seo quick wins: the small things that make the big differences
TRANSCRIPT
The aggregation of marginal gains
Dave Brailsford / Team SKY Src: http://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains
Quick Wins Small things that make a big difference
It’s all in the history.
What do you know about the domain portfolio associated with this site?
What do you know about the technical history of your site?
Change of domains?
Staging / dev server address?
Subdomains?
Change of Address vs a 301’d domain
Go here: http://builtvisible.com/change-of-address/ - date ranges aligned in charts so that’s why one is tiny!
Clean-up old subdomains: Redirect or remove − Redirect out unnecessary sub-domains
− Maybe just rel canonical them!
− Robots.txt and remove necessary (dev) domains via GWMT
This isn’t the host’s fault, it’s yours!
Things that are hard to test but I think they’re important:
−Redirected domains should use same IP as target host
−Match WHOIS records between domains
−Deal with errors at the source
Address Errors on Legacy Domains / Sub Domains − I think managing errors at the source makes a difference
Builtvisible.com errors Caused by a subdomain redirect:
Remember legacy https!
− Without a valid SSL cert on an old domain, you can’t redirect 301 requests
https://seogadget.co.uk >> https://builtvisible.com/
This needs to stay valid for the redirect to be possible…
Still not sure if there’s any legacy stuff indexed?
− site:yourdomain.nl “show me all pages indexed on this domain”
− site:yourdomain.nl –inurl:www “show me all pages indexed on this domain without www”
− site:competitordomain.co.uk -inurl:www inurl:subdomain
− “show me all of this agency’s clients”
Robots.txt doesn’t matter if you’re linking to your dev server all over the place!
Internal links
Read: http://builtvisible.com/link-equity-and-crawl-efficiency-maintenance/
Internal 301s are bad…
Internal 301 Redirects Are *BAD*
− “HTML5 Examples” – removed all tag / category links Oops
Pages w/few internal links Sort by lowest
Look for redirect chains
Moz links here
Additional redirect
Spot the difference
− http://seogadget.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-to-generating-rich-snippets/
− http://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-to-generating-rich-snippets/
− http://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-generating-rich-snippets/
Spot the difference
− http://seogadget.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-to-generating-rich-snippets/
− http://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-to-generating-rich-snippets/
− http://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-generating-rich-snippets/
Why?
− We’d migrated to the new site and a bunch of pages had their stop words removed because of this setting:
− http://seogadget.co.uk/how-to-install-virtualbox/ − http://builtvisible.com/how-to-install-virtualbox/ − http://builtvisible.com/how-install-virtualbox/
Use Link Equity: Top Pages
External links
Links to old domains to realign
People linking to the wrong subdomain: your WWW
Realign those links!
Linked to 404
This URL redirects to home and should point elsewhere
The power of your best links
− Update with new URLs / domains
− Realign anchors to branded
− Promote inbound links and
strengthen them with new links
Fast analysis with URL Profiler
Fast find + disavow directory links Get the contact details of your competitor’s inlinks
I wonder if the people who link here, know
about this
Contacts!
Fast find + disavow directory links
− Search title for “directory” sort by external links. You’re looking for no external links, on very low DA sites with competitive anchors. Suggest for disavow.
aHrefs: search + sort
Suggest a disavow
“Link Intersect” done Right
− Find sites that link to your social profiles but not your sites
− Don’t forget your old social account URLs
− DEFINITELY check your Slideshare URL…
Find quick content opportunities Identify content to redevelop
Start simple: Identify Strong Pages
Read: http://builtvisible.com/start-simple/
− In top 20 pages on our site
− This content desperately needs updating
Check internal site search − “schema cheat
sheet” was creating a 404 page (no results!)
− Identify popular terms with high exit rate and fix by adding terms into correct pages
Re-use old Guest Posts
I wrote this 5 years ago. Mild rewrite an
republish, it outranks the original
Chop up old infographics − PSD to HTML
− Fiddle around with jQuery
− Dig out & republish the original research in a blog post
Do a survey and take the story:
Assorted quick wins
Images
http://www.imageraider.com/
Unlinked mentions − Go deeper, don’t just look for brand, look for product mentions, your CEO etc
− Use talkwalker / fresh web explorer / mention / ahrefs alerts
Technical Checks
Technical Checks
− Implement article mark-up / search action schema
− Check for canonical / meta headers / href lang / robots index, follow
− OGP/ Twitter card
− Check www and trailing slash redirects and duplicates
− Do this: http://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015
− Read this: http://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-generating-rich-snippets/
Be curious. Find it, and optimise!
