D
10 Things You Must Check When You Re-launch Your Website
Re-launching a site is a crucial and often worrying time. There are many many things that can go wrong, and when they do go wrong the results are often spectacular.
Technical SEO
Traditionally, the phrase Technical SEO refers to optimizing your site for crawling and indexing, but can also include any technical process meant to improve search visibility.
Technical SEO is a broad and exciting field, covering everything from sitemaps, meta tags, JavaScript indexing, linking, keyword research, and more.
If you’re new to SEO, we recommend starting with the chapter on Technical SEO in our Beginner’s Guide. Below are the latest posts on technical SEO, and we’ve included a few top articles here.
On-Site SEO : What are the technical on-page factors that influence your rankings? Our free learning center will get you started in the right direction.
The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet : This handy—and printable—cheat sheet is invaluable for anyone building websites. Contains several useful references that cover a ton of technical SEO best practices.
MozBar : This free Chrome extension is an advanced SEO toolbar that helps you to examine and diagnose several technical SEO issues.
The Technical SEO Renaissance : Is it true that technical SEO isn't necessary, because Google is smart enough to figure your website out? Mike King puts this rumor to rest, and shows you what to focus on.
Technical SEO: The One Hour Guide to SEO : Want a quick introduction to the basics of technical SEO? Our guru Rand has you covered—all in about 10 minutes.
Most Recent Articles on Technical SEO
High Impact/Low Effort SEO from a Developer's Perspective
When was the last time you had a heated discussion with your developer? Or better yet, when was the last time they rolled their eyes at you when you asked them to make some sort of change to the website? My guess is that it probably hasn't been all that long. Or has it? A higher probability is actually that you work with some wicked smart developers who blow your mind away with their sheer awesomeness!
M
Dynamic Landing Pages: Optimizing for Natural Search
We all know the conversion benefits of tuning your PPC ad titles to match the exact words the customer typed in their search, breaking out what would be convenient "groupings" of ads with the same landing page into separate ads with separate, search-matching titles.For example, we have a honeymoon registry--but brides might...
P
Redirecting Spiders on Windows Servers (Specify http crawling)
In a recent visit to Bing Webmaster tools, I discovered that many pages on my site (including my home page) were being indexed as https:// rather than http:/ I had a look into my Yahoo Webmaster stats and discovered a similar phenomenon.Google indexed http pages only.Because I run a shopping cart on my site that requires https for certain pages, 301 redirecting the entire s...
Level Up Your SEO Skills With Our Free Training
Moz Academy Training
Complete courses to master SEO basics
Keyword Research Master Guide
Learn Keyword Research like the pros
Guide to SEO Competitor Analysis
Win rankings and traffic from your competition
Are 404 Pages Always Bad for SEO?
There are some very different schools of thought out there regarding 404 error code pages. Some SEOs recommend: Never allowing them - 301'ing every error page back to the home page or an internal category level page to preserve the maximum amount of link juice (in case someone links to a broken URL) Letting any erroneous/mistyped URL 404. Something...
M
Down and Dirty: Write Your Own URL Rewrite
We all know by this time about the benefits of converting your parameterized URLs to human- and crawler-friendly URLs, but the stock tools of the trade (ISAPI_Rewrite, mod_rewrite, etc.) don't necessarily scale all that well when you have a large number of categories, product pages, etc. I'm going to walk you through what it takes to code this yourself, and I think you'll find it's less scary and complex than you thought, and gives you a number of benefits in terms of ongoing maintenance, flexibility, etc.
Using .htaccess to Rewrite Dynamic URLs to SEO Friendly URLs
I recently read jennita's excellent post, "URL Rewrites and 301 Redirects - How does it all work?", and thought a mod_rewrite example might be helpful to some. So, here's some example code of how I have used mod_rewrite to replace dynamic URLs with SEO friendly URLs.
D
The Cookie Conundrum
I have been going back and forth with SEOmoz’s Danny Dover for the past couple weeks regarding a crawling error occurring within the site I am currently doing SEO for. He has been a tremendous help to me, and believes others may be having the same issues as I. So…low and behold, I’m going to discuss it here in hopes of finding others just like me and some further expertise on how to handle the situation.
URL Rewrites and 301 Redirects - How Does It All Work?
URL rewrites and 301 redirects... you talk about them, you recommend them, but do you truly understand how they work? Sure, you know that rewriting a URL means that the URL displayed in the browser changes to be more SEO (and user) friendly. And you know that a 301 redirect is a permanent redirect. But let's dig a little deeper, and explain how they work together.
A Better Web Development Process Based On the Concept of Link Bait
Before I became a full time SEO I was developing websites for years, and while I enjoyed the finished result something always sat a bit uneasy with me about the web design/ development process; basically, its in the wrong order. I would expect most readers will have noted this or something similar themselves, so I guess this article is more of an attempt to help the enlightened explain and build a case for a better web development process (which ultimately leads to a more successful SEO campaign).
V
IIS SEO Issues
This entry was inspired by a YOUmoz post by Jeremy Chatfield called IIS Case Folding, Robots and Results. I believe Jeremy's post only scratched the surface of SEO issues isolated to IIS, so I thought I would cover some of the other issues worth considering. I have been working with IIS and MCMS now for over 6 months, and although only a third of my job is dedicated to SEO, I have taken the time to isolate all the SEO issues that plague our site. The following IIS issues do not just impact your SEO, they also impact your analytics and your ability to ensure the information you are passing onto your managers is accurate.
Uncovering Issues Via Site Reviews
I've just read the technical issues blogpost about CDN's and redirects from Mr Critchlow. Interesting stuff, but beyond anything I see from day to day. However, when he mentions redirects and how getting things put in scope is difficult, I HAVE come across those issues, even in my early days.
Are There Any Good Solutions for Caching Redirects?
A couple of large client projects we are working on at the moment have had me thinking about a tricky issue that rears its head in enterprise SEO projects especially. When large clients are making extensive website changes, our experience is that the section entitled '301 redirects' is inevitably the section that gets read quickly and then quietly shuffled out of scope. We have found we have to push hard to get large businesses to see the importance of permanent redirects.
New Info from Google and Yahoo! Tilts the Geo-Targeting Balance
At the SMX Sydney conference in Australia this past week, search engineers Priyank Garg & Greg Grothaus (of Yahoo! & Google, respectively) shared information about duplicate content filtering across domains of which I and many of the other speakers/attendees were previously unaware. Priyank, when asked about best practices for "localizing" English language content acro...