10 Things Webdesigners tend to do Wrong in SEO - SMX 2014

source: http://www.communityelf.com/blog/fun/the-3-biggest-social-media-mistakes-and-how-to-avoid-them/attachment/mistake-bridge/ 1

10 Things Web Designers tend to forget when doing SEO

by Timon Hartung @ SMX Munich 2014

Timon Hartung

• Managing Director @DNTX.com

• Master of Business Informatics

• 10 years SEO & online marketing experience

• Former Head of Online Marketing at amiando

• Consulting cooperations on international SEO

• 15 years coding experience Java, PHP, MySQL

• Previously spoken at SMX Munich and Social Media Economy Days

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source: http://businesswebcoach.com/beating-google-webmaster-tools-into-utter-submission/

Use Google Webmaster Tools

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• Setting GWMT up takes 5 minutes!

• GMWT gives you a lot of information on how google sees your site

• Find 404 pages on your website with external links pointing to it

• So use Google Webmaster Tools! Just do it!

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Google Webmaster Tools

source: http://www.linetoweb.com/google-xml-sitemap-wordpress-plugin/

Good site maps

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Site map

• Auto generate a site map! So that it‘s allways up to date

• Submit your site map to google in the GWMTs

• Check your site map for broken links with Screamingfrog to find and fix the 404 errors

• A good clean site map will increase your crawl rate

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Good site maps increase your crawl rate

8A good site map and a good website will have most of its content in the site map indexed if not check the content and why (GWMT)

source: http://awesome-design.com/stati/seo/seo-optimizacziya-sajta-robotstxt-poobshhaemsya-s-poiskovymi-robotami.html

Careful with Robots.txt

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Robots.txt

• Check your Robots.txt right now!

• You probably don‘t need a robots.txt and it does more harm wrongly configured than having one

• Use noindex, follow as a meta tag instead to steer the crawler

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Robots.txt

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Robots.txt What if your developers

forget to take out the disallow all in the

robots.txt from the development server

when deploying.

When do you notice!?

Great website about actors12

SERPs for this website13

The robots.txt is blocking all crawler access

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source: http://www.briandanielboyd.com/

Speaking URLs

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Speaking URLs

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/apple-expecting-ipad-mini-to-sell-big-report-says/2012/10/08/72ea60f4-1144-11e2-be82-c3411b7680a9_story.html

http://www.jbl.com/estore/jbl/us/shop/speaker-docks/cat70007;jsessionid=CDDF2BAD1EEE175356846240358FF160.node3

http://www.apple.com/ipad/accessories/

source: http://www.linetoweb.com/google-xml-sitemap-wordpress-plugin/

Be careful with AJAX & JS

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• The google crawler might not see content loaded by Javascript and Ajax because it is loaded after the page has been loaded.

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Ajax and Javascript

Ajax can really improve UX but check that you SEO

content is not loaded via Javascript

Normal HTML

Ajax loaded content invisible for the crawler

Ajax and Javascript

• To check if your content is seen by the google bot go into GWMT and check your page with the function: „Fetch page as google bot“

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Fetch as google bot20

source: http://www.freegreatpicture.com/animal-collection/running-leopard-15978

Site speed

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Site speed

22Source:http://www.strangeloopnetworks.com/assets/images/infographic2.jpg

Site speed

• Amazon: increased revenue by 1% for every 100 milliseconds load time improvement

• AOL: the top 10% in site speed viewed 50% more pages than the bottom 10%

• Yahoo: increased traffic by 9% for every 400 milliseconds of load time improvement

• Conclusion: Users love fast websites!

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Site speed

24Source: http://bit.ly/QWoGmp

Site speed - what about google

• Site speed is one of the over 200 signals used by google to determine search rankings.

• Site speed is NOT the most critical ranking factor

• But Remember: Search engines like fast sites that don‘t waste their resources.

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Site speed - some tips how to optimise

• Check your site speed with: tools.pingdom.com

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Site speed - Analyse your site

• Analyse your site with google and yahoo

• Google: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

• Yahoo: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

• Site speed optimisation guideline

• Yahoo: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

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Site speed -Check your site speed in Google Analytics

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source: http://www.theyenvy.us/photo/html5

Schema.org & Rel Author

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Schema.org = Rich Snippets

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Movie"> <h1 itemprop="name">Avatar</h1> <span>Director: <span itemprop="director">James Cameron</span></span> <span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" itemprop="trailer">Trailer</a></div>

More Rich Snippets

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Events

Ratings

Check out the schema.org specification and increase your snippet CTRs

dramatically

Rel=Author

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Which snippet would you click?

Rel=Author

• Rel=Author is huge and easy to get.

• Rel=Author will dramatically increase you SERP snippet CTRs

• How to:

• Get a google+ profile

• Get circled a lot by others

• Link to your domain from your google+ profile

• Link to your google+ profile from your domain with ?rel=author

• Done!

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Schema.org and Rel=author

• Check your markup with googles Rich Snippet Testing Tool:

• http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

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source: http://www.icangiveyouhouse.com/2010/09/04/world-in-our-hands/

International IP Redirects

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• Sometimes you might think redirecting all of your visitors based on their IP to the dedicated country and language page might be a good idea.

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Country redirection

page

US

DE

FR

ES

DE

FR

Users get redirected correctly

• But where does the google bot come from? The US!

• Thats a serious problem for SEO

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US

DE

FR

ES

US Country

redirection page

Google bot from the US will also get directed „correctly“ ALWAYS to the US version but NEVER

see any other language or country version!


• Solution:

• If you want IP redirects just do them on the home page nowhere else

• Don‘t forget about the users:

• What if a user from Germany follows a US link from a forum. That user will not get the desired and expected result and thats bad.

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A great way to do it is to give the user a notification that there

is a dedicated country page 41

source: http://onlineitallmatters.blogspot.de/2012/08/is-your-mobile-content-strategy-working.html

Mobile Strategy

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• There are a few mobile web design strategies out there

1.Subdomain strategy m.domain.com

2.Different domain strategy domain.mobi

3.Subdirectory strategy domain.com/mobile

4.Responsive design or template strategy on same URL

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Mobile Strategy

Responsive Design

• Responsive web design (often abbreviated to RWD) is an approach to web design in which a site is crafted to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).

44Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Boston_Globe_responsive_website.jpg

Live example: http://www.olevmedia.com/themes/preview/?item=metro

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Desktop & IPad 1024x 76846source: http://themeforest.net/item/metrostyle-responsive-all-purpose-wordpress-theme/2921313

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Mobile Strategy

• Best thing about responsive design for SEO

• All links go to the same URL

• No duplicate content

• Other benefits

• No problems displaying content on different devices following a mobile or not mobile link, better conversion rates

• Easier to manage content

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source: http://www2.tbo.com/news/outdoors/2012/oct/09/skydiver-begins-prep-for-supersonic-jump-ar-526778/

Relaunch SEO

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• Don‘t change your URLs

• Redirect changed URLs by 301 or canonical

• Short downtimes

• Check your titles and descriptions

• Do a crawl before and after with Screamingfrog or XENU to find missing pages

• Use GWMT to solve 404 problems52

Relaunch SEO Tips

Thank you!

get in touch:

• facebook.timonhartung.com

• @timondeluxe

• linkedin.timonhartung.com

• googleplus.timonhartung.com

• www.timonhartung.com

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