Tag: crawlable

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How to Explain SEO to Marketers

My latest on NBC 5 Chicago’s Inc. Well: “How to Reach Customers Via Search Engines“

You don’t get the privilege of speaking to customers via organic search until the search engines understand what you’re saying.

Organic search is like speaking through a translator. The search engines’ algorithms are the gating factors that decide which sites will have a chance to speak to which searchers.

People searching Google know what they’re looking for. They ask Google to find it for them using a cryptic search phrase. From these few words, the search engines analyze relevance, intent and historical preference, and deliver a search results page with 10 organic search options.

Searchers decide based on those 10 links which site most closely meets their needs, and away they go. If Google doesn’t consider your site relevant or important enough to include in those 10 links, you don’t even get considered as an option by searchers. Period. Each time this happens is a lost opportunity to reach new customers or to market to those who already know your brand.

Businesses can improve their chances of success by understanding how to influence the process. That’s what SEO is all about.

Read the whole article at » Inc. Well

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Migrating Your Site? SEO Checklist

Excerpts from my latest article at Practical eCommerce: “SEO Site Migration Checklist.”

Migrating a site to a new platform or domain, or implementing a major redesign, are some of the most stressful situations in search engine optimization. The potential for massively impacting organic search traffic and sales is higher during these launches than at any other time. With planning and priority on the SEO impact of the launch it’s possible to actually improve SEO performance after a major launch event.

However, most sites neglect to include an SEO professional in the planning, design, development and launch phases of the project, typically resulting in a loss of SEO performance post-launch. While an experienced SEO professional can certainly come in afterwards to guide the team through a strategy to revive the site’s SEO performance, this process typically takes three to six months of planning, rework from the design and development teams, and a loss of traffic and revenue in the interim.

Speaking from experience helping clients through many platform changes, redesigns, domain moves and other assorted SEO pitfalls, these are my best tips for arriving at the other end of the launch with your SEO safely intact.

Read the article in full for 2,000 words worth of SEO site migration tips at Practical eCommerce »

Migrating a site is always a complex process and should always include an SEO professional. Just as a marketing team wouldn’t dream of replatforming or redesigning without information architecture expertise, the same logic needs to apply to search engine optimization. The stakes are too high in terms of organic search traffic and revenue to risk cutting corners on SEO.

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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SEO Impact of Ratings, Reviews and Comments

My latest article at Practical Ecommerce, read it in full here.

 

Content that consumers leave on an ecommerce site can improve the site’s search engine optimization, if the platforms and underlying code are set up optimally. Ratings, reviews and comments each play a part in SEO, utilizing the words and opinions that real shoppers voice to strengthen optimization.

In aggregate, these types of content fall under the label of user-generated content. I wrote in more detail about reviews and SEO here, in “SEO: Letting Customers Generate Long Tail Search Terms.” The gist of that article still stands. Optimizing a site manually for the millions of phrases that could drive one or two converting customers just isn’t scalable. User generated content such as reviews and question-and-answer sections can solve the problem by outsourcing long tail optimization to your own customers. In addition to reviews, though, ratings and comments have their place in ecommerce SEO as well.

Reviews for SEO

When review content displays on the relevant product page, it boosts the keyword theme for that individual product page. Most reviews vendors — such as Bazaarvoice — offer product variations that display the reviews on the product pages in a crawlable manner, but some don’t. At the same time, Google and Bing are getting better at crawling the JavaScript that has traditionally kept crawlers out of juicy review content. An easy way to check whether reviews content is crawlable is to just Google a random chunk of the review content and see if it appears in the search results.

For example, the Asics Women’s GEL-Blur 33 on Shoes.com has six reviews. But are they crawlable? To find out, copy a unique-looking chunk of a review and Google it in quotes like this:

“Asics have never let me down! I love these shoes because they look good and they provide awesome support for all kinds of workouts and the best part is I can wear them out and get tons of compliments!”

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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8 SEO Reasons to Crawl Your Sites

My latest article at Ecommerce Developer, read it in full here.

 

The first thing I do when working with a new site is set my favorite crawler on it. This gets me acquainted with all the URLs, site sections, interlinkings, forgotten pockets, scars and warts. A good crawler offers a wealth of data useful not just to search engine optimization, but also to site maintenance in general.

Luckily, some great crawlers are free. You’ll find pages of options just by Googling “web crawler” or a similar term. Xenu Link Sleuth is my favorite for the price — it’s free — and for the broad assortment of data collected on every URL it crawls. GSite Crawler is another good, free alternative. It’s focused mainly on creating XML sitemaps and feeds, but it’s good for other uses as well.

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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XML Sitemaps: Dexy’s Midnight Runners of SEO

Yesterday on the train, Brian R. Brown and I were chatting about orphaned pages, XML sitemaps and indexation without benefits. Brian referred to XML sitemaps as the “one hit wonder of SEO.” Brilliant! XML sitemaps, like Dexy’s Midnight Runners, are one hit wonders.

Dexy’s Midnight Runners, for those of you who missed the 80s, are famous for their one hit “Come on, Eileen.” XML sitemaps are famous for inviting the crawl. And just like Dexy’s Midnight Runners don’t have any other great songs, XML sitemaps really don’t provide anything other than a way to request that search engine spiders crawl your site. This comparison just begs for a Weird Al-style lyrics mod:

Come on Crawl Me,
I swear (well he means)
At this sitemap
You’ll find everything…

Actually Blondie’s “Call Me” was screaming for a “Crawl Me” spoof, but you can hardly call Blondie a one-hit wonder. Anyway, back to XML sitemaps.

What XML Sitemaps Do

  • Invite search engines to crawl specific URLs

What XML Sitemaps Do Not Do

  • Guarantee crawling of URLs included in the XML sitemap
  • Block crawling of URLs not included in the XML sitemap
  • Guarantee indexation
  • Improve rankings
  • Drive traffic or sales
It reminds me of  the horseshoe nail proverb:
For want of the crawl indexation was lost.
For want of indexation rankings were lost.
For want of rankings the visitors were lost.
For want of visitors the site was lost.
And all for the want of a crawl.
I’m taking a few liberties, but the premise is the same. No crawl, no organic search visitors. End of story. In this regard, XML sitemaps play a role in the initial discovery of your URLs.

 

The XML sitemap rolls out the red carpet and invites search engines to crawl and index the URLs you’ve so thoughtfully included. This, in turn, can increase indexation for large, complex sites that contain of thousands of pages. On such sites it could take even a committed bot (like Googlebot) many visits to crawl the whole site, especially if it keeps encountering duplicate content. Less thorough bots (I’m looking at you Bingbot) might take even longer to discover new content. A conscientiously updated and autodiscoverable XML sitemap helps bots find new URLs, which should speed time to indexation and rankings if the content is valuable.

 

Learn more about XML sitemaps at Google Webmaster Tools.

 

PS: “Come on, Eileen” makes me involuntarily dance like Elaine. It’s not pretty but I love the song anyway.
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Originally posted on Web PieRat.