Technical SEO Updated

Technical SEO Updated

Joomla! Day 2012
Sofia, Bulgaria

Stanislav Dimitrov, Head of SEO, Hop Online

Today’s SEO Agenda

1) Why SEO matters
2) Technical SEO problems
3) Common mistakes
4) Google’s Panda/Penguin updates
5) Latest SEO trends
6) Useful tools and resources
7) 10 actionable tips for your site
8) Q&A time

The Growth of Search

Number of Searches/Day on Google

Source: SEOmoz.org

The Growth of Search

75% of all clicks go to organic results

Using WordPress? You’re 80% there!

Matt Cutts, Google
http://goo.gl/teuUi

Let’s Talk About …

 Joomla! used by more than 30 million website owners
 Joomla! is popular because of its features for communities

S.P.A.M = Sites Positioned Above Mine

Search Engine Friendly URLs
 Dynamic URLs
Low CTR, dups

Need to 301?

 Unstructured URLs

Mirror site structure?

Creates dups

 Keyword Stuffing

Spammy site

 Page extensions / trailing slash don’t matter for SEO
 Joomla! Documentation http://bit.ly/RfqTcL
 IIS 7.0 and URL rewrite http://bit.ly/QocfAi

Safe Browsing Tool

Even Joomla may get in trouble

 Safe Browsing Tool:
http://bit.ly/PqysBF

 Report to StopBadware:
http://bit.ly/SOCIdm

 Reconsideration Request

Check Your Crawl Stats
Site downtime?

What takes so long?

Page Speed Insights

Page Speed Tools http://goo.gl/iMfkJ

Crawl Errors and 4xx/5xx Codes

 URL fixed or not
 Remove from sitemaps
 Fetch as Google
 Mark as Fixed
 If needed: Remove URL

URL Parameter Handling

 Optimize crawl budget
 Address dup content
 Robots.txt analysis in GWT
 Works with meta robots
 Help http://goo.gl/zCChz

Submit to Index
 Indexation in real time
 Useful when changing content
 Fetch limits update every week

Index Status/XML Sitemaps

Check indexation

http Status Codes for SEO
Mtel losing link juice

Dir.bg slightly better

Where it Can Go Wrong

 Not knowing your 301s from 302s
 Redirecting all pages in one go to a single URL

When You Should Use a 301

 Moving sites
 Expired content
 Multiple versions of the home page
 Pro tip: if homepage serves a unique purpose (shown to users who are
logged in or have cookies dropped), rel=canonical a better option

When to Use rel=canonical

 Where 301s may not be possible
 Multiple ways of navigating to a page (ecommerce sites)
owww.phoneshop.com/smartphone/3G
owww.phoneshop.com/3G/smartphone
 When dynamic URLs are generated on the fly
o session IDs
o tracking code: www.example.com/widgets/red?source=footer-nav

When NOT to Use rel=canonical

 On new website
 On pagination (or at least with caution)
 Across your entire site to one page

Faceted Navigation

 Pagination/sorting can cause duplicate content – use Ajax/JavaScript to avoid
 Selective robots.txt
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*crawl=no
 No matter of the route, only one indexable URL per page
 How to handle faceted navigation http://mz.cm/SUHJN8

View All Page

 View All pages must be fast
 Big (ecommerce) sites sometimes dislike them
 … but users love them! (if they are fast)

Google Prev/Next Tag
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1

Page 1
<link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2" />

Page 2
<link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1" />

Page 3

Google Prev/Next Tag
 Declare in <head> section of the page

 The first page only contains rel=”next” and no rel=”prev” markup

 Pages two to the second-to-last page should be doubly-linked with
both rel=”next” and rel=”prev”

 The last page only contains markup for rel=”prev”, not rel=”next”

 Use absolute URLs

 The chain can’t be broken

 Each page can be in only one pagination chain

 Use of prev/next consolidates signals across entire series

 Add rel=canonical to View All page on all pages in the series

Google Algorithm Changes

 Google updates’ history http://mz.cm/QZCga4
 Map the dates as annotations in Google Analytics

Mozcast – Google Weather Report

Sept 14 - Panda 4.0

Google Panda
2

1

4
3

Source: SEOmoz

Who Gets Pandalized?
 Sites with too many pages relative to the size of their brand footprint
 A high % of duplicate content (might apply to a page, a site or both)
 A low amount of original content on a page or site
 A high % (or number) of pages with a low amount of original content
 A high amount of inappropriate (they don’t match the search queries a page
does well for) adverts, especially high on the page
 Page content (and page title tag) not matching the search queries a page
does well for
 High bounce rate on page or site
 Low visit times on page or site
 Low % of users returning to a site
 Low CTR % from Google’s results (page/site)
 High % of boilerplate content (the same on every page)
 Low or no quality inbound links to a page or site

How to Recover After Panda?
 Take a deep breath
 Check the timeline in Google Analytics
 Double check for IT problems
 Decide which URLs are canonical and create strong signals (rel canonical,
robot exclusion, internal link profile, XML sitemaps)
 Decide which URLs are your most valuable and ensure they are indexed
and well optimized
 Add quality content to them – text, videos, photos, reviews/ratings
 Remove any extraneous, overhead, duplicate, low value and unnecessary
URLs from the index
 Build internal links to canonical, high-value URLs from authority pages
(strong mozRank, unique referring domains, total links)
 Build high-quality external links via social media efforts
 Use content-based link building

Great guide at WordTracker : http://goo.gl/C0zSH

Who Gets Penguinized?

 Overly aggressive anchor text (both internally and externally)
 Overuse of exact-match domains
 Low-quality article marketing & blog spam
 Keyword stuffing in internal/outbound links
 Link spikes (too many links built too fast)
 Links from irrelevant sources
 Blogroll links
 Comment links
 Sitewide links (SEO’d footer links)
 Too many links from one domain to a single page (GWT)

How to Recover After Penguin?
 Compare Penguin dates with traffic drop in Google Analytics
 Investigate which keywords dropped
 Download all links and sort them by type, anchor text or DA
 Open Site Explorer
 Majestic SEO
 Link Detective
 Combine data in Excel and find the poison links
 Remove all unrelated links on/off your website
 Diversify anchor text in links to your site
 Social signals (DataHub) over links
 Links from government(.bg) sites / industry associations
 Reconsideration request won’t help http://goo.gl/YDFu7
 Increase the brand digital footprint:
 Complete contact info (Google Maps/Plus, team photos)
 Genuine social media accounts
 Branded links / branded traffic

Rich Snippets in SERPs

Products

Events

Recipes

Restaurants

Rich Snippet Testing Tool
Test HTML code

Which result will you click?

Rel author in SERP

Google rel=author Tag

 3-link verification method
 How to implement rel=author http://selnd.com/QUbUYy

Google rel=author Tag

 2-link verification method
 How to implement rel=author http://selnd.com/QUbUYy

Google rel Publisher
Verified G+ account

Recent Google+ posts

Rel Publisher for Brands

Google+ and site linked

Screaming Frog

Free download
http://bit.ly/j8as0V

Custom Dashboards in GA

Segment and track

SEOmoz Guide to SEO
 Best SEO Guide
http://mz.cm/TjZshv

Distilled University

 $40/month
 60 day free SEOmoz Pro
http://bit.ly/SOgOH9

10 Actionable Tips for Your Site
1. SEO friendly page titles and META descriptions
2. Proper keyword usage in the body of your pages
3. Website redirects from www to non www or vice versa
4. Duplicate URLs removed from your website
5. All URLs are search engine friendly
6. Properly configured XML sitemaps
(products/categories/video/image/geo)
7. Working robots.txt file
(Pro tip: reference sitemaps, hide with .htaccess)
8. Structured data (products, location, author, events,
organization)
9. Traffic/goals/events in Google Analytics
(Pro tip: create custom dashboards)
10. Use rel=author and Google+ for more CTR

Thank you!
Q&A Time …

@SearchRocks
/in/stanidlavdimitrov
+StanislavDimitrov

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