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Search Engines
65.8% 2.3%
11.0%
3.8%
17.1%
comScore July 2010 Rankings
Google AOLBing AskYahoo
Why?
“SEO Expert”
== “Spammer”
“Many of the so-called SEO professionals are not much more than modern snake oil salesmen. They game and manipulate the system for their own intentions.”
“SEO is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls.”
“I'm not an SEO expert, but [it] seems like SEO is something spam sites do. If you are trying to create a high quality destination site, just write good content and let Google do its job.”
- Sachin Agarwal, CEO Posterous
“Let FastCGI do its job”.
On average, 40% of traffic comes from organic search*
“Not my audience!”
luigimontanez.com
“Experts” Not Needed
Professional Practices• User-Centric Design
• Test-Driven Development
• DRY and Maintainable Code
• Server Performance
• Client-Side Performance
• Search Engine Considerations
Six Simple Rules• Can’t outsmart Google (or Bing or Y!)
• Follow Google’s advice
• Obey conventions and standards
• Stay away from hacks
• Think like a search engine
• Think like a searcher
Search Engine Pipeline• Crawling
• Indexing
• Ranking
<crawling>
Discovery• Links to your pages from other sites
• Links to your pages from within your site
• Your sitemap.xml
sitemap.xml• Tell search engines exactly what you
want them to crawl
• sitemaps.org
• Limit: 50,000 URLs, 10MB
• Can specify multiple sitemaps with a sitemap index
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <url> <loc>http://example.com/about</loc> <lastmod>2010-01-01</lastmod> <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> <priority>0.8</priority> </url></urlset>
Generating sitemap.xml• Write it by hand, stick it in public/
• Build a controller, action, and route entry to respond to ‘sitemap.xml’. Use XML Builder to generate the entries. Cache it.
• Importantly: Strive for 100% coverage.
robots.txt• Exclusion rather than inclusion
• robotstxt.org
User-agent: *Disallow: /profile
Be nice to the crawler• Be performant. Fast server response.
Fast page load. Compress files. Use if-modified-since header.
• Non-www vs. www - pick one.
• Ensure unique content. Use <link rel=”canonical”/> where approriate.
</crawling>
<indexing>
Don’t sabotage it• Don’t use a 302 redirect when you
mean a 301 redirect.
• Make sure images, video, Flash, Silverlight, and AJAX are accessible.
• See the Google Webmaster Central Blog for details.
• Account for crawlers with region-specific content.
</indexing>
<ranking>
<title>• Most important element to search
engines
• Think long and hard about it
• Keywords! Think like a searcher.
• Best format: Page Title | Site Name
URLs• Override to_param for pretty URLs.
• Dashes are word separators, underscores are not. Use dashes.
• International domains are treated as such.
<meta>• <meta name=”description” content=”...” />
• Make it unique for every page. Use content_for.
• Shown to users, doesn’t affect ranking.
• <meta name=”tags” ... /> is ignored
Headings and Content• <h> tags should be used appropriately.
• Page content should match what the <title> and <h> tags refer to.
• Limit use of text-indent:-9999px and display:none in CSS.
Rich Snippets• Microformats, RDFa, Microdata
</ranking>
Tools• Google Webmaster Tools
• Bing Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo! Site Explorer
Four Takeaways• Think like a searcher
• Optimize your <title>s
• Use Google Webmaster Tools
• Read the Google Webmaster Blog