Changes

<p>You can&rsquo;t truly have a successful search engine optimization (SEO) program without evaluating your performance over time and knowing how potential technical issues can affect your website from a crawling, indexing and user experience perspective.</p><p>The SEO Diagnostics for the Skilled Search Mechanic panel at last week, moderated by Kristjan Mar Hauksson (), founder and director of Search &amp; Online Communications at Nordic eMarketing, brought together some very useful ideas on monitoring and getting the most out of your search results, being prepared to react and fix issues when need be, and knowing what to think about when it comes to the ins and outs of technical SEO.</p>Real-Time SEO Diagnostics: Ways to Lead a Moving Target<p>To kick things off we had Chris Boggs (), CMO of Internet Marketing Ninjas,longchamps, Chairman of SEMPO and also on the Advisory Board of SES, discuss why having a proactive approach to SEO is important, but also being prepared to react at the right time is crucial when it comes to the success of your program. In fact, Boggs recently wrote a Search Engine Watch post around this same topic &ndash;.</p><p>Boggs started off by saying there is no single needle in the haystack that can help you with the success of your site&rsquo;s performance and digital marketing program as a whole. Over time you need to establish the right steps and find the tools that make most sense for your business.</p><p>When it comes to seeing whether your brand has authority in Google&rsquo;s eyes, here are three things you can evaluate:</p><p>Touching more on the brand social presence piece, Boggs went on to say that if you already have your Google+ Business page showing up on the right side of your brand search results, you have the ability to directly communicate in real-time with your target audiences, which is great. You can tell if your social presence is strong if you have that enabled; you can also look at the rest of the seven-pack when/if it appears to see if your social channels are showing there as well.</p><p>So what other proactive tactics did Boggs recommend? Here are some additional tips:</p><p>Shifting focus to reactive SEO tactics, Boggs offered the following advice when things don&rsquo;t exactly go as planned in his PREPARE acronym:</p>Summary of Technical SEO<p>Adam Audette (), Chief Knowledge Officer at RKG, was up next with his information-packed presentation on technical SEO.</p><p>Audette started off by saying that we need to be strategic about what we&rsquo;re doing and why we&rsquo;re doing it,longchamps sac. Technical SEO might make a lower impact on results, but it&rsquo;s highly dependable in terms of control,longchamp sac.</p><p>Before making any changes to your site try and justify your recommendations by putting together projections for your key stakeholders. For example, take the number of pages you think will be impacted by the changes, multiply them by average conversion percentage, or average revenue per page, or average leads per visit, etc. and articulate what kind of increase you&rsquo;ll likely see in traffic, conversions and ultimately revenue as it makes sense.</p><p>Audette touched on the following technical areas:</p><p>Canonical Signals</p><p>There were two main issues that Audette pointed out with Canonical Signals:</p><p>What you want is consistent signals with your URLs across your site. So when search engines start crawling the pages you want everything to line up, from the links in your navigation, to internal links, external backlinks, canonical tags, XML files, etc. If you&rsquo;re able to accomplish this it&rsquo;s incredibly powerful as a signal to search engines and works very well.</p><p>Pagination</p><p>Audette touched on two generally-accepted best practices for pagination:</p><p>Handling Duplicate Content</p><p>There were two main issues that Audette discussed when it comes to handling duplicate content.</p><p>Audette then went on to discuss six tools for managing duplicate content:</p><p>Faceted Navigation</p><p>Audette had three recommendations for dealing with faceted navigation, which are a powerful and easy way for users to search for what they want on your site by selecting their options. They were:</p><p>Product Variations &amp; Inventory</p><p>Audette then went on to identify three basic options to handle product variations: you can either:</p><p>So what happens when products expire and don&rsquo;t come back? If you have review data for products you don&rsquo;t carry, but you want to still leverage the review data (i.e., user-generated content), provide a message that the product is no longer carried on the page, but link to a similar product option.</p><p>Crawling &amp; Response Codes</p><p>There are two main issues that Audette identified here:</p><p>Another thing you can do to help your crawl efficiency is to use 304 not modified for pages that have not changed in a while.</p><p>Site Speed</p><p>There were seven main tips that Audette highlighted for fast sites:</p><p>Mobile</p><p>Companies are seeing more of their overall traffic coming from users on mobile devices, so what do you do to provide a good user experience? Responsive design is in fashion and is a great idea, but it&rsquo;s not for every business. So what other ways are possible? You can</p><p>What issues do you need to consider when it comes to setting up your mobile experience using responsive design? Given that it isn't trivial to do, you have always serve the exact same HTML code and CSS controls the layout, so Google needs to be able to crawl all your JavaScript and CSS.</p><p>Finally, Audette covered some of the advantages of responsive design, which include:</p> <p><br>Want to view one of the sessions you missed or listen to an especially informative presenter a second time? SES New York sessions were recorded and are available for purchase on ClickZ Academy's new e-Learning site.<br></p>

<p>You can&rsquo;t truly have a successful search engine optimization (SEO) program without evaluating your performance over time and knowing how potential technical issues can affect your website from a crawling, indexing and user experience perspective.</p><p>The SEO Diagnostics for the Skilled Search Mechanic panel at last week, moderated by Kristjan Mar Hauksson (), founder and director of Search &amp; Online Communications at Nordic eMarketing, brought together some very useful ideas on monitoring and getting the most out of your search results, being prepared to react and fix issues when need be, and knowing what to think about when it comes to the ins and outs of technical SEO.</p>Real-Time SEO Diagnostics: Ways to Lead a Moving Target<p>To kick things off we had Chris Boggs (), CMO of Internet Marketing Ninjas,longchamps, Chairman of SEMPO and also on the Advisory Board of SES, discuss why having a proactive approach to SEO is important, but also being prepared to react at the right time is crucial when it comes to the success of your program. In fact, Boggs recently wrote a Search Engine Watch post around this same topic &ndash;.</p><p>Boggs started off by saying there is no single needle in the haystack that can help you with the success of your site&rsquo;s performance and digital marketing program as a whole. Over time you need to establish the right steps and find the tools that make most sense for your business.</p><p>When it comes to seeing whether your brand has authority in Google&rsquo;s eyes, here are three things you can evaluate:</p><p>Touching more on the brand social presence piece, Boggs went on to say that if you already have your Google+ Business page showing up on the right side of your brand search results, you have the ability to directly communicate in real-time with your target audiences, which is great. You can tell if your social presence is strong if you have that enabled; you can also look at the rest of the seven-pack when/if it appears to see if your social channels are showing there as well.</p><p>So what other proactive tactics did Boggs recommend? Here are some additional tips:</p><p>Shifting focus to reactive SEO tactics, Boggs offered the following advice when things don&rsquo;t exactly go as planned in his PREPARE acronym:</p>Summary of Technical SEO<p>Adam Audette (), Chief Knowledge Officer at RKG, was up next with his information-packed presentation on technical SEO.</p><p>Audette started off by saying that we need to be strategic about what we&rsquo;re doing and why we&rsquo;re doing it,longchamps sac. Technical SEO might make a lower impact on results, but it&rsquo;s highly dependable in terms of control,longchamp sac.</p><p>Before making any changes to your site try and justify your recommendations by putting together projections for your key stakeholders. For example, take the number of pages you think will be impacted by the changes, multiply them by average conversion percentage, or average revenue per page, or average leads per visit, etc. and articulate what kind of increase you&rsquo;ll likely see in traffic, conversions and ultimately revenue as it makes sense.</p><p>Audette touched on the following technical areas:</p><p>Canonical Signals</p><p>There were two main issues that Audette pointed out with Canonical Signals:</p><p>What you want is consistent signals with your URLs across your site. So when search engines start crawling the pages you want everything to line up, from the links in your navigation, to internal links, external backlinks, canonical tags, XML files, etc. If you&rsquo;re able to accomplish this it&rsquo;s incredibly powerful as a signal to search engines and works very well.</p><p>Pagination</p><p>Audette touched on two generally-accepted best practices for pagination:</p><p>Handling Duplicate Content</p><p>There were two main issues that Audette discussed when it comes to handling duplicate content.</p><p>Audette then went on to discuss six tools for managing duplicate content:</p><p>Faceted Navigation</p><p>Audette had three recommendations for dealing with faceted navigation, which are a powerful and easy way for users to search for what they want on your site by selecting their options. They were:</p><p>Product Variations &amp; Inventory</p><p>Audette then went on to identify three basic options to handle product variations: you can either:</p><p>So what happens when products expire and don&rsquo;t come back? If you have review data for products you don&rsquo;t carry, but you want to still leverage the review data (i.e., user-generated content), provide a message that the product is no longer carried on the page, but link to a similar product option.</p><p>Crawling &amp; Response Codes</p><p>There are two main issues that Audette identified here:</p><p>Another thing you can do to help your crawl efficiency is to use 304 not modified for pages that have not changed in a while.</p><p>Site Speed</p><p>There were seven main tips that Audette highlighted for fast sites:</p><p>Mobile</p><p>Companies are seeing more of their overall traffic coming from users on mobile devices, so what do you do to provide a good user experience? Responsive design is in fashion and is a great idea, but it&rsquo;s not for every business. So what other ways are possible? You can</p><p>What issues do you need to consider when it comes to setting up your mobile experience using responsive design? Given that it isn't trivial to do, you have always serve the exact same HTML code and CSS controls the layout, so Google needs to be able to crawl all your JavaScript and CSS.</p><p>Finally, Audette covered some of the advantages of responsive design, which include:</p> <p><br>Want to view one of the sessions you missed or listen to an especially informative presenter a second time? SES New York sessions were recorded and are available for purchase on ClickZ Academy's new e-Learning site.<br></p>