SEO speed dating

Jani Tarvainen, 20140625

What is technical SEO

  1. Search Engine Optimization
  2. Help robots find your content on the web
  3. Not rocket science, but very easy to mess up

Basic SEO

  1. Common sense: have proper titles, headings, etc.
  2. Every page needs to be crawlable (robots.txt, crawlers helped by a sitemap/index)
  3. It's HTTP, use the correct headers

Essential metadata

  1. Duplication and linking (canonical, equivalent translations, etc.)
  2. Google+ ownership, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.
  3. Schema.org meta (itemprops, etc. in markup)
  4. Discovery vs. Search in eCommerce

Launching a site

  1. Plan and execute (and charge for it, too)
  2. For replacement sites, redirect at least most relevant pages (and all domains) to their new counterparts
  3. Have URLs optimal at launch, changing patterns later is not good fun
  4. Verify the site to a web master tools and take a look a week after launch for errors

Tools and factors

  1. Webmaster tools to track and receive errors (and set geo targetting, submit sitemaps...)
  2. Increased weight on the technical performance (markup, response, reliability)
  3. Site testing tools (good on mobile => score higher)
  4. 3rd parties can be party poopers - Adwords now responsive, not sure on others...
  5. Pagespeed insights

JSON-LD

  1. Linked Data, meaningful JSON JSON-LD
  2. Schema.org + inline JSON
  3. El Goog has some support for it
  4. Best domain ever

Analytics

  1. Increasingly complex, a simple tracker may not be enough any more
  2. Universal Analytics can (and will) collect data from your fridge
  3. Keyword data increasingly less visible

Future

  1. I guess the semantic web is already here, so markup your essential data
  2. More "visits" from apps / OS level - meta, meta, meta (phone numbers, locations, etc.)
  3. Management of content streams vs. my "CMS" has it all
  4. Freebase

Take it seriously

  1. Search rules (for now, everyone's a bitch)
  2. SEO, Analytics are an essential part of web development Projects and need to be sold at a price
  3. Continuous consulting, follow ups can be worth the money (SEM, algo changes, A/B testing, content creation, etc.)

For teh profitz