SEO

What is SEO?
Search engine optimization is a technique that helps to improve visibility of our site through coding and content. Analytics and Web intelligence Keyword and content On-page SEO & Site architecture technical Link development or off page SEO mostly non technical

Technical SEO
Site architecture Providing the readable content to search engines Avoiding duplicate issues Delivering the content faster to users and search engines Improving user experience

Site Architecture
Site need to be designed based on the intended target audience For example if the site is for kids then color, theme and font size need to be selected to attract kids. Kids also feel comfortable in spending time in the site. Mostly Business analysts, Project managers and Designers will take care of this part

How to provide content to search engines

Unique URL- SEO friendly Meta data to provide details about the page XML site maps for regular pages and for videos Updating the sitemap if there is a change in the site

URL is important for good ranking.

Best practices to follow for URL structure:

Relevant, compelling and accurate. Use hyphens to separate words and dont use underscores. URL to have primary keyword. Adding secondary keywords will be an additional value. Limit URL slug to 3 -5 words.

Here the following URL has 2 slugs.

http://www.egrovesys.com/application-development/prestashopdevelopment.html

Whereas the following URL has 7 slugs. It is using H1

Programmers should not use such default functionality and need to use a solution for this.
If your SRS doesnt say about this, clarify with Xavier. Try to limit 3 levels deep unless clients are specific about this.

Title and Meta description are very important and need to follow SEO guidelines

Title should not exceed 65 characters and Meta description should not exceed160 characters. Otherwise the content provided in the Meta will be truncated if they are used by search engines.

The Open graph protocol

OG will help to control how a link appears in Facebook when a page is shared or liked there. So they have a value in FB, but none in search engines. Since Facebook is growing, more and more clients are interested to have OG implementation in their sites. I recommend you to raise question if there is no mentioning.

Avoiding the duplicate content, title and description

Duplicate issue is one of the serious issues that programmers need to avoid

Some example sources:

http://www.example.com and http://example.com www.example.com and www.example.com/index.html www.example.com and www.example.com?session-id=1234 www.example.com/1 and www.example.com/1/

301 redirect
301 redirect will help if any page is no longer required and can be permanently redirected. Advantage with this practice is there wont be any loss in the link values.

For example egrovesys.com and egrovesys.com/index.php render the same page.

See it from Screenshots in next Slide

Solution is one of them can be 301 redirected to other URL.

Canonical element
Canonical element will be helpful to avoid duplicate issues arising out of URL generation with session ids, query parameters and tracking codes.

Example: Pages with session ids generate duplicate title issues in this example:. http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/article/0,,1147475,00.html http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/article/0,,1147475,00.html?xid=hinewsletter 081908-47-skills

Need to implement canonical back to the preferred URL to resolve this issue. Need to add the canonical element within the head section. <link rel="canonical" href=" http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/article/0,,1147475,00.html"/> * Business analyst and programmer can add this feature as an additional scope in the project development.

Pagination handling
Pages in series or galleries will normally generate duplicate title and description issues which can be avoided by using rel=next and rel=prev

Let us See In detail from Following Screenshots..

http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/tools-products/14-surprising-uses-for-yourmicrowave-10000001035388/index.html

http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/article/0,,451111,00.html

Egrovesys.com Portfolio Page

Pagination Screenshots Explanation

The first page only contains rel=next and no rel=prev markup. Pages two to the second-to-last page should be doublylinked with both rel=next and rel=prev markup.

The last page only contains markup for rel=prev, not rel=next.
rel=next and rel=prev values can be either relative or absolute URLs (as allowed by the<link> tag). And, if you include a <base> link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL. rel=next and rel=prev only need to be declared within the <head> section, not within the document <body>.

No index Meta and robots.txt

No index meta will be useful if we dont want to index a page. robots.txt can be used to block any particular section of a site from crawling. If the page is already indexed, robots.txt will not have any impact. So wherever possible use noindex.

Page load time

Page load time one of the factors that could influence users to stay and do transaction in the sites. Some of the areas where programmers can use their intelligence are:

Avoiding Excessive CSS in Head:

Placing CSS inside of head should be avoided for helping spiders to reach the text quickly. Example: http://www.health.com/health/static/buzz/contests_and_giv eaways.htm External CSS file is recommended to handle such issues like <link rel=stylesheet type=text/css href=externalcss.css />
We Can See it from Screenshot in next Slide

Avoiding Excessive JS in Head

Pages that contain excessive java script need attention from development team to find the possibility to move either to the bottom or to the external file. Google and other search engine spiders are more advanced nowadays and can be able to detect page text even if there are excessive java scripts. Time required to reach the text will be the important factor. Java scripts are unnecessary areas for spiders. Excessive java scripts in the head will consume spider time with no reason. So delivering the required text to spiders quickly by eliminating lengthy java scripts ahead of body text will improve the ranking.

Example: http://www.health.com/health/anxiety
We can See it From Screenshot in Next Slide

Avoiding Excessive JS in Body

It is recommended to reduce the JS in the body to help spiders to quickly crawl the page. Page load time also improves if JavaScripts are handled properly. In order to load a page, the browser must parse the contents of all <script> tags, which adds additional time to the page load. By minimizing the amount of JavaScript needed to render the page, and deferring parsing of unneeded JavaScript until it needs to be executed, we can reduce the initial load time of page.

Example: http://www.health.com/health/appendicitis

We can See it From Screenshot in Next Slide

Avoiding Excessive Whitespace

Minifying code is recommended which refers to eliminating unnecessary space, new line characters, comments etc.
Example: http://www.health.com/health/library/mdp/0,,d04537t1,0 0.html

Following Heading Rules

H1 should come first in the source code and should be the first Header tag parsed by any search engine crawler. Do not precede the H1 with any other Header tag. You should have only one (1) H1 tag per page. Thereafter, you can have as many H2 H6 tags as necessary to layout the page and its content, but use a logical sequence and do not style your text via Header tags in your CMS.

---H1----

---H2------H3 --H3 ---H4----H2---

Custom 404 error page:

HTTP requests are expensive. So making an HTTP request and getting a 404 error or not found will slow down the user experience. Some sites have helpful and creative 404 error page to cover bad user experience. Still such pages waste server resources (like database, etc). Particularly bad is when the link to an external JavaScript is wrong and the result is a 404. It is a good practice to keep 404 errors to minimum level through other means like blocking unnecessary URL generation. As a final resort 301 redirects can be used. But such redirects should go to main page or any other related page. Google maintains that 404 errors wont impact sites search performance, and can be ignored if were certain that the URLs should not exist on our site. Its important to make sure that these and other invalid URLs return a proper 404 HTTP response code, and that they are not blocked by the sites robots.txt file.

Bad design: taking advantage from their brand value

Redirected to home page: O.K

Custom 404 page: Good

Better: designed with search option

Ajax implementation
Ajax implementation in the site needs to follow Google guidelines to display AJAX URLs in the search results.

For example: www.egrovesys.com/portfolio#1 Should become:www.egrovesys.com/portfolio#!1

Q and A

Thank You
Part II:

Combining images: Browser caching

Lossless compression of images

Inline Java script Rich snippets for ratings and reviews Moving a site to a new host Ajax implementation