Download - What's Important for Technical SEO?
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TECHNICAL SEO
WHAT’S IMPORTANT? “12 Popular, interesting & critical issues we’ve
discovered in our most recent technical consulting
projects”
Richard Baxter – Founder / Director – SEOgadget LTD
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1) THIN INTERNAL PAGES / NO CONTENT / BOILERPLATE
CONTENT
You’ve got to have unique text on a page – try persuasive, beautifully written content to
inspire your customers to trust, be inspired and buy!
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2) POOR INTERNAL LINK ARCHITECTURE
Increased # links on homepage and improved internal nav elements with CSS styled drop downs and popular products
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Internal links and links from the homepage to key internal category pages remains an important part of
your SEO strategy
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3) EXCESSIVE DUPLICATION OF CONTENT VIA PAGINATED
NAVIGATION / FACETED NAVIGATION
Check out this pagination guide: Best Practices for SEO & User Experience (SEOmoz), be
careful with rel=“canonical” and use noindex, avoid robots.txt if you can
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4) INDEXED STAGING SERVER
Cleaning up a leaky staging server is a pain – best way, user agent detect and 301 the staged urls to the
public site. Use IP detection – anything that isn’t from a pre-approved range, redirect it.
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5) CANONICALISATION – AND NOT JUST THE WWW
Domain level canonicalisation still a huge problem – most sites we review have a bunch of problems like
this. Check that the trailing slash is added (or removed) and case is handled correctly – check for https in
the index too.
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6) SOFT 404 HEADERS / NO 404 RESPONSE
Don’t install Firefox 4 just yet – live HTTP headers doesn’t work. Redbot is one of many
server header checkers
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7) IF-MODIFIED-SINCE PRODUCES 500 ERROR
Feed the Bots' IF-MODIFIED-SINCE server header checker is really useful – check it out:
http://www.feedthebot.com/tools/if-modified/
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8) SITEMAP.XML FILE RESPONDED WITH A 404 SERVER
HEADER RESPONSE EVEN THOUGH THE FILE WAS
DOWNLOADED
“Google webmaster tools reported no sitemap found at the sitemap URL – the file was loading in a browser, but the malformed server header response had everyone scratching their heads.”
Internal pages and 404 pages aren’t the only files you should check out – sometimes
malformed server header responses can cause days of work to diagnose
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9) BINGBOT / MSNBOT CRAWL BLOCKED
It’s good to crawl like a search engine from time to time, use SEOmoz’s toolbar to change
user agent – disable JavaScript and CSS for a new kind of awesome.
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10) 40,000+ INTERNAL 301 REDIRECTS
Learn to install IIS SEO Toolkit - http://seogadget.co.uk/how-to-install-and-use-iis-seo-
toolkit/ we think it’s awesome
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11) VERY EASY TO INJECT LINKS WITH HTML
Do Followed Link
Check your search boxes and other form functionality to make sure that HTML is stripped –
particularly for sites that create user profile pages and search results
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12) UGC CONTENT ON INTERNAL PAGES IN JAVASCRIPT
Check your search boxes and other form functionality to make sure that HTML is stripped –
particularly for sites that create user profile pages and search results
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“Fantastic!..Excellent quality with a brilliant bag to
keep all the items in...wonderful present for a
scooter crazy chick, with a pink scooter to match
her pink car/scooter wash kit! “
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12) TONS OF DATA / CONTENT? MAKE IT EMBEDDABLE
Be it content, data, images, video, charts – almost everything can be converted to an
embeddable strategy – think: how can others use our data on their sites?
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THANK YOU
@richardbaxter
Thanks for listening! Check out our blog at SEOgadget.co.uk for more actionable guides and
tips – or hire us for SEO, Conversion Rate Optimisation and bespoke technology consulting.