Session 1 of RankAbove's SEO workshop tailored to developers. RankAbove Senior Analyst Avromi Sommers breaks down the history of SEO, on-page search, site structure, sitemaps (including those for video and news), mobile SEO, and structure for foreign language sites.

1. The SEO Workshop -
Site Structure
By Avromi Sommers
Senior Analyst

2. About Me
• RankAbove Employee #2
• Senior SEO Analyst / Director Training
• SEO for Enterprise size sites
Musician
Married + 4
http://www.linkedin.com/in/avromisommers

3. Overview
• History of SEO to date
• Significance of on page search
• How Google works
• Site structure
• Sitemaps
• Mobile SEO

4. SEO in the 90’s
• Yahoo, Alta-Vista etc.
• Meta tag spam
• Keywords Stuffing
• Directory Search
• Why was this bad?
• NASA vs. Avromi

5. SEO in the 90’s
• Google in 1997
• PageRank
• Based on PhD theory
• Quality and Quantity of
inbound links
• SEO - now a two part
(very easy) game
• Off page - buying
building links
• On page - keywords
stuffing

6. 21st Century
• 2003
• Florida Update - Googles first update to fight Spam -
mostly on page spam
• Need better quality and relevant links
• Content is king
• Yet also link importance – Google Bombs
• 2005/2006
• Google officially says do not buy links
• Starts penalizing sites for spam

7. 21st Century
• 2007/8
• Penalized a whole bunch of link sellers
• 2011
• Panda - aimed at sites with bad content
• 2012
• Penguin - aimed at sites with bad back link
profile
• killed the concept off bad/ easy back links

8. SEO Today
• Still a combination of off page and on
page
• Off page – more difficult
• marketing oriented approach
• On page
• Now becomes very important - also more
complicated
• You have more control of on page

9. SEO Today
• On page
• Content
• Site structure

10. Google needs to crawl you site
• How does Google work?
• Crawling, indexing, serve results

11. What can Google see?
• HTML
• Java Script – Not really
• Any thing Google needs to execute the lower the
chance
• Google is getting better
• Test using a text only browser to see what
Google can see (lynx)
• iframes are generally bad
• Officially crawl-able and supported by
Google

12. Blocking Google?
• Blocking Google
• Robots.txt
• Meta no index

13. Blocking Google?
• Common pitfalls
• Blocking development sites
• PW, IP block, robots, noindex

14. Internal Linking Structure
• Has direct effect on SEO - important pages
gets more links
• Google needs to find all pages on site
• Site Hierarchy
• Pyramid
• Web structure - i.e. Wikipedia

15. Internal Linking Structure
Do both

16. URL Structure
• Loosely follow hierarchy
• Google will often try to understand from URLs
• But to a point - keep em’ short
• Ecommerce sites - only one product page

17. Duplicate Content
• Caps
• HTTPS
• URL Parameters
• Sorting
• Referral strings
• Canonical tags

18. Pagination
• rel= prev & rel = next
• infinite scroll - push state
• View all
• Canonical tag
• Avoid Reusing content
• For category pages - OK

19. Filters for Browsing
• Problems with filters
• Infinite number of
pages
• Auto generated
• Stub & empty pages
• Block to Google
• AJAX
• Filters
• URLS

20. AJAX URLs
• AJAX tabs
• Make sure content on page
• When can Google see AJAX URLs
• # vs. #!
• escape fragment
• #! = ?_escaped_fragment_
• bidirectional
• <meta name="fragment" content="!">

21. Be Careful!
• Don't hide text/links
• Scrape content
• Comments/ comment spam
• Malware on site
• downloading things users don't really want
• Cloaking - showing different info to Google
then to user
• JS redirects - looks bad
• fine for login pages

22. Sitemaps
• Helps Google find pages on site
• Different types - News, Videos, images
• Guidelines
• Size limit - 50 MB & URL limit - 50,000
• UTF-8 encoding
• Full URLs
• No parameters, redirects or non canonical
• Multiple sitemaps OK
• Use sitemap Index file

23. Once Its Created
• Submit Sitemap to Google Via Webmaster Tools
• Or list in robots.txt
• Google will crawl sitemap/site
• Check status in WMT
• Is Google processing correctly
• Errors
• Is Google actually indexing

24. Video Sitemaps
• What information is needed?
• Title
• Description
• Thumbnail URL
• Player page URL
• Location of raw video file
• Recommended but not necessary
• Duration, date published, family friendly

25. News Sitemaps
• What information is needed?
• Publication
• Publications date
• Access (if blocked)
• Title
• Recommended but not necessary
• Meta keywords
• Only within 48 hours
• 1000 URLs max

26. Mobile Sites
1. Responsive design
• Ideal for SEO
2. Different mobile URLs
• Tell Googlebot to crawl with mobile- Vary HTTP
header
3. Dynamically serving different HTML on the same
URL
• Annotation in HTML and Regular sitemap
• <link rel="alternate" media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)"
href="http://m.example.com/page-1" >
• <xhtml:link
rel="alternate"
media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)"
href="http://m.example.com/page-1" />
• Canonical tag from mobile URL

27. Mobile Sites – cont.
• Speed is very important
• Especially at the top of the page
• Mobile sitemaps
• For mobile ready pages only
• Proper redirects to mobile site
• JS pop ups, Flash
• Tablet users generally prefer desktop version

28. Site Speed
Site speed is a ranking factor
• Page speed insights from Google
• https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
• Analytics

29. Foreign Language sites
• TLD vs. Folder vs. Sub-domain language vs. Sub-
domain country
• Meta language tag <link rel="alternate" hreflang="es"
href="http://es.example.com/" />
• Geo targeting in webmaster tools
Multi Country Non-Multi
Country
Local Dependent TLD for each
country
One TLD with sub-
domains per
language
Non-Local
Dependent
One TLD with sub-
domains per
language
One TLD with sub-
domains or folders
per language

30. Additional Resources
• Google updates - http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
• Webmaster central support - https://support.google.com/webmasters/?hl=en
• Google Webmaster Videos - https://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp/videos
• General Google Guidelines -
https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/6001981?hl=en&ref_topic=3309300
• Blocking Google - https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-
index/docs/robots_txt
• Pagination - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.il/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-
relprev.html
• Escape fragment / AJAX URLs- https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-
crawling/docs/specification
• Page speed - https://developers.google.com/speed/
• Page speed insights - http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
• Multi-regional sites - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.il/2010/03/working-with-multi-
regional-websites.html
• Site-maps - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156184?hl=en
• Mobile Sites - https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details
• Tablet usability - http://www.nngroup.com/articles/tablet-usability/

31. Thank You!
We are always available for questions!
Avromi@rankabove.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/avromisommers