages without redirecting
Speaking of lost link equity.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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Winning with alternatesThe opportunity in going further afield
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What are alternates?
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Site.co.uk/poker
Site.de/poker mobile.site.co.uk/poker
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• Expand internationally by leveraging the relevance and authority of your main site
• Declare language and (optional) country alternates for each page in HTML header – see “rel=alternate hreflang”
• Can be used to segment countries in the same language (US and UK) or languages in the same country (French and English in Canada)
Language / Region Alternates.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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• I am a travel discount & cashback affiliate:
• Hreflang implementation on one merchant: two extra pages (German and Dutch) caused a 40% YoY uplift in conversions• Cost me a round of beers
• Speak the language, but understand the culture – using Google Translate is asking for a content penalty
Language / Region Alternates.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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• Set geographic target in webmaster tools
• Google is not always the king• US: Consider Bing• Russia: Yandex• China: Baidu
• A ccTLD normally wins (but do market research first)
Other internationalisation.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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• Mobile devices are not The Future. They are The Now.
Mobile Alternates.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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• If your desktop site gives a poor mobile experience, it may not rank as well on mobile searches*
• Three types of mobile deployment – responsive, dynamic, separate.
For separate mobile sites (mobile.yoursite.com):• Implement “rel=alternate media” on desktop site, and
canonicalisation on mobile site
• A sub-directory is normally preferred for microsites. In this specific case, sub-domain (or separate TLD) is fine
• *http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/changes-in-rankings-of-smartphone_11.html
Mobile Alternates.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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SEO tools you should be usingEfficiently monitor for technical issues
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• Crawl and error data
• Link and keyword data
• Control search crawler and ranking settings
• Your only communication channel to search engines
Webmaster Tools.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Engine URLGoogle https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Bing http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster
Baidu http://zhanzhang.baidu.com/Yandex http://webmaster.yandex.com/
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• – Will give you raw data (Advanced users)
• – Full crawl and some top-line analysis of data and issues
• Microsoft IIS Search Engine Optimisation Toolkit – one of the better (and least-known) free website crawlers
• – Alerts you when your robots.txt has changed.
Website Auditing.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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• Google Webmaster Central
• Google Developer Guidelines
• @mattcutts – Always tweets out latest technical things
• Moz – Best practice and some implementation examples
• SEOBook – The opposing view
Technical SEO resources.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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Key takeaways.If you only remember five things, make it these five
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• Ensure all pages have a correct canonical tag
• Perform top line website audit
• Reclaim lost link equity
• Fix your internationalisation with hreflang (or consider internationalisation)
• Ensure your mobile experience is fantastic
Key takeaways.
Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
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Thanks!
Alec BertramSenior SEO Engineer, Fresh Egg
@KiwiAlec