mcanerin technical seo
DESCRIPTION
Slides presented at SMS India 2011 in Bangalore. The title font didn't upload properly - I'll fix on later presentations.TRANSCRIPT
Technical SEOCEO Summit
Speaker: Ian McAnerin, CEO McAnerin International Inc.
Who?
2Copyright 2009 McAnerin International Inc.April 9, 2023
• YOU! (Probably)• In our experience, roughly 60% of
SEO issues can be traced to technical problems.
• Most companies face unnecessary hurdles due to technical issues that can often be fixed in minutes.
Where?
3Copyright 2009 McAnerin International Inc.April 9, 2023
• Problems can be a single critical issue, but more commonly are a combination of several issues.
• Often an accumulation of problems results in an accumulation of distrust for the site as a whole.
Why or How?
4Copyright 2009 McAnerin International Inc.April 9, 2023
• Accident or omission• Deliberately done to accomplish
another goal.• Software bug or hardware glitch• Technical limitation of environment• Political or management decisions.
What?
5Copyright 2009 McAnerin International Inc.April 9, 2023
The Seven Deadly Technical Sins1. Hosting and Infrastructure2. DNS and Domains3. Errors and Redirects4. HTML Validation5. Spider Traps6. Scripting and Objects7. Geolocation / Personalization Disconnect
Hosting and Infrastructure
6Copyright 2009 McAnerin International Inc.April 9, 2023
Small Business = LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
Medium = LAMP or IIS ClusterLarge = IIS ClusterMega = Custom OS: GoogleOS,
DynamoWhy Care?: Slow response times =
site Google doesn’t want to send many visitors to. Also slower indexing.
7Copyright 2009 McAnerin International Inc.April 9, 2023
Multiple Servers• Rotating IP addresses (load
balancing) = many different sites = duplication.
• Edge computing can cause geolocation issues.
• Fix: detect spiders and send to a canonical site version.
Hosting and Infrastructure
DNS and Domains
8Copyright 2009 McAnerin International Inc.April 9, 2023
• www vs non-www versions of sites• Subdomain.domain.TLD/subdirectory
www.mysite.com/stuff• Subdomains and sub-subdomains
(circular dependency)• Multiple DNS servers sometimes not
updated = weird results.
DNS and Domains
9Copyright 2009 McAnerin International Inc.April 9, 2023
Rule of Thumb:• TLD (and ccTLD) for country• Subdomains for language or major
groups• Subdirectories for Topics• language.domain.ccTLD/topic/
page.htm• en.canada.ca/justice/
introduction.htm
Errors and Redirects
10Copyright 2009 McAnerin International Inc.April 9, 2023
• An error page should always respond with a 404.
• Strongly recommended that you use custom error pages for usability, but watch for error codes.
• Error responses are different at directory and page level – test both.
Errors and Redirects
11Copyright 2009 McAnerin International Inc.April 9, 2023
• Fun with error pages: an intelligent error page can solve a lot of problems, such as redirecting old pages.
• Google Webmaster Tools are strongly recommended – need working error page and robots.txt file.
www.mcanerin.com/EN/search-engine/robots-txt.aspOr search “robots.txt generator”
Errors and Redirects
12Copyright 2009 McAnerin International Inc.April 9, 2023
• 301 redirect (Permanent) • 302 redirect (Temporary) • 200 OK
Errors and Redirects
13Copyright 2009 McAnerin International Inc.April 9, 2023
• Parameters:• URL = http://www.ibm.com/
UAG = Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0
Receiving Header:• HTTP/1.1·302·Found(CR)(LF)
Date:·Sun,·14·Sep·2008·10:11:01·GMT(CR)(LF)Server:·IBM_HTTP_Server(CR)(LF)Location:·http://www.ibm.com/us/(CR)(LF)
• Receiving Header:• HTTP/1.1·200·OK(CR)(LF)
Date:·Sun,·14·Sep·2008·10:11:01·GMT(CR)(LF)Server:·IBM_HTTP_Server(CR)(LF)
HTML Validation
14Copyright 2009 McAnerin International Inc.April 9, 2023
• Search engines strip most HTML code out of a document before parsing, so most HTML validation errors do not affect rankings.
• Exception: Some errors, such as a missing “>”, can kill the indexing of your page.
• Best Practice: always try to validate your code.
Spider Traps
15Copyright 2009 McAnerin International Inc.April 9, 2023
• Spider Trap: Dead ends, such as Word or PDF documents.
• Honey Pot: PR sculpting to the extreme – creates a circular trap.
• Anchor Away: Only the first anchor text of a link on a page counts.
• Infinite URLs: Pages with more than one URL to them – canonical issue.
Scripting and Objects
16Copyright 2009 McAnerin International Inc.April 9, 2023
• Search engines don’t run scripts.• Script that changes look of link = good. Script
that builds link on the fly = bad• Flash is not indexable. (Well, it is, but it’s best
to assume it isn’t). Most AJAX isn’t.• An Iframe is treated as a separate page –
includes are better.• Use a spider simulator (i.e. SEO-Browser, Lynx)
to test site.
Geolocation / Personalization
17Copyright 2009 McAnerin International Inc.April 9, 2023
• A gTLD (.com, .net) is almost always geolocated via IP address
• A ccTLD (.ws, .la, .tv) overrides IP geolocation
• Duplication problem does not affect clearly geolocated sites
• Always declare language and character types on web pages.
More Questions?
18Copyright 2009 McAnerin International Inc.April 9, 2023
About Us
19Copyright 2009 McAnerin International Inc.April 9, 2023
About Us
McAnerin International Inc is a search marketing firm specializing in international and global SEO, SEM and PPC (Pay per Click) marketing. If you are marketing online to another country, we can help you!
Services
• Translation and SEO of websites and web pages• Consultation on the geolocation and localization of websites• Multi-language/country SEO and link building• Multi-language/country PPC and SEM• General SEO, SEM and PPC (i.e. global)• Website analytics implementation and consulting• Conversion, Usability and Retention consultation
Contact Us
20Copyright 2009 McAnerin International Inc.April 9, 2023
Bankers Hall – West Tower888 3rd St SW 10FLCalgary, AB, CanadaT2P 5C5
Web: www.mcanerin.comEmail: [email protected] Site: private.mcanerin.comMobile: mcanerin.mobi
Reception: +1 (403) 444-6981Fax: +1 (403) 668-6001