Standard SEO caveat: It's a black box, and the algorithms are proprietary, and trying to predict and game the search engines is a crappy way to make a living.
That said, what are the baseline steps you want to take to make sure your content is visible to the major search engines (Google, Bing, etc.)
I'm specifically curious as to what role your URI Information Architecture plays. It's common wisdom that you want keywords in your URI, and you want to avoid the query-string laden approach, but what else beyond that?
A quick example of what I'm talking about. Based on something I read on a forum, I recently exposed a /category/* hierarchy on my site. In the following weeks I noticed a sharp uptick in my page views.
I'm curious what other basic steps a site/weblog should take with its URIs to ensure a baseline visibility.
A few URI tips that have kept me ranking:
Write URIs in English but include a unique ID. SO does this well: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1278157/seo-and-uri-structure
Stay consistent when linking to a page: domain.com/, domain.com/index and domain.com/index.php are different URIs
Use .html extensions, or purely /one/two/ directories for pages
There's probably hundreds of other tips! The structure of linking plays a very important role too...
Logically break your site down into many categories/subcategories
Link all pages back to your homepage
Don't link to hundreds of pages from your homepage
EDIT: Oh I forgot a very important one - a proper 404 response!
Hopefully that helps a bit
some simple things ...
meaningful and accurate meta fields (especially description, keywords)
a valid hn hierarchy on every page (e.g. h1 h2 h3 h2 h2 h3 h3 h4 h3 h2)
all (text) content accessible to a text browser
check spellings
keep content and display functionality separated (e.g. use HTML and CSS fully)
validate CSS and (X)HTML and use standard DOCTYPES
relevant <title> for each page
sensible site hierarchy and no orphan pages
1) Don't use www subdomain if you do not have to. If you or your company has made the mistake of using subdomains for asset management then you likely forced into using www just to be safe.
2) The biggest problem faced by search engines is redundant URIs for the same page. This problem is solved by using a canonical link tag in your HTML. This will perhaps help you more than any other single SEO factor.
3) Make your URIs meaningful. If people can remember URIs well enough to type them out your SEO will be significantly improved.
The most important factors with URIs is easy to remember and the ability to specify uniqueness to the search engine. Nothing else matters with regard to URIs and SEO.
Related
Let's say I have a website that has 2 languages, one uses Latin and the second one Cyrillic transcriptions in URLs.
For example:
example.com/link
example.com/ссылка
My question is which is more user and SEO friendly, if I leave them as is or if I add the language prefix, so they'd become
example.com/en/link
example.com/ru/ссылка
I understand that such subdirectories should be used if I have languages that are similar and then the user wouldn't be confused, but does that also apply in my case?
It's better to use the second one for better SEO results.
example.com/en/link
example.com/ru/ссылка
Google likes the tree-like structure. Of course you can use the main language without prefix.
Also it's better to have all languages in one domain:
domain.com/en
domain.com/ru
not on subdomains like this
en.domain.com
ru.domain.com
Wish you luck.
I have a restaurants directory Rails app in which I need to categorize the content (restaurant description pages) by cities. The cities are stored in the database. The questions that I have:
What is the Rails way of doing this? Is it best to add a scope in routes as for ex. the language locale? For ex.: example.com/en/new-york/restaurants...
Is it better to translate, transliterate or leave the city names as-is provided that the content is targeted for the locals. For ex.: example.com/moscow vs example.com/moskva vs example.com/москва in terms of "Rails-wayness" and SEO friendliness?
In terms of SEO, is it better to use subdomains (new-york.example.com) or subdirectories (example.com/new-york).
I would appreciate if you could share your experience about this matter!
You probably don't want the locale/language to be embedded in the URL.
For SEO purposes you probably want to pick one version and go with it all the time. That way you're aggregating all of your "link juice" to one URL. Some search engines will penalize you for having the same content at multiple URLs.
This is a good question, and I'm not entirely sure. I'd be kind of surprised if either one makes a huge difference. (It wouldn't be the first time I've been surprised...)
Opencart produces different links for a product like:
website.com/product_name
website.com/category/product_name
website.com/category/subcategory/product_name
website.com/brand/product_name
etc.
It is based on the listing page which you reach to product. My question is that, using different links for a product/content is beneficial or harmful for seo?
I will make it one link if it is harmful or unnecessary.
Personally I find it bad for SEO. From what Google says, it really doesn't matter too much since it just ignores duplicate content not penalise as some suggest - plus each product page has the canonical URL's which again Google will make use of. However, if you are looking for something to make your URL's more consistent, I have an extension (commercial) which does make them all uniform across the site (and also makes the pages breadcrumbs the same too)
What is the optimal SEO strategy for storing a blog?
1) In a directory: www.example.com/blog
2) In a separate domain: www.exampleblog.com
3) In a sub-domain: www.blog.example.com
With a directory, the repetitions earned by the blog are directly transferred to the main domain (www.example.com). With a separate domain, any links to my site would count as backlinks.
I'm leaning towards option 1. What other pros and cons should I consider?
This is comprehensive, Sub-domain versus sub-directory (via Webmasters SE). It was updated in November 2012. Look at this answer too, as it specifically describes, with a huge chart, what effect sub-folders (meaning sub-directory in this context) versus sub-domains have on SEO, and how use of reverse proxy can affect blog SEO. The gist of it is that a sub-domain is preferable to a sub-directory.
EDIT
I may have mis-read the question. If the choice is between
mywebsitename.com/blog
versus
mywebsitenameblog.com
then I would definitely recommend using the sub-directory. This is why:
If you use an entirely different domain name, even if it is your website's domain with the four letters blog concatenated, it will be confusing to users, as no one does that!
You will need to pay for a second domain and that costs more money.
You'll be doing something that is inconsistent with typical website naming conventions, which I'd avoid if I were concerned about SEO and were developing an e-commerce website. I don't know if it will negatively affect SEO ranking, but it won't help, as it will be an entirely different domain name, without any of the positive reputation or credibility of your primary domain name.
It will be four characters longer, which is never good, as it will be less convenient, more difficult to remember, etc.
Better yet, use a sub-domain of your primary website for your blog. To summarize, you should do the following, in order of best to worst:
blog.mywebsitename.com
mywebsitename.com/blog
mywebsitenameblog.com
There is slight difference depending on which search engine is going to look at and add or subtract value to your blog on basis of this decision.
Read this blog post from Matt Cutts. or Watch this video for summary
If you go for another domain then search engine expect it to be separate content and not much relation in terms of your main domain rank.
I would install the blog in sub-directory called blog and stop worrying about actual juice from search engines as it may vary from one to another.
What do search engine bots use as a starting point? Is it DNS look-up or do they start with some fixed list of well-know sites? Any guesses or suggestions?
Your question can be interpreted in two ways:
Are you asking where search engines start their crawl from in general, or where they start to crawl a particular site?
I don't know how the big players work; but if you were to make your own search engine you'd probably seed it with popular portal sites. DMOZ.org seems to be a popular starting point. Since the big players have so much more data than we do they probably start their crawls from a variety of places.
If you're asking where a SE starts to crawl your particular site, it probably has a lot to do with which of your pages are the most popular. I imagine that if you have one super popular page that lots of other sites link to, then that would be the page that SEs starts will enter from because there are so many more entry points from other sites.
Note that I am not in SEO or anything; I just studied bot and SE traffic for a while for a project I was working on.
You can submit your site to search engines using their site submission forms - this will get you into their system. When you actually get crawled after that is impossible to say - from experience it's usually about a week or so for an initial crawl (homepage, couple of other pages 1-link deep from there). You can increase how many of your pages get crawled and indexed using clear semantic link structure and submitting a sitemap - these allow you to list all of your pages, and weight them relative to one another, which helps the search engines understand how important you view each part of site relative to the others.
If your site is linked from other crawled websites, then your site will also be crawled, starting with the page linked, and eventually spreading to the rest of your site. This can take a long time, and depends on the crawl frequency of the linking sites, so the url submission is the quickest way to let google know about you!
One tool I can't recommend highly enough is the Google Webmaster Tool. It allows you to see how often you've been crawled, any errors the googlebot has stumbled across (broken links, etc) and has a host of other useful tools in there.
In principle they start with nothing. Only when somebody explicitly tells them to include their website they can start crawling this site and use the links on that site to search more.
However, in practice the creator(s) of a search engine will put in some arbitrary sites they can think of. For example, their own blogs or the sites they have in their bookmarks.
In theory one could also just pick some random adresses and see if there is a website there. I doubt anyone does this though; the above method will work just fine and does not require extra coding just to bootstrap the search engine.