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Ask the Experts: What SEO To Require From My…

October 11, 2011
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: I just hired a developer for my small-budget site development project. Is there a Top 10 list of things I should insist on SEO-wise to be built into the site?

A: As we all know by now, SEO consists of several different endeavors:

Technical SEO: ensuring a search-friendly and social-friendly site from a structural/technical standpoint
Content/Editorial SEO: creating content that aligns with your target audience’s search behavior and keywords
Link appeal and link-building

It’s obvious that your web developer’s work influences the technical side of SEO. But structural issues and CMS capabilities will also have long-term effects on your ability to maximize your content/editorial SEO and link power. Here are my top 10 developer requirements for SEO:

Each page on the site must exist on a separate, unique, permanent URL that is indexable by search engine robots
All pages on the site must be accessible by clicking standard HTML links, preferably no more than 3 clicks from the home page
Text content on the site must be search-engine-indexable, standard, visible HTML text
Search engine robots are like site visitors that do not accept cookies, do not fill out forms, do not log-in, and have limited javascript and CSS capabilities. These robots should be able to read versions of each page that match as closely as possible what a human visitor would see.
Every page on the site must have a unique, descriptive HTML title. The CMS should allow the site owner to edit the HTML title separately from editing other elements of the page, such as the page heading.
We recommend that every page on the site include a Facebook Like, Google +, and Tweet button.
The CMS should allow the site owner to edit OG tags on each page.
If there is any chance that identical pages will be seen via more than one URL (creating potential duplicate content in search engines), the CMS should allow the site owner to include/edit a canonical tag on each page.
URLs should be meaningful, human-readable and include the page title or relevant keywords
Images that are clickable should have ALT and TITLE tags that provide a text description of the destination page being clicked to.

Granted, every one of these won’t apply to every project, but for the majority of small budget jobs, this list will form a strong foundation on which you can build your SEO efforts.

And one last piece of advice: communicate like crazy and stay on ’em. If you don’t have an outside SEO vendor involved in the project, you will need to serve the role of SEO watchdog during development.

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Ask the Experts: Recovering from Google’s Panda Update

October 5, 2011
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: I have an ecommerce site containing a useful library of product information that the manufacturer allows me to use on my site. My site was hammered in Google’s Panda update, and I think it was because of this “duplicate” content. What should I do now? I don’t want to remove this library because it is useful for my customers.

A: Even though this library of content is genuinely helpful for your site visitors, it could be similar to the low-quality, “stub”, or content farm materials that were punished in Google’s Panda update. To make matters worse, the product information library you’re describing is probably also present on many other sites as well. These two factors are both likely to be viewed negatively in Google’s eyes.

To play it safe, the easiest thing you can do is to deindex all these pages using either the robots.txt file or a robots meta tag on the concerning pages. This way, the materials can still help your website visitors, without putting your site at any risk for Panda issues.

If deindexing the content is not an option, then you should work on improving the content, with an eye toward improving the user engagement on these pages. What can you do to make these pages more unique, more interesting, and more likely to be a satisfying experience for searchers who land on these pages?

Not interested in rewriting hundreds or thousands of pages? Here’s a hybrid approach you might try:

Deindex any pages that have a 90% or higher bounce rate
For pages that have better (lower) than 90% bounce rate, work on improving content. Possible ways to improve content:

manually add your own links to related materials elsewhere on your site. Make them intriguing or attractive enough to encourage visitors to click on them; remember your goal is to engage visitors and prevent bounces.
manually add commentary/analysis that makes these materials more useful. Be sure this is unique and well written.
Proofread.
add a prominent Google +1, Facebook Like, and Tweet button

In addition to these steps, you should also pursue other SEO efforts, especially link-building, in order to gain stature in the Post-Panda search world.

Like any SEO effort, approach your Panda recovery with an iterative mindset. Make some changes, watch for results over a several-week period, and repeat. And a final word of wisdom: Keep the user experience a priority, and you can’t go wrong.

Ask the Experts: What SEO To Require From My…

Q: I just hired a developer for my small-budget site development project. Is there a Top 10 list of things I should insist on SEO-wise to be built into the site?

Ask the Experts: Recovering from Google’s Panda Update

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