BrightonSEO 2013 Takeways

Image Credit:http://www.analyticsseo.com

Although it has been exactly a month since BrightonSEO I decided to share with you my favourite takeaways from BrightonSEO. It is an awesome free SEO conference in a beautiful city, so if you haven't attended yet try to do that next time because it is well worth it!

International SEO –Aleyda Solis SEER Interactive

Image Credit:http://uk.queryclick.com

·         Check where are my current visitors coming from? What keywords and pages are attracting International traffic right now (GA&GWT).

·         Do a keyword research for other countries, use tools such as SEMrush to see SEO visibility in particular countries

·         International SEO isn’t all about translating – It’s about customer behaviour and penetration of services - Research your potential audience using TNS Digital Life or comScore Data Mine.

·         Lexipedia to identify the relevant localized terms.

·         Analyse competitors and their USP, targeted keywords etc. use Google Display Network site to find out more about them 

·         Consider the best website structure for your international site (subfolder, subdomain or sub-directories) – pros and cons

·         If the international versions are country targeted but aren’t using ccTLDs geo-target them through GWT

·         Place rel=”alternate” hreflang”x” tags on the international websites to let Google know you have the same website available in different languages. Place the tags in the XML Sitemap.

·         If there is still little potential to go international you can always create custom alerts in Google Analytics for the most important countries/languages to be notified when they bring some decent traffic

·         Do a thorough analysis on your international traffic (The SEOmoz keyword difficulty tool supports international markets). If you don’t have the volume or potential to be starting international SEO, at least purchase your localised ccTLDs.

Paul Madden Manual Link Building– ‘How to spot a shitty link’
·         Paul said that every link we build brings a risk. We need to accept that any link we build to impact the search results in our favour is un-natural, and therefore un-ethical.

·         As part of his presentation, he also discussed his experiences with penalty removal. Having collated reams of web data, he explained that there are multiple clues that help Google recognise un-natural link building.

·         Paid links are a bad idea, and if spotted are likely to get you penalised. Gifts are banned by Google, and Advertorials resulted in the situation with Interflora being temporarily knocked out of search results.

·         Use Majestic's historic advanced report to analyze your backlinks and decide which are the bad ones.

·         These include having a large volume of backlinks from 40X/50X pages

·         Having an un-natural number of links from foreign domain names

·         And having an un-natural percentage of exact anchor text links.

·         Sitewide links

·         We can audit our backlinks using ScreamingFrog (Mode à upload URL  list and select “Does Not Contain” in the filter 1 dropdown, then enter your website URL in the text input field) and see where you have links -- > remove the dodgy ones or disavow if you cant remove (when using the Disavow tool, make sure the entire domain is removed instead of removing each ‘dodgy’ link).

·         He also suggested that recognizable brands such as Interflora and BMW never get penalised as badly as other sites. The simple reason being that Google makes its money so long as it provides the best search results. If a well-known brand is seen to be missing by the average search user, then their confidence in Google’s ability to display the most relevant results would dwindle.

Berian Reed Autotrader – ‘Automating SEO on large websites’

·         Set up monthly or even weekly boosts/drops alerts in Google Analytics (Google Intelligence Alerts).

·         Automate your link building when using for example tynt (82% of content shared on the web occurs via copy &paste – take advantageof that with tynt.

Speed up your SEO tasks using SEOTools for Excel from Neil Bosma

Julia Logan ContentMango ‘NegativeSEO: Myths and Reality’

·         Bad SEO can be self-inflicted and not the result of a negative SEO campaign.

·         What you think is a negative SEO campaign against you could be an error on your own website, eg duplicate content, de-indexing your own site, robots.txt problems.

·         Check your plug-ins are working properly, up to date and secure.

·         Make sure you are not producing any duplicate content and beware of any changes to your keywords or peaks in links that are disproportionate to any SEO you are doing

·         Self inflicted in Wordpress - indexable searches, e.g.:

·         www.domain.com/search/buy+Viagra

·         www.domain.com/?s=buy+Viagra

·         Add to your Wordpress following directives:
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /?s=*
to your robots.txt to arm yourself against negative SEO

·         To identify negative SEO watch your anchor text, links

·         Avoid mistakes that can make a negative SEO campaign against you easier 


Find out more about negative SEO from a fantastic infographic about testing negative SEO.

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What is the best solution to pagination?

The best solutions to pagination from Martyna Sroka

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How to do SEO on Magento

Recenlty I have been reading loads about Magento and I came across this brilliant presentation which I believe should be shared also on my blog because it is really insightful! Enjoy!

Magento SEO

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Responive Design and SEO- how bad or good it really is?

Responsive design is a way of building mobile websites serving the same HTML for all devices and using only CSS media queries to decide the rendering on each device. Ultimately it is one site for every screen, regardless if you shrink your browser or switch devices you will see the same version of the website. 

Image credit - hotandmobile.com

Google and responsive design

In June 2012 Google stated in their guidelines for mobile SEO that responsive design is their preferred method of building mobile sites. However, there are quite a few arguments working against responsive design when thinking about SEO of pages created that way.

Sure responsive design is great because the website appears on all portable devices exactly in the same way as on a desktop and because it is displayed on the  same URL on all devices all the links go to that one URL.

However with Google being able to understand which site should appear on a certain device regardless of the URL structure (thanks to the introduction of switchboard tags) the only argument giving responsive design superiority over other methods of mobile site building becomes easily undermined as well.

What then if not responsive design?

If mobile URLs (f.e. http://m.debenhams.com/) or dynamic serving (where the server responds with different HTML (and CSS) on the same URL depending on the user agent requesting the page) provides a better user experience, then Google does not suggest using site responsive design, but instead provides options to give you the same benefits of consolidated link equity on mobile URLs.

Google still support dynamic serving and mobile URLs if they are better for a user.

Responsive Design has been assumed to be the best solution because: 

• It has been recommended by Google as their preferred way of building mobile websites as the industry best practice - one URL with the same HTML regardless of the device makes it easier for Google to crawl, index and organise the page.
• It offers great user experience - transitioning from mobile to desktop is nice and easy f.e. causal browsing for products in your free time can be finished in purchase done on the desktop when you return later to the desktop version of the page and easily locate found earlier on product.
• It makes managing SEO & content strategy easier - it saves us from having separate SEO& content campaigns.
• It preserves link juice and page authority -since there is one website for desktop and mobile the page preserves its original link authority, obviously separate mobile domains can also consolidate link authority when using rel="canonical" and rel="alternate" tags, but this is the simplest out of all of them all.
• It is easy to develop - the existing content of the website is styled to fit mobile browsers of various sizes.

When dynamic serving or mobile URLs is better for a user and superior to responsive design? 

• When desktop website doesn’t have categories mobile searchers are looking for – if your page has got some serious site architecture issues and certain categories and pages are not easily accessible on the desktop page designing mobile equivalent of the page won’t help.
• When desktop website doesn’t use keywords mobile searchers are looking for - often mobile users are looking for local results, therefore it is important we adjust our mobile website to that types of searches accordingly and enhance mobile version of the website by commonly used local keywords such as for example ‘nearby’.
• When site speed is crucial for conversions on your site – responsive design requires more coding and therefore more time for the page to load and since speed is a ranking factor choosing responsive design especially for huge websites may be simply not the best option.
• When users primarily use feature phones – according to Google guidelines websites for users of featured phones (any other phone type than smartphone, still used across the globe) should not be built using responsive design.
• When user experience could be enhanced using mobile features not available on desktop (products which may be accessible only on a mobile, hence different version of the website is justifiable).

What has is the recommended solution: Dynamic serving or mobile URLs. 

Both these solutions are equally good and one of them should be implemented opposed to the responsive design if they provide better user experience (in all the instances mentioned in the previous point). 

The recommended solution depends however on individual to every page factors and therefore in some cases responsive design will be the best solution, whereas in some other instances dynamic serving or mobile URLs could be much better than responsive design. It really depends on the website in question. 

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