Search-Friendly Web Development at RubyNation

Search EnginescomScore February 2011 Rankings Google AOL Bing Ask 65.6% 1.7% Yahoo 13.1% 3.4% 16.1%

“SEO Expert”

== “Spammer”

White Hat vs.Black Hat

Discovery +Navigation

A Story...

“Not my audience!”

“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• Understand how search engines work• Think like a searcher

Search Engine Pipeline• Crawling• Indexing• Ranking

Discovery• Links to your pages from other sites• Links to your pages from within your site• Your sitemap.xml

Check internal links$ wget --mirror

sitemap.xml• Tell search engines exactly what you want them to crawl• sitemaps.org• Limit per sitemap: 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.orgUser-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>

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.• Region-speciﬁc content? Think about the bots.

</indexing>

<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.

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

Five Takeaways• Think like a searcher• Create a sitemap.xml• Optimize your <title>s• Use Google Webmaster Tools• Read the Google Webmaster Blog

Search-Friendly Web Development at RubyNation

by Luigi Montanez on Apr 02, 2011

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Search-Friendly Web Development at RubyNation — Presentation Transcript