This document summarizes a technical SEO presentation given by Stanislav Dimitrov at Joomla! Day 2012 in Sofia, Bulgaria. The presentation covered topics like the growth of search engine usage, technical SEO problems and common mistakes to avoid, Google algorithm updates like Panda and Penguin, latest SEO trends, and 10 actionable tips. It provided information on things like properly configured XML sitemaps, working robots.txt files, using structured data, and setting up Google Analytics tracking to monitor site performance. The presentation concluded with a Q&A section.

1. Technical SEO Updated
Joomla! Day 2012
Sofia, Bulgaria
Stanislav Dimitrov, Head of SEO, Hop Online

2. Today’s SEO Agenda
1) Why SEO matters
2) Technical SEO problems
3) Common mistakes
4) Google’s Panda/Penguin updates
5) Latest SEO trends
6) Useful tools and resources
7) 10 actionable tips for your site
8) Q&A time

3. The Growth of Search
Number of Searches/Day on Google
Source: SEOmoz.org

4. The Growth of Search
75% of all clicks go to organic results

5. Using WordPress? You’re 80% there!
Matt Cutts, Google
http://goo.gl/teuUi

7. Let’s Talk About …
 Joomla! used by more than 30 million website owners
 Joomla! is popular because of its features for communities

8. S.P.A.M = Sites Positioned Above Mine

9. Search Engine Friendly URLs
 Dynamic URLs
Low CTR, dups
Need to 301?
 Unstructured URLs
Mirror site structure?
Creates dups
 Keyword Stuffing
Spammy site
 Page extensions / trailing slash don’t matter for SEO
 Joomla! Documentation http://bit.ly/RfqTcL
 IIS 7.0 and URL rewrite http://bit.ly/QocfAi

10. DNS / Server Connectivity

11. Message Alerts from Google

12. Safe Browsing Tool
Even Joomla may get in trouble
 Safe Browsing Tool:
http://bit.ly/PqysBF
 Report to StopBadware:
http://bit.ly/SOCIdm
 Reconsideration Request

13. Check Your Crawl Stats
Site downtime?
What takes so long?

14. Monitor Uptime with Pingdom

15. Page Speed Insights
Page Speed Tools http://goo.gl/iMfkJ

16. Server Density

17. Crawl Errors and 4xx/5xx Codes
 URL fixed or not
 Remove from sitemaps
 Fetch as Google
 Mark as Fixed
 If needed: Remove URL

18. URL Parameter Handling
 Optimize crawl budget
 Address dup content
 Robots.txt analysis in GWT
 Works with meta robots
 Help http://goo.gl/zCChz

19. Submit to Index
 Indexation in real time
 Useful when changing content
 Fetch limits update every week

20. Index Status/XML Sitemaps
Check indexation

21. http Status Codes for SEO
Mtel losing link juice
Dir.bg slightly better

22. Where it Can Go Wrong
 Not knowing your 301s from 302s
 Redirecting all pages in one go to a single URL

23. When You Should Use a 301
 Moving sites
 Expired content
 Multiple versions of the home page
 Pro tip: if homepage serves a unique purpose (shown to users who are
logged in or have cookies dropped), rel=canonical a better option

24. When to Use rel=canonical
 Where 301s may not be possible
 Multiple ways of navigating to a page (ecommerce sites)
owww.phoneshop.com/smartphone/3G
owww.phoneshop.com/3G/smartphone
 When dynamic URLs are generated on the fly
o session IDs
o tracking code: www.example.com/widgets/red?source=footer-nav

25. When NOT to Use rel=canonical
 On new website
 On pagination (or at least with caution)
 Across your entire site to one page

26. Faceted Navigation

27. Faceted Navigation
 Pagination/sorting can cause duplicate content – use Ajax/JavaScript to avoid
 Selective robots.txt
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*crawl=no
 No matter of the route, only one indexable URL per page
 How to handle faceted navigation http://mz.cm/SUHJN8

28. View All Page

29. View All Page

30. View All Page
 View All pages must be fast
 Big (ecommerce) sites sometimes dislike them
 … but users love them! (if they are fast)

31. Google Prev/Next Tag

32. Google Prev/Next Tag
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3
Page 1
<link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2" />
Page 2
<link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1" />
<link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3" />
Page 3
<link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2" />

33. Google Prev/Next Tag
 Declare in <head> section of the page
 The first page only contains rel=”next” and no rel=”prev” markup
 Pages two to the second-to-last page should be doubly-linked with
both rel=”next” and rel=”prev”
 The last page only contains markup for rel=”prev”, not rel=”next”
 Use absolute URLs
 The chain can’t be broken
 Each page can be in only one pagination chain
 Use of prev/next consolidates signals across entire series
 Add rel=canonical to View All page on all pages in the series

34. Google Prev/Next Tag

35. Google Algorithm Changes
 Google updates’ history http://mz.cm/QZCga4
 Map the dates as annotations in Google Analytics

36. Mozcast – Google Weather Report
Sept 14 - Panda 4.0

37. 3

38. Google Panda
2
1
4
3
Source: SEOmoz

39. Who Gets Pandalized?
 Sites with too many pages relative to the size of their brand footprint
 A high % of duplicate content (might apply to a page, a site or both)
 A low amount of original content on a page or site
 A high % (or number) of pages with a low amount of original content
 A high amount of inappropriate (they don’t match the search queries a page
does well for) adverts, especially high on the page
 Page content (and page title tag) not matching the search queries a page
does well for
 High bounce rate on page or site
 Low visit times on page or site
 Low % of users returning to a site
 Low CTR % from Google’s results (page/site)
 High % of boilerplate content (the same on every page)
 Low or no quality inbound links to a page or site

40. How to Recover After Panda?
 Take a deep breath
 Check the timeline in Google Analytics
 Double check for IT problems
 Decide which URLs are canonical and create strong signals (rel canonical,
robot exclusion, internal link profile, XML sitemaps)
 Decide which URLs are your most valuable and ensure they are indexed
and well optimized
 Add quality content to them – text, videos, photos, reviews/ratings
 Remove any extraneous, overhead, duplicate, low value and unnecessary
URLs from the index
 Build internal links to canonical, high-value URLs from authority pages
(strong mozRank, unique referring domains, total links)
 Build high-quality external links via social media efforts
 Use content-based link building
Great guide at WordTracker : http://goo.gl/C0zSH

41. 3

42. Google Penguin

43. Google Penguin

44. Google Penguin

45. Google Penguin

46. Who Gets Penguinized?
 Overly aggressive anchor text (both internally and externally)
 Overuse of exact-match domains
 Low-quality article marketing & blog spam
 Keyword stuffing in internal/outbound links
 Link spikes (too many links built too fast)
 Links from irrelevant sources
 Blogroll links
 Comment links
 Sitewide links (SEO’d footer links)
 Too many links from one domain to a single page (GWT)

47. How to Recover After Penguin?
 Compare Penguin dates with traffic drop in Google Analytics
 Investigate which keywords dropped
 Download all links and sort them by type, anchor text or DA
 Open Site Explorer
 Majestic SEO
 Link Detective
 Combine data in Excel and find the poison links
 Remove all unrelated links on/off your website
 Diversify anchor text in links to your site
 Social signals (DataHub) over links
 Links from government(.bg) sites / industry associations
 Reconsideration request won’t help http://goo.gl/YDFu7
 Increase the brand digital footprint:
 Complete contact info (Google Maps/Plus, team photos)
 Genuine social media accounts
 Branded links / branded traffic

48. Rich Snippets in SERPs
Products
Events
Recipes
Restaurants

49. Structured Data in GWT

50. Rich Snippet Testing Tool
Test HTML code

51. Which result will you click?
Rel author in SERP

52. Google rel=author Tag
 3-link verification method
 How to implement rel=author http://selnd.com/QUbUYy

53. Google rel=author Tag
 2-link verification method
 How to implement rel=author http://selnd.com/QUbUYy

54. Google rel Publisher
Verified G+ account
Recent Google+ posts

55. Rel Publisher for Brands
Google+ and site linked

56. The (Google) Circle of Trust

57. Screaming Frog
Free download
http://bit.ly/j8as0V

58. Custom Dashboards in GA
Segment and track

59. SEOmoz Guide to SEO
 Best SEO Guide
http://mz.cm/TjZshv

60. Distilled University
 $40/month
 60 day free SEOmoz Pro
http://bit.ly/SOgOH9

61. 10 Actionable Tips for Your Site
1. SEO friendly page titles and META descriptions
2. Proper keyword usage in the body of your pages
3. Website redirects from www to non www or vice versa
4. Duplicate URLs removed from your website
5. All URLs are search engine friendly
6. Properly configured XML sitemaps
(products/categories/video/image/geo)
7. Working robots.txt file
(Pro tip: reference sitemaps, hide with .htaccess)
8. Structured data (products, location, author, events,
organization)
9. Traffic/goals/events in Google Analytics
(Pro tip: create custom dashboards)
10. Use rel=author and Google+ for more CTR

62. Thank you!
Q&A Time …
@SearchRocks
/in/stanidlavdimitrov
+StanislavDimitrov
Joomla! Day Bulgaria Organized by:

63. Спонсори:
Медийни партньори: