Posts on State of Search about ‘Technical SEO’

Upgrading a website shouldn’t affect your SEO traffic

UpgradeOne of the key misconceptions from website owners’ is that a website re-launch will cause a temporary, or permanent, drop in SEO traffic as the search engines switch to the new URLs. In my opinion the search engines have got far better at ensuring the migration from the old to the new website is far more seamless than before. There are, however, many areas that you need to ensure are 100% to ensure uninterrupted service.

I recently ran a migration project for a key client of MediaVision’s where we had improved organic traffic by over 600% in the last two years. Clearly the client was concerned that the traffic from organic search would drop as it was a key lead generator for their business and would definitely affect their bottom line. What was very pleasing was that not only did we preserve the current rankings but by using the strategy below we actually increased non-brand SEO traffic by 23% month on month. (more…)

How to influence search robots in crawling your website

spiderman

Search engines depend on search robots or crawlers to find and collect all the information on the web they present in the search results. These robots however have a limited capacity and therefore simply cannot find all the available information on the web all the time. Especially for large content websites it can be a difficult task to get the most important and latest content in the index of search engines. You want to influence the way robots crawl your website to focus on the most important content. But how should you do this?

Crawling the web

First of all you need to know how search robots crawl the web. Google’s crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes. From here they start indexing and following links on these web pages. (more…)

HTTP Headers now supporting the Canonical Tag: More stuff to watch out for!

mine

Maybe you remember my post on things to look at and make sure how not to get cheated in link-building? Well, that list needs to be extended by a very, very important item: The “newly” introduced Canonical Tag using a HTTP header directive.

But first of all, let’s have a look on what happened: Last Friday there was a post on the official Google Webmaster blog stating the following: “Based on your feedback, we’re happy to announce that Google web search now supports link rel=”canonical” relationships specified in HTTP headers […]”. Ok, so what does it mean? Up to now you had to place the canonical tag within a website’s HTML source code. (more…)

How to Use Xenu for the basis of a SEO Campaign

SOS_Xenu_GettingStarted

Depending on who you ask Xenu is either the dictator of the “Galactic Confederacy” who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of his people to Earth in a DC-8-like spacecraft or a tool that finds broken links. The second option doesn’t sound as interesting but to you and me it is far more valuable.

Earlier this week I was speaking to a few SEOs I know who work in house and I was surprised to hear that neither of them had heard about Xenu. I was even more surprised since they both work for large brands whose sites have over 50k pages indexed and if anyone can benefit fromXenu it is large sites.  Xenu was originally built as a broken link checker but as I will illustrate you can use it as a basis for technical and on poge analysis but to also as a basis for client questions and discovery. A lot of our regular readers will most probably be familiar with Xenu although there are hopefully some takeaways for everybody. (more…)

Schema.org – What does it really mean for us

schema-org

Its now been just over a week since the three major search engines announced a unified approach to “create and support a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages”. The announcement made almost simultaneously by Google, Bing and Yahoo is in simple language a way of standardising markup – such as microformats – for any party wishing to utilise the schema.org framework. According to the official schema.org site the requirement for a new schema was bourne out of three main issues

  • Webmasters – Schema.org provides a single resource for webmasters to go to rather than the existing fragmented approach.
  • Search Engines – Provides a centralised structured approach required in order to ‘improve search’. In real terms – pages can be interpreted as required with no potential for misintepretaton’
  • Users – With structured data – users will have a better experience from services such as search engines. We have already seen evidence of this via Googles Microformats adoption however further takeup of schemas.org should see this translate across multiple engines. (more…)

Technical SEO in Magento

magento

More and more ecommerce websites are being built on the Magento platform but the number of technical SEO resources remains few and far between.  There are a lot of good extensions out there, particularly from Yoast, who also has the best starter guide too so make sure you check that out.

Magento is one of the most search engine friendly e-commerce platforms around but even for simple setups there are always the inevitable head scratching moments for people who are new to the platform. This is hopefully where I come in, as I have compiled a small list (that I will update as time goes on either from experience or from the comments column) which covers some of the first stages of the techical SEO side of a campaign. This includes how to sync your Google Base account with Magento to perform product uploads, the magic of path hints for changing on page elements to implementing the EPDQ payment platform. (more…)

HTML 5 re-visited: What’s in it for SEOs?

html5-display

Mid of 2010 fellow StateOfSearch blogger Louis Venter had first look at the new and upcoming HTML 5 mark-up. Keep in mind that HTML 5 is not ready yet and it’s still a work in progress – officials say we’ll see it finalized by end of 2012 – but I’m pretty sure it’s more going to be 2013 or so. But that’s not the main thing I want to look at. I just thought it might be nice to point out some of the changes that can have an impact in regards to on-page SEO and how developers (and SEOs) currently do use existing elements and tags.

I found it to be extremely interesting, having a technical background, in which direction the usage of HTML 5 is heading. Even though, and I probably should have put this in my summary, I don’t think its ground breaking – but it does make a lot of sense. (more…)

Pouring Water on the Panda – UK Observations and Data Cautions Regarding Price Comparison

panda-water

Google Panda update – communicated as an algorithm update designed to de-prioritise sites that were deemed to be low on user trust, sites that lack original non-commercial content, and sites that create, or copy content as something to chuff around commercial content. Live end of February in the US and rolling out to the UK April 11th/12th with seemingly a major target in the crosshairs – that being the price comparison sector.

Says who?

Well SearchMetrics, and Sistrix, in their “visibility” analysis which was neatly summarised on Holistic Search (more on “visibility” later). However I have my doubts as to the true business impact to the price comparison sector, having worked closely with many of the sites reportedly affected. In addition whilst there’s a lot of popular media coverage about the 94% drop in “search visibility” reported for Ciao; there’s yet to be a formal statement from Ciao themselves. Plus eHow owners Demand Media; in a statement issued yesterday are keen to point out some cautions about the measured data… (more…)

What Really Impacts Google Suggest Suggestions? An Experiment

google-suggest-geek

A few weeks ago I read with a huge amount of interest about Rishi’s experiment around Google Suggest where he suggested it was sheer volume of mentions which influenced what was suggested. This seemed a slightly different outcome from Brent Payne who’d seemed to be influencing the suggestions by increasing search volume.

Two different theories – seemed like the perfect opportunity for a test.
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Monitoring your server uptime and performance

pingdom

Most of us are afraid of experiencing server downtime or loss of performance as this might result in loss of rankings, removal from the SERPs and loss in conversions.

This post aims at providing some insights tools that are available (either paid or free) to monitor your server performance and uptime. Some of them are paid, some of them are open-source and self-hosted. Each of the tools has its own characteristics and it really depends on what your needs are or what your technical experience level is to find a solution suitable for you or your company. (more…)

Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues

duplicate-content

More and more site owners are concerned that they might be getting penalised accidentally or overtly because of duplicate content.

Do they have cause for worrying? Certainly, many in house or external SEOs have experienced duplicate content issues and 90% of them through natural means such as syndicating content or catalogue driven product pages that vary only in colour of product.

This session looks at various issues and explorers potential solutions.

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The Power of RSS for SEO

rss-up-1

RSS is a widely used format of web feeds used for content syndication. It is amongst others used to spread news and new posts on a blog. Users subscribe to RSS feeds to follow interesting information from all around the web. RSS feeds use a standardized XML file format to publish information. Users can subscribe to the feeds with many different RSS readers like Google Reader or Bloglines but Microsoft Outlook, for example, also supports RSS feeds. They can also add feeds to their browser home page. It is a very good way to spread your information to your audience and therefore a great tool for SEO.

An RSS feed  consists of a part that describes the main information of the feed, like title, website and webmaster, followed by a list of items. An item can represent a news item, a blog post, a new vacancy, an upcoming event, basically everything you want. (more…)

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