Search Engines

65.6% 1.7%

13.1%

3.4%

16.1%

comScore February 2011 Rankings

Google AOLBing AskYahoo

Why?

“SEO Expert”

== “Spammer”

White Hat vs.Black Hat

Discovery +Navigation

A Story...

“Not my audience!”

“Not my audience!”

“Experts” Not Needed

Professional Practices• User-Centric Design

• Test-Driven Development

• DRY and Maintainable Code

• Server Performance

• Client-Side Performance

• Search Engine Considerations

Six Simple Rules• Can’t outsmart Google (or Bing or Y!)

• Follow Google’s advice

• Obey conventions and standards

• Stay away from hacks

• Understand how search engines work

• Think like a searcher

Search Engine Pipeline• Crawling

• Indexing

• Ranking

<crawling>

Discovery• Links to your pages from other sites

• Links to your pages from within your site

• Your sitemap.xml

Check internal links

$ wget --mirror

sitemap.xml• Tell search engines exactly what you

want them to crawl

• sitemaps.org

• Limit per sitemap: 50,000 URLs, 10MB

• Can specify multiple sitemaps with a sitemap index

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">   <url>      <loc>http://example.com/about</loc>      <lastmod>2010-01-01</lastmod>      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>      <priority>0.8</priority>   </url></urlset>

Generating sitemap.xml• Write it by hand, stick it in public/

• Build a controller, action, and route entry to respond to ‘sitemap.xml’. Use XML Builder to generate the entries. Cache it.

• Importantly: Strive for 100% coverage.

robots.txt• Exclusion rather than inclusion

• robotstxt.org

User-agent: *Disallow: /profile

Be nice to the crawler• Be performant. Fast server response.

Fast page load. Compress files. Use if-modified-since header.

• Non-www vs. www - pick one.

• Ensure unique content. Use <link rel=”canonical”/> where approriate.

</crawling>

<indexing>

Don’t sabotage it• Don’t use a 302 redirect when you

mean a 301 redirect.

• Make sure images, video, Flash, Silverlight, and AJAX are accessible.

• See the Google Webmaster Central Blog for details.

• Region-specific content? Think about the bots.

</indexing>

<ranking>

<title>• Most important element to search

engines

• Think long and hard about it

• Keywords! Think like a searcher.

• Best format: Page Title | Site Name

URLs• Override to_param for pretty URLs.

• Dashes are word separators, underscores are not. Use dashes.

• International domains are treated as such.

<meta>• <meta name=”description” content=”...” />

• Make it unique for every page. Use content_for.

• Shown to users, doesn’t affect ranking.

• <meta name=”keywords” ... /> is ignored

Headings and Content• <h> tags should be used appropriately.

• Page content should match what the <title> and <h> tags refer to.

• Limit use of text-indent:-9999px and display:none in CSS.

Rich Snippets• Microformats, RDFa, Microdata

</ranking>

Tools• Google Webmaster Tools

• Bing Webmaster Tools

• Yahoo! Site Explorer

Five Takeaways• Think like a searcher

• Create a sitemap.xml

• Optimize your <title>s

• Use Google Webmaster Tools

• Read the Google Webmaster Blog