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:
- Duplicate Content Destroyer: use canonical tag
- Domain Choice: www or non-www
- Cookie It: get rid of session id’s in URL strings (store in cookie rather than URL)
- No Old School JavaScript: drop down menus should be in CSS and include no script tag
- Flash & Java Upgrades: more advanced tactics for Flash and JavaScript
- Page has importance: nofollow links to supplemental pages
- 301: use 301 & 302 as appropriate
- Sitemap two-ways: xml and html
- 5 or less: limit # of parameters in URL strings to 5 at most
- 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
Mike Nierengarten is an Account Executive at Anvil Media Inc. Mike’s area of focus include building out social media strategies and measuring social media’s impact, but his strength in PPC is what makes his clients the big bucks. Mike’s influences include Avinash Kaushik, Brian Solis, and Mark Cuban.
Thanks for the write-up, Mike. Although for the record–even though I live in Seattle and do appreciate the rain–I recommended reining in infinite spaces, not raining in them. 😉
typo corrected 😉 and thank you VERY much for coming!
Susan,
Live blogging can cause those pesky spelling errors. Thanks for the follow up. Hope you didn’t mind the “token googler” throw in.
Oh, I am very much a token Googler. 🙂
Thanks for having me, it was fun!