advanced technical seo - smx london 2016

#SMX @hannahjthorpeAdvanced Technical SEO Panel

SEO IN THENEW COMPLEX

TECHNICAL WORLD

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#SMX @hannahjthorpe

Advanced Technical SEO is…

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Increasing visibility of a website in organic search

or visits by improving click

through rate

any type of

searches relevant to the audience

whilst still ensuring the site has a good

UX

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‘Advanced’ is subjective, based on circumstances and

complexities of the on-site experience

#SMX @hannahjthorpeThe power to define ‘advanced’ is in your hands…sort of

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Page Titles Robots.txt Pagination

Headings Meta Descriptions

Keyword Research

Internal Linking Crawling Backlinks

Before we go any further…

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How is our technical SEO world changing?

A change is proposed/or made on a

website based on perceived

UX improvement

A range of implications are seen, or expected, as a result of

this change

The technical SEO team

must resolve these

problems and react to make

it work for SEO

#SMX @hannahjthorpeSo let’s tackle some examples

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A whirlwind tour of some common technical SEO issues, in more complex situations…

Faceted Navigation Javascript

User-Centric

Strategy

#SMX @hannahjthorpeMake strategic choices with Faceted Navigation

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Faceted Navigation

Risk of duplicate content diluting ranking ability

Wasted crawl budget on multiple similar

pages

Over indexation withlots of content

Let’s make a way users can refine their search more so they don’t have to click through pages of results they are not interested in…

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Faceted Navigation

Something broke – quick, just undo the changesand go back to what we’ve always had

But what about the

users…?

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Faceted Navigation

• Determine what is valuable and what is not as a facet

• Canonise to the closest alternative of value

THE SOLUTION

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Faceted Navigation

• Is the category a natural extension to your current categories?

• Is there high demand around this grouping?

• Does this page add new product choices, or just reorder the page?

When to Index…

#SMX @hannahjthorpeSometimes Googlebot doesn’t understand…

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JavaScript

Allows much more interactive and interesting websites, greater flexibility in the functionality…

…but Google’s crawling of JS is questionable.

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JavaScript

Serve selected snapshots

specifically to Googlebot

when it visits your site

Use a pre-rendering service to

ensure that the correct content is

served

Wait and see what

happens…not advisable!

Option 1: Option 2: Option 3:THE SOLUTION

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#SMX @hannahjthorpeFocus on the Users

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User-Centric Strategy

It is likely that CTR does in fact influence rankings

https://moz.com/blog/does-organic-ctr-impact-seo-rankings-new-data

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THE SOLUTION – STRUCTURED DATA

User-Centric Strategy

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How to…

Either use Microdata RDA or JSON-LD

• Nested Values – allows lots of information in one place

• Quicker & simpler – both learning JSON-LD and editing it

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JSON-LD

#SMX @hannahjthorpeThe world of technical SEO is not finished evolving

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So, what’s next? Emphasis

on improving

page speed, seen by

the adoption of AMP

#SMX @hannahjthorpeThank you for Listening

Padilha, Jose. 2014. Robocop. [film stills]. Available at : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1234721/