3. Search Engines
comScore February 2011 Rankings
Google AOL
Bing Ask
65.6% 1.7% Yahoo
13.1%
3.4%
16.1%

4. Why?

5. “SEO Expert”

6. == “Spammer”

7. White Hat vs.
Black Hat

9. Discovery +
Navigation

10. A Story...

16. “Not my audience!”

17. “Not my audience!”

18. “Experts” Not Needed

19. Professional Practices
• User-Centric Design
• Test-Driven Development
• DRY and Maintainable Code
• Server Performance
• Client-Side Performance
• Search Engine Considerations

20. 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

21. Search Engine Pipeline
• Crawling
• Indexing
• Ranking

22. <crawling>

23. Discovery
• Links to your pages from other sites
• Links to your pages from within your site
• Your sitemap.xml

24. Check internal links
$ wget --mirror

25. 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

26. <?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>

27. 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.

28. robots.txt
• Exclusion rather than inclusion
• robotstxt.org
User-agent: *
Disallow: /profile

29. 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.

30. </crawling>

31. <indexing>

32. 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.

33. </indexing>

34. <ranking>

35. <title>
• Most important element to search
engines
• Think long and hard about it
• Keywords! Think like a searcher.
• Best format: Page Title | Site Name

39. URLs
• Override to_param for pretty URLs.
• Dashes are word separators,
underscores are not. Use dashes.
• International domains are treated as
such.

40. <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

41. 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.

42. Rich Snippets
• Microformats, RDFa, Microdata

43. </ranking>

44. Tools
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Bing Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo! Site Explorer

59. Five Takeaways
• Think like a searcher
• Create a sitemap.xml
• Optimize your <title>s
• Use Google Webmaster Tools
• Read the Google Webmaster Blog