Site Auditing and Panda Survival tips

SEO Auditing
Post Panda and Best Practices
Fionn Downhill
CEO, Elixir Interactive
@fionnd
6/16/2011

What Happened?

Back to Basics
What makes a page successful?

On-Site Improvements

Keyword Research

HTML Title Tag
Most important optimization element
First thing users see
Should be unique for each page

Meta Description
Provides search engines with context
Used in results page listings
Should be unique for each page

Meta Keywords
Mostly deprecated tag
No more than 3 per page

Header Tag - <H1>
Reinforces theme of page
Provides additional context
Use keyword variations here

ALT Text
Be descriptive and accurate of the image
Do not keyword stuff
Assists visually impaired users
Can provide additional context to the spiders

Copy
Be concise and use proper grammar/spelling
Break up large chunks with lists
“Sprinkle” targeted keywords – no stuffing
Incorporate relevant links

Site Auditing

Auditing Basics
Robots.txt
XML Site Maps
CSS & JS
Meta Tags
HTML Syntax
SEO Optimization
Usability
Programming Issues
On Site Linking

SEO Tools

Google WMT

Bing -Tools for Webmasters
adCenter Keyword research tool
Plugin for Excel 2010
Video tutorials
Bing’s Webmaster Tools
Inbound links tracking
Integrated into Webmaster Tools account
Up to 20,000 inbounds/URL tracked
Shows external links to your site
Export all data
Bing Index Explorer
See what URLs we have in our index from your website
See Page Details
Discovery and crawl dates
Header responses
Number of external links pointing to page
Keywords and traffic to page
Average rank of page in SERPs
RecrawlURL request
Block cache and/or URL function
Export all data
Submit URL tool
Crawl Management
Manage query string parameter handling
IIS SEO Toolkit – integrated with IIS for Windows servers
Crawls your site, tells you what needs attention
Submit sitemaps directly to Bing via your account
Webmaster Tools and Features request forum
Tell us what you want and what we should revise
Paid Search Tools
Keyword research
Microsoft Advertising Intelligence is a keyword research and optimization tool that operates seamlessly in Microsoft Office Excel 2010. It provides keyword expansion, research, pricing, KPI data and more
Desktop bid management
Save time by managing your Microsoft adCenter campaigns in an easy-to-use desktop application. Work faster, edit and create campaigns with ease, get performance alerts and research new keywords
Bid management
Atlas Search is a web-based tool that allows you to manage your pay-per-click bids and listings in the top-tier search engines and shopping portal sites, all in one place, with measurable results

Bing-SEO Documentation
This five part series walks you through a detailed approach to performing an SEO review for any site.
Bing Webmaster Toolsalso offers deep content coverage on the following important topics and information related to our data.
Part 1Part 2 Part 3Part 4Part 5
Using Bing Webmaster Tools – overview
Webmaster Tools Data: Dashboard
Webmaster Tools Data: Crawl
Webmaster Tools Data: Index
Webmaster Tools Data: Traffic
Link Building
Removing or blocking a page from our index
Blocking content from Bing (robots.txt)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) guidance
Tell us how to handle URL parameters
Rich Snippets (www.schema.org)
Tell Bing your Site's locale
Managing Canonicalization (duplicate content)
Using the <rel="nofollow"> tag
AJAX management for Webmasters
Managing redirects
404 page management
Rich Media and Search
…and much more…
This four part series helps you understand how to approach optimizing a large website.
Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4
Bing Webmaster Center FAQs
Guide to Using Bing Webmaster Tools
Link Building Overview
Keyword Research Guide
SEO Links and Guidance

Linking Tools

Were you “Pandalized”

If you think you were fine before and you are not now, you have done something wrong or in Google’s view you have breached their guidelines. Get over it and start auditing.

Panda-Case Study
http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/2657-SEO-Case-Study-One-Store-s-Struggle-with-Google-Updates

Content on product pages pulled from publishers description
Traffic dropped 38%
Pages with pulled content all dropped
This was okay before not now

Other Spam Signals
Check for:
Duplicate content from pages in your own site.
Oversaturating for keywords.
Excessive grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors.
Missing meta titles and descriptions.
Duplicate content from off-site (including checking whether off-site pages have duplicated your pages).
Poor user performance (time on site, bounce rate, etc.).
An excessively high “ad to content” ratio.
Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-panda-2-2-why-the-pandobsession-has-to-stop/30480/#ixzz1PBdIugvV

Key Take Away….
Before you worry about Panda you must audit your site first.
On Site SEO is vital to success
Do not forget Bing now 30% of traffic
Broaden your reach with digital assets
Google is great until it goes away, follow their rules or perish in their updates
Panda is an ongoing iteration of the Google algorithm to improve quality

Thank You
SEO Auditing
Fionn Downhill
CEO, Elixir Interactive
fionn@elixirinteractive.com
(602) 494-6326
@fionnd
www.linkedin.com/in/fionndownhill
SEO Auditing

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Site Auditing and Panda Survival tips

by Fionn Downhill

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