On-Site Insight: Technical SEO Advice

Panelists: Susan Moskwa – Google, Vanessa Fox – Nine by Blue, and Aaron Kahlow – Online Marketing Summit & Online Marketing Connect

SEO Trifecta: site-wide SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO – panel addresses site-wide SEO and answers, “Are you experiencing technical difficulties?”

Aaron”Warm Up Act” Kahlow: Translating Technology

Getting Technical SEO Ingrained in the Organization: Selling Internally

• Think about making money first
• Help others understand search and empower those within the company
• Sound the alarm – stop allowing your company to hit the snooze button

Top Ten:

1. Duplicate Content Destroyer: use canonical tag
2. Domain Choice: www or non-www
3. Cookie It: get rid of session id’s in URL strings (store in cookie rather than URL)
4. No Old School JavaScript: drop down menus should be in CSS and include no script tag
5. Flash & Java Upgrades: more advanced tactics for Flash and JavaScript
6. Page has importance: nofollow links to supplemental pages
7. 301: use 301 & 302 as appropriate
8. Sitemap two-ways: xml and html
9. 5 or less: limit # of parameters in URL strings to 5 at most
10. Check it twice: check and double check robot.txt files in Web Master Tools

Educate > Translate > Execute – in that order. Too difficult to execute without first educating

Susan “Token Googler” Moskwa: Technical Insight URL’s

Why Care About Technical SEO

• Google can crawl a limited (albeit significant) amount of information on the web and can index even less – you want to be indexed
• Google prioritizes crawling (new content > refresh old content > few duplicates)
• Google then keeps the “good stuff”

* Funnel crawling “budget” toward important content

Reduce Inefficient Crawling of Your Site

• Avoid maverick coding problems – e.g. discourage alternative encodings (QQ instead of ?) and eliminate positional coding
• Remove user specific details from URLs (creates infinite URL’s) – e.g. user id
• Keywords in name/value pairs are just as good as in path (static v. dynamic URL’s)
• Optimize dynamic URL’s – create patterns for crawlers to understand (category, article, sid): patterns allow Google to analyze variables
• Rein in infinite spaces: e.g. uncover issues in CMS
• Disallow actions Googlebot can’t perform (disallow shopping carts, contact forms, login pages)

Get Preferred URL’s Indexed

• Set preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools
• Put canonical URL’s in Sitemap
• Use rel=”canonical” tag
• Get feedback in webmaster tools

Vaness “Cyberspace Visionary” Fox: Diagnosing Search Issues

Path to Improvement

• Assess where your site is today
• Identify problems
• Root-cause analysis

Identify Problem

• Big drop in traffic – limited use of rankings
• Not getting traffic where you expect
• Content in SERP’s does not look appealing
• Customers have bad clickthrough experience

Make Sure It’s a Problem

• Toolbar PageRank drop – not necessarily important unless coordinates with loss in traffic
• Number of indexed pages drop – can be a good thing as long as important pages are being indexed
• Indexation ratio change – look at the right metrics

Find the Cause

• Traffic drop: ensure from search, ranking problem or indexing problem?
• Indexing problem: whole site or just a few pages
• Ranking problem: drop for all keywords or some, same pages as ranked before?
• Flowchart shown (see Nine by Blue)

Diagnostics and Resources: janeandrobot.com

To do: submit an XML Sitemap by category and view your index statistics (total URL’s:indexed URL’s) – allows users to see where the issue exists

SERP display issues: look at your listings and ask would you click it

Findability issues: Superbowl Ad example – edityourown.com (Hyundai). People actually typed “edit your own” in Google where Hyundai’s microsite was not listed, leading to lost traffic.

What really matters: Accessibility > Discoverability > CONVERSIONS

Q&A:

Addressing duplicate content throughout sections of a site? Recommendation: Why? Extra click can be beneficial. Other option is to use CSS. Yahoo has a duplicate content tag as well.

No cache meta tags causing an issue? Recommendation: No cache meta tags should not cause an issue

Flash & SEO friendliness – serving humans and robots with different content? Recommendation: Why? Search engines cannot completely crawl Flash. Put everything around Flash in text – limit Flash content to moveable objects. Jane & Robot addresses Flash issues