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By Michael Mazzone, Fathom SEO's Sr. Account Executive
What is the most important element when building a house, an education, a sports franchise, etc? The answer is both logical and simple - a strong foundation. Once that foundation is put in place, adding snazzy details can really finish off a truly worthwhile product.
The same is true in regards to SEO. You can have oodles of experts teaching you the best keyword research techniques, the optimal keyword saturation for your page content, fantastic METAs and Title Tags, credible inbound links from reputable websites, viable link bait, and so on. While those garner so much attention (as well they should), your website may not get the full benefit if the proper Technical SEO principles are not in place.
Search Engine Robots are extremely logical entities. While they can process, index, qualify, and rank an infinite number of pages in one second, they are still bound by the limits of logic. The human element can interpret intent, read text embedded with an image and enjoy the smooth flow of an interactive flash element. Robots simply read code. There is no interpretive learning curve, though Google and Bing (Yahoo!) keep improving their programs at an impressive rate.
Why does this matter you ask? If a Robot cannot read the information on your site – no matter how amazing and valuable – you will not organically rank and have human eyeballs and wallets visit your site. Prime your website with the right core technical elements. Once that foundation is as solid as a core basketball team of Michael Jordan, Dr. J, Wilt Chamberlin, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, only then will all those well-developed optimization tactics yield the reward you seek.
While building the Technical SEO evaluation of your website ask yourself the following questions:
How do I improve my website's caching frequency and quality to the Search Engines?
- Use the various Webmaster Tools from the different engines. Submit your sitemaps. Correct reported crawling errors.
- Actively manage your search engine-specific XML sitemaps. Ensure the sitemaps are updated each time a new page is added.
- Ensure a robots.txt file exists at the root domain and is properly set up to ensure only the pages that need indexed are identified. Robots.txt is the first file search engines look for when crawling a website. It can also act as a "No Trespassing" sign for private content on the site.
- Implement consistent internal linking. This decreases the amount of wasted time Search Engine Robots crawl a site.
- Quality caching can often be negatively impacted by having dilution from too many subdomains or pages with duplicate content.
- The closer the code on the site is built to W3C compliance standards, the less likely Robots will get lost in messy code. Also, incorporate Includes where appropriate to simplify the code. This is perfect for lengthy navigations and complex elements like some JavaScripts.
What makes my website easier for a Search Engine Robot to crawl and digest my content?
- Make sure that the navigation is readable to search engines.
- Check that there is a logical flow to the pages and links in the navigation. Keep the most important content only a few clicks deep from the home page.
- "NoFollow" and "NoIndex" tags should be installed across the website to ensure search engines do not waste time on irrelevant pages on the website.
- Build a directory structure for the pages on the website.
- Institute the proper server-side redirecting strategies. Incorporate 301 redirects for permanent redirects and 302's for temporary redirects. This sends the correct header and status of a page to the search engines and builds credibility for the structure of your website.
- 404 Error Pages are equally important to sign that a search engine lands on a missing URL. Creating custom 404 Error Pages with navigation built in for the user can further build credibility in the eyes of a search engine.
- Ensure the correct fields – Title Tags, Headers, META Descriptions, META Keywords, and Navigation/Menu Items – are all independently editable. Each page of content on a website is unique. Make sure the fields mentioned can reflect the focus of each page with proper keyword insertion.
- When building the URL structure, keep the URLs concise and flexible enough to include keywords. Take advantage of potentially rewriting dynamic URLs to SEO- and user-friendly URLs.
- Convert text that is embedded in images into text overlaying images.
- Be wary of having large headers/flash movies at the top of a page that pushes the content down on the page. Search engines read left to right and top to bottom. Keep the most important text (headers and leads) as close to the top of the page as possible.
