SEO Basics How search engines work SEO myths Developers and SEO Tips and Tricks for Developers

2. Nikhil Raj R
Senior Engineer – SEO
Alamy Images India Pvt. Ltd.
http://www.alamy.com

3. How do you navigate the
web?
GOOGLE

5. How Search Engines Work
1. Query
2. Categorization* *=Relevancy
3. Matching documents
4. Results*

8. Is that all?
It starts even before you type in Google. 
DISCOVER and
ORGANIZE documents.

9. Main Parts of a Search Engine
• Crawler (Google’s web crawler is called
Googlebot)
• Index
• Algorithm

10. CrawlingGoogle Search Console (GSC)
Log file Analyzers

11. Index
Also use Sitemaps in GSC

12. Our job is to do everything possible to make sure the search
engine is able to accurately assess whether the page will fulfill
the user’s request.
Why should I care?

13. Why should I care?

14. SEO for Developers
How to make sure that I lose my job

15. URL
Which is better?
http://www.nikhil.com/post?id=16
http://www.nikhil.com/articleid=16
/web-design: Google sees the words web, design, web design,
design web
/web_design: Google sees webdesign
http://www.nikhil.com/how-to-create-search-engine-friendly-url
Hyphens are preferred.
http://www.nikhil.com/how_to_create_search_engine_friendly_url

16. URL - Guidelines
Choose your hostname
http://example.com http://www.example.com
301
http://www.example.com/ABOUT-US
http://www.example.com/about-us
301
Set rules for the URL path
http://www.example.com/About-Us 301
http://www.example.com/About-us
301

17. /Robots.txt
Internal Search
Disallow: /search.html
www.example.com/category/toys.html
www.example.com/search.html?q=toys
www.example.com/search.html?q=toys&price=low-to-high
www.example.com/search.html?q=toys&price=high-to-low
Crawl Optimization

18. XML Sitemaps

19. Schema / Structured Data
•Sponsored by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex
•Improves search experience

20. Schema
Logo schema
Site Search schema
Social profiles schema
To debug use Google Structured Data testing tool

21. Site Speed
•Site speed is a ranking factor
•Reduces bounce rate
•Increases conversions

22. Responsive Design
• My website is not yet ready for mobile because I am limited by the
technology I have
• I don't need a mobile optimization strategy
Mobile friendly Update
“Mobilegeddon”

23. How a user sees the page
What Google see!
Images

24. Image Ranking Factors
• Alt attribute.
• Image File Name. (Instead of banner1.jpg use seo-for-
developers.jpg)
• Text surrounding the image.
• Importance of the Page where the image is placed.

25. SEO Myths
What I thought: Google uses Google Analytics data in its algorithm
What I learnt: Google Doesn’t Use Google Analytics data in its algorithm
Data from SimilarTech.com

26. SEO Myths
What I thought: A lot of 404s can cause a Google penalty.
What I learnt: 404 Error Pages Do Not Cause a Google Penalty

27. SEO Myths
What I thought: Google cannot crawl and index Javascript.
Disallow: *.css
Disallow: *.js
Remove
What I learnt: Google CAN crawl and index Javascript.
Use Fetch and Render in Google Search Console

28. Questions ?

29. Love your users. Make a great website that is easier to
navigate, loads faster, has useful content. Follow the
webmaster guidelines from Google. Traffic and Rankings will
follow.
Thank You