Conference Buddies

Speakers:
Vanessa Fox
Adam Audette
Derrick Wheeler
Track: SEO

Has something gone wrong with your organic search engine traffic? An SEO audit might be in order. This session covers how to conduct an efficient audit that troubleshoots real problems, rather than taking you down blind alleys. It also helps you reassess your current SEO efforts for areas that can be tweaked and improved.

Speaker: Derrick Wheeler

CIRTA:

Crawl
Index
Rank
Traffic
Action

Six Steps to Sucess:

Organic Search Engine Optimization is the process of systematically satisfying the needs of search engines and the needs of your users.

1. search engine crawls entire site
2. search engine indexes entire site
3. users perform targeted queries
4. search engine ranks appropriate pages
5. users click on ranked listings
6. users take action and/or interact with the site

You Should Track SE Ranking on a Monthly Basis:

• Your top keyword list
• Your long tail keyword list
• User paths
• Success events
• Value of user

Speaker: Adam Audette

Outrider (’97), AudetteMedia, Oversee SEO at Zappos, Lead SEO strategy at AKQA

Site Audits are extremely intensive

• Rely on experience
• Problem solving is crucial
• Basics can easily be taught
• Takes time to learn deeply

Part Art:

• Follow your nose
• Use your experience
• Requires diligence
• Requires trust

Part Science:

• Use tools to diagnose
• Undergo calculate investigation
• Check for set factors
• Document everything

Factors Investigated:

• Main navigation elements
• General navigation items
• URL

A Framework for SEO audits:

On-page:

• Domains
• Sections and categories
• Pages
• Media (Images, video, etc.)

Off-Page:

• Back-links (quantity, quality)
• Social media signals
• Cache date(s), indexed pages
• Toolbar PageRank

Big 4 Factors:

1. URLs
2. Site Architecture & Navigation
3. Product-level Pages
4. Site Latency

What about Deliverables:

• Summarize
• Keep it Prioritized
• Keep it Actionable
• Build in Follow-up
• Sizzle Matters (presentation matters, professional, visuals)

Executive Summary

Priority level = High Medium Low

Documenting Issues:

• Problem
• Impact
• Recommended Solutions

Some Cool Tools:

• Google Searches
  site: + inurl: / intitle:
• Lynx / SEO-browser.com
• Charles / ySlow (checks latency)
• Various Toolbars
  SEO Book Toolbar – compare up to 5 URLs together
• Google WAVE

Other Tools:

• Linkscape
• SEMRush
• wget
• Log Analysis

Speaker: Vanessa Fox

Tools and Tactics for Diagnostics

• webmaster.live.com
• siteexplorer.yahoo.com
• Google Analytics
• tools.seobook.com
• firefox plugins

Crawling, Indexing, Ranking

Step 1: Get the data

Benchmark the top 10 search queries that bring in the most traffic
Aaron wall’s rank checker

Crawl Log Example: Apache Log Analyzer 2 Feed
code.simonecarletti.com/wiki/apachelog2feed

For SEO: Site latency = indexing factor = if site not crawled then it’s a ranking factor

AJAX = URL needs to change (don’t keep the same URL for all content/pages)

URL structure Checklist

Crawl efficiency checklist

No Follow -> registration pages, add to cart shopping cart pages, etc.

1. Check if you are penalized
   webmaster.live.com
   google.com/webmasters
2. Review the webmaster guidelines
3. Identify the issue
4. Fix it!
5. Request re-evaluations

For SEO: site optimization, main site errors, http://www.iis.net/extensions/seotoolkit/