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A Crash Course in Technical SEO from Patrick Stox - Beer & SEO Meetup May 2019

The document provides an overview of technical SEO best practices. It discusses on-page SEO elements like titles, meta descriptions, headings, images and URLs. It also covers technical aspects like sitemaps, indexing APIs, robots.txt files, redirects and canonical tags. The document recommends prioritizing content, links and proper indexing as the most important ranking factors. It also lists various tools for SEO audits, monitoring and troubleshooting technical issues.

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A Crash Course On Technical SEO
Our Speaker Tonight Patrick Stox Technical SEO at IBM
On Page The main thing is content But since this is technical SEO: â—Ź Title â—Ź Meta Description â—Ź Headings â—Ź Images â—Ź URL Most of these should align with the content and what the page is about.
Title “A <title> tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is.” Say what the page is about There’s no actual character limit Google may overwrite if not relevant or too long Desktop and Mobile lengths are different
Don’t do this:
Maybe do this: https://www.seroundtable.com/math-sans-bold-unicode-google-27474.html
Meta Description “A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about.” Not a ranking factor Google can ignore this one too and write you a new one No real limit on this either Chance to sell yourself or fulfill their needs
Typically highlights relevant search terms, except when text is hidden by default (feature/bug?)
Rich Results Rich results are designed to highlight key information and help search engines understand a page's purpose as accurately as possible.
A meta description that’s longer than normal can indicate the site has an eligible result
Try this, Google: your phrase -site.com where site.com is the current eligible snippet
And again phrase -site.com -newsite.com These tell you the eligible featured snippets and indicate the type of content you need to write to be eligible
Nosnippet <meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet">
Headings H1 > H6 Break up content into a structure and allow for easier skimming of sections Order doesn’t matter, can use h1 after h2 Can use multiple h1 tags Can use h2 or h3 as the highest, it’s okay really Describe the section Makes pages skimmable
Images Google has a real focus on images at the moment The image index is separate from the index for pages Allow crawling of images Have an image sitemap If you have a lot of good images, opening up copyright to allow people to use the images with attribution = links!
What Matters For Image Optimization Text around the image Content of the image Image name (minimal impact) Alt attribute Webpage title + description
SEOs have a lot of debates around image best practices, mine are: You can’t use an alt attribute on a background image You shouldn’t use an alt attribute for an irrelevant image or one used for spacing You shouldn’t add your keyword if the image is not relevant
URL The address of a web page, i.e. https://patrickstox.com Mainly used as an identifier Keywords in URL are a tiny ranking factor Up to 2083 characters (IE cutoff) Structure matters for discovery/crawling but not ranking
Keep URL structures sensible and logical. The structure can change Internal linking (links from one page on your site to another) which can impact results
Fun: http://matthewrayfield.com/articles/animating-urls-with- javascript-and-emojis/#%F0%9F%8C%92
Most Important For Ranking This is how I’d order them Is a page indexed, how is it indexed Content Links
•Is it indexed, how is it indexed •How are signals consolidated (content, internal and external links, redirects). Fewer, stronger pages •Content (talk about the right things, the things people are searching for, the things top pages are ranking for, the things top pages are talking about, expand to domain/topic level opportunities, what’s driving value to competitors) Every person, every time •Intent – to me this is as simple as match popular search terms. Google tries to show a mix (fractured intent) of popular searches in their results and generally top pages talk about what people search for. Meet user needs and fulfill your promises
Crawl vs Index These are not the same
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203?hl= en https://search.google.com/search-console/index
Search Engines are Constantly Crawling the Web Googlebot Bingbot They find pages by following links, through sitemaps, submissions (Google Search Console, Mobile Friendly Test), Indexing API Crawl budget = # of pages they’ll crawl on your site, but note they prioritize them based on a lot of things like how often the pages update and how strong the pages are
Googlebot Uses a long viewport 431x731, 12,140 pixels high for mobile and 768/1024 9,307 pixels high for desktop https://codeseo.io/console-log- hacking-for-googlebot/ Is being updated to current Chrome Heavily caches files Runs with a sped up clock
Robots.txt Tells crawlers where they can and can’t go Multiple robots.txt files may need to be looked at when troubleshooting. Each domain and subdomain can have it’s own. Max size is 500 KB You can search archive.org for older versions of robots.txt files Blocking things causes lots of issues with canonicalization
User-agent — specifies which robot. Disallow — suggests the robots not crawl this area. Allow — allows robots to crawl this area. Crawl-delay — tells robots to wait a certain number of seconds before continuing the crawl. Sitemap — specifies the sitemap location. Noindex — tells Google to remove pages from the index. (Not officially supported) # — comments out a line so it will not be read. * — match any text. $ — the URL must end here.
Do this: Allow: .js Allow: .css
Sitemap “A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to more intelligently crawl your site.” Not Required Manually run sitemaps are almost impossible to maintain Most common is xml, but can be txt Can be cross-domain if both sites verified in GSC Limit 50MB (uncompressed) and 50,000 URLs, can create a sitemap index (file that points to other sitemaps) if more are needed Pages, video, images, news
Sitemap 2 “A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to more intelligently crawl your site.” Used as a canonicalization signal Should be only resolved URLs Can include hreflang here (internationalization) Can filter to see how pages are being treated in the Index Coverage report in Google Search Console
Indexing APIs API to notifiy search engines of updates, may replace sitemaps in the future https://developers.google.c om/search/apis/indexing- api/v3/quickstart https://www.bing.com/web master/help/submit-urls-to- bing-62f2860a
Robots Directive Controls crawling, indexing, and some more items Good bots will listen to these Can be in the <head> section or the the server response headers in the request <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex" /> X-Robots-Tag: noindex Google will take the most restrictive setting
all There are no restrictions for indexing or serving. Note: this directive is the default value and has no effect if explicitly listed. noindex Do not show this page in search results and do not show a "Cached" link in search results. nofollow Do not follow the links on this page. none Equivalent to noindex, nofollow. noarchive Do not show a "Cached" link in search results. nosnippet Do not show a text snippet or video preview in the search results for this page. A static thumbnail (if available) will still be visible. notranslate Do not offer translation of this page in search results. noimageindex Do not index images on this page. unavailable_after: [RFC-850 date/time] Do not show this page in search results after the specified date/time. The date/time must be specified in the RFC 850 format.
Conflicting Signals A page can that’s marked noindex but is blocked by robots.txt can be indexed Lots of different signals add up and sometimes search engines have to make a decision. Some things for them are directives and others are more like suggestions. They will typically lean towards more restrictive statements.
Server Responses HTTP response status codes indicate whether a specific HTTP request has been successfully completed. Responses are grouped in five classes: informational responses, successful responses, redirects, client errors, and servers errors 200 - Okay 301 - permanent redirect (really more cached) 302 - temporary 307 usually used for HSTS and browser cached, mostly a 301 or 302 behind this 308 - similar to 301 but no switching from Post to GET 404 - Not Found 410 - Gone (faster than 404) 418 - I’m a teapot 5xx - Server error
Canonical Tag The canonical tag helps solve duplicate content issues by setting the preferred version of a page and passing signals such as links to the preferred version. The tag helps consolidate duplicate content caused by issues such as: HTTP and HTTPS www and non-www parameters and faceted navigation session IDs trailing slashes index/default pages alternate page versions such as m. or AMP pages or print versions
Canonical Tag 2 The canonical tag helps solve duplicate content issues by setting the preferred version of a page and passing signals such as links to the preferred version. Can be ignored Google prefers https over http, shorter URL over longer, and usually will ignore canonical tags if enough other signals are stronger like potentially with hreflang (used for internationalization) Wouldn’t be needed in an ideal world Don’t work in the <body> section Can be in <head> or <header> <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/" /> HTTP/1.1 200 OK Link: <https://example.com/>; rel="canonical"
If the canonical is thrown into the <body> section, it’s usually because something like an iframe was injected into the <head> section and caused the browser to end the <head> early. To troubleshoot this, you can use DOM breakpoints to step through what might have caused this https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/05/view-and-change-your- dom-breakpoints
Canonicalization Determining which page to show in the index, which pages will share signals Canonical tags Hreflang Duplicates Sitemap URLs Internal Links Redirects
Duplicate Content Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. “Don't be afraid of duplicate content. It's the internet, it happens. Google search does not penalize for duplicate content.” - Gary Illyes, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Duplicates are typically filtered or folded together in Google’s index in what are called Clusters. These typically share signals like links.
Duplicate Content 2 Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. HTTP and HTTPS www and non-www Parameters and faceted navigation Session IDs Trailing slashes Index pages Alternate page versions such as m. or AMP pages or print Dev/hosting environments Pagination Scrapers. Copying, syndication Country/language versions
Solutions: Do nothing and hope Google gets it right. Canonical tags. Redirects. Tell Google how to handle URL parameters in GSC Rel=”alternate”. Used to consolidate alternate versions of a page, such as mobile or various country/language pages. With country/language in particular, hreflang is used to show the correct country/language page in the search results. Follow syndication best practices, typically canonical back if you can or at least link back to original source.
Tools Crawlers: DeepCrawl, Botify, Oncrawl, Ryte, Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, ContentKing Change Monitoring: ContentKing, PageModified, Little Warden Chrome: Ayima Redirect Path or Link Redirect Trace - shows header responses and redirect paths Tag Assistant (GTM), Tealium Tools Dev Tools
Tools See what Google sees: Mobile Friendly Test (Mobile) https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly Search Console URL Inspector https://search.google.com/search-console/inspect Rich Results Test (Desktop) https://search.google.com/test/rich-results
Tools give data, but you need insights. These are common suggestions that waste time: Page size - Google says keep it under a couple hundred megabytes Too many links on a page - Google says a few thousand at most https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en&ref_topic=6001981 Missing sitemap Missing robots.txt No custom 404 page Title tags too long/short Invalid HTML Word Count Keyword Density Readability Favicon Social tags Multiple h1 tags
Troubleshooting Info: command deprecated /cry Paste URL into Google Cache: URL Inspector in GSC (if on domain) Site:
Paste URL into Google
Cache, I asked for ibm.com/us-en
URL Inspector
Site: What’s indexed Will show what’s available even if it may not be returned in normal results, i.e.
Search Engines Might Fix Issues on Their End Hints from websites can be mixed and confusing
Redirects Take users and bots from one page to another
Site Speed https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ https://www.webpagetest.org/ CrUX (Google’s real user monitoring) Soon GSC Boomerang, New Relic, lots of options for RUM
Site Speed Faster site More users recorded in analytics
AMP https://www.slideshare.net/patrickstox https://searchengineland.com/the-amp-is-a-lie-278401
Schema What it gets you, site search box, reviews, etc
Sitelinks
Jumpto Links Take users to a section of your page
<a id="whatever-you-want">What you want to link to link to.</a> <a href="#whatever-you-want">Something about the section you’re linking to.</a> That anchor is all that’s needed.
HTTPS https://www.slideshare.net/patrick stox/better-safe-than-sorry-with- https-smx-east-2016-patrick-stox
HTTP/2 (h2) https://searchengineland.com/everyone-moving-http2-236716
Mobile Friendliness https://www.slideshare.net/patrick stox/mobile-first-indexing-smx- advanced-2017-patrick-stox
Content Security Policy Fix mixed content issues when migrating to https upgrade-insecure-requests
Referrer Policy https://searchengineland.com/need-know-referrer-policy- 276185
JavaScript https://www.slideshare.net/patrick stox/smx-advanced-2018-seo-for- javascript-frameworks-by-patrick- stox https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKoqnv2vTMUPOalM 1zuWDP9OQl851WMM9 <Recommended
Pagination Hasn’t worked in years...
Facets Fewer, stronger pages
Log Files
Middleware Systems like SEO A/B Testing Platforms
Edge SEO Probably should have been called serverless
Hreflang https://www.slideshare.net/patrickstox/pubcon-vegas-2017- youre-going-to-screw-up-international-seo-patrick-stox https://searchengineland.com/4-hreflang-tag-errors-google- corrects-for-you-296034 https://searchengineland.com/google-changed-the-way-it- works-and-no-one-really-noticed-300213
Cannibalization https://searchengineland.com/what-people-get-wrong-about- keyword-cannibalization-292148
Internal Links https://searchengineland.com/important-thing-seos-overlook- internal-links-234275