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CLIENT NAME EXCLUDED
SEO Recommendations & Best Practices
Oxford Communications | May 23, 2012

SEO Recommendations Overview
Indexable Content
Website layout and design was assessed to establish how easily search
engines can locate relevant content. Findings and recommendations are
provided in this section.
Keyword Usage & Targeting
The most effective keyword strategies including keyword placement,
user-friendly contextual usage, and use of keywords in linking tools.
Competitive Analysis
Methods to monitor the SEO progress of competitors in order to meet
SERP rankings in the top 10 slots for vital keyword terms.

Indexable Content

Page View
Indexable Content | Content Structure
Duplicate and Near-Duplicate Content:
Topic: Product Variations
– Issue: Search engines will view pages with nearly
identical content as low-quality and will not
intuitively identify that these are product
variations.
– Recommendation: Employ canonicalization on
secondary pages to present the order of
importance of these pages to search engines;
allowing variations to be indexed but not counted
negatively against rank.
– Additional Use: When allowing access to the
same content from multiple navigation origins
(top, side, and bottom navs for example) that
designate an origin parameter in the URL, this
solution can also be used.
– Future Alternatives: Creating fresh content for
each product page OR a site redesign where
product variations are listed dynamically on the
same page.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit
amet, consectetur
adipiscing elit. Proin
volutpat accumsan
semper. Nunc convallis
laoreet eleifend.
$XX.XX BUY
amet, consectetur
volutpat accumsan
laoreet eleifend.
$XX.XX BUY
www.example.com/products/star-purple
www.example.com/products/star-blue
<link rel="canonical"
href="http://www.example.com/products/star-
blue"/>
HEAD Tag
on “Star-
Purple”

HTTP View
Duplicate and Near-Duplicate
Content:
Topic: HTTP vs. HTTPS
– Issue: Reviewing products after
being added to a shopping cart
presents a different page URL for
the same product content.
– Recommendation: Employ the
NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW tag on
duplicate HTTPS pages to prevent
engines from weighing the content
against rankings.
amet, consectetur
volutpat accumsan
laoreet eleifend.
$XX.XX BUY
$XX.XX
-----------
Tax $X.XX
Total $XX.XXBUY
amet, consectetur
volutpat accumsan
laoreet eleifend.
$XX.XX BUY
HTTPS View
DUPLICATE
<html>
<head>
<title>...</title>
<META NAME="ROBOTS"
CONTENT="NOINDEX,
NOFOLLOW">
</head>

Page View
Content:
Topic: Canonical URL
Search engines cannot distinguish that
www. and non-www. URLs are the same
website.
- Issue: Pages viewed in both
the www. and non-www.
versions
- Recommendation: Choose to
show site in either www. or
non-www., and use 301
permanent redirects to have
search engines ignore the
losing candidate.
www.example.com
example.com

Page View
Content:
Topic: Trailing Slash “/”
URLs that return a 200 status code response for
both www.example.com and www.example.com/
are telling search engines that content resides in
both places. If that content is identical, there is a
risk of diluting SEO efforts for both versions.
- Issue: Unless there is different content
on the file version of a URL (no slash)
and the directory version (with slash),
which is not recommended for user
experience, then the pages will
experience duplicate content problems.
- Recommendation: Choose to show site
in either file version of a URL (no slash)
or directory version (with slash). For all
pages except the root URL
(www.example.com), use 301 permanent
redirects to transfer link-building efforts
and have search engines ignore the
losing candidate. For the root URL, a 301
permanent redirect cannot be used and
the rel=canonical tag is recommended to
serve the same purpose for the losing
candidate.
www.example.com
www.example.com/
www.example.com/product
www.example.com/product/
301 Permanent Redirect
Rel=canonical

Topic: 302 Temporary Redirects
- Issue: 302 temporary redirects tell search
engines and users that the redirected-to
page is fleeting, the user should continue to
use the original URL, and the search engines
should not perform link juice and ranking
calculations until the content on the original
page is updated.
- Recommendation: Use a permanent
redirect to tell search engines to pass ranking
power and link juice from original pages to
the new permanent pages.
Page A Page A
Page B Page B
302 Temporary
Redirect
0% link juice from
original page, does
not rank B like A
301 Permanent
Redirect
100% link juice from
original page, ranks B
like A

$10.00
Page View
Topic: URL Parameters
Presenting and passing content from one page to
another is an extremely valuable functionality for users
as well as data collection. The process however can
attach a variety of different parameters to a URL,
creating duplicate and near duplicate content.
- Issue: In these cases, many crawlable pages
can be created for the same content, hurting
search rankings for duplication and spending the
bandwidth allotted for search engines to crawl
all of the rich content available. Groups of
duplicate pages created by separate parameters
often get clustered and consolidated in search
results, with search engines taking a ‘best
guess’ at the original. That assumption may not
always be desirable (you would want to present
the cleanest URL in search results for example).
- Recommendation: The most accurate way to
handle this issue for the same content that can
be reached via multiple URLs is to choose a
master and employ the rel=canonical tag on the
rest. Google Webmaster Tools also allows
developers to designate how Googlebot will
treat parameters through the URL Parameters
tool. Developers can specify whether there is
different content presented which should be
crawled or duplicate content which should not
for each parameter. As a rule, parameters that
display content that can be crawled elsewhere
(such as Search parameters) should not be
indexed.
www.example.com/products/stars/blue
www.example.com/products?category=stars&color=blue
Rel=canonical
www.example.com/products?category=stars&sortBy=price
$20.00 $30.00 $40.00
Google Webmaster Tools: URL Parameters Settings
Name Content Behavior Googlebot to Crawl?
sortBy Sorts Only URLs with value = Price
Reason: Product list pages are valuable to users and provide a crawlable link
structure for search engines. However, crawling each sort variation is redundant
and spends unnecessary bandwidth. Choose one universal parameter value
(price for example) to ensure the list page reveals all products.

Topic: Multiple Language Content
- Issue: Search engines cannot always tell that pages served in different
languages are different and will interpret this as duplicate content.
- Recommendation:
- The most effective way to solve this issue is by using country
specific top-level domains (www.example.de). This solution
requires a great amount of effort including: buying country specific
domains hosted in target countries and performing country specific
on-page optimization and link building. This makes sense if trying
to secure an international market for the long term (where the
returns will eventually justify efforts), however this may not make
sense if attempting to provide a better user experience in a multi-
lingual country (serving English and Spanish versions in the US for
example). Especially because each domain will have its own
independent link portfolio, but if targeting only one country, the best
scenario is to have all links and their rank power pointing to one
website.
- Languages can be served within the same domain using a
subdomain (de.example.com) or a subfolder (example.com/de).
For SEO, the latter is the optimal option because in some cases,
only a portion of the domain authority will be passed to the
subdomain (negatively affecting rankings). If serving separate
languages within the same domain is the best solution for the
company, then there are several best practices to use in order to
help search engines realize that perceived duplicate pages are for
language preference and not a ‘spammy’ attempt to boost
rankings:
- Translate meta data, such as TITLE tags into each
language version – do not recycle primary language data.
- Use a LANG attribute in the HTML tag to declare the
language of the document.
Page View
Blue Star: dolor sit amet,
consectetur adipiscing
elit. Proin volutpat
accumsan semper. Nunc
convallis laoreet eleifend.
$XX.XX
BUY
Estrella Azul: dolor sit
amet, consectetur
volutpat accumsan
laoreet eleifend.
$XX.XX COMPRAR
www.example.com/products/stars/blue
www.example.com/es/productos/estrellas/azul

Page View
Company Webpage
Duplicate Content on Other
Domains:
Search engines will view different domain pages
with identical content as low-quality, attempting to
penalize scrapers.
- Issue: When search engines encounter
several domains with the same content, they
will choose one domain as the master and
ignore the rest. Unfortunately, that choice may
not always be the origin site.
- Recommendation: Always ensure that
affiliates, retailers, and separate company
websites have different copy from the target
website.
- Tips: It can be difficult to create significantly
different copy for a product with limited or
straightforward information, but there is always
an opportunity to discuss possible awards
received, several different niche uses, or cater
to various market segments in copy. While the
algorithm for the amount of difference in copy
is always changing, 30% is generally a good
amount to aim for.
amet, consectetur
volutpat accumsan
laoreet eleifend.
$XX.XX BUY
amet, consectetur
volutpat accumsan
laoreet eleifend.
$XX.XX BUY
AffiliateSite.com

Indexable Content | Site Structure
URL Construction
URLs, which are the web address for a
particular document, are used by the
search engines in ranking pages. So
there is a benefit of including keywords
separated by hyphens in the naming
convention of directories and file names.
– Issue: Using SKU numbers or other
internal codes in URL construction is
not readily beneficial to users and
misses out on opportunities to rank for
keywords when search engines
evaluate URLs for SERP placement.
– Recommendation: When including
multiple words within a directory or file
name, hyphens should be used as
separators. Descriptive wording offers a
preferable usability experience and
increases ranking relevancy for
keywords.
http://www.example.com/products/sku=3456.html
http://www.example.com/products/blue-star.html
Current URL
Recommended URL

Page View
4xx Errors:
- Issue: Search engines will rank
pages pulling 4xx and 5xx errors
very poorly, but they are not ignored
when weighing the link juice of
connecting pages. 4xx and 5xx
errors should be addressed to fulfill
the maximum amount of relevancy
link juice available from pages.
- Recommendation: Identify if any of
these particular downloads link to
pages that should be getting
ranked, then address the 404 after
discussing with developers whether
redirecting to a landing page or
continuing the redirect to another
page is more appropriate.
NOT FOUND
__________________________
Page A is
about:
1/3
Page
B
1/3
Page
D
1/3
Page
E
200 OK 200 OK 404 Not
Found
Diluted
Link Juice

Consolidated Code:
- Issue: Search engines will rank content higher up in a page as
the most relevant information; if the rich content is deep within
the code (hundreds of lines in) then a page is less likely to rank
for the keywords contained than sites that keep their content
relatively close to the top.
- Duplicate tags and meta data can often confuse search engines;
they will either pull into SERPs incorrectly or simply become
ignored and replaced with a snippet.
- Recommendation: Strive to consolidate code regularly by
ensuring that css and scripts are linked into a page from a
separate location rather than in-line, and by spot-checking
pages on a regular basis for page component consistency.

Google Image SERP
Indexable Images:
Google’s February release targeted images for the
next optimization candidate on their universal
search results after eye-tracking analysis proved
that images facilitate user search experience.
Especially for eComm sites, Google Images can
contribute a consistent stream of traffic. The
industry standard is approximately a 10% boost in
monthly search traffic.
- Issue: Images that are not optimized for
their content will be unable to rank for
their subjects. Especially for visually-
driven products, neglecting to optimize
images opens up opportunities for
competitors to pull prospects for
consumers who use image search to
shop.
- Recommendation: Best practices for
images include: naming the image files
with a keyword, using absolute
references to images over relative (img
src=“http://www.example.com/images/bl
ue-star.jpg” versus img
src=“../images/blue-star.jpg”), and
including descriptive ALT tags.
My Company Competitor
blue star

Horizontal Links
In addition to a logical site structure, it is
important for search engine ranking and link
juice to host on-page links to related
content.
– Issue: A site with a link structure
that is very vertical (meaning
content that can only be reached
through one path for many paths)
can lose out in SERPs because
search engines use the content of
incoming links to a page to gauge
where to rank it – a page with few
incoming links will not look as
relevant to a topic as a page with
many.
– Recommendation: Internally, look
for opportunities to show search
engines how a page relates to the
rest of the site. Related products,
manuals, reviews, blog posts and
other sorts of content are excellent
pieces of content to link to.
Link Juice
Home
Category
A
Category
B Blog
Topic
1
Topic
2
Topic
3
Topic
4
Topic
5
Topic
6
Topic
1
Vertical Structure = 100% about Category A = Relevant
only to Category A in SERPs
Horizontal Structure = 33% about Category A 33%
about Topic 3, and 33% about Topic 5 = Relevant to
Category A, Topic 3 and Topic 5 in SERPs

Many On-Page Links
Search engines will dilute the power of links by
the total number of links on the page.
– Issue: When considering the amount of links
present on a page, it is important to decide if there
are a portion of links that are considerably more
important that others. For example, while there
may be hundreds of product variation links on a
page, some of them are bound to be best sellers
(and more important to rank for). If this is the case,
then the power of these links will be increasingly
diluted as the number of links rises.
– Recommendations:
• Consider the viability of using pagination or
DHTML to expand sections (the position of
content can be tweaked with CSS)
• Create a separate section of links before the
full list that feature the most popular items,
as these keywords will be given more
weight.
• Creating an XML-Sitemap and submitting it
to major search engines will help assuage
this concern by pointing engines towards
important content that should be indexed
and ranked.
Page View
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Lorem ipsum
Dolor sit amet
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Upload and Submit XML Sitemap
Sitemaps guide search engines through your site to
discover all of the content and pages it may miss
through normal crawling practices.
– Issue: There may be some scenarios when
search engines will be unable to discover
all of the pages and media located on a
site through normal crawling practices.
Pages that are orphaned through crawlable
link structure, a robust navigation that is
not search engine friendly, dynamic content
and other issues may hinder search
engines’ ability to discover all of a site’s
content.
– Recommendation: Create and submit an
XML sitemap using each search engine’s
guidelines. Support for images, mobile,
news, video, update intentions and more
have made this practice a valuable method
of insurance in the recent past.
www.example.com/sitemap.xml

On-Page Targeting
Topic: TITLE Tags
– Issue: TITLE tags become the text
displayed to users in SERPs and are also
used to rank the relevancy of a page for a
particular keyword. Thus, there is a two-
fold benefit to optimizing this information.
– Recommendation: Use the targeted
keyword at least once in the TITLE tag and
as close to the beginning of the tag as
possible, include branding elements and
restrict to 70 characters to avoid an ellipsis
“…” that users have been trained to view
as a less targeted result.
– Recent Changes: Google has begun to
dynamically change TITLE tags in SERPs
in order to show more relevant information
to users. While this may not necessarily be
a negative, it will be important to monitor in
the near future.
Keyword some word, Keyword some word, keyword.com
The Online Keyword Store| Keyword.com
Penalty Title
Optimized Title

On-Page Targeting
Topic: Meta Descriptions
– Issue: Though not weighted strongly for ranking by
search engines, a relevant and compelling meta
description is crucial to attract click-thrus in search
query results.
– Recommendation: Create and add compelling sales
descriptions under 150 characters to meta data.

On-Page Targeting
Topic: H1 through H6 Tags
- Issue: H1 through H6 Tags not only lay out the
on-page content of a website for users, but build
the semantic structure of a site for search
engines, which use the information contained in
these tags to rank.
- Recommendation: The most important
keywords for which a page should rank for
should be held within the H1 Tag, with sub
header information in the respective H2 through
H6. Placing this information within divs misses
out on an opportunity to rank well for keywords.

Content Below the Fold
– Issue: Content that is only reached
through scrolling is a lost opportunity to
engage with users and encourage
increasing the popularity of content
through link-sharing. Google has recently
adjusted its semantic search algorithm so
that content that is not optimized to provide
a benefit to the user above-the-fold may
see dramatic drops in page rank. Though
this update mainly targets websites that
feature a slew of ads before content, links
that push content down may suffer the
same repercussions.
– Recommendation: Display content to
users above-the-fold, pushing ads, links,
and other elements below useful
information. If this is not possible, make
attempts to link down to the content on-
page so that the important information is
readily accessible.
Page View
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Lorem ipsum
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Optimizing Video
– Issue: Search engines are unable to crawl
the content of a video to index and provide
to users.
– Recommendation: Add an on-page link or
expand/collapse tag to a transcript of on-
page videos and register a video sitemap
with Google if video content will make a
regular appearance on the site.
– Future Alternatives: Using captioning
tools directly from Youtube and optimizing
the video description for site navigation will
improve usability and search results, even
allowing humans and engines to search
the content of your videos.
Page View

Page View
Keyword Positioning
Body Content vs. Sidebar
Content:
– Issue: Search engines value and rank
keywords and links found in the body
content and anchor text more highly than
those found in either sidebar or images.
– Recommendation: Especially for list
pages, like product pages, be sure to link
to important pages within the body content
with keyword-infused anchor text.
Stars
Circles
Squares
Diamonds
Ovals
Triangles Stars Circles

Keyword Trends
Keyword Focus
– Issue: In writing body content and page components for a
site, it is important to choose a limited number of keywords
and phrases to target and stick with in order to ensure a
greater relevancy ranking for a site.
– Recommendations:
• There is no specific number of keywords to target as
long as the list is manageable (meaning small enough
to perform interim ranking research on and monitor
distribution on site). Keep in mind that the larger the
list becomes, the weaker each keyword group will
become as well.
• Include keyword variations and related keywords on
the list.
• Avoid ‘spammy’ practices and overstuffing keywords
into a phrase, noting that keyword density will not help
rankings and will more likely hurt. In general, if a
phrase would work equally as well in a conversation as
it would in writing, it is acceptable.
• ‘Head’ terms should be kept high in the site structure
and high on-page, allowing ‘Middle’ and ‘Long-tail’
terms to fall into content and deeper in structure. This
will ensure that the site is attracting traffic, hosting rich
content, and able to capture prospects at various
stages of the sales cycle.
Row Labels HIGH MED LOW Grand Total
HEAD 4% 7% 7% 18.5
MIDDLE 2% 5% 5% 11.5
LONG-TAIL 14% 28% 28% 70
Grand Total 20 40 40 100
SEO Ideal Keyword Index

Competitive Analysis

Competitive Analysis Checklist
Immediate Action Items:
• Assess all on-page copy and identify all
opportunities to employ a market-appropriate
keyword strategy in body copy and page
components including head, middle and
long-tail terms with high, medium, and low
competition.
• Identify opportunities to build out ‘rich’
content on the site.
• Actively seek strategies to target specific
market segments and consider this a tertiary
strategy to the previous two mentioned.
• Develop a system for reviewing and
competing with the meta descriptions and
calls to action of Alexa 1000 sites competing
with target site.
• Identify opportunities to rank multiple times
in the Top 10 results by getting content
published with Alexa 1000 ‘information
resources’ and partnering with Pay e/re-
Tailor sites. (wikipedia.org, about.com,
amazon.com, ehow.com, etc.)
• Analyze Adwords and other paid search
campaigns, and begin adjusting on-page
components to rank organically for keywords
that are expensive to maintain with the goal
of cutting these keywords from the
campaigns once they rank #1.
Ongoing Action Items:
• Actively explore opportunities to improve the
credibility metrics of the domain (Domain authority,
Page authority, .edu & .gov links, MOZrank, Alexa
rank, Dmoz listing, etc.)
• Develop an ongoing link-building strategy with high
quality sites (remember to offer meaningful anchor
text). Monitor incoming links from low quality sites.
• Develop an ongoing Social Media strategy,
optimizing through platform-specific tools and
employing OG Tags on the site which will be
considered by search engines.
• Develop an ongoing schedule for monitoring the
performance of ranking metrics, noting when
tactics work short-term, long-term, and not at all.

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