What's Important for Technical SEO?

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TECHNICAL SEO

WHAT’S IMPORTANT? “12 Popular, interesting & critical issues we’ve

discovered in our most recent technical consulting

projects”

Richard Baxter – Founder / Director – SEOgadget LTD

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1) THIN INTERNAL PAGES / NO CONTENT / BOILERPLATE

CONTENT

You’ve got to have unique text on a page – try persuasive, beautifully written content to

inspire your customers to trust, be inspired and buy!

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2) POOR INTERNAL LINK ARCHITECTURE

Increased # links on homepage and improved internal nav elements with CSS styled drop downs and popular products

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Internal links and links from the homepage to key internal category pages remains an important part of

your SEO strategy

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3) EXCESSIVE DUPLICATION OF CONTENT VIA PAGINATED

NAVIGATION / FACETED NAVIGATION

Check out this pagination guide: Best Practices for SEO & User Experience (SEOmoz), be

careful with rel=“canonical” and use noindex, avoid robots.txt if you can

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4) INDEXED STAGING SERVER

Cleaning up a leaky staging server is a pain – best way, user agent detect and 301 the staged urls to the

public site. Use IP detection – anything that isn’t from a pre-approved range, redirect it.

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5) CANONICALISATION – AND NOT JUST THE WWW

Domain level canonicalisation still a huge problem – most sites we review have a bunch of problems like

this. Check that the trailing slash is added (or removed) and case is handled correctly – check for https in

the index too.

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6) SOFT 404 HEADERS / NO 404 RESPONSE

Don’t install Firefox 4 just yet – live HTTP headers doesn’t work. Redbot is one of many

server header checkers

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7) IF-MODIFIED-SINCE PRODUCES 500 ERROR

Feed the Bots' IF-MODIFIED-SINCE server header checker is really useful – check it out:

http://www.feedthebot.com/tools/if-modified/

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8) SITEMAP.XML FILE RESPONDED WITH A 404 SERVER

HEADER RESPONSE EVEN THOUGH THE FILE WAS

DOWNLOADED

“Google webmaster tools reported no sitemap found at the sitemap URL – the file was loading in a browser, but the malformed server header response had everyone scratching their heads.”

Internal pages and 404 pages aren’t the only files you should check out – sometimes

malformed server header responses can cause days of work to diagnose

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9) BINGBOT / MSNBOT CRAWL BLOCKED

It’s good to crawl like a search engine from time to time, use SEOmoz’s toolbar to change

user agent – disable JavaScript and CSS for a new kind of awesome.

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10) 40,000+ INTERNAL 301 REDIRECTS

Learn to install IIS SEO Toolkit - http://seogadget.co.uk/how-to-install-and-use-iis-seo-

toolkit/ we think it’s awesome

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11) VERY EASY TO INJECT LINKS WITH HTML

Do Followed Link

Check your search boxes and other form functionality to make sure that HTML is stripped –

particularly for sites that create user profile pages and search results

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12) UGC CONTENT ON INTERNAL PAGES IN JAVASCRIPT

Check your search boxes and other form functionality to make sure that HTML is stripped –

particularly for sites that create user profile pages and search results

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“Fantastic!..Excellent quality with a brilliant bag to

keep all the items in...wonderful present for a

scooter crazy chick, with a pink scooter to match

her pink car/scooter wash kit! “

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12) TONS OF DATA / CONTENT? MAKE IT EMBEDDABLE

Be it content, data, images, video, charts – almost everything can be converted to an

embeddable strategy – think: how can others use our data on their sites?

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THANK YOU

[email protected]

@richardbaxter

Thanks for listening! Check out our blog at SEOgadget.co.uk for more actionable guides and

tips – or hire us for SEO, Conversion Rate Optimisation and bespoke technology consulting.