Lucas Callado | Blog    About    Archive

15 Mar 2016

Search Engine Optimization – Quick guide & Best practices

I’ve been collecting some info on SEO. I just wanted to share all what I think is a very valuable info and references:

Optimal Format

http://www.foo.io/category-keyword/subcategory-keyword/primary-keyword.html

 

A well-crafted URL should semantically make sense.

URLs with duplicate content should have canonical URLs specified for them; there should be no confusing redirects on the site (two maximum redirects).

The word “canonical” simply means “preferred” in this case. Picking a preferred (canonical) URL becomes necessary when search engines see duplicate pages on your site.

Add the following code to the <head> section of the page. Use absolute paths rather than relative — http://foo.io/*

<link rel="canonical" href="#" />

Google @ “Use Canonical URLs”

 

When search engines arrive on a page with a canonical tag, they attribute the page to the canonical URL, regardless of the URL they used to reach the page.

So, for example, if a bot reached the above page using the URL http://foo.io/index.html, the search engine would not index the additional, non-canonical URL.

Typically, it seems that inbound link-juice is also passed through the canonical tag.

 

Underscores, while legal, are problematic for SEO. It’s an issue search engines have always dealt with but never solved.

Search engines see underscores as connectors. Ex: blue_doll = blue_doll, and blue-doll = blue doll

To separate words, use dashes.

Not recommended characters on URLs:

Space %20
Quotation marks %22
< %3C
> %3E
# %23
Percentage %25

 

For the discussion on case sensitive URLs and SEO the rule of thumb is to keep everything lowercase, unless there is intent for the capitalization.

For the discussion on sub-folders the rule of thumb is to keep things clean, try to have the least possible number of sub-folders. But keep in mind that a well-structured website three won’t make a bad impact on rankings.

 

Create an XML Sitemap

This helps search engines find your site’s pages more easily; Use Google Developers Console (former Google Webmaster Tools), and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Search engines can use the Sitemap as a reference when choosing canonical URLs on your site. Create a Sitemap structure for each language on the site (e.g. sitemap-FR.xml, sitemap-DE.xml, sitemap-ES.xml, and so on) and reference those files from a main sitemap file (sitemap.xml).

sitemap.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap><loc>http://foo.io/sitemap-EN.xml</loc><lastmod>2014-10-28</lastmod></sitemap>
<sitemap><loc>http://foo.io/sitemap-FR.xml</loc><lastmod>2014-10-28</lastmod></sitemap>
<sitemap><loc>http://foo.io/sitemap-DE.xml</loc><lastmod>2014-10-28</lastmod></sitemap>
<sitemap><loc>http://foo.io/sitemap-IT.xml</loc><lastmod>2014-10-28</lastmod></sitemap>
<sitemap><loc>http://foo.io/sitemap-ES.xml</loc><lastmod>2014-10-28</lastmod></sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

sitemap-EN.xml

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<urlset xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd"
        xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:example="http://www.example.com/schemas/example_schema">
  <url>
    <loc>http://foo.io/en/index.html</loc>
    <lastmod>2014-10-15</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.7</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>http://foo.io/en/another-page.html</loc>
    <lastmod>2014-09-17</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.7</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

Regardless of how smart you are to trick search engines with strategies like keyword stuffing it all comes down to content. Make relevant content very measurable.

It’s all about developing relevant and comprehensive content for users dealing with more than just one aspect of a certain topic.

The conclusion for the basics of SEO is also understanding that a low quality blog post once a week is far less valuable than collecting details on a single subject for a month and putting something outstanding out for readers to consume.

I keep an excellent article for my own reference:

Why Quality Content Focuses on Topics, not Keywords @ https://moz.com/blog/searchmetrics-ranking-factors-2014

Here is his conclusion that I agree 100%.

“Don’t build landing pages for single keywords. And don’t build landing pages for search engines, either. Focus on topics related to your website/content/niche/product and try to write the best content for these topics and subtopics. Create landing pages dealing with several, interdependent aspects of main topics and write comprehensive texts using semantically closely related terms. This is how you can optimize the user experience as well as your rankings…”

 

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