Inbound 2015: Quick Wins for SEO That Make a Difference

QUICK WINS FOR SEO (THAT MAKE A DIFFERENCE)

Richard Baxter

Founder

[email protected]

The aggregation of marginal gains

Dave Brailsford / Team SKY Src: http://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains

Quick Wins Small things that make a big difference

It’s all in the history.

What do you know about the domain portfolio associated with this site?

What do you know about the technical history of your site?

Change of domains?

Staging / dev server address?

Subdomains?

Change of Address vs a 301’d domain

Go here: http://builtvisible.com/change-of-address/ - date ranges aligned in charts so that’s why one is tiny!

Clean-up old subdomains: Redirect or remove − Redirect out unnecessary sub-domains

− Maybe just rel canonical them!

− Robots.txt and remove necessary (dev) domains via GWMT

X-Robots

<?php

$post = $wp_query->post;

if ($post->ID === 22273) { header('X-Robots-Tag:

noindex,nofollow'); }

if ($post->ID === 22273) { header('Location:

http://my.tsohost.com/aff.php?aff=757', TRUE, 302); }

?>

Cannibalisation

Pages with very similar content on a domain or multiple subdomain via http://www.pi-datametrics.com/see-pi-datametrics-at-brighton-seo-2015/

This isn’t the host’s fault, it’s yours!

Things that are hard to test but I think they’re important:

−Redirected domains should use same IP as target host

−Match WHOIS records between domains

−Deal with errors at the source

Host Location Host IP changed to US here

Host Location Host IP changed to UK here

Host Location Host IP changed to US here

Host Location Host IP changed to UK here

Host Location Volatile rankings in Searchmetrics to correlate with our data

Address Errors on Legacy Domains / Sub Domains − I think managing errors at the source makes a difference

Builtvisible.com errors Caused by a subdomain redirect:

Remember legacy https!

− Without a valid SSL cert on an old domain, you can’t redirect 301 requests

https://seogadget.co.uk >> https://builtvisible.com/

This needs to stay valid for the redirect to be possible…

Broken SSL Certs Don’t Pass Link Juice

Still not sure if there’s any legacy stuff indexed?

− site:yourdomain.ie “show me all pages indexed on this domain”

− site:yourdomain.ie –inurl:www “show me all pages indexed on this domain without www”

− site:competitordomain.co.uk -inurl:www inurl:subdomain

− “show me all of this agency’s clients”

Robots.txt doesn’t matter if you’re linking to your dev server all over the place!

Internal links

Read: http://builtvisible.com/link-equity-and-crawl-efficiency-maintenance/

Internal 301s are bad…

Internal 301 Redirects Are *BAD*

− “HTML5 Examples” – removed all tag / category links Oops

Pages w/few internal links Sort by lowest

Look for redirect chains

Moz links here

Additional redirect

Spot the difference

− http://seogadget.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-to-generating-rich-snippets/

− http://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-to-generating-rich-snippets/

− http://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-generating-rich-snippets/

Spot the difference

− http://seogadget.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-to-generating-rich-snippets/

− http://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-to-generating-rich-snippets/

− http://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-generating-rich-snippets/

Why?

− We’d migrated to the new site and a bunch of pages had their stop words removed because of this setting:

− http://seogadget.co.uk/how-to-install-virtualbox/ − http://builtvisible.com/how-to-install-virtualbox/ − http://builtvisible.com/how-install-virtualbox/

Use Link Equity: Top Pages

Broken Internal Links

Check My Links Extension For Chrome: http://bit.ly/1xhPq6n

External links

Links to old domains to realign

People linking to the wrong subdomain: your WWW

Realign those links!

Linked to 404

This URL redirects to home and should point elsewhere

The power of your best links

− Update with new URLs / domains

− Realign anchors to branded

− Promote inbound links and

strengthen them with new links

Fast analysis with URL Profiler

Fast find + disavow directory links Get the contact details of your competitor’s inlinks

I wonder if the people who link here, know

about this

URL Profile Export Contacts

− Export provides:

− About URL

− Email Addresses

− Contact URL

− Write for Us URL

− Whois Email Addresses

http://urlprofiler.com/

Fast find + disavow directory links

− Search title for “directory” sort by external links. You’re looking for no external links, on very low DA sites with competitive anchors. Suggest for disavow.

aHrefs: search + sort

Suggest a disavow

Sites That Link to Your Social Profiles, But Not You!

http://builtvisible.com/social-link-intersect/

“Link Intersect” done Right Create this filter in Screaming Frog…

When You Paste Link Data from aHrefs / Moz / Majestic

The results – a list of easy link opportunities

Find quick content opportunities Identify content to redevelop

Start simple: Identify Strong Pages

Read: http://builtvisible.com/start-simple/

− In top 20 pages on our site

− This content desperately needs updating

Check internal site search − “schema cheat

sheet” was creating a 404 page (no results!)

− Identify popular terms with high exit rate and fix by adding terms into correct pages

Optimise CTR + Avoid High Bounce

CTR = Ranking Signal

Re-use old Guest Posts

I wrote this 5 years ago. Mild rewrite an

republish, it outranks the original

Chop up old infographics − PSD to HTML

− Fiddle around with jQuery

− Dig out & republish the original research in a blog post

Do a survey and take over the story

http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home

Assorted quick wins

Images

http://www.imageraider.com/

Unlinked mentions − Go deeper, don’t just look for brand, look for product mentions, your CEO etc

− Use talkwalker / fresh web explorer / mention / ahrefs alerts

Technical Checks

Technical Checks

− Implement article mark-up / search action schema

− Check for canonical / meta headers / href lang / robots index, follow

− OGP/ Twitter card

− Check www and trailing slash redirects and duplicates

− Do this: http://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015

− Read this: http://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-generating-rich-snippets/

− Get URL Profiler and check for Mobile Friendliness: http://urlprofiler.com/blog/mobile-friendly-update/

Be curious. Find it, and optimise!

THANK YOU

Richard Baxter

CEO

[email protected]