On-Site SEO

On September 27, I presented about On-Site SEO at the Affiliate Summit Toronto Meetup Group at Syndicate in Niagara Falls, Ontario.

Liz Gazer of Growthspurt Media organized the event; Eric Schwarzer also spoke with this presentation, 16 random things you can do to improve your productivity, mindset and achieve bigger goals. Eric is full of energy, but if you can get him to focus for a minute, you’ll see he’s a true genius (and a great speaker).

Download a PDF of my On-Site SEO presentation from the Affiliate Summit Toronto Meetup Group.

 

Search Engine Optimization

• On-Site SEO
  • You control
• Off-Site SEO
  • Other’s control (mostly)

Off-Site SEO

Backlinks

• Page Rank (PR)
• Top-Level Domain (TLD)
  • .com
  • .edu
  • .gov
• Anchor text
• Author

Trust Rank

• http://seogadget.co.uk/life-after-link-trust/

On-Site SEO

Title Tag

• Shown in the Window or Tab of the Browser
• Used in SERP as Page Title
• Make it unique
• 70 characters maximum

Meta Tags

• Description
• Robots
  • Index / Noindex
  • Follow / Nofollow

Header Tags

• <h1>… <h6>
• One <h1> per page
• Your most important / stressed keyword
• WordPress: Post title, not blog title

Site Structure

• Header, content, sidebar, footer
• HTML5 new tags
  • Article
  • Aside
  • Header
  • Footer
  • Nav
  • Section
  • Summary

Site Speed

• April 9, 2010
  • Google is incorporating site speed as one of the over 200 signals (used) in determining search rankings
  • fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal
• Enable compression
  • gzip compression
• Leverage browser caching
  • Specify expiration times
• Optimize images
• WordPress Plug-ins
  • WP Super Cache, WP Total Cache
• Fix manually
  • .htaccess

    <IfModule mod_deflate.c>
    	<FilesMatch "\.(js|css|png)$">
    		SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
    	</FilesMatch>
    </IfModule>
    
    <IfModule mod_headers.c>
    	# YEAR
    	<FilesMatch "\.(ico|gif|jpg|jpeg|png|flv|pdf)$">
    		Header set Cache-Control "max-age=29030400"
    	</FilesMatch>
    	# WEEK
    	<FilesMatch "\.(js|css|swf)$">
    		Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800"
    	</FilesMatch>
    </IfModule>

• PHP’s gzip compression
  • php_value output_handler ob_gzhandler
• Google’s mod_pagespeed module

  ModPagespeedEnableFilters make_google_analytics_async
  			ModPagespeedEnableFilters collapse_whitespace
  			ModPagespeedEnableFilters extend_cache
  			ModPagespeedEnableFilters rewrite_javascript
  			ModPagespeedEnableFilters rewrite_images
  			ModPagespeedEnableFilters remove_comments
  			ModPagespeedEnableFilters remove_quotes
  			ModPagespeedEnableFilters trim_urls
  			ModPagespeedEnableFilters inline_css
  			ModPagespeedCssInlineMaxBytes 2048

Microformats / Rich Snippets

• Labeled HTML elements
• Uniform structure to data
• Helps search engines read your data
• Schema.org
  • Google
  • Microsoft
  • Yahoo
• Types
  • Creative works (book, movie, etc)
  • Audio, Image, Video objects
  • Event
  • Person
  • Place (Local business, restaurant, etc)
  • Product
  • Review
  • Recipe
  • Breadcrumb