Hamlet Batista is presenting on advanced data-driven SEO. He will discuss diagnosing common SEO problems like link equity, robots.txt files, XML sitemaps, duplicate content and stale content. He will also cover performing competitive analyses, improving content and keyword strategy, and measuring SEO progress. Attendees can receive a complimentary SEO ebook by providing their business card or emailing Hamlet after the presentation.

1. ADVANCED DATA-DRIVEN SEO
// BUSINESS 341
Hamlet Batista
Founder, Hamlet Batista Group
http://hamletbatista.com

2. Career Highlights
 2002-2005: Affiliate marketer, 1st page rankings in
Google for “Viagra”, 7 figures in commissions
 2005-2008: Inventor, granted patents for enterprise
and small business SEO technology (RankSense®,
Product Priority®)
 2009-2011:Technical review editor. “TheArt of SEO” –
first and second editions
 2012: EB1 Green Card - Alien of Extraordinary Ability
(Search Engine Optimization)

3. Learn More About Me

4. How to Ask the Wrong Questions
http://serpiq.com/blog/how-important-is-domain-age-why-data-driven-seo-analysis-trumps-guru-opinions

5. How to Ask the Wrong Questions
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1_1NQWQJ2Q

6. Agenda
 How to Diagnose Common SEO Problems
 How to Perform Quick CompetitorAnalyses
 Specific Recommendations for Correcting
Site Architecture Issues, Improving Content,
Keyword Strategy, Link Acquisition Strategy
 How to Forecast SEO performance
 How to Measure Progress

7. Diagnosing Common SEO Issues
 Link Equity
 Robots.txt
 XML Sitemaps
 Duplicate Content
 Stale Content
 Site Navigation
 Page Speed

8. Diagnosis Tools

9. Diagnosis Tools
 curl -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;
Googlebot/2.1;
+http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
www.sears.com > gbot.html
 curl -I -L -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;
Googlebot/2.1;
+http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
www.sears.com
 curl -x 190.85.37.90:8080 -L -A "Mozilla/4.0
(compatible; MSIE 5.01;Windows NT 5.0)"
www.starmedia.com.ec >
ecuador_regular_from_colombia.html

10. Diagnosis Tools

11. Link Equity: Blekko.com
Link Equity: 2.07

12. Link Equity: MajesticSeo.com

13. Link Equity:
OpenSiteExplorer.Com

14. Robots.txt

15. Robots.txt

16. Finding Canonical URLs

17. Finding Canonical URLs

18. XML Sitemaps
 Great for:
 Improving crawling
 Tracking indexation
 Providing canonical guidance

19. XML Sitemaps

20. XML Sitemaps

21. XML Sitemaps
http://code.google.com/p/googlesitemapgenerator/

22. XML Sitemaps

23. Duplicate Content
 Symptoms of duplicate content problems:
 Crawl Activity (Infinite Crawl Spaces)
 Internal Links
 Duplicate Meta Data

24. The Duplicate Content
Opportunity

25. Infinite Crawl Spaces

26. Infinite Crawl Spaces

27. Infinite Crawl Spaces

28. Infinite Crawl Spaces

29. Duplicate Meta Data

30. Stale Content

31. Stale Content

32.  How to address stale content issues:
 Return proper 404 code for non existent URLs.
Also provide an useful 404 page to users
 Retired products, categories or content pages
should be 301 redirected to a) equivalent pages b)
parent category pages
 Don’t redirect all missing URLs to the home page!
Stale Content

33. Site Navigation

34. Site Navigation
 Best practices
for dynamic
navigations:
 Implement
interactivity
using CSS or
Javascript
 Keep the links
and content
in regular
HTML

35. Pagination
 Best practices
for pagination:
 Canonicalize to
‘view-addl’
page if it exists
and loads
reasonably fast
 Otherwise,
implement
pagination
tags
(rel=prev/next)

36. Consistent Linking
 Best practices for consistent linking:
 Use 301 redirects when absolutely necessary. For
example, external sites linking in different ways
 Make sure all internal links are consistent. For
example: every link to the home page is
www.sitename.com and not
sitename.com/default.aspx
 Use GoogleWebmasterTools’ URL Parameters
configuration tool to remove tracking parameters,
etc.

37. Schema.org

38. Page Speed
YAY!

39. Content Encoding
 Best practices
for
International
sites:
 Return proper
Content-
Encoding
headers and
HTML tags
 Usually:
Content-Type:
text/html;
charset=utf-8

40. Competitive Analysis:
ShopStyle.com
 On-Page Analysis:
 Link Equity: According to Blekko, Shopstyle has
1,982,150 inbound links and 956,753 pages, which
yields a ratio of 2.07 links per page. Compare this ratio
to your site.
 Site: When queried with a “site:shopstyle.com”
search, Google sees 12,600,000 unique pages on the
Shopstyle site.This might suggest duplicate content
issues since Blekko identified only 956,753 pages on
the site.
 404 Handling: User is shown a generic 404-error page.
This should be customized for the site.

41. Competitive Analysis:
ShopStyle.com
 On-Page Analysis:
 Shopstyle has appropriate XML sitemaps.
 The crawlable navigation of the site is designated by
relative links, which may pose problems for search
engine bots. Absolute links should be used.
 Disabling Javascript doesn’t list all the products, only a
small fraction of them, which suggests the search
engine isn’t crawling all of the necessary items.
 When a product is clicked on, the user is redirected to
actual merchant sites.
 The site has faceted navigation that is disabled by
Javascript to prevent multiple paths to each content
page.

42. Competitive Analysis:
ShopStyle.com
 Off-Page Analysis:
 Themes of Links:
 A majority of users link from shopping sites (1233),
with others coming from entertainment sites (403),
blogs/personal sites (376), society/daily living sites
(327), and forum sites (130).
 Type of Links:
 A majority of the sites that link to Shopstyle are
blogs (1589), but others are general sites (1319),
feeds (43), content farms (33), and free hosters (12).

43. Competitive Analysis:
ShopStyle.com

44. Competitive Analysis:
ShopStyle.com
 Off-Page Analysis:
 Over the last month, backlinks have remained
relatively stable around the 50,000 – 100,000 link
mark.

45. Competitive Analysis:
ShopStyle.com
 Off-Page
Analysis:
 Ongoing Link
Building:
Shopstyle
utilizes a
blogging ad
network by
providing
widget ads for
users to post
on their blogs
and websites.

46. Competitive Analysis:
ShopStyle.com
 Strengths &Weaknesses:
 Strengths:
 Through its blogging network and widgets,
Shopstyle is creating a community that drives a
great number of backlinks to the site.
 Shopstyle has more keywords ranking than X.
 Weaknesses:
 Shopstyle has a duplicate content issue even though
they are effectively preventing search bots from
accessing faceted navigation.

47. Keyword Strategy

48. Keyword Strategy

49. Keyword Strategy

50. Keyword Strategy

51. Improving Content
 H1 should
surround most
important text
on the page
 Breadcrumb
navigation is
important
 Product image
should have
ALT text

52. Improving Content
 Write
descriptive titles
and meta
descriptions
 Treat them as
ads
 Incorporate
main keywords
naturally
 Don’t obsess
over lengths

53. Link Acquisition Strategy

54. Link Acquisition Strategy
http://www.distilled.net/linkbait-guide/

55. Simple predictive model

56. Link Acquisition Strategy

57. SEO Dashboard

58. Tools & Resources
 GoogleWebmasterTools
 Google Analytics
 Google Adwords KeywordTool
 Blekko.com /seo slash tag, masjesticseo.com,
opensiteexplorer.org
 LinkResearchTools.com
 Traffic logs
 Scrapy.org / Screaming Frog
 Searchmetrics.com

59. Tools & Resources
 Buzzfeed.com
 GetFireBug.com
 Distilled.net/linkbait-guide/
 google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
 Google’sWebmaster Academy
 developers.google.com/webmasters/

60. Tools & Resources
 Buzzfeed.com
 GetFireBug.com
 Distilled.net/linkbait-guide/
 google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
 Google’sWebmaster Academy
 developers.google.com/webmasters/
 Google’s SEO Score Card
 Google’s SEO guide

61. Complimentary SEO ebook
 Get this presentation and a complimentary SEO ebook
 Leave your business card or
 Send me an e-mail at hamletb@hamletbatista.com.
Please use as subject “Redesigning with SEO”
 I welcome your feedback about the class!
Blog http://hamletbatista.com
Twitter @hamletbatista
LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/hamletbatista