SEO FOR DEVELOPERSIthaca Web People • November 2016 • Paul Stonier

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATIONJob #1:

Making sure your site’s content is as crawlable as possible

THE BASICS➤ Markup Structure

➤ <title>

➤ <meta name="description">

➤ <h1><h2><h3>

➤ <a>

➤ Content Structure

➤ Keyword density (~2–3%)

➤ At least 300 words

➤ Write for humans

➤ Performance

➤ Load Time

➤ Bounce Rate / Time on Page

THE REL ATTRIBUTE

➤ rel="nofollow"

➤ rel="canonical"

➤ rel="next", rel="prev"

➤ rel="home"

➤ rel="author"

https://vimeo.com/blog/post/video-seo-how-structured-data-and-rich-snippets

https://vimeo.com/blog/post/video-seo-how-structured-data-and-rich-snippets

DUPLICATE CONTENT

➤ Helping Google decide which version to use. (http vs https, www vs no-www, http://example.com/ vs http://example.com/?user=123)

➤ 301 Redirects to preferred version

➤ <link rel="canonical" href="http://mypage.com/page.html" />

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html

HIDDEN CONTENT

➤ Robots.txt

➤ Define directories or files that you do not want to be crawled.

➤ Don’t block JavaScript or CSS files needed to load your page properly

➤ Screen Reader Text gets crawled

➤ Logo to homepage link

➤ Learn More ( about retail best practices )

➤ Visibly hidden content is indexed but given less weight (ie. Tabs, Click to Expand)

PROVIDING ADDITIONAL DATA

➤ Structured Data -> Providing metadata about the page and/or objects on your page

➤ Formats: JSON-LD, microdata, RDFa

➤ Vocabulary: schema.org

➤ Types of content:

➤ Business info (organization type, contact info, etc)

➤ Media details: Video (duration, thumbnail, author, etc)

➤ Reviews (ratings, name, date, author)

➤ Recipes

➤ Breadcrumbs

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/search-gallery

VIDEO MARKUP WITH MICRODATA

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/videosearch/schema

https://vimeo.com/blog/post/video-seo-how-structured-data-and-rich-snippets

AMP PAGES

AMP PAGES

QUESTIONS?