SEO for Developers

the absolutely essentials

Understanding Requests

• GET not POST where appropriate

• Expose (POST) Hidden URLs

• Use HTML AND XML sitemaps

Discovery

• Faster indexing = More traffic

• Use RSS / PubSubHub / RPC pings

• Bounce off Realtime platforms e.g. Twitter / Friendfeed

• Link REL helps Google discover RSS

Links• Use Link Text on internal and

external links where you can

• Use ALT text on images - its a substitute for link text where images linked

• Rel nofollow - affiliate links, and links you don’t trust.

HTML

• H1 - H5 - Use keywords in Headings

• Title Tag - Again, important for keywords,

• ..More important for search CTR

• Keep your content high up the page

HTML cont.• Microformats enhance SERPs - e.g.

Product Reviews

• Use Meta Descriptions to improve CTR

• ..don’t forget about social web snippets e.g. OpenGraph protocol

• Semantic HTML naturally reflects page structure - easier to crawl.

Duplicate Content

• Wastes crawl budget

• Splits link equity / pagerank

• Results in pages either being merged or dropped in Google

Pagination

• Redirect or REL=canonical on duplicate paging scenarios.

• Use rel=prev and rel=next in your link markup

URLs

• Cool URLs dont change - maintain link equity when rebuilding a site

• Keep keywords in your URLs

• Separate words with dashes not underscores.

• Understand which status code to use when redirecting

Status Codes

• 200 OK - things are ok.

• Use 410 Gone for faster removal

• Make sure 301 not 302 used when migrating content

• Log your 500 errors

Crawl Quota

• Google crawls in descending pagerank order

• Google has a limited crawl budget

• Bigger for bigger sites (with higher Pagerank)

• Impacted by duplicate content

• Can be diagnosed from server logs

Rich content

• Avoid Flash where possible

• Enhance HTML with Javascript

• Don’t use lots of document writes to generate HTML

• Don’t hide valuable content server side

• Full article:

• http://www.webdistortion.com/?p=11547

• Follow me: @webireland