This document discusses search engine optimization (SEO) best practices. It covers the search engine pipeline of crawling, indexing, and ranking pages. It provides tips for improving discoverability through sitemaps and internal linking, as well as guidelines for optimizing content, titles, and metadata to influence search engine rankings. The key takeaways are to think like a searcher, create a sitemap, optimize titles, use Google Webmaster Tools, and follow advice from search engine blogs.

3. Search Engines
comScore February 2011 Rankings
Google AOL
Bing Ask
65.6% 1.7% Yahoo
13.1%
3.4%
16.1%

4. Why?

5. “SEO Expert”

6. == “Spammer”

7. White Hat vs.
Black Hat

9. Discovery +
Navigation

10. A Story...

16. “Not my audience!”

17. “Not my audience!”

18. “Experts” Not Needed

19. Professional Practices
• User-Centric Design
• Test-Driven Development
• DRY and Maintainable Code
• Server Performance
• Client-Side Performance
• Search Engine Considerations

20. 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

21. Search Engine Pipeline
• Crawling
• Indexing
• Ranking

22. <crawling>

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

24. Check internal links
$ wget --mirror

25. 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

26. <?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>

27. 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.

28. robots.txt
• Exclusion rather than inclusion
• robotstxt.org
User-agent: *
Disallow: /profile

29. 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.

30. </crawling>

31. <indexing>

32. 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.

33. </indexing>

34. <ranking>

35. <title>
• Most important element to search
engines
• Think long and hard about it
• Keywords! Think like a searcher.
• Best format: Page Title | Site Name

39. URLs
• Override to_param for pretty URLs.
• Dashes are word separators,
underscores are not. Use dashes.
• International domains are treated as
such.

40. <meta>
• <meta name=”description”
content=”...” />
• Make it unique for every page. Use
content_for.
• Shown to users, doesn’t affect ranking.
• <meta name=”keywords” ... /> is
ignored

41. 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.

42. Rich Snippets
• Microformats, RDFa, Microdata

43. </ranking>

44. Tools
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Bing Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo! Site Explorer

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