Senior SEO Engineer at Fresh Egg, Alec Bertram's presentation on the most common and easiest to fix technical SEO issues from the London Affiliate Conference 2014

1. Technical SEO.
Alec Bertram
Senior SEO Engineer, Fresh Egg
@KiwiAlec

2. Alec Bertram
Senior SEO Engineer at Fresh Egg
Passion for technical SEO
New Zealander (sorry for the accent)
Industry standard tool for monitoring usage
of brand images across the web
New tool for discretely tracking who sees
offsite content
I’m an affiliate too

3. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Technical SEO is the foundation of organic marketing

4. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Today.
• A quick run through of how your website’s architecture affects
your organic search performance
• A broad look at the most important aspects of technical SEO
• Five things you can do to improve your website’s organic visibility
through technical SEO
• Hopefully time for questions and to run through some of your
questions

5. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Today.
• Not going to give you code examples (too basic)
• Not going to go in depth or solve all of your problems (too
advanced)
•
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•
•
•
•
•
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Website and URL structure
Site speed
Robots directives
Basic and essential on-page elements
Microdata and semantic markup
Reclaiming lost link equity
Basic website audit
Internationalisation
Setting up mobile websites
Tools you need to be using

6. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
How search engines find your website.
Crawling
Indexing
Post-Index
Analysis

7. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
How search engines rank your webpages.
User Search
Query
Information
Retrieval
Ranking +
Alternates
More? Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and indexing documents and images

8. Crawling.
How a search engine sees your website

9. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec

10. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Robots.txt
• “disallow” blocks access to URLs. Will not stop a URL from being
indexed
• Never block images, javascript, stylesheets, or other elements
• Don’t get it wrong
More? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156449

11. Website structure
Your site’s architecture affects it’s performance

12. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Site structure and the flow of link equity.
45
100
100
100*0.9/2
100*0.9/1
135
135*0.9/3
32.9
40.5
40.5
40.5
36.5*0.9/1
32.9*0.9/2
40.5*0.9/1
36.5
14.8
14.8

13. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
URL Structure.
• Vertical not horizontal
/poker/learn/what-is-a-flop
Not
/learn-poker-what-is-a-flop
• Site architecture should make sense to users and group
similar pages in the same directory
More? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76329

14. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Where should you put a new website section?
• Sub directory?
www.yoursite.com/blog
• Sub domain?
blog.yoursite.com
• Separate domain?
www.yourblog.com
• Google says subdomains are treated the same as subdirectories
In general, try to use sub directories
More? http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

15. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Site Speed is critical.
• “Just One Second Delay In Page-Load Can Cause 7% Loss In
Customer Conversions” - Amazon
• “1 second above the fold rendering goal for mobiles” - Google
•
•
•
•
Compression
Conditional GET
Minimise use of, and optimise images and script files
Implement SPDY
• Benchmark your speed against competitors using GTMetrix
More?
1 Second target: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/mobile
SPDY: http://www.chromium.org/spdy
GTMetrix: http://gtmetrix.com/

16. Technical on-page basics
The things that you need to always get right

17. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
The important (but completely mundane) bits.
http://moz.com/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet-2013-edition

18. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Let’s talk about duplicate content.
Why it’s important to eliminate:
• Search engines rank webpages from a pool of eligible documents
• When it finds two identical documents, how does it decide which to
rank? It uses authority and relevancy signals
• It’s better to merge all authority and relevancy signals into one
document
• Having one strong document is better than many weak duplicates

19. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Canonical URL.
• Canonical is the postcode of your website
• Every unique page needs a unique
canonical
• If the page is served from a “wrong” URL,
canonical ensures authority and relevance
signals go to correct URL
• HTML tag or HTTP header
More? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394

20. Giving meaning to your content.
The case for semantic mark up

21. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Microdata.
• Tells robots the meaning behind a piece of content
• Schema.org, RDFa, Microformats
• Use Schema.org
• Do dishonest implementations, get a penalty
• Social microdata
More? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/176035

22. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Schema.org Places.
• Location microdata sends a strong
signal that the page is suited to
local search queries

23. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Schema.org Reviews.
• Review microdata tells search
engines that text is a user
review
• Has obviously been spammed
(now penalised)

24. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Schema.org Product.
• This page has a strong
“purchase” intent
• More likely to be
returned to an “inmarket” user

25. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Schema.org for Email.
• Get into a user’s email and predictive search (Google Now)

26. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Social Microdata.
Twitter Cards
Facebook OpenGraph
• OpenGraph markup turns a page into a semantic entity (potentially eligible to
appear in Facebook graph search).

27. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Google Data Highlighter.
• Give Google a semantic understanding of your pages without implementing
any code

28. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
The argument against using microdata.
• “Giving Google too much information will kill your market”

29. Reclaim lost link equity
Finding your city of gold.

30. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec

31. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Reclaim Lost Link Equity.
BBC.com
Yoursite.com/old-poker
Pokerstars.
com
Dmoz.org
404 Error!

32. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Reclaim Lost Link Equity.
BBC.com
Pokerstars.
com
Industry convention states that link equity does not flow
through a 302 redirect
Yoursite.com/old
-poker
302 / 307
Redirect
Yoursite.com/new
-poker
Dmoz.org
(there is some empirical evidence to dispute this)

33. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Reclaim Lost Link Equity.
BBC.com
Pokerstars.
com
Dmoz.org
Reclaim lost link equity by implementing a 301 redirect
Yoursite.com/old
-poker
301
Redirect
Yoursite.com/new
-poker

34. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Reclaim Lost Link Equity.
• Find all pages with inbound links on your website
• Google Analytics landing pages
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Commercial Link Graphs
• Ahrefs.com
• MajesticSEO.com
• OpenSiteExplorer.com
• Free Link Graphs
• Openlinkprofiler.org
• Webmeup.com

35. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Reclaim Lost Link Equity.
http://fortseo.com/bulk-website-response-checker/

36. Audit Your Website.
Common problems that you probably have.

37. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Audit your website.
http://www.deepcrawl.co.uk
• Enterprise level website auditor and monitoring tool
• Free 10, 000 credits when you signup before Monday:
URL: [redacted]
Password: [redacted]
• I’m not affiliated with DeepCrawl, it’s just great.

38. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Audit your website.

39. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Audit your website.
• Eliminate links to broken
pages or which redirect
• Identify spidertraps and
block with robots.txt
• Identify pages which are
disallowed

40. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Audit your website.
• Identify pages which do not
have “the basics”
• Find pages which have
duplicated content
• If thin pages are key organic
landing pages, ensure they
provide good value

41. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Audit your website.
• Google some page titles and
description snippets – if the same
page is in more than one result,
you have a problem
• Find cases where the same text
has been duplicated across your
site (or other sites)

42. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Speaking of lost link equity.
• This is what happens when you remove pages without redirecting

43. Winning with alternates
The opportunity in going further afield

44. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
What are alternates?
Site.co.uk/poker
Site.de/poker
mobile.site.co.uk/poker

45. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Language / Region Alternates.
• Expand internationally by leveraging the relevance and authority
of your main site
• Declare language and (optional) country alternates for each page
in HTML header – see “rel=alternate hreflang”
• Can be used to segment countries in the same language (US and
UK) or languages in the same country (French and English in
Canada)

46. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Language / Region Alternates.
• I am a travel discount & cashback affiliate:
• Hreflang implementation on one merchant: two extra pages
(German and Dutch) caused a 40% YoY uplift in conversions
• Cost me a round of beers
• Speak the language, but understand the culture – using Google
Translate is asking for a content penalty

47. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Other internationalisation.
• Set geographic target in webmaster tools
• Google is not always the king
• US: Consider Bing
• Russia: Yandex
• China: Baidu
• A ccTLD normally wins (but do market research first)

48. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Mobile Alternates.
• Mobile devices are not The Future. They are The Now.

49. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Mobile Alternates.
• If your desktop site gives a poor mobile experience, it may not
rank as well on mobile searches*
• Three types of mobile deployment – responsive, dynamic,
separate.
For separate mobile sites (mobile.yoursite.com):
• Implement “rel=alternate media” on desktop site, and
canonicalisation on mobile site
• A sub-directory is normally preferred for microsites. In this specific
case, sub-domain (or separate TLD) is fine
•
*http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/changes-in-rankings-of-smartphone_11.html

50. SEO tools you should be using
Efficiently monitor for technical issues

51. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Webmaster Tools.
• Crawl and error data
• Link and keyword data
• Control search crawler and ranking settings
• Your only communication channel to search engines
Engine
Google
URL
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Bing
http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster
Baidu
Yandex
http://zhanzhang.baidu.com/
http://webmaster.yandex.com/

52. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Website Auditing.
•
– Will give you raw data (Advanced users)
•
– Full crawl and some top-line analysis of data
and issues
• Microsoft IIS Search Engine Optimisation Toolkit – one of the
better (and least-known) free website crawlers
•
– Alerts you when your robots.txt has changed.

53. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Technical SEO resources.
• Google Webmaster Central
• Google Developer Guidelines
• @mattcutts – Always tweets out latest technical things
• Moz – Best practice and some implementation examples
• SEOBook – The opposing view

54. Key takeaways.
If you only remember five things, make it these five

55. Alec Bertram - @KiwiAlec
Key takeaways.
• Ensure all pages have a correct canonical tag
• Perform top line website audit
• Reclaim lost link equity
• Fix your internationalisation with hreflang (or consider
internationalisation)
• Ensure your mobile experience is fantastic

56. Thanks!
Alec Bertram
Senior SEO Engineer, Fresh Egg
@KiwiAlec