Technical SEO.

Alec BertramSenior SEO Engineer, Fresh Egg

@KiwiAlec

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

Technical SEO is the foundation of organic marketing

Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec

• 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

• 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

How search engines find your website.

Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec

Crawling Indexing Post-Index Analysis

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

Crawling.How a search engine sees your website

Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec

• “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

Website structureYour site’s architecture affects it’s performance

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

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

• 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/

• “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/

Technical on-page basicsThe things that you need to always get right

http://moz.com/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet-2013-edition

The important (but completely mundane) bits.

Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec

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

• 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

Giving meaning to your content.The case for semantic mark up

• 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

• Location microdata sends a strong signal that the page is suited to local search queries

Schema.org Places.

Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec

• Review microdata tells search engines that text is a user review

• Has obviously been spammed (now penalised)

Schema.org Reviews.

Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec

• This page has a strong “purchase” intent

• More likely to be returned to an “in-market” user

Schema.org Product.

Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec

• Get into a user’s email and predictive search (Google Now)

Schema.org for Email.

Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec

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).

• Give Google a semantic understanding of your pages without implementing any code

Google Data Highlighter.

Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec

• “Giving Google too much information will kill your market”

The argument against using microdata.

Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec

Reclaim lost link equityFinding your city of gold.

Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec

Reclaim Lost Link Equity.

Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec

BBC.com

Pokerstars.com

Yoursite.com/old-poker

404 Error!

Dmoz.org

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

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

• 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

http://fortseo.com/bulk-website-response-checker/

Reclaim Lost Link Equity.

Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec

Audit Your Website.Common problems that you probably have.

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

Audit your website.

Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec

• 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

• 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

• 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

• This is what happens when you remove pages without redirecting

Speaking of lost link equity.

Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec

Winning with alternatesThe opportunity in going further afield

What are alternates?

Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec

Site.co.uk/poker

Site.de/poker mobile.site.co.uk/poker

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Mobile devices are not The Future. They are The Now.

Mobile Alternates.

Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec

• 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

SEO tools you should be usingEfficiently monitor for technical issues

• 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/

• – 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

• 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

Key takeaways.If you only remember five things, make it these five

• 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

Thanks!

Alec BertramSenior SEO Engineer, Fresh Egg

@KiwiAlec