5 Technical Tune-ups to Optimize Your Website

by Greg Orelind 

So, you’ve just updated your website following SEO best practices.
Time to sit back and relax, and take a well-deserved break, right?

Not so fast! The web is not a static place. Google rolls out search
algorithm changes daily. Other sites update their content and links
all the time. And, you (hopefully) update your site regularly as well.

Whether you’ve hired an SEO consultant, built your site on an SEO
friendly CMS, or just tuned up your site, it’s still important to audit
your site on a regular basis to make sure all the hard work you put
 in continues to drive traffic, boost conversions, and deliver sales.
Regular site audits also ensures your site is accessible and navigable
 for customers. Because at the end of the day, a customer-focused
site means more traffic for you and less for your competitors.
“The best place to hide a dead body is page
2 of Google search results”-Unknown

The Alexa Site Audit, for example, consists of 30 or so sub-topics.
 Here are five of the most important topics you should look at on an
 ongoing basis:

Search Engine Optimization

There are a lot of small, technical things you must do to make sure that
it is as easy as possible for search engines to find and understand your
site’s content. Though simple, these elements can have a big impact on
 your site’s visibility.

There are four basic SEO elements on a site: the title tag, meta description,
 H1 tag, and alt tags. Let’s go through them one by one.

The title tag is the blue link displayed in search results, on external
websites, and in browser tabs. Generally, it defines the title of a document
and is important for social sharing and for SEO. It’s best practice to keep
the title tag under 65 characters so it will fit in the search engine results
display. If titles are kept at or under 65 characters, it’s estimated that at
least 95% of your titles will display correctly.

The meta description is the text that’s included underneath your title tag.
It is a concise description (approximately 155 characters) of the page’s
content and is the first interaction a prospective visitor has with your site.
Think of the meta description as the elevator pitch for your web page or
website. It serves as a compelling description that you hope will entice
the visitor to click through.

The H1 tag tells crawlers/bots what to expect on a page. There is only
 one H1 tag per page, and it should be similar to the page title (title tag).
The implementation of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm, which aims to
incorporate semantic (or intent) analysis into search, has opened up more
opportunity to optimize H1 tags. Think about the H1 tag as the question
your user might be searching for, and the associated content is the answer. Optimizing for your users’ questions, in addition to adding appropriately
placed keywords, will reward in better search engine placement.

Alt tags are the behind the scenes descriptions of content, like images,
on your website. They describe an image when it is unable to be seen,
and search engines use them to decipher the image or give context to
the corresponding content. Alt tags should use concise, descriptive,
keyword-relevant text. This is important so search engines can interpret
 them properly, but also because visually impaired visitors using screen
readers will hear alt text when visiting a website.

Even if your site was initially set up with SEO in mind, as you add new
content to your site it is easy neglect technical best practices. These
 are among the easiest things to get right in SEO, and if you’re not doing
 them you are needlessly throwing away SEO benefits.

Duplicate Content

If not handled properly, duplicate content can be damaging to your SEO.
 Multiple copies of content can dilute the authority of your page, and since
 Google usually filters out duplicate content from search results, it is
 possible for the wrong version of a page to be displayed as a search
 result. In other words, search engines are forced to decide which
version of the duplicate content is most relevant to searches.

Duplicate content can show up on your site unexpectedly in many
different ways. One way is surfacing the same content with different
 request parameters, because of campaign tags or session ids in the
URL. Another is having printable versions of pages get indexed.

Alexa’s Site Audit can identify duplicate content on your site and you
can fix it by pointing search engines to a “canonical” version of the
page, or by blocking crawlers from accessing it altogether.

Broken Links

Broken links can be a huge detriment to your users’ experience,
resulting in lost conversions and sales. For search engines, a broken
 link is a signal of a poor quality site, which may negatively affect
ranks.

Broken links can be caused by renaming or moving a webpage and
 failing to change internal links, linking to content that has been
moved or deleted, or linking to a third party page that changed
the URL or changed the page. Even if your own site hasn’t changed,
the links or pages on other sites may not longer work. This is also
 referred to as “link rot.”

A regular site audit will check both your internal and external links to
 make sure you are not confusing your visitors or search engine
crawlers with broken links.Alexa’s Site Audit even provides you
with a full downloadable list of problem links, including broken
 references to images and redirects, and exactly where they are
 found so you can correct quickly to avoid penalty.

HMTL Tags & Certified Metrics

You make business decisions based on the data from your on-site
 analytics tags. It’s important to make sure that the code for
each of your web analytics products (Alexa Certified Metrics,
Google Analytics, etc.) are all properly added so you can be
sure all of your site’s traffic is counted. Regular site audits will
make sure that as you add new content to your site, all pages
 are covered and your on-site analytics are as accurate as possible.

Performance

Your website’s performance impacts both your visitors experience
 and your search engine rankings. One study reports that 47% of
people expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. With just
seconds to make an impression on visitors, page load time is the
 last thing that you want to stand between you and conversions.

In terms of SEO, Google has reported that page speed is one
element factored into page rank algorithms. Not only that, search
engines have a designated crawl budget so slow page speeds
could mean fewer crawled pages and a negatively impacted
indexation.

Alexa’s Site Audit will monitor your site for the slowest pages, and
 make sure that you are not introducing performance problems
that could annoy your visitors, and hurt your SEO.

The bottom line: No matter how good your SEO is now, the web and
 how people use it is always changing. Regular Site Audits allow
you to assess the health of your website quickly with actionable
recommendations to ensure you’re optimizing traffic, driving
 conversions, and delivering sales.

Google Panda Running Instantly & In Real-Time?

by Barry Schwartz | Filed Under Google Search Engine Optimization

Last night at SMX West during the Meet The Search Enginespanel, Google's Gary Illyes was supposedly quoted as saying that Panda, the Google algorithm, is constantly running, instantly.

Rae posted on Twitter, "@methode (who is Gary Illyes of Google) says panda happens "pretty much instantly":

But what does processed mean? After they are crawled by Google?

We do know that Panda is a rolling update now but it has been over four months since a Panda update, at least based on my records. By update I mean, Panda sites seeing any ranking benefit or decline in over four months.

So it is possible that Panda is no longer a rolling update, no longer running instantly or so. 

Google Begins Reducing Visibility for Non-Mobile Friendly Sites That Received Warnings

New Google Mobile Algo: 

Earlier this month, Google began sending warnings to some webmasters that their sites were not mobile friendly. Not all webmasters received one of these notices, so there’s little bit uncertainty about what criteria was needed in order to prompt one of these warnings.

However, now we know that Google is taking action against those sites if they are not mobile friendly in the form of a new mobile only algorithm. People began noticing that websites that received this notice are no longer ranking when a search is done on a mobile device. The rankings are retained for desktop searches, but the visibility is mobile searches drops dramatically. So it does seem that it is only specifically affecting mobile searches, at least at this time.

Ryan Jones, Manager, Search & Analytics at  SapientNitro began noticing the drop recently. “Over the past few days I’ve seen some sites that have gotten warnings retain their #1 desktop rankings for competitive keywords but fall several pages down for the same keywords in mobile.”

It raises the question about whether this is the same fluctuation that prompted the chatter on Friday about a possible update although Google stated they didn’t believe it was either Panda or Penguin related in a Google Hangout.

But with such an emphasis being placed on mobile-friendly sites by Google, particularly in the last year, many SEOs have been expecting last year that an additional mobile-only algorithm to begin affecting non-mobile friendly sites at some point.  They added mobile tools to Google Webmaster Tools to assist webmasters in making their sites mobile-friendly.

Alan Bleiweiss of AlanBleiweiss.com believes that the mobile warnings may be tied to page speed, which would explain why some mobile un-friendly sites received the warning in Google Webmaster Tools yet others did not.

As far back as the MayDay update, the writing was on the wall that page speed was a factor for SEO and would become more emphasized over time. That proved to be quite true for all search queries, regardless of platform or device. The same can be said about overall page processing, and a host of quality considerations. It was inevitable then, that this would be adapted specific to mobile search and we are now seeing that play out. Sites that are ranking for phrases for desktop searches are now not showing up for mobile searches even when they previously had.

We’re not talking about just mobile related to localization. We’re talking about quality factors.  Trust factors unique to a mobile experience.

Google is displaying “mobile friendly” labels on many sites as another example that they are taking it to a new level.  Unfortunately that specific action is critically flawed – they’re displaying many sites that are not mobile friendly from a site speed or page processing performance perspective specific to mobile but where those sites are doing better for those signals on desktop devices.  Which is directly opposite of how they’re NOT displaying other sites specific to mobile devices due to performance issues.

So it’s still an in-flux issue, however the only safe and proper course of action is for site owners to get their act together regardless of device type, but more now than ever, for mobile if that is where they have the most weakness, yet across the board if the problems are wide spread enough.

For users that may not have made their sites mobile friendly yet, if they are affected by this new mobile algo, it will likely show pretty clearly a dramatic drop in mobile traffic without a corresponding drop in desktop traffic. Site seem to beranking as usual in desktop, however the unfortunate thing is that some webmasters might not realize that a drop in traffic is strictly mobile related.

15 SEO Best Practices for Structuring URLs

It's been a long time since we covered one of the most fundamental building blocks of SEO—the structure of domain names and URLs—and I think it's high time to revisit. But, an important caveat before we begin: the optimal structures and practices I'll be describing in the tips below are NOT absolutely critical on any/every page you create. This list should serve as an "it would be great if we could," not an "if we don't do things this way, the search engines will never rank us well." Google and Bing have come a long way and can handle a lot of technical challenges, but as always in SEO, the easier we make things for them (and for users), the better the results tend to be.

#1: Whenever possible, use a single domain & subdomain

It's hard to argue this given the preponderance of evidence and examples of folks moving their content from a subdomain to subfolder and seeing improved results (or, worse, moving content to a subdomain and losing traffic). Whatever heuristics the engines use to judge whether content should inherit the ranking ability of its parent domain seem to have trouble consistently passing to subdomains.

That's not to say it can't work, and if a subdomain is the only way you can set up a blog or produce the content you need, then it's better than nothing. But your blog is far more likely to perform well in the rankings and to help the rest of your site's content perform well if it's all together on one sub and root domain.

For more details and plenty of examples (in the post and comments), check out  this recent Whiteboard Friday on the topic.

#2: The more readable by human beings, the better

It should come as no surprise that the easier a URL is to read for humans, the better it is for search engines. Accessibility has always been a part of SEO, but never more so than today, when engines can leverage advanced user and usage data signals to determine what people are engaging with vs. not.

Readability can be a subjective topic, but hopefully this illustration can help:

The requirement isn't that every aspect of the URL must be absolutely clean and perfect, but that at least it can be easily understood and, hopefully, compelling to those seeking its content.

#3: Keywords in URLs: still a good thing 

It's still the case that using the keywords you're targeting for rankings in your URLs is a solid idea. This is true for several reasons.

First, keywords in the URL help indicate to those who see your URL on social media, in an email, or as they hover on a link to click that they're getting what they want and expect, as shown in the Metafilter example below (note how hovering on the link shows the URL in the bottom-left-hand corner):

Second, URLs get copied and pasted regularly, and when there's no anchor text used in a link, the URL itself serves as that anchor text (which is still a powerful input for rankings), e.g.:

Third, and finally, keywords in the URL show up in search results, and  research has shown that the URL is one of the most prominent elements searchers consider when selecting which site to click.

#4: Multiple URLs serving the same content? Canonicalize 'em!

If you have two URLs that serve very similar content, consider canonicalizing them, using either a 301 redirect (if there's no real reason to maintain the duplicate) or a rel=canonical (if you want to maintain slightly different versions for some visitors, e.g. a printer-friendly page).

Duplicate content isn't really a search engine penalty (at least, not until/unless you start duplicating at very large scales), but it can cause a split of ranking signals that can harm your search traffic potential. If Page A has some quantity of ranking ability and its duplicate, Page A2, has a similar quantity of ranking ability, by canonicalizing them, Page A can have a better chance to rank and earn visits.

#5: Exclude dynamic parameters when possible

This kind of junk is ugly:

If you can avoid using URL parameters, do so. If you have more than two URL parameters, it's probably worth making a serious investment to rewrite them as static, readable, text.

Most CMS platforms have become savvy to this over the years, but a few laggards remain. Check out tools like mod_rewrite and ISAPI rewrite or MS' URL Rewrite Module (for IIS) to help with this process.

Some dynamic parameters are used for tracking clicks (like those inserted by popular social sharing apps such as Buffer). In general, these don't cause a huge problem, but they may make for somewhat unsightly and awkwardly long URLs. Use your own judgement around whether the tracking parameter benefits outweigh the negatives.

Research from a  2014 RadiumOne study suggests that social sharing (which has positive, but usually indirect impacts on SEO) with shorter URLs that clearly communicate the site and content perform better than non-branded shorteners or long, unclear URL strings.

#6: Shorter > longer

Shorter URLs are, generally speaking, preferable. You don't need to take this to the extreme, and if your URL is already less than 50-60 characters, don't worry about it at all. But if you have URLs pushing 100+ characters, there's probably an opportunity to rewrite them and gain value.

This isn't a direct problem with Google or Bing—the search engines can process long URLs without much trouble. The issue, instead, lies with usability and user experience. Shorter URLs are easier to parse, to copy and paste, to share on social media, and to embed, and while these might all add up to only a fractional improvement in sharing or amplification, every tweet, like, share, pin, email, and link matters (either directly or, often, indirectly).

#7: Match URLs to titles most of the time (when it makes sense)

This doesn't mean that if the title of your piece is "My Favorite 7 Bottles of Islay Whisky (and how one of them cost me my entire Lego collection)" that your URL has to be a perfect match. Something like

randswhisky.com/my-favorite-7-islay-whiskies

would be just fine. So, too would

randswhisky.com/blog/favorite-7-bottles-islay-whisky

or variations on these. The matching accomplishes a mostly human-centric goal, i.e. to imbue an excellent sense of what the web user will find on the page through the URL and then to deliver on that expectation with the headline/title.

It's for this same reason that we strongly recommend keeping the page title (which engines display prominently on their search results pages) and the visible headline on the page a close match as well—one creates an expectation, and the other delivers on it.

For example, above, you'll see two URLs I shared on Facebook. In the first, it's wholly unclear what you might find on the page. It's in the news section the BBC's website, but beyond that, there's no way to know what you might find there. In the second, however, Pacific Standard magazine has made it easy for the URL to give insight into the article's content, and then the title of the piece delivers:

We should aim for a similar level of clarity in our own URLs and titles.

#8: Including stop words isn't necessary

If your title/headline includes stop  words (and, or, but, of, the, a, etc.), it's not critical to put them in the URL. You don't have to leave them out, either, but it can sometimes help to make a URL shorter and more readable in some sharing contexts. Use your best judgement on whether to include or not based on the readability vs. length.

You can see in the URL of this particular post you're now reading, for example, that I've chosen to leave in "for" because I think it's easier to read with the stop word than without, and it doesn't extend the URL length too far.

#9: Remove/control for unwieldy punctuation characters

There are a number of text characters that become nasty bits of hard-to-read cruft when inserted in the URL string. In general, it's a best practice to remove or control for these. There's a great  list of safe vs. unsafe characters available on Perishable Press:

It's not merely the poor readability these characters might cause, but also the potential for breaking certain browsers, crawlers, or proper parsing.

#10: Limit redirection hops to two or fewer

If a user or crawler requests URL A, which redirects to URL B. That's cool. It's even OK if URL B then redirects to URL C (not great—it would be more ideal to point URL A directly to URL C, but not terrible). However, if the URL redirect string continues past two hops, you could get into trouble.

Generally speaking, search engines will follow these longer redirect jumps, but they've recommended against the practice in the past, and for less "important" URLs (in their eyes), they may not follow or count the ranking signals of the redirecting URLs as completely.

The bigger trouble is browsers and users, who are both slowed down and sometimes even stymied (mobile browsers in particular can occasionally struggle with this) by longer redirect strings. Keep redirects to a minimum and you'll set yourself up for less problems.

#11: Fewer folders is generally better

Take a URL like this:

randswhisky.com/scotch/lagavulin/15yr/distillers-edition/pedro-ximenez-cask/750ml

And consider, instead, structuring it like this:

randswhisky.com/scotch/lagavulin-distillers-edition-750ml

It's not that the slashes (aka folders) will necessarily harm performance, but it can create a perception of site depth for both engines and users, as well as making edits to the URL string considerably more complex (at least, in most CMS' protocols).

There's no hard and fast requirement—this is another one where it's important to use your best judgement.

#12: Avoid hashes in URLs that create separate/unique content 

The hash (or URL fragment identifier) has historically been a way to send a visitor to a specific location on a given page (e.g. Moz's blog posts use the hash to navigate you to a particular comment, like  this one from my wife). Hashes can also be used like tracking parameters (e.g. randswhisky.com/lagavulin#src=twitter). Using URL hashes for something other than these, such as showing unique content than what's available on the page without the hash or wholly separate pages is generally a bad idea.

There are exceptions, like those Google enables for developers seeking to use the hashbang format for dynamic AJAX applications, but even these aren't nearly as clean, visitor-friendly, or simple from an SEO perspective as statically rewritten URLs. Sites from Amazon to Twitter have found tremendous benefit in simplifying their previously complex and hash/hashbang-employing URLs. If you can avoid it, do.

#13: Be wary of case sensitivity

A couple years back, John Sherrod of Search Discovery  wrote an excellent piece noting the challenges and issues around case-sensitivity in URLs. Long story short—if you're using Microsoft/IIS servers, you're generally in the clear. If you're hosting with Linux/UNIX, you can get into trouble as they can interpret separate cases, and thus randswhisky.com/AbC could be a different piece of content from randswhisky.com/aBc. That's bad biscuits.

In an ideal world, you want URLs that use the wrong case to automatically redirect/canonicalize to the right one. There are htaccess rewrite protocols to assist ( like this one)—highly recommended if you're facing this problem.

#14: Hyphens and underscores are preferred word separators

Notably missing (for the first time in my many years updating this piece) is my recommendation to avoid underscores as word separators in URLs. In the last few years, the search engines have successfully overcome their previous challenges with this issue and now treat underscores and hyphens similarly.

Spaces can work, but they render awkwardly in URLs as %20, which detracts from the readability of your pages. Try to avoid them if possible (it's usually pretty easy in a modern CMS).

#15: Keyword stuffing and repetition are pointless and make your site look spammy

Check out the search result listing below, and you'll see a whole lot of "canoe puppies" in the URL. That's probably not ideal, and it could drive some searchers to bias against wanting to click.

Repetition like this doesn't help your search rankings—Google and Bing have moved far beyond algorithms that positively reward a keyword appearing multiple times in the URL string. Don't hurt your chances of earning a click (which CAN impact your rankings) by overdoing keyword matching/repetition in your URLs. 

Originally Posted by Rand Fishkin to Technical SEO and Basic SEO