What every Web Developer should know about SEO
polemicdigital.com
polemicdigital.com
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/...
You can do a good enough job by sending such requests to a PhantomJS instance, waiting for the page to load, outputting the PhantomJS-rendered HTML to the browser, and saving the HTML to a cache for faster access next time.[1]
There are also plenty of SaaS apps that will handle the pre-rendering for you.
An additional bonus of doing this is that you can intercept requests from engines and services that don't support _escaped_fragment (e.g. Facebook external hit), and always ensure that you serve pre-rendered HTML to them. (e.g. by matching on the user-agent string).
[1a] One potential hitch is knowing when a page has finished rendering. You could potentially set a variable in your code and have PhantomJS wait for that.
[1b] One other hitch is that it's possible for PhantomJS to time out e.g. waiting for an external JS library to load. It's sensible to check that your HTML output looks vaguely sane before sending to the browser (e.g. for Angular, make sure there are no {{ }} blocks in the HTML), and sending a temporary error code if something looks odd.
For one of our sites, the Angular router redirects the user to a "true" 404 page if the in-app page cannot be found, along with the troublesome URL.
For example:
https://example.com/products/name-does-not-exist/
Will do a JS redirect to:
https://example.com/not-found/?url=/products/name-does-not-e...
The /not-found/ URL serves a "true" 404 response.
We're still in early days, and have very little data to back up the pros or cons of doing it this way.
All I can say with any certainty is that for the several months now we have zero "soft" 404s listed in Webmaster Tools.
Hehe, as I say, take it with a grain of salt, as I have very little real data to back it up with :)
Search engines make their money from advertising your site, _not_ from sending you free traffic via SEO. So fire up your credit card and buy some Adwords in key search terms for your business, that's want they want from you. I believe we are already in the post-SEO age of the Internet, maybe we have been for a few years now.
Could you expand on this? I'm interested in your thoughts.
Sure! Here goes...
SEO was supposed to give you a competitive advantage, with your highly-optimized site appearing ahead of your (supposedly) less-optimized rivals in the search rankings. With the majority of above-the-fold space on Google being taken up by ads, those looking for free traffic via organic SEO are really just fighting for scraps.
For the past few years, the companies I have been working with have been competing for rankings on relevant search key terms on Adwords with their rivals, meaning the guys with the biggest advertising budgets wins (and Google wins either way). Organic SEO does not suit Google, in terms of their business model. They want you to pay for placement.
It seems like you get diminishing returns on SEO. What's the point at which you'd recommended a site stop SEO and try other means of maximizing exposures. What would these other means be?
Correct.
> It seems like you get diminishing returns on SEO.
I agree, better to spend the money on ads than SEO consultancy.
> What's the point at which you'd recommended a site stop SEO and try other means of maximizing exposures. What would these other means be?
I consider SEO at this point to be about breaking even with the search engine bots: if your _don't_ do it then they might actually penalize you (e.g. your site is slow, you have broken links, broken redirects etc.), but if you do optimize then they will take benign view of you, but not necessarily a favorable one.
Most people are going to use a search engine if all they get are paid ads. People go to Google for the organic results and sometimes the paid ads are useful for those people. It's still in Google's best interest to provide the most relevant organic results as possible.
Most businesses I've worked with still get more revenue from organic than paid and even if the percentages change, it's mostly from increased paid spend leading to more revenue and not decreasing organic revenue.
Most people will just click on the first few "results", even if they are in fact ads. They can hardly tell the difference. That's why businesses are paying so much to be on top of certain lucrative search key terms: if they we not getting a return on their advertising spend, then they would not be spending it.
My main point is, even if your website is horribly un-optimized in terms of SEO, if you have a bucket of cash to spend on Adwords, you will still get a tonne of traffic. SEO in this instance is almost irrelevant.
You main point is valid. You can buy traffic from lots of places and that traffic is often very good. But organic traffic can still make up a big part of your revenue and shouldn't be ignored.
Our organic efforts are much more fruitful.
I do not agree. A competitor with an optimized page will pay less and rank higher even in the payed result. It is not as simple as the one who payes the most will rank highest, Google has a quality score for Adwords landing pages that will effect your ranking in the payed result as well as what you pay per click.
Incorrect. Specific percentages vary from study to study, but on average no more than 30% of clicks on a search results page are on ads, leaving 70%+ for organic results.
Remember that SEO is optimization. It can't replace ads, but the more traffic you can get organically, the more profit you can make, and then you'll have more to spend on ads. It's a virtuous cycle.
And success is relative. If you're not doing any SEO, and your competitor does it half-assed, well, then their average visitor cost is going to be less than yours--and that's a competitive advantage.
SEO is likely depreciating gradually as Google gets better at 1) devaluing link spam and 2) accessing and assessing website content for its meaning, but it's unlikely to ever be perfect at doing either.
People should be focusing on building sites right, not relying on dirty hacks to get their sites indexed of using Javascript etc.
You can actually rank quite well and get respectable clicks if you just build your site well and create a good action plan to actually optimise your site over a set period of time.
Or you know, go to BlackHatWorld and fall for one of their scams to promises super trusty backlinks that'll rank your site.
So, in other words, by doing SEO right.
If you think SEO is 'dirty hacks', then you obviously don't know SEO.
I think trying to rank for "car insurance," for example, as a new company is a fool's errand with how much work it would take to overthrow one of the big guys, but that doesn't mean there aren't thousands (if not millions) of other relevant monthly searches you could go after while you grow a business.
I dabble in SEO quite a lot because I see return on it (B2B SaaS company), and it's still relatively a wild west. Things are always changing, and it pays to be on top of it.
1. Don't let the new HTML5 tags distract or confuse you. Google knows how to deal with traditional DIVs so only use the new tags (example: SECTION, ASIDE) if you know how to properly implement.
2. Maintainability is a big one for page speed optimizations. You can easily get 95% there but that remaining 5% often comes at the expense of maintenance, and the ability to see/make changes easily.
3. Can't agree more with the section on redirects. 301's are often forgotten and can cause issues down the road with SEO and site functions.
4. The last tip I would add would be to monitor 404/access logs. Often times they will reveal SEO problems.
Agreed. You might be able to gain a percentage point by inlining some vital CSS rules, but without hellish attention to details, that way madness lies.
"From a development point of view SEO is the concern of how well a robot can read and understand your content. As we will see, a robot being able to read your content easily is normally a good thing for humans too."
I don't think we need different points of view of what SEO is. SEO is about getting your page ranked as high as possible for whatever keywords you're targeting. Technical execution is a tactic that supports that, not a different view of it.
A constantly updated and properly marked up site map is also good to have.
It works like an aggregator of all the existing speed tools and provides a nice speed testing resource that is outside my local network.
Google recommends kebab-case and will afford a small SEO bump accordingly.
What you should know about SEO, is that it's all about getting organic links to your content, and having content that has a semantic connection to the keywords being searched for.
On that note, is there even even one example of assistive technology that uses semantic markup? As I understand it ARIA tags are needed for this, semantic markup is irrelevant since most (all?) assistive technology is outdated as far as browser technology goes.
Developers should also know that creating good technical content and open source projects on your site will over time generate links and attention for your website. While those links aren't going directly to your product pages, the long term benefit of those pages linking back to your main company pages/products will help those pages rank, which makes you money. It's a bit indirect, but still is worthwhile.
Reason being - all too often I see SEO developers use this as a hook to sell their services to clients to be able to get into their codebase.
Moreover, Google has come out and said it's a factor. Not that we can always trust everything Google says, but in this case it aligns well with their efforts to optimise crawl efficiency. Faster loading websites means more efficient crawling, which helps Google.
And if Google recommends something it benefits from itself, it's a safe bet to assume it actually benefits your website's visibility in Google's search results as well. Google is, after all, very adept at the carrot & stick approach to making webmasters do what it wants them to.
I first thought the article is written on similar lines of sarcasm.