SEO – From Beginner to Boffin Brian Bentley BSc (Hons) Download free books at Brian Bentley BSc (Hons) SEO – From Beginner to Boffin (and everything in between) Download free eBooks at bookboon.com SEO – From Beginner to Boffin (and everything in between) 1st edition © 2013 Brian Bentley BSc (Hons) & bookboon.com ISBN 978-87-403-0498-5 Download free eBooks at bookboon.com SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Contents Contents 1 Introduction 1.1 Search Engine Optimisation IS a Science 1.2 About the Author 1.3 Google isn’t that Bright SEO Theories and Practice 10 2.1 Keyword and Competitor Research 10 2.2 Content Remains King 10 2.2 Tagging Up 12 2.3 Site Maps 2.4 Linking 2.5 Split-testing and Measuring 2.6 Best Practice 360° thinking 360° thinking 12 13 14 15 360° thinking Discover the truth at www.deloitte.ca/careers © Deloitte & Touche LLP and affiliated entities Discover the truth at www.deloitte.ca/careers Deloitte & Touche LLP and affiliated entities © Deloitte & Touche LLP and affiliated entities Discover the truth at www.deloitte.ca/careers Click on the ad to read more Download free eBooks at bookboon.com © Deloitte & Touche LLP and affiliated entities Dis SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Contents 16 Technical SEO and Workflow 3.1 Content 16 3.2 Page Titles and Metas 18 3.3 Title Tags 21 3.4 Site Maps 22 3.5 Links 25 3.6 29 Coding Validation 3.7 Alt-tags 31 3.8 Conversions 33 3.9 Dynamic Websites 34 Platform Specific 38 4.1 Joomla 39 4.2 Wordpress 39 4.3 Drupal 39 4.4 Magento 40 4.5 Others 40 Increase your impact with MSM Executive Education For almost 60 years Maastricht School of Management has been enhancing the management capacity of professionals and organizations around the world through state-of-the-art management education Our broad range of Open Enrollment Executive Programs offers you a unique interactive, stimulating and multicultural learning experience Be prepared for tomorrow’s management challenges and apply today For more information, visit www.msm.nl or contact us at +31 43 38 70 808 or via admissions@msm.nl For more information, visit www.msm.nl or contact us at +31 43 38 70 808 the globally networked management school or via admissions@msm.nl Executive Education-170x115-B2.indd 18-08-11 15:13 Download free eBooks at bookboon.com Click on the ad to read more SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Introduction 1 Introduction 1.1 Search Engine Optimisation IS a Science Far too many well meaning Search Engine bods get too philosophical about their work, reading strange things into the latest Google algorithm changes or how Yahoo ranks its site indexes There is simply no need to think laterally about search engine optimisation, that’s akin to trying to find hidden meanings in Beatles’ lyrics ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ has no hidden meanings Search Engine Optimisation is, to put it into rational words, a systematic series of processes that will result in the website moving up the search engines until it can move no more According to me, and I’m a scientist by blood, SEO can only be defined as a science The dictionary definition of science is: sci·ence (s1'ǝns) n The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena Such activities restricted to explaining a limited class of natural phenomena Such activities applied to an object of inquiry or study Knowledge, especially that gained through experience The good thing about science is that, once the theory bit is out of the way, the performance of a series of controlled experiments should, if the theory has any founding whatsoever, turn theory into fact So, if we practice the findings of the research and not deviate then the results will always be the same – that’s a fact about science as long as there are no external forces present Unfortunately, the external force, in this case, is the ever-changing environment that is the worldwide web and the resultant search engine criteria Clients often bug me when their site seems to drop in the rankings, but leave me alone when its on the way up If a site is done properly, it will not go down, its just that other sites may literally leap frog yours That’s hardly a problem, it’s a signal to some more work It would have been all too easy to write three volumes of this SEO book; beginner, intermediary and advanced but, having been in the industry for over 15 years, I’ve seen so-called experts completely miss the basics Most sites I get given these days have had some sort of SEO performed on them yet so much has been missed I can spot these errors almost immediately, blowing the incumbent company out of the water, taking over the contract and, by putting in place what wasn’t there, get almost immediate results What you currently know about SEO is most likely wrong and almost definitely flawed and, therefore, I would urge you to start at the very beginning (again) Download free eBooks at bookboon.com SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Introduction I will begin with an overview and probe into exactly why Google keeps on changing, throw in a few contentious arguments that the search engine giant actually favours certain CMS platforms, feed you with industry ‘insider tips’ into how to get a site moving up the rankings quickly and back it all up with technical worksheets Whichever way you want to approach SEO, I hope to cover it all Brian Bentley BSc (hons) 1.2 About the Author Armed with a Physics degree and experience in coding in Fortran, Pascal, Qbasic, Cobol and C++, Brian Bentley saw the bottom blown out of his world when Windows 95 was released The need for a freelance computer programmer who was more than capable of writing bespoke coding in order to ensure that the works’ computer would connect to the works’ printer had gone – and so had Brian’s source of income Blagging his way into a job with a premium rate sports news company, Brian was soon on his was to adding html and php to his coding skills as his employers embarked on setting up a massive web presence Being both logical and mathematical, getting this website top of Yahoo, Webcrawler and Alta Vista wasn’t a problem (Google was just a blip on the horizon at this time) and a career in SEO was born That was around 1996 and there aren’t that many folk who can say they’ve been in the industry that long Never ever outsourcing his work, Brian continues to have his head stuck in website coding on a daily basis, only breaking off to perform Dad Taxi duties, take the Labradoodles to the park or indulge in his favourite pastime of drinking beer in Sprotbrough Country Club Now, having worked on literally thousands of sites, Brian helps hundreds of businesses, large and small, to financial success through healthy rankings across all the major search engines Whilst his company, Creativebox Ltd has its own website, all the spade work is done through GoogleGeeks.co.uk Whilst this book will concentrate on Google, it should be noted that the processes detailed below work just as well, and sometimes even better, in the likes of Bing and Yahoo 1.3 Google isn’t that Bright Before we get into the technicalities of the SEO process, we should delve further into, and rip apart, some of the nonsense that is spouted by so-called SEO experts on website forums across the planet on an almost daily basis Download free eBooks at bookboon.com SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Introduction Experience of working with thousands of different sites, coded in as many different ways as possible has lead us to some rather contentious conclusions We doubt that anyone in Google, or the other companies mentioned below, will ever respond as they love to keep an ‘air of mystery’ about themselves Why that secrecy exists I not know Firstly, Google is a piece of software and, as such, cannot read actual words in a literal sense It works in binary; on or off, black or white, or – so while ‘engaging and original’ website content is a must as far as the user is concerning, Google has no idea what we are writing about Secondly:- How often we hear about Google updates – Panda, Penguin and the soon to come Platypus (I made the last one up) and algorithm changes? Most of this webchat is total nonsense All Google is doing, as the self-proclaimed ‘keeper of all things good’, is trying to make life easier for itself Every day, some 14000 new sites are added to Google’s cache – this can’t go on so it is simply flagging up those that have ‘no worth to the world wide web community’ I would love to be a fly on the wall when the ponytailed, Nirvana t-shirt wearing bods at Google discuss the easiest ways to this Probably laughing to themselves, they then disperse to dark corners of the Google labs to press a button that has the label ‘SEO Panic’ I have no doubt that the following have been discussed, and actioned over the past five years:a) Dump affiliate sites that all have the same product with the same images with the same content at the same price i.e duplicate content b) Penalise sites that have obviously bought inbound links c) Dump sites whose coding is so bad that its own spiders have difficulty getting through them d) Actively promote sites that are built using platforms that Google has a (written or unwritten) agreement with Now ‘d’ is the most contentious here and its only through years of experience that we have noticed that – build a site in Drupal, Wordpress or OSCommerce and it will rank almost immediately, without the web owner even having to submit the site to Google That doesn’t happen with Joomla, Magento, Zen Cart or ‘bespoke’ back end systems from your overpaid web designer Why’s that? It’s probably because Google reckons that these ‘DIY’ jobs fit in to their mantra of supporting the good guys and ousting the baddies with the black hats Download free eBooks at bookboon.com SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Introduction It’s just something I picked up in a conversation with a Google employee once He reckoned that all Google wanted to see was a level playing field where a one man band, working from home and holding his stock in the garage, could easily compete with multi-nationals If the site was built using Open Source software, the content was written by the man himself and the SEO was done on a fortnightly basis then the guy should be rewarded with first page rankings Quite bizarrely, it is my job, as the SEO practitioner for larger companies, is to make Google think its a cottage industry After all, Google knows as much about the warehousing, lorry fleets, HR and Marketing Departments and turnover as it does what size shoes I wear Google updates then – what are they? There have been instances when, like any other piece of software, on any machine, something goes wrong It’s not often that Google breaks but when it does it is hilarious We’ve had maps over Adwords, results from local searches hundreds of miles appearing and all manner of strange behaviour causing an upsurge in coffee sales across the world Google backs itself off on a Friday, the guys play with their servers and maybe have a fool around with the algorithms on a Saturday, they look what mayhem they’ve caused on a Sunday and, if its all gone tits-up, restore from the back-up on Monday Never ever check your rankings at the weekend If you do, you’ll only see last month’s results In June 2013, we had another update when it was someone else’s turn to speak at the Google meeting ‘Let’s concentrate on local listings’ – he said And pressed a button That was a mistake and they spent the next month trying to work out what button was pressed and how to unpress it The best sites will float to the top, sometimes with absolutely no work on my part I will give an example but won’t name names One particular client of mine, who had been top five for a majorly competitive search term for over four years, decided to have his site rebuilt and redesigned (without first consulting me) The rankings plummeted when the new site went live Harbouring a grudge, I did nothing with the new site, hoping that the client would simply go away Three weeks later and the site was not just top five but top I got a phone call from an ecstatic MD, a cheque for ££££££ and a huge testimonial to boot In fact, while I am thinking about that case, it should be remembered that, whilst doing nothing can be good, the opposite i.e gung-ho SEO can have totally the opposite effect I have seen sites, whose SEO has been outsourced to India, disappear off the face of the Earth as they rip through the coding and placed 100s of links in a week Always ask what your SEO guy has been doing, it should be a simple five line report every two weeks (or even a shared doc on Google Drive that he updates whenever he’s been on your site) Download free eBooks at bookboon.com SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) SEO Theories and Practice SEO Theories and Practice 2.1 Keyword and Competitor Research Again, let’s give money away shall we? There are tools and there are companies, both of which prove very expensive to use, which will all your keyword research and competitor analysis for you You may have bought this book, you may have got it for free – now I am going to give you all the keyword research and competitor analysis you will ever need You have set up a website because you want to sell something; products or services or both Ask your best mate what they would search for should they be wanting what you have on your website There’s part one of your keyword research done Part two is expand the list to include variations and, perhaps, locations Put all these on a spreadsheet and check where your site is If it appears nowhere in the first five pages, then its nowhere Who are your main competitors? Are they above you in Google? For what search terms are they above you in Google? There’s part three of your keyword research done and your competitor analysis done at the same time Don’t get me wrong, I have been contracted to companies who (wrongly) believed that a 200 page document outlining key search terms and what the competitors where doing would be of benefit I don’t think that they were ever opened let alone read and utilised SEO is an ongoing and ever repeating process Once a fortnight for a couple of hours That process also included seeing what search terms are performing and working on the pages harbouring those that aren’t Poking round Google Analytics to see where folk are coming from, what pages they are landing on and what they thereafter should lead your SEO process for the day Oh, another reason to the fortnightly thing is that, when it comes to checking rankings again (two weeks after your last session), Google will have been to have a look 2.2 Content Remains King Algorithms may well have changed, and changed back again, but the one key aspect of any website that Google has always put right at the top of its lists is content 10 Download free eBooks at bookboon.com SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Technical SEO and Workflow Yes and No It can be a right royal pain in the bum to get registered on a forum, contribute enough postings in order to qualify for a text link and then even get one on there without the administrator deleting it Larger forums are now known to Google as being ‘link machines’ and are consequently binned from the linking algorithms However, and as with most scenarios when it comes to linking – if you look at what links your competitors have gleaned and one or more is from a forum, join that forum yourself – it saves time Blogging Oh dear, oh dear and how Google has lost sight of blogs within the past 12 months It’s not really Google’s fault as it is now the easiest and cheapest way of setting up personal and even corporate web space Simply set up a blog and point a domain at it and, hey presto, one site (that could even be spidered an hour after conception) Google has its own blog – blogger.com – and, as it is now too big to marshal and contributes nothing to our world, is worthless when it comes to links Don’t even bother The Wake the only emission we want to leave behind QYURGGF 'PIKPGU /GFKWOURGGF 'PIKPGU 6WTDQEJCTIGTU 2TQRGNNGTU 2TQRWNUKQP 2CEMCIGU 2TKOG5GTX 6JG FGUKIP QH GEQHTKGPFN[ OCTKPG RQYGT CPF RTQRWNUKQP UQNWVKQPU KU ETWEKCN HQT /#0 &KGUGN 6WTDQ 2QYGT EQORGVGPEKGU CTG QHHGTGF YKVJ VJG YQTNFoU NCTIGUV GPIKPG RTQITCOOG s JCXKPI QWVRWVU URCPPKPI HTQO VQ M9 RGT GPIKPG )GV WR HTQPV (KPF QWV OQTG CV YYYOCPFKGUGNVWTDQEQO 26 Download free eBooks at bookboon.com Click on the ad to read more SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Technical SEO and Workflow Social Websites As with blogs, the upsurge in social websites link Facebook, Bebo, MySpace etc means that Google doesn’t even recognise these as valid sites, let alone the links that comes from them However, and this is a big ‘however’ – if such sites ever got their act together (and they will) then there could well be an upsurge of traffic derived from social media For example, if Facebook could ever include a web search, that isn’t powered by Google, into its pages then Google would be in trouble The vast amount of mobile phones sold with free access to Facebook, Twitter etc means that more people will be using them on the move At the time of writing (Summer 2013) this is moving and there are links coming in from Facebook postings We have access to webstats from some massive high-traffic sites and the percentage of referral sites that are social media is negligible (0.02%) but a link is a link The current trend for people setting themselves up as Social Media Consultants will come to an end when clients realise the cost per acquisition is totally inhibitive What happens now is that Google will take one link from one Facebook page news feed and that’s it – no more Search Engine Submissions Why would Google think that your site being listed on another search engine is good? Why some folk succumb to the ‘we will submit your site to 10,000 search engines every month’ malarkey? Do they tell the postman their address every time he comes to the house? By all means get listed on as many search engines as you can but :1 Don’t pay for it and Only it once Paid Links Google reckons that it has put paid to paid links It hasn’t It can’t It isn’t that clever (and that’s a phrase that we may be using time and time again) The problem is with paying for links is administration of those links A paid link from a PR5 page is worth 1000 free links from PR0 pages 27 Download free eBooks at bookboon.com SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Technical SEO and Workflow Another thing to notice before you get your cheque book out is that some sites, sitting at the top of Google, will have fewer inbound links that those on page 10 Why is that? How does that work? A good site will have quality links coming in from other quality sites, not 10000 garbage ones Quality, from our end, can only be measured in Google Page Rank Linking Websites There are websites around that allow you to enter your site details for free and receive emails from other webmaster who want to link with you Guess what? Google knows about these sites and every single link gained from them is as much worth as a Zimbabwe one dollar bill Reciprocal Linking Done properly, this is an easy way to get links There are a few dos and don’t though:1 Don’t link to and from each other’s site from your target pages i.e if your cohort places a link on his site from his index to yours, don’t link from your index to his – choose another page with a similar page rank Don’t place more than five outbound links on any one page of your website unless you aren’t bothered about the page ranking at all (Outbound links sap Page Rank) Ensure that your preferred anchor text is in the link and not your company name Always assume that the other chap doesn’t know anything about coding, linking or anything remotely technical We may still reserve judgement on reciprocal linking but Google will have no idea as it spiders millions of sites a day and sure isn’t going to remember one little link that was on one site and its twin on another Three Way Linking This works and proves that Google isn’t clever at all A link from site A to site B, a link from site B to site C and link from site C to site A will never be caught out by the search engine spiders They are a bummer to set up but damn useful Software There are things link Adblaster and Blogblaster available – supposedly sending your sites links to millions of sites with just one click Avoid, they don’t anything 28 Download free eBooks at bookboon.com SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Technical SEO and Workflow Conclusion Google is all over the place when it comes to links so, in order to cover all events, get links from everywhere and let it decide which ones are worth filing in their system The only thing that we can be sure of is that 10000 links from PR0 sites will totally wreck your site’s rankings 3.6 Coding Validation Introduction There are more than 17,000 new websites registered every single day and, no doubt, a vast percentage of these will be submitted to Google Our feelings are that the mother of all search engines is going to draw the line somewhere What Makes your Site Special? We have to believe that Google will look favourably on sites that are ‘unique’ The main way it determine this, of course, is through content but, with millions of affiliate websites pushing the same gear from the same suppliers through data feeds, Google seems to have given up the ghost when it comes to unique content Brain power By 2020, wind could provide one-tenth of our planet’s electricity needs Already today, SKF’s innovative knowhow is crucial to running a large proportion of the world’s wind turbines Up to 25 % of the generating costs relate to maintenance These can be reduced dramatically thanks to our systems for on-line condition monitoring and automatic lubrication We help make it more economical to create cleaner, cheaper energy out of thin air By sharing our experience, expertise, and creativity, industries can boost performance beyond expectations Therefore we need the best employees who can meet this challenge! The Power of Knowledge Engineering Plug into The Power of Knowledge Engineering Visit us at www.skf.com/knowledge 29 Download free eBooks at bookboon.com Click on the ad to read more SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Technical SEO and Workflow After all, given the vast array of dynamic websites, with content that changes daily (and quicker) the Google robots have no chance in determining which site has the same content as the next One thing that Google has got in its armoury is the so-called Sandbox A new site is presumed to be spam, porn or both until proven innocent and Google salts these sites away in its ‘sandbox’ until such a time as it deems fit The timescale can vary but, given that spammers move their sites once a year, 12 months is the accepted gestation period where a site cannot be found even under the most specific of searches Getting out of the sandbox is easy – get a link from a website of note (usually Page Rank or above) What’s Coding Got to with It? You would have thought that every web designer in the world would find it physically impossible to put a site on the internet which contained invalid code After all, poor coding in (say) the workings of an ATM machine could results in money being spat out so how can a website exist that contains shoddy coding practise? The answer is, Google has got to draw the line somewhere and the mutterings are that the line is going to come down firmly below properly coded sites Here’s the scenario:- Google has two new, nearly identical sites to spider, cache and rank One of the sites passes all coding validation whilst the other proves to be a nightmare for the search engine robots to battle through Which one would be cached and ranked first? Half the battle in SEO is providing the spiders with a clear run through of the whole site, that’s why we don’t have image navigation, flash intros and javascript and its why we have xml and html site maps Helping the spiders cache every single page of the website and not allowing them the opportunity to jump ship is vitally important Example In html, health & safety, would see the search engine spiders leave the site with very little intention of coming back Why? Because & is an invalid character Simply replacing health & safety with health & safety has seen many a site rise in the rankings 30 Download free eBooks at bookboon.com SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Technical SEO and Workflow The same goes for the following invalid characters; “,£,$,%,: etc etc Just think, there is a reason why www.w3.org exists Check your coding, amend your coding and check it again until there are no errors A Google insider tells us that ignoring all poorly coded websites will relieve the Google servers of some 85% of their workload, leaving them to concentrate on ranking sites ‘properly’ 3.7 Alt-tags Introduction According to professors of the internet, the much ignored alt-tag (alternative text) is vital for web users who are visually impaired as they describe their associated image In a perfect world, the alt-tag for an image of a can of coke zero on a web page should be:Alt=“picture of a can of coke zero” We can turn this to our advantage Also the massively under-rated and seldom optimised meta-description and how good ones can turn your website from an also ran to a champion hurdler The alt-tag As described above, the alt-tag is ‘supposed’ to help visually impaired users to navigate the website They already have text readers but, much like Google itself, cannot see an image so the alt-tag is used as a description Not only will the alt-tag make peace with those who still try to enforce the DDA but, if coded correctly, can help in web rankings too You should, of course, know that the search engines will not navigate through images unless they have an alt-tag anyway and that should have given everyone a massive clue as to its importance Google has to include alt-tags in its overall ranking algorithm and it is through split-testing (a posh way of saying ‘trial and error’) that we discovered some really useful tricks Okay, so that alt-tag could still say ‘a picture of a can of coke zero’ but we’ve wasted a couple of words here as the user would still understand, though their text reader, alt=“coke zero can” 31 Download free eBooks at bookboon.com SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Technical SEO and Workflow Google now considers what is inside the alt-tag as part of the page’s content but doesn’t count it in the keyword density Now, that’s a bonus Just think… Let’s say we have a website for an Accountant in Cheltenham, he loves his website and doesn’t want the look, feel or words altering in anyway, shape or form The easiest (and most valid) way of getting his key search term into his home page is by tagging three or four of his home page images as ‘accountants in cheltenham’ That’s it but there are a couple of words of warning Don’t go mad as the Google alt-tag spider, if there is such a thing’ may well tell his boss that there’s something spammy going in Don’t ever, ever put any punctuation or, indeed, anything that isn’t a number or a letter in the alt-tag – you’ll find out why when you come to validated the code 32 Download free eBooks at bookboon.com Click on the ad to read more SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Technical SEO and Workflow 3.8 Conversions Introduction A website that gets fifty visitors a day and has a conversion rate of 100% is better than one which gets 5,000 visitors a day with a conversion rate of 1% Discuss Conversion rates Of course, in the above example, both sites will deliver the same results but the second one, as it’s getting decent traffic and Google measures ‘everything’, would be the better one to own Just going away on a quick tangent, Google measures ‘everything’ is quite a sweeping statement but here’s some facts which may prove useful Spammers change URLs regularly so Google prefers established domain names to new ones – if you can then use an older domain Spammers change hosting servers regularly Even if you think that your hosting company is rubbish, it can more harm than good to switch Google measures how users move through your site Make the navigation as idiot proof as possible i.e you are on this page, which page you want to go to now? Do you think that Google provide analytics for free because they like giving things away or because you have to include their trackers on your site? Do you think that Google webmasters is there to help you perform your SEO better of for Google to put a marker on your site saying ‘Watch this one as they have a professional on board’? Back to conversion rates and there are three things we have to remember above anything else:a) You have seven seconds to capture the visitor – if your first line of content is either rubbish or hard to find then you user will leave the page, maybe the site b) The visitor is as thick as swine poo c) The visitor has to reach his target page in three clicks or he’ll leave the site This is achieved by clear navigation and content that helps the thick visitor get to where he needs to be If you achieve all of the three above then conversion rates with increase It goes without saying that if your webpage takes 20 seconds to load then you’ll lose the visitor anyway, that’s what style-sheets are for 33 Download free eBooks at bookboon.com SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Technical SEO and Workflow Website owners are, more often than not, too close to their products and services to be allowed to write the content on the website One fantastic example comes from 2008 when a PR Agency, who shall remain anonymous for now (but they know who they are) asked us to optmise their site We did our research before meeting them in London One of the first questions they asked was: “Have you looked through our website.” Our reply being: “Yes and can you just tell us what it is you do?” “We’re a PR Agency of course, I thought you’d looked at our website.” “It doesn’t say the words ‘PR Agency’ anywhere on your site.” They’d overlooked this small fact and had started their website content with something like –‘through a top-down resurgent philosophy, we deliver bespoke media solutions to our clients’ Don’t write high-faluting nonsense that you thick visitor will not understand By the way, we changed their content to – ‘We are a top London PR Agency’ and put a big phone number on the site – conversion rates increased dramatically 3.9 Dynamic Websites Introduction Dynamic websites, those that allow the webmaster to simply ‘fill in the boxes’ using a back-end content management system (CMS) are, in the main, totally incompatible for search engines We can, however, make the best of a bad lot Get FTP Access With even the most search engine friendly CMS, the website owner will find himself in all sorts of trouble when in comes to on-page optimisation Page titles should be editable, meta-descriptions should be part of the CMS, h1 and h2 tags, alt-tags, link-titles and html site maps should not be generated automatically What if they are? 34 Download free eBooks at bookboon.com SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Technical SEO and Workflow Get FTP access Now, the chances are that your web designers may well have conned you into believing that they build your ‘bespoke site’ through a back-end system that they developed themselves and are hosting your site on its own chunk of web space If they won’t give you FTP access, this is nailed on to be the case It’s not the web developers fault – it’s yours for being ignorant and not asking the right questions during the development and design process but we are past that now and there’s not much you can about it The web developer has no need to start thinking about a bespoke CMS when there are so many off-theshelf solutions available Whatever you wanted your website to do, someone, somewhere has already written a bolt-on module that will it All the web developer has to do, therefore, is search the web for such a module and, if he’s using Drupal (look it up) then it costs him nothing There are thousands of CMS systems available and, if the web designer is going down the php route, most of them are either free or very cheap indeed You can check if your site is written in php, asp or aspx by simply checking the URLs (web addresses) of some of your product pages or, if your web team have adopted a MOD-REWRITE (again, look it up) – you’ll have to ask DO YOU WANT TO KNOW: What your staff really want? The top issues troubling them? How to retain your top staff FIND OUT NOW FOR FREE How to make staff assessments work for you & them, painlessly? Get your free trial Because happy staff get more done 35 Download free eBooks at bookboon.com Click on the ad to read more SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Technical SEO and Workflow If in doubt, php is cheaper to code and host that the Microsoft licensed asp As the website owner your web developer has a legal right to grant you FTP access If he doesn’t, don’t pay him ever Before we go into what you can through FTP, let’s just remind ourselves what you should be able to achieve through the basic CMS as regards SEO Content is King – as per module Alt-tags and meta-descriptions as per module and title-tags as per module (there may be an option to view and the html source of your content and this will give you the ability to add these) Page titles No doubt, the CMS will contain a ‘configuration file’ which will hold your default settings for things like page titles and, maybe meta-descriptions but, if all these then remain the same across all pages in the site then FTP is the only way forward The one main advantage of getting FTP into CMS sites is that there is very little work to be done as there aren’t that many pages to edit For example, although your site may look as though it has thousands of pages, it may be driven by just a handful i.e index.php, category.php, product.php etc and these, in turn, could well be split up into tpl files and may even hold ‘includes’ such as header.php, navigation.php and footer.php We recommend that you back-up your website first unless you totally know what you are doing What comes below is a generalisation of what you may be able to achieve through FTP as all CMS systems are different and, if you are unlucky enough to have yours coding via Joomla, simply finding the files you need to edit is a nightmare Firstly, look for the template or themes folder – this contains the main ‘look’ of your website If the web developer has simply picked a theme from those freely available, you may have to check out your source code through a web browser to find out which theme has been used (look for the stylesheet link in the header) Through the FTP, navigate your way into the main template and there you should see some familiar code i.e , etc (Unless there is an includes/header.php which contains what we need to get at) 36 Download free eBooks at bookboon.com SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Technical SEO and Workflow If you then look at that code you should be able to see what variables (text wise) the page title and metatags are calling in and echoing In the template, you should also be able to either edit the footer or at least find footer.php Change the associated stylesheet if you need to in order to get h1 tags into your page You should also be able to now get link titles, proper alt-tags etc into your pages Perhaps, most importantly, you can include your own bespoke html site-map As we covered in module 4, a hand coded site map is far better than any of the self-generated muck that these CMS chuck out Easiest way is to copy the source code of a typical page into notepad, remove all the content but leave the banners, navigation etc intact Save that on your hard-drive as (sitetheme.html) and upload it through FTP Create a link in the footer of your website to /sitetheme.html and check it’s live (but with no links) Now, on your PC, start building the html site map with proper anchor text, the link to the home page with a link title embedded etc and upload This can be very tedious and extremely time consuming but well worth the effort A quick way to get every page into your site map is use the URLs that the xml site map has generated, remove all xml syntax by replacing (for example) with >Titles & Metas In pages, for the title, try %%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%% and for meta-description – %%title%% %%page%%%%category%% | %%sitename%% (that will make sense when you try it OK, so I’ve years of experience but, when I go into a Wordpress site, I still put test1 in post template page title, test2 into the meta and so on, update and then open the site itself in a new window Two minutes later and all page titles and meta-descriptions are done on the whole site This then gives you a perfect html site map too and plenty of time to go through individually categories, products, posts etc 4.3 Drupal I love drupal and, should misinformed client to be asks me to build a site, it will be in drupal – no question about that at all Install the meta tag module, install the site map module and let the whole thing rip Don’t bother with the URL rewrite, it doesn’t work properly and doesn’t make any difference as regards rankings 39 Download free eBooks at bookboon.com SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Platform Specific That’s it – any problems and a search for it – Drupal developers are very proud of being part of a growing community and any problem I have had has been answered already on a forum or the like 4.4 Magento You definitely need FTP when working in Magento – adding link titles and sitemap links in the footer can only really be done in FTP As a whole, getting everything in place in Magento is dead easy Just remember to actually generate the xml site map in catalog >> Google site maps The html site map is found at yourdomain.com/catalog/seo_sitemap/product/ and that will also have a link to the category site map (which should all be in your navigation anyway) Magento needs to be kept simpleas in the good old days where naming files and folders was an art Adding static blocks to pages to bring in pieces of content is damn useful but call these blocks something glaringly obvious as they can be a right royal pain to find at a later date if, for example, you have called them block1 or abz_003 Nope, a simple ‘front page torches ad’ tells both you and anyone else that works on the site that the advertisement for the solar powered torch that appears on the home page is right here 4.5 Others OSCommerce, ZenCart, CubeCart etc – they are all fine, if somewhat cumbersome when it comes to SEO Each has a bolt-on to what needs to be done Why they aren’t in the standard package defeats me Again, like drupal, everything you need and any question you can ask is already answered on the web Challenge the way we run EXPERIENCE THE POWER OF FULL ENGAGEMENT… RUN FASTER RUN LONGER RUN EASIER… READ MORE & PRE-ORDER TODAY WWW.GAITEYE.COM 1349906_A6_4+0.indd 22-08-2014 12:56:57 40 Download free eBooks at bookboon.com Click on the ad to read more ...Brian Bentley BSc (Hons) SEO – From Beginner to Boffin (and everything in between) Download free eBooks at bookboon.com SEO – From Beginner to Boffin (and everything in between) 1st... Download free eBooks at bookboon.com SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Technical SEO and Workflow It is useful, however, to go to webmasters tools and see how many URLs are... on the ad to read more SEO – From Beginner to Boffin: (and everything in between) Technical SEO and Workflow Why have we done that? Google reckons that a link from a relevant page to another