An Affiliate's Guide - Navigating the Technical SEO Minefield
•
1 like•478 views
This document provides a summary of key technical SEO fundamentals that website owners should check on their sites. It outlines 15 technical factors to evaluate, including proper use of robots.txt files, XML sitemaps, page speed, mobile usability, and avoiding duplicate content issues. It also mentions two additional proactive optimizations of using schema markup and user testing to help search engines understand content and how users interact with sites. The document emphasizes that getting these technical fundamentals right is important for search engines to properly crawl and index sites.
Report
Share
An Affiliate's Guide - Navigating the Technical SEO Minefield
- 1. pagesauce@ A guide for affiliates; Navigating the technical SEO minefield Digital Marketing Show 19th November 2015
- 2. Charlie Williams Head of Marketing charlie (at) white.net @pagesauce
- 3. pagesauce@ Affiliate sites Frederick Valleys, Google (then) Affiliate Summit 2010 are largely “just an unnecessary step in the sales funnel” http://searchengineland.com/author/frederick-vallaeys
- 6. pagesauce@ Relevancy (content) Authority (links, citations, trust) Brand recognition Engagement (user signals, SERP bounceback) https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/correlations
- 7. pagesauce@ BUT… before that can happen…
- 8. pagesauce@ BUT… before that can happen… Google has to be able to crawl & understand your website = Technical SEO
- 9. pagesauce@ Not having it STOPS you ranking Is the prerequisite to play SEO: Technical SEO
- 10. pagesauce@ It supports other marketing/SEO work doing it Plenty of your competitors aren’t Much of this is simple to implement Good news: Quick wins
- 11. pagesauce@ Think of your website like a shop… Your content is your staff, site design the shop building & technical SEO the layout & signage
- 12. pagesauce@ Technical SEO prevents this Do you show what’s in your shop?
- 13. pagesauce@ 15 technical fundamentals That you can check on your site
- 14. pagesauce@ 15 technical fundamentals That you can check on your site & 2 bonus proactive optimisations
- 16. pagesauce@ 1. Technical SEO right now How successful are you right now? What does Google think of your site?
- 17. pagesauce@ How many URLs are on your site?
- 18. pagesauce@ How often does Google visit?
- 19. pagesauce@ 2. Meta keywords tag Remove it, unless your CMS uses it for internal search
- 21. pagesauce@ 3. Robots.txt Showing what’s open for business
- 22. pagesauce@ Folders robots (search engines) are blocked from Signpost your XML sitemap
- 23. pagesauce@ Select host (domain) to see URLs affected Common issues
- 24. pagesauce@ 1. Edit robots.txt 2. See if warnings appear 3. Test URL to see if successfully blocked
- 25. pagesauce@ 4. Robots meta tag Can be (mis)used to stop a page from being indexed http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html
- 26. pagesauce@ Know which of your URLs are noindexed
- 27. pagesauce@ 5. XML sitemaps A guide to your website
- 28. pagesauce@ Monitor indexation of submitted URLs http://www.sitemaps.org/
- 29. pagesauce@ Use sitemap index & multiple maps on large sites
- 30. pagesauce@ 6. Internal errors Issues search engines, & users, have crawling your site
- 31. pagesauce@ Errors identified by Google, split by type & device Not always comprehensive or current!
- 32. pagesauce@ Use crawler: See the broken URLs, then the pages that link to them – fix!
- 33. pagesauce@ 6.5 External errors If I ran an affiliate site… I’d be checking my external links weekly (unless I decided I liked losing money)
- 34. pagesauce@ 7. Internal linking Showing what’s important & where I want to direct users
- 35. pagesauce@ Homepage is usually most powerful URL How many pages do you link to from it?
- 36. pagesauce@ 8. URL structure • Lowercase • Readable • Contains keywords • Isn’t full or parameters (?=) https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls https://moz.com/learn/seo/url
- 37. pagesauce@ 9. Duplicate content part 1 So many ways to reach one page
- 38. pagesauce@ URL Parameters test.com/vs. test.com/sort=price Trailing Slash test.com/vs. test.com Index variation test.com/index.html www vs non-www test.com/vs. www.test.com/ test.com/ responsetester.appspot.com
- 39. pagesauce@ 10. Duplicate content part 2 Products in many categories
- 40. pagesauce@ What do I mean?
- 42. pagesauce@ Say hello to this guy
- 43. pagesauce@ 11. Duplicate content part 3 Manufacturer descriptions
- 44. pagesauce@
- 45. pagesauce@ 12. Duplicate content part 4 The blessing, & curse, of rel=canonical
- 47. pagesauce@ Rel=canonical tags Ian Lurie Portent Interactive “I still don’t recommend using rel=canonical. It should be your weapon of absolute last resort” http://searchengineland.com/why-i-still-hate-relcanonical-48317
- 48. pagesauce@ 13. Doorway pages Created to rank highly for specific search queries - make you click again to get what you actually need
- 50. pagesauce@ 14. Page speed Nobody likes a slow website 47% of consumers • 40% abandon a website that expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less 40% abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds
- 51. pagesauce@ 14. Page speed Nobody likes a slow website • 40% abandon a website that
- 52. pagesauce@ 47% of consumers • 40% abandon a website that expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less 40% abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds
- 54. pagesauce@ 2 billion global smartphone users audience searches 15. Mobile Being usable however your
- 55. pagesauce@
- 57. pagesauce@
- 58. pagesauce@ https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ Get detail on what is & isn’t mobile friendly
- 59. pagesauce@ 16. Schema Semantic markup to help get you understood, & noticed SERP rich snippet Knowledge Vault
- 60. pagesauce@ • Person • Product • Event • Organisation • Movie • Book • Review https://developers.google.com/structured-data Current Schemas in the SERPs (Rich Snippets)
- 63. pagesauce@ content 17. User testing Eye-opening insight into what your audience wants from your
- 64. pagesauce@ https://www.usertesting.com/product/videos-and-metrics Audio, visual & written feedback Starts @ $49 per video
- 65. pagesauce@ How users interact with your site has become an important ranking consideration. https://moz.com/blog/the-massive-ranking-factor-too-many-seos-are- ignoring-whiteboard-friday http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors
- 66. pagesauce@ Reading to get you started • http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide/ • https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search- engine-friendly-design-and-development • https://blog.kissmetrics.com/seo-guide/ • http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.co.uk/ en/uk/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter- guide.pdf • https://www.softwarepromotions.com/news/how-to-carry-out- an-seo-audit-for-free/
- 68. pagesauce@ THANK YOU Questions? charlie (at) white.net @pagesauce