Sharing experience and ideas of ways one can leverage Engineering to drive top of the funnel SEO growth.

1. Engineering the SEO
Leveraging science and engineering in different
ways to bring intelligence in SEO
- Radhesh Gupta

2. Is SEO something technical?
Job Requirements:
● Experience working with back-
end SEO elements such as
.htaccess, robots.txt, metadata
and site speed optimization to
optimize website performance.
● Experience in quantifying
marketing impact and SEO
performance and strong
understanding of technical
SEO (sitemaps, crawl budget,
canonicalization, etc.).
● Knowledge of one or more of
the following: Java, C/C++, or
Python.
● Excellent problem solving and
analytical skills with the ability
to dig extensively into metrics
and analytics.

3. Why invest in SEO?
❏ Makes You Ubiquitous
❏ Builds Trust & Credibility
❏ Is A Long-Term Strategy
❏ Drives Offline Sales
❏ Helps Capitalize On Weak Competition
❏ SEO can MULTIPLY your impact
❏ SEO is never too costly

4. Organic searches surfaces 64%
of the web traffic

5. Segmenting SEO Engineering:
1. Content
2. Back-links
3. SERP Tracking
4. K/W Research
5. Crawlability
6. Link Sculpting (Juice flow)
7. Experimentation

6. #1. ContentCreating New Content:
❏ New Search-Pages based on volume
❏ High impressions+Low ctr from Webmasters
❏ Associate IMAGES through ontology
(Images are awesome but limited)
❏ Some Data about Images:
❏ Facebook: 53% likes ↑ , 104% comments ↑
❏ Twitter: 5X engagement, 2.5X retweets

7. #1. Content
Organizing Content:
❏ Applying Machine Learning methods:
❏ Clustering (group similar pages)
❏ Scripting common patterns to clean content
❏ (e.g.: competitor urls in forums)
❏ Finding right candidates for:
❏ rel=”canonical”
❏ 301 redirect

8. #1. Content
Fixing Content:
❏ Applying Machine Learning methods:
❏ Classify pages as good or bad
❏ Filtering pages with a custom Quality Score
❏ Identifying duplicate content
❏ Aggregating content
❏ Scripts to fix slip-ups in user generated content:
❏ Spells, Grammar, Punctuations, Capitalization

9. Link Building
❏ Go Natural (#Penguin)
❏ Blogs
❏ wikipedia, quora,
stackoverflow
❏ Audit links every 6 months
❏ Disavow bad links
(linkresearchtools)
❏ Audit links every 6 months
#2. Back-links

10. #2. Back-links
How to find Back-links?
❏ Bing Link Explorer
❏ LinkResearchTools

11. #3. SERP Tracking
Tracking Search Engine Ranking:
❏ Track Ranking and Competition
❏ Build an Internal SERP tracker tool
❏ Outside tools: Authority Labs, WebCEO
❏ Piwik (NO sampling like GA)

12. #4. K/W Research
How to optimize Keywords?
❏ Optimize Keyword Density
❏ be wary of ‘keyword stuffing’
❏ repeat keywords in a creative way
❏ having keywords in <h2>, <h3> helps

13. #4. K/W Research
Target long tail keywords Some potential sources:
❏ Google Keyword Planner
❏ Uber suggest
❏ Google: Related Searches
❏ Google: Auto-complete
❏ impressions; low from
Webmasters tool
Where and What Keywords to target?

14. #5. Crawlability
Vertical linking structure
● Homepage links to category pages.
● Category pages link to sub-category and
product pages as appropriate.
● Product pages link to relevant category
pages.
E.g. Breadcrumbs
Horizontal linking structures
● Category pages link to other relevant category
pages.
● Product pages link to other relevant product
pages.
E.g. Youtube, Recommendations
Website’s Linking Structure

15. #5. Crawlability
Tracking google’s crawling
Crawl yourself or Analyze logs (splunk) to track:
❏ how google crawls your website
❏ how google crawls a web-page
❏ how google crawls non-js version
❏ how google indexes DOM, javascript
❏ performance
❏ mobilegeddon

16. Fresh Content
Improving
Crawlability
Semantic Linking
Search
&
Recommendations
#5. Crawlability

17. #6. Link-sculpting
Discovering optimal Juice-flow
❏ Fresh content
❏ Semantic linking
❏ Improved search and
recommendations
❏ Interlinking

18. #7. Experimentation
Building SEO experiment framework
❏ Configuration to define experiments
❏ Gather data for control and tests
❏ Dashboard

19. #7. Experimentation
❏ content
❏ number of links
❏ k/w density
❏ duplicate tags
❏ search
❏ layouts
❏ International
❏ mobile
❏ javaScript
❏ heading tags
❏ custom/ dynamic
meta tags
Some examples:

20. Questions!

21. References:
http://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls-javascript-heres-learned-220157
http://www.relentlesstechnology.com/insights/page-speed.html
http://thenextweb.com/google/2015/07/17/google-is-hiring-someone-to-help-improve-its-seo-ranking-seriously/
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/more-likes-on-facebook/
http://www.ideasoverdose.com/write-perfect-search-engine-optimized-article/
https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015
http://engineering.pinterest.com/post/109318939139/demystifying-seo-with-experiments