The document discusses strategies for optimizing technical SEO, focusing on enhancing site crawling efficiency and accessibility to improve search engine performance. Key points include structuring site architecture, utilizing proper internal links, managing redirects, and improving site speed using various tools and techniques. It also emphasizes the importance of ongoing performance auditing and user experience optimization.

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TECHNICAL SEO
BECOMING THE WORLDS BEST CRAWLED DOMAIN!
Bastian Grimm, VP Organic Search, Peak Ace AG | @basgr

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Presentation Download:
http://pa.ag/seozone14

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LETS TALK ABOUT SPACE!
BEAUTIFUL, ISN‘T IT?
Source: http://bit.ly/1iT6JSk

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CRAWLSPACE
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN TECHNICAL SEO!
Source: http://bit.ly/1iT6JSk

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WHAT IS CRAWLSPACE?
ACCESSIBILITY, EFFICIENCY, PRIORITY & SPEED!
Source: http://bit.ly/1iT6JSk

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But why…
… do search engines love efficient, easily
accessible sites for crawling?

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Starting with Google Webmaster Tools
GWT > Crawl > Crawl Stats
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

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Efficient vs. non-efficient Domains
Maximum unique pages, (almost) no duplicates, all contents crawlable, etc.
http://www.deepcrawl.co.uk/

9. http://www.deepcrawl.co.uk/ 9

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#1 Proper architecture
Use no. of links & link depth to control crawlers

11. THE MOST IMPORTANT THING?
YOUR HOMEPAGE! ALL CONTENTS MAX. 3-4 CLICKS AWAY!
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12. Prioritize based on Search Volume
Searchers demand to create hierarchy: Homepage > Categories > … > Detail pages
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More keyword research: http://bg.vu/sesldn14

13. webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.domain.com&strip=1
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Make sure your links are “readable”
Give it a try and disable JavaScript as well as CSS
http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/ & http://www.feedthebot.com/spiderview.html

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#2 Have the “right” links
Make sure to get the best internal links for each
and every sub-page!

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Implement Breadcrumbs
The “proper” link and most-valuable anchor-text – all the time!
https://schema.org/breadcrumb

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Consider Contextual Relevance
People who bought product X also bought products Y & Z

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Also do semantically related Linking
For content X we also have related articles Y & Z
easy
advanced

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“SEO Special Interest” also needs Links
Seasonal keywords or quick wins (e.g. page 2 > 1 movements)

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#3 Do Crawler Control
Care about which pages you put into the index
and more importantly how you do that!

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Meta Robots Tag vs. Robots.txt
What are the key differences?
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />
 Pages will be crawled
 Pages won’t be indexed
 Pages won’t show up in search results
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /some-page.html
 Pages won’t be crawled
 URLs will “partially” be indexed
 URLs will show up in search results

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URL pattern has been robots.txt’ed out
But Google still shows a reference in their search results

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Don’t do both, either!
Google cannot read a Robots Meta Tag once the URL is disallowed in robots.txt!

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Do proper Redirects
Get rid of 302, 307 as well as redirect chains!

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Watch your Canonical Tags
Generally speaking: They are (usually) “OK” for filtering, sorting, HTTPs, etc.

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Google might ignore Canonicals…!
Don’t use Canonicals as excuse for poor architecture; do 301’s whenever possible!
Is rel="canonical" a hint or a directive?
It's a hint that we honor strongly. We'll
take your preference into account, in
conjunction with other signals, when
calculating the most relevant page […]
Full story: http://pa.ag/1FxYZEd

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On-Page Auditing Tools
Architecture: Crawling, Headers, Redirects, etc.

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#1 Screaming Frog SEO Spider
free (or £99 / yr.), Win + Mac + Ubuntu
http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

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#2 DeepCrawl Website Crawler
http://deepcrawl.co.uk/
paid (€60 / mo.), web-based

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#3 strucr.com
https://strucr.com/
free (or €119 / mo.), web-based

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#4 botify.com
https://www.botify.com/
paid (€39 / mo.), web-based

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#5 Searchmetrics Suite
http://www.searchmetrics.com/de/suite/
paid (€349 / mo.), web-based

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Performance Auditing
It’s all about site speed!

33. Google officially confirms using site speed
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It‘s a „ranking factor“ for quite some time now, however…
Full Story: http://pa.ag/1t4xVs6

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It really is more a benefit for your users
But nevertheless it helps in crawling sites as well…
“We encourage you to start looking at
your site's speed - not only to improve
your ranking in search engines, but
also to improve everyone's experience
on the internet.”
- Amit Singhal & Matt Cutts, Google Search Quality Team
Full Story: http://pa.ag/1t4xVs6

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Site owners did listen to Google
The top-3 results are way faster than it’s competitors
Source: Searchmetrics Ranking Factors 2014 (US) - http://pa.ag/10cZuU2

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Start with Google PageSpeed Insights
It‘s a free, web-based tool to „score“ your site against a set of rules / best-practices
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

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If you prefer browser-based, use YSlow
Also free, however keep in mind results can depend on your connection as well!
http://yslow.org/

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Combine both with GTmetrix
PageSpeed & YSlow at-a-glance, report download, URL comparison & API
http://gtmetrix.com/

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ANOTHER TOP-5 TIPS
HOW TO MAKE YOUR SITE REALLY FAST!

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#1 Reduce no. of requests
As few HTTP connections as possible!

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Move CSS to the top, JS to the footer
Or: HeadJS enables parallelizing JS file downloads; Super-awesome!
http://headjs.com/

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Do CSS sprites
SpriteCow & SpriteMe can help your with that
http://www.spritecow.com/ & http://spriteme.org/

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#2 Decrease size of requests
The smaller the file, the faster it loads!

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Minify CSS & JavaScript files
Removing unnecessary whitespaces, line-breaks and comments to reduce file-size
For CSS, try:
http://www.phpied.com/cssmin-js/
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/
For JS, go with:
http://www.crockford.com/javascript/jsmin.html
https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler

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Reduce image filesize significantly
TinyPNG & JPEGmini can help
https://tinypng.com/ & http://www.jpegmini.com/

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Enable GZIP compression
Output compression massively decreases size and therefore speeds up rendering
On Apache, try “mod_deflate” which is straight forward:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain
text/xml
http://www.gzip.org/ & http://pa.ag/1t4DGpH

47. #3 Implement proper caching
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Only transfer files when really necessary!

48. ASK YOUR IT GUYS!
THEY WILL KNOW HOW TO DO IT
Image Source: podbean.com

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Are you using proper caching?
Use Firebug, Live HTTP Headers or Web Sniffer to find out

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#4 Clean-up your HTML
Get rid of everything that bloats up the source!

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Optimize your Mark-Up
The HTML you’re serving should be as small as possible!
 There is no need for HTML comments on a live system – remove
them during build-time (e.g. with Apache ANT)
 Move inline CSS / JS to external files – you want your HTML to
be as small as possible
 Don’t use @import in CSS – it makes it impossible for browsers
to download in parallel
 Don’t scale using width / height – smaller images means less
file-size. Always provide images in proper dimensions.
 Do async loading whenever possible: Non-SEO images or your
social buttons must not block your site’s rendering

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#5 The server-side
Hosting, database, webserver & more

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Not enough time… you want more?
Way, way more performance optimization tools & strategies…
http://www.slideshare.net/bastiangrimm/

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ITS NO ROCKET SCIENCE
PLEASE DON‘T USE TOOLS WITHOUT QUESTIONING THEM!

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WE ARE HIRING: pa.ag/ace-jobs
10+ Openings in PPC, SEO as well as Content & Online PR in Berlin!
http://pa.ag/ace-jobs

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Your turn! Questions?
 bg@peakace.de
 twitter.com/peakaceag
 facebook.com/peakaceag
 www.peakace.de
http://pa.ag/seozone14