I really wanted ya'll to feel comfortable...
... so, I'm presenting this from GitHub as a PRESENTME.md 👇
(Hey, everyone has to have a secret talent,
mine just happens to be markdown...
silentTears(lackOfTalent))
...awkoTacoPause()... 🌮
Anyways, let's get started()!
A response: We know that 70%* of the work we ask devs to do can cause trauma, but we don't want it to.
Most SEOs would rather do strategic, data-driven, and insightful work. 👩💻
So, today, we're going to go through some ways we can improve our mutual happiness! 😀
- link tags with canonical attributes (SEOs can provide what values canonical tags should be)
- meta robots tags (99.99% (repeating of course) should NOT have
noindex) - any Schema your site has
- h1 tag
- title tags
- meta descriptions
- XML sitemap (assert 200 HTTP status code and includes top KPI-driving URLs)
- robots.txt
- (if you prerender or give bots SSR version) content is appearing
- XML sitemap creation
- image compression
Neither Dev nor SEOs are robots
3. 99%* of SEOs don't care what JS framework you use, just make sure bots can render it (we do care about that) (and mayyyybe weight of the framework...)
- if you want to not deal with hassle of prerendered pages, just commit to making it isomorphic/universal/SSR JS from the beginning
- biggest challenge with bot-versions - if the bot-versions break... it can be hard to catch (so make sure that checks are automated)
- great chart by @eywu:
- if you have templates that are constant, just roll in microdata (wrap components)
- otherwise, just make a section for JSON-LD (it's a tiny baby
<script>), so we can throw a baby script in there- side note: I would probably validate in Google's Structured Data Testing Tool whatever your team sends you (buuuut that's just because I have trust issues...aaaaand security)
- side note two: if you use React think about rolling schema into a component (tip from my man @eywu)
We want our unstructured textual data to be clearly annotated for a machine:
- give us some creative space, let our creative wings sour....
- ... maybe near the footer or something
- especially on product category pages
👩🎨
6. we'll probably want a blog or thought-leadership-influencer-section of the site, just give us our creative
- it's probably easier to just add a site section with WP
7. if you have access to any clean API data and can do some sort of mad-lib, computer generated text for useful information on pages
- especially when there are many pages, we'll probably like it
- we want each page to have a purpose that is clear in its textual content
- visuals are becoming more important, buuuut most SEOs still focus a lot on textual content
- look at Google's lighthouse and the page speed insight tool and you'll get 80%* of what most SEOs will tell you
- use your SEO friend to start a war to remove tracking pixels from the site, let them fight for you
- tell your SEO you refactor your code on a monthly basis (and review legacy code for potential technical debt...)
- find a way to remove any unused JS and CSS in production (invent a product that does this for all sites, become the next lesser-known Bill Gates)
Things we care a lot about and will probably lose our minds over... haha... haha... hahahahahahaa ⊙_ʘ
9. breathe with me.... okay... one more.... 301 redirects are the only valid redirect to permanently move a URL... ah... didn’t that feel good ☺️
- it did... (thank you past self for your encouraging words)
- use 302s for testing and temporary moves
break; // from crazy loop
- main navigation
- footers
- contextual links
- "related" links
- anchor text (we'll be looking for relevant, highly search terms)
- (maybbbbeee additional
rel=""attributes to<a>tags (likenofollow,sponsored, andugc)
- Note:
<a>tags is how all internal links are connected, don't get fancy on us. - Side note: if you're a fan of graph theory; ultimately we want a connected, directed graph (where all vertexes (i.e., pages), have an edge (i.e., links) with edges that make sense.
- In a way, it's almost like building roads! We need roads to get people from city to city, but roads should make sense.
# resolving duplicate content
if (you can demolish page) {
301 redirect page;
}
else if (you can't demolish page) {
use canonical tags;
}
else {
get a new CMS; //kidding... but only kind of kidding
}
- side note: there could also be "duplicate content" generated from sites that have "thin" textual content
- think about how the robots feel... for once, already
- buuut seriously, just a URL, title tag, and heading tag are not enough to rank as the best result on the entire web
12. we care a little about conversion optimization (b/c we can't stand getting traffic to the site and then it not converting!!)
- so, you'll probably hear some basic stuff from us like -> make CTA buttons on the top half of the page, make them a color that stands out...ya know, the basics
13. we also want to be on HTTPS (w/ HSTS of course), mostly because google said they use it as a ranking factor, buuut also because it's a more secure format that allows for the encryption of user's probably private browsing information 🔐
- other than HTTPS, most of us won't talk to you about XSS, SQL injections, DoS, etc.; we assume you got that (thanks developer buddy)
14. if you have a lot of 3rd party writers, we'll want some system (like Yoast) that helps writers in their workflow
- literally just copying from Yoast (for WP plugin) tool...
- what is the primary keyword?
- is primary keyword in the title tag?
- is meta description added?
- are images present? (cough... and optimized)
- are internal links on the page?
- does keyword density look reasonable for a human being?
- relevant outbound links present?
- is content the optimal content length?
- are there subheadings? (so we can all skim the content)
- what is the ease of reading (Flesch)?
- using active voice?
1. we come from a ton of different backgrounds (business, CS, music (we have both players, producers), writing, veterinarians, etc...)
- this means we could potentially be really hard to communicate w/, since you don't know what you're getting
- we probably know a lot about completely random things from black-box testing the crud out of the website,
- which may make our requirements spotty
- tell us if we're being unclear (hold us accountable to clarity)
- we will rely on your help with the white-box side of the site
- which may make our requirements spotty
2. in the past SEO and SEs used to not like each other (if you've read an IR textbook, you'll probably find a chapter on us). In today’s world, we work together to bother developers, into doing things like:
- improving site speed
- going secure
- implementing structured data (mostly semantic HTML and Schema.org)
- making content renderable and accessible to bots
- some accessibility requests (ARIA, heading tags, alt-text, and such)
- (asking for the sites log files to find out whether or not googlebot is crawling appropriately)
Chapter from university IR textbook:
pause(); //pause neverending struggle
- link tags with canonical attributes
- maybe link tags with hreflang (for international)
- meta robots tags
- schema.org
- semantic HTML
- heading tags
- title tags
- meta descriptions
- XML sitemaps
- more likely where hreflang stuff will be brought up
- robots.txt
- HTTP status code of pages
- https://
- HSTS
- site speed:
- image optimization
- JS code coverage
- CSS coverage
- caching
- maybe PWAs
- mayyybbeeee AMP
- http/2
- http/3
- resource hinting (also known as the pre-* paaaaaaartayyyyy)
- bots ability to render content on pages (including lazy loaded images)
- site content
- mayyyybee personalized content (generally based on cookies)
- let's learn together!
- don't be afraid to ask questions or tell us where you're coming from
- have each page be the best on the internet... (best UX, content, imagery, ambience, vibe, etc.)
- have our site make sense to search engines (particular bots = technical SEO)
- building a website with good technical SEO is following web standards
- standards are the requirements search engines build their systems against
- build a site that follows web standards = an easily interpretable site
- build a site that goes rogue = a more challenging to interpret site (maybe a corner or edge case) *a semi-official percentage (may or may not reflect real life)