If you think about it, search engines are more or less constantly driving us SEO people to keep our technical SEO strategy in a state of constant refinement. This “evolution” of the marketing environment we thrive in is a great thing, it challenges us to come up with new ways to improve our traffic generating capabilities, user experience and the overall agility of our websites.
Here are a few ideas (6, to be exact) based on issues I’ve encountered in QA or on our recent client work that I hope will provide a little food for thought the next time you’re planning SEO enhancements to your site.
1) Leverage UGC (review content) beyond the product page
UGC is brilliant, particularly on product, content thin or affiliate sites. Making it easy for users to leave a review is powerful stuff, but are you making the most of your precious user generated comments? Consider this scenario. So many users leave product reviews on your pages that you decide to limit the number of reviews visible for that product. You could cherry pick some UGC for category listings pages, adding to the uniqueness of those otherwise content-thin pages too.
2) Use “other users found this document for”
I know Tom loves this trick, and rightly so. You can turn insightful recent searches data into valuable on-page uniqueness. Internal search and external referrals are great, but how about extending the process to make it easy for users to evaluate, extend, tag or remove terms they feel are irrelevant to the page?
3) Consider delivering search engine friendly URLs in your internal site search results
I know how “out there” this might initially sound, but why settle for search engine unfriendly URLs on your internal site search pages? I have seen lots of examples of links being awarded to unfriendly, internal site search URLS. Why do we spend so much time carefully crafting our external URLs, only to completely forget our internal search URLs? A little extra development work to apply a meaningful pattern to your search result page URLs today could lead to the construction of an entirely new content type down the line.
Look at how folks are linking to these search query pages (where instead of a URL rewrite, this site is using breadcrumbs to make their ranking page URL appear more friendly)
4) Microformats are really gaining traction – be creative with them
What we’ve found with Microformats is that webmasters tend to apply the markup to web pages hosting the content, but that’s where they stop. Imagine you have a website that sells tickets. Do you add hCalendar to your event page and walk away? No! You can nest other Microformats such as hProduct and hReview, and syndicate your formatted data to other internal pages, snippets on your homepage and category pages. Any mention of an event, a link to a product or a review snippet should use the appropriate mark-up, consistently across your website.
5) Work hard to resolve errors and improve site speed
Think about how Google have placed site performance at the top of their agenda. I genuinely believe that a site riddled with performance issues and errors is tolerated less today by search engines than ever before. Websites with platform issues can raise serious problems for SEO, users, conversion and repeat visits. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools (including SEOmoz Pro, IIS Toolkit, Pingdom Tools and Webmaster Tools from Bing and Google) to help you identify and tackle these issues head on. Go and set aside some performance maintenance time, if you haven’t done for a while.
6) Watch your homepage title in Google’s SERPs
Google can be pretty aggressive when it comes to choosing the most appropriate text to appear in your title snippets. Sometimes, you might disagree with Google's choice! Our tests so far indicate that the NOODP meta tag (used to prevent Google using the DMOZ description from displaying in your SERPS) can prevent Google from doing this, even if you have no DMOZ listing.
From this;
To this:
That “penny drop” moment when a new technical SEO strategy idea presents itself has to be my favourite part of SEO work. I'm glad that technical strategy has to evolve as search engines develop. I really can't see a time in the near future when that will change.
If you’d like to hear more tips, I’ll be speaking at next week’s A4Uexpo in London on exactly this topic. If you’re there, be sure to drop by and say hello. My buddy Dave Naylor will be introducing me (I have no idea what he’s going to say) and hopefully there’s going to be some time to do a preview of the session over on his blog soon.
Some good tips here. Be careful with that second one though. Any time you show text on the page from queries like that (e.g. "your search for keyword returned 0 results") you could be opening yourself up to code injection. Just make sure you escape any characters that would be used in html, javascript, etc...
I recently undertook a site performance audit, and I was amazed at how many opportunities there were for performance improvements. I found PageSpeed and Yslow very useful for this. I agree, don't neglect site performance, there may be some very easy wins that would give you a leg up on your competition, since few sites seem to have implemented a full set of performance optimizations.
Edit to add: I learned a lot from my exercise in performance optimization (still in progress), not only about technical issues but also a general lesson: go for efficiency before austerity. You may very well be able to make sufficient efficiency improvements that austerity is unecessary. Our society as a whole could benefit enormously from this lesson IMO.
Yes , Using Microformats is surely gaining increasing attention of the SEOs. I have been using hCard extensively till now and it has surely helped for local search in a big way.
But hReview, hProduct , hCalendar are also being integrated on sites for SEO benefit.
The search engines are surely keeping the SEOs on their toes and remaining updated with the latest developments is the only way to ensure success in this field.
Great points in general, but I particualrly like #1 as I am going thorugh a simialr situation right now. I deal with a site that has some great UGC for product reviews that are helping to bring in some very nice longtail traffic. However, now that the reveiws are growing in numbers I do not see the point of keeping all that content just on the product pages as much of it is somewhat redundant and I think they are getting a little long for the page. I like your point about cherry picking some UGC for category listings pages and will definitely consider this. I have also kicked around the idea of adding the spillover reviews to a subdomain to allow for more pages of indexation with this great UGC, therefore hopefully taking over more spots in the results for similar topics.
Any thoughts on if that would be an effective strategy? Was thinking another subdir would work as well, but I think this might actually be better at subdomain level.
Thank you for your tips Richard.
Using Microformats is on my to do list since a few weeks. I would love, if there would be more possibilities in the near future to use them. Apart from recipies, products, ratings... you have to be in a special branche to use them.
Hey - I suspect we're about to see more happening with hProduct - their hProduct help page states:
"Google is experimenting with markup for product data. We do not currently display this information, unless the product is part of a review."
This is the first time i am reading your post and admire that you posted article which gives users lot of information regarding particular topic thnaks for this share.
FYI: If you search for "SEOmoz" within Google, the title for seomoz.org is displayed as simply "SEOmoz".
It appears that you do not use the noydir or the noodp tag yourselves.
Good catch Pete - you're correct. We've been talking with Danny about getting this implemented. Danny! Heads up :0)
Right on target, I am with you on site speed 100% one thing that few of my clients can't seem to get and doesn't matter what I try to do they won't listen. Hosting is step one in all of this, if that isn't good everything else is pointless. Google is really trying to get word out about this, even with their WebP image format.
Thanks,
Emil
Site speed is crucial both in terms of SEO and usability.
Great article I have implemented some of the tips already.
Regarding internal search results urls; I do agree that the friendly urls are great for the users. I was under the impression that Google asked webmasters to block their internal search results pages from the spiders. Do you recommend not doing that?
There is definitely some actionable advice is this post, but it seems to me, to lack direction or a particular theme - a bit of a mish-mash of information. Even the title, 6 Technical SEO Strategy Tips for Better Traffic and Rankings [Site Architecture], had me thinking, 'ummmm?' Might have been better served broken into seperate posts with stronger themes (imho).
WOW superb technical issues you have tell us about the seo thing but i never understand this SEO phenomena my opinion is that on SEO is that a SEO is a silly thing no one can be sure when its at the top and when its jump out of the competition lolz.. but you said it right..here is another site which surely gives you the chance to boost up your keywords and take you to the top...Portland seo is a new seo company in market... I really worked on that technical issues before our team made this site..
Thanx for this post!! Im new to SEO and I would like to know more about microformats like what are microformats? How to implement them in SEO,etc.
This information is great to me! I'll take your tips to heart. Thank you!
Im using title tags for my site and meta description tags so that i can dictate what i want to appear in google search resutls page.
International SEO consultant Joe Spencer presented some more technical aspects of SEO at a Swiss conference.
Way over my head!
Who wants to see a Dummies Guide to this stuff?
Please vote!
Maybe I'm missing the point, but is #2 not heading towards user generated keyword stuffing?
Interesting tips, though I have found that so far Google has not been displaying my rich snippets (microformats) in search results. I figure they'll start doing it eventually, but for now I'm not sure how much benefit a site really gets from it if it's not getting picked up. Do you think Google will eventually have some sort of validation process? For example, what's to stop a site from displaying fake reviews about itself or about a partner site?
Search engine friendly URLs for internal searches is a good call.
Excellent tips
I have some homework to do on microformats
Site maps may be so 2006 but they are useful for setting up site flow and can assist in making sure the site runs smoothly
Hi Richard, Great post thanks. In regards to the hProduct microformat ... how would you envisage usage? A product details pages has the usual content about the product, most of which is detailed in the hProduct specification and with the Description allowing HTML markup, would you envisage the product details content block now being an hProduct formatted block or would you add a vCard style icon which contains the hProduct as an addition to the page's content? Cheers, Scott.
It seems I'm going to be the link man today.
About products and microformats, and if you are using Magento, I'd suggest to check out this great post/guide by Yoast:
Embedding hReview and hProduct in Magento
Thanks gfiorelli1 aka link man :) So the hProduct is used as the whole product decription. Great.
Hey Scott - I envisage a direct implmentation of the hProduct attributes directly into the on page. I'd guess Google may either create a new type of rich snippet for product category (listings pages) and the product pages themselves. I also think that this will look different to Google shopping results, where the product feed is used.
I also belive in site speeds
but i m little bit confuse in Microformats
Can u expplain me in details
Microformats are for sure one great addition to every SEO job.
Here some of the sources I have in my favorites carpet dedicated to them:
I hope these sources will help you discover the great opportunities of Microformats...
And follow the SEOGadget Blog by our Richard, because there you will find quite regularly news about Microformats (apart many other great stuff).
Thanks, i will be checking your links here. I also want to learn about the stuffs you guys are talking about because this seems all new to me. Now i know why SEO was really a hard stuff, we got to be updated with all this new seo softwares for us not to be left behind.
Hi There!
No problem - forgive the self promotion but there's a ton of stuff on Microformats over on my blog: https://seogadget.co.uk/category/microformats-html5/ - take a look!
[EDIT - wow, Gianluca got there before me, thanks buddy!]
I love the 2) trick. It's a good idea to let users tags and add keyword for some topics. Those tags and related searches added by users can only be more relevant for other users.
Another link ;)
This Plugin for WordPress comes handy with Tip #2
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-seo-tags/
Good stuff Richard. We are in the process of added both the hProduct and hReview to some sites using Magento. In a twist my development team asked for resources after seeing that Yoast post and I sent them to SEO Gadget for a better understanding.
I have wanted to test microformats for a while and this new opportunity seems to be the right time. Cheers!
Hey Kevin! Cool with me - thanks for that and I hope all's well over there.
You mentioned site speed, are they any evidence that site speed is used as a ranking factor?
For the most part, the evidence is that Google says it is. This may be FUD on their part to try to get people to speed up their sites, but there have been some sporadic reports of search rankings improving following significant performance improvements.
And aside from rankings, your users will love you for it... people love fast loading sites!
I strongly agree with that, the great thing about performance optimization is that if you do it right, it's a pure win with no downside even if it has no SEO effect (unlike some SEO tactics).
You can usually get large performance improvements without removing any features or graphics from your site (with things like lossless image compression, CSS sprites, parallelized downloads, cookieless domains etc).
Nobody is going to get upset because your site runs faster. No search engine is going to penalize you for better performance. The only loss is the time you put into it and it's well worth it IMO.
Fully agree FJ, and your suggestions for improving site speed are spot on!
I'll also add that a lot of times looking at site speed will also force you to look at the user experience, and one will improve the other.
I'm thinking of all those blogs out there that let feature creep take over, because it's so easy to add a new plugin to wordpress.
Sometimes something as simple as cutting unnessecary fluff can go a long ways to making your page load faster, and at the same time focus your visitor on more important tasks at hand!
I have to admit I've been putting off proper use of microformats, except in business addresses, but it seems there are so many positive uses for these, seamless integration seems also to be an item in our armoury that is needed. I guess sometimes, people assume the search engines are psychic which clearly isn't the case and I don't mind shouting the obvious at any search engine so long as it's heard.
Pardon my ignorance, but wasn't Scribd.com potentially penalized for implementing something like #2?
"Internal. Scribd's own SEO optimization techniques were both a blessing and a curse, for while they drove organic search traffic, they did so in a fashion that many complained were abusive if not down-right black hat. The "aggressiveness" Adler spoke of included, for instance, the questionable tactic of dynamically utilizing popular terms that generated organic search referrals within the page to create a sort of self-serving SEO cycle. This appears to have produced a good amount of organic search traffic but at a cost, namely a significant number of traffic-generating terms being associated with documents they were irrelevant to."
From: https://econsultancy.com/us/blog/4392-scribd-and-seo-live-by-the-sword-die-by-the-sword
Personally I don't think this was a large part of the problem but you're right that this technique should be carefully managed. As referenced in that article this kind of activity left unchecked can lead to a lot of random keywords appearing on the page so I'd recommend using this intelligently and putting some checks in place to ensure relevance.
One of our clients uses a similar technique where exactly that happens - new keywords are queued for approval, basically. Thanks Tom!
Also, knowing a bit of the background to the Scribd situation specifically, they weren't penalised for it, but rather turned it off because it was driving very poor quality traffic.
Please suggest the best way to find broken links in a TypePade blog?
Thanks
Hi Richard,
Good post....!
SEO Strategy is the most important factor for success on search engines. Each web site is unique and has a different potential. We formulate a strategy that is very specific to the website to realize its full potential.I talked about the importance of inbound linking relevancy and inbound linking consistency to any Advanced Link Building campaign.
Seriously mate? a link with "advanced link building" and posting comment spam on SEOMoz!
I'll second Omar's post on the spam. Just a bit ironicalish methinks.