Search Engine Friendly Design (Focus on Online Shops), SMX Munich 2014

Search-Engine Friendly Design Focus on Online Shops

Jan Hendrik Merlin Jacob

! @jhmjacob" fb.me/jhmjacob# hjacob.com/

!

About me

Entrepreneur: > 2002: Gamona.de > 2006: JobAustralia Ltd. > 2008: Evenity GmbH > 2012: OnPage.org GmbH

Sidenotes: > 2003/2004: World travel > 2013: Young-Entrepreneur of the Year,

Startup of the Year (by Association of German Internet, eco) Best Bavarian Startup(by kfw Bank)

Studies: > Business Informatics (University of Marburg / University of Hagen) > Dialog- & Online-Marketing (Bavarian Academy of Marketing)

Agenda

- Basics - Title Tag - Good Architecture -Webmaster Tools

- Advanced - Duplicate Content - The Crawl Budget - Blocking / Deindexing Content

Basics: Title TagWhat is the „Title Tag“?

<!DOCTYPE HTML> <html lang="de">"<head>"<title>Der offizielle Online-Shop des Hofbräuhaus München | Fanartikel online exklusiv shoppen </title>!...

Basics: Title TagWhat is the „Title Tag“?

Basics: Title Tag

- Myth Buster: The Title Tag is one of the primary ranking factors

- True story: The title has high impact on click rates („CTR“)!

- Side-Effect: A good CTR and a low Bounce-Rate lead to better rankings. By the way: Those Metrics are called „User Intent Data“

- Keyword Scoring: A keyword mention in the title probably hasa weightening bonus (compared to a mention throughout the body).

Basics: Title Tag

Bad Title Better Title

Titles with Focus on User Intent

Rule of thumb: Title should invite users to click, but don´t

promise anything your site can´t keep

Basics: Title TagSpecial Title for Social Networks

Why? Higher Focus on Call-To-Action. Adopt language of audience.

<meta property="og:title" content="Zieh dir die neusten Board…“ />

Basics: Good Architecture

Inspired by: spottedpanda.com

http://spottedpanda.com

Basics: Google Webmaster ToolsWhat are the Google Webmaster Tools?

PS: Bing also offers nice Webmaster Tools!

webmasters.google.com

http://webmasters.google.com

Basics: Google Webmaster ToolsSee the amount of indexed pages

Basics: Google Webmaster ToolsSetting up the preferred Domain

Agenda

- Basics - Title Tag - Good Architecture -Webmaster Tools

- Advanced - Duplicate Content - The Crawl Budget - Blocking / Deindexing Content

Advanced: Duplicate ContentWhat is „Duplicate Content“?

hofbraeuhaus-shop.de www.hofbraeuhaus-shop.de

= =

Three different URLs, with each 100% content

www.hofbraeuhaus-shop.de/

http://hofbraeuhaus-shop.de

http://www.hofbraeuhaus-shop.de

http://www.hofbraeuhaus-shop.de/

And even more …

and so on … in total 8 different URLs for the same page (!)

www.hofbraeuhaus-shop.de/index.php

https://www.hofbraeuhaus-shop.de/index.php

https://hofbraeuhaus-shop.de/index.php

https://hofbraeuhaus-shop.de/

Advanced: Duplicate Content

http://www.hofbraeuhaus-shop.de/index.php

https://www.hofbraeuhaus-shop.de/index.php

https://hofbraeuhaus-shop.de/index.php

https://hofbraeuhaus-shop.de/

- Myth Buster: Duplicate Content leads to ranking penalties

- True story: A lot of duplicate content will bore Search Engines and they will rather crawl other domains with more „original“ content

- This means: Duplicate Content does not cause a penalty, but it will lower your „Crawl Budget“, which means thatless pages get the chance to get crawled + indexed.

- Sidenode: By the time anyone in the internet links to your wrong(Sub-)Domain or protocol (http/https) and you do not capture it correctly you are running into DC problems!

Advanced: Duplicate Content

Advanced: The Crawl Budget

- „Crawl Budget“ = The Amount of time the (Google-)Bot spends on your domain

- Search Engines have to allocate their own ressources -> SE Primary aim: Providing the best results for its own users-> Will focus on pages with original content-> Trying not to spend too much time/money on spam pages-> Brand + Unique Content is important

Advanced: The Crawl Budget- Conclusion

-> Most times: „Less is more!“-> Focus on a rather small amount of pages which provide outstanding content

nytimes.com jameda.de moo.com

http://nytimes.com

http://jameda.de

http://moo.com


- Conclusion-> If you own tons (10k+) pages and all (!) of them provide good original content, which also receives updates time by time (user reviews for instance), make sure you provide a good site structure-> Every page should be reachable within 4-5 clicks from the homepage. Sitemap.xml and navigable sitemaps will help.

Advanced: Blocking / Deindexing Content

In case you are not able to delete „low quality“ content or duplicate content there are several techniques to helpSearch Engines to better understand your Website: -> „noindex“ Flag-> „nofollow“ Flag -> Canonical Tag-> robots.txt-> Redirects -> Webmaster Tools

„noindex“ Flag Can be set in: Response-Header or Meta Section of DocumentWill lead to:Google will crawl this pages and will afterwards see, that it is not meant to be displayed in the search results.


„noindex“ Flag Pro:Block contents you dont want to see in search resultsContra: You crawl budget gets consumed, as the Search Engine still needs to crawl the page before it can see it is „noindexed“.All links on this page will be crawled as well (!).


„nofollow“ FlagCan be set in: Response-Header, Meta Section of Document or asAttribute of Hyperlinks Will lead to:The links marked as nofollow won’t pass any link juice (but still will be crawled!)


„nofollow“ FlagPro: Used to remove the „recommendation“ character of link (-> no page rank / link juice is passed)Contra: Widely misused as many people think it tells the SearchEngine Bot not to crawl the linked page.When used on internal links it can harm your own pages,as link juice is thrown away without a need.


„Canonical“-Tag Can be set in: Response-Header or Meta Section of DocumentWill lead to:Similar result as the „noindex“-flag but combined withthe information, that there is another URL which is theone supposed to rank in search engines.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/unterseite.html"/>


„Canonical“-Tag Pro: It helps the Search Engines to determine which URL is the original content and which other URLs are just copies of that.Good tool to handle wildcard subdomains and other stuff, if the IT guys can’t fix the DC Problem correctly.Contra: Crawl-Budget is spended, as the Bot will see this information only after crawling the page. It rather helps on smaller DC Problems.


<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/unterseite.html"/>

„unavailable-after“ Flag !

What is it for: Helps Google to understand if a page has a expiry date. Useful if you know, that an item won’t be in stock again. Tells the Bot that this page is irrelevant in future and the crawl budget should rather be used other pages. Could be used in combination with a canonical tag.But: Use with care!

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="unavailable_after: 25-Aug-2014 15:00:00 EST“/>


robots.txt !

What is it for: Block pages based on URL patterns. You can set up rules based on UserAgent (=> Bots).

User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /search/ !

User-agent: * Disallow: /cache/

PS: Do not put admin interfaces into robots.txt


robots.txtPro: Easily mark complete folders / patterns as „disallowed“, without editing code. Contra: Pages may still get listed in search results (because of external links).Heavy blocking via robots.txt may result in „headless“ link-graphs.


See blocked pages


- In case you’re IT team can not handle some kind of Duplicate Contentissues, the Webmaster Tools can be used to block certain pages from crawling - so Search Engines can focus on your „real“ content.

- But keep in mind: You better handle those DC problems at theirSource instead of „trouble-shooting“ …

Advanced: Blocking / Deindexing ContentGoogle Webmaster Tools

Block pages based on URL parameters


Thanks!

Jan Hendrik Merlin Jacob

! @jhmjacob" fb.me/jhmjacob# hjacob.com/blog/ (you can find the slides here!)

!

OnPage.org GmbH

! @onpage_org " fb.me/onpage.org # de.onpage.org

!

Search Engine Friendly Design (Focus on Online Shops), SMX Munich 2014

Marketing

Transcript of Search Engine Friendly Design (Focus on Online Shops), SMX Munich 2014