Presentation from Jerusalem Web Professionals Seminar on Advanced SEO Tactics, delivered in Jerusalem on July 7, 2010.

1. Mark Ginsberg
JWP
July 10, 2012

2.  In Browser
◦ Browser Extensions
 Chrome Sniffer, Mozbar, etc.
◦ SaaS Tools
 SEOMoz campaign tools, and lots more
 Standalone Applications
◦ Screaming Frog SEO Spider
◦ Xenu Link Sleuth
◦ IIS Crawler

3.  Chrome Sniffer - http://bit.ly/NgrMlx
◦ Quickly find out what CMS the site is using, like wordpress, drupal,
magento, prestashop, etc. Click on the
icon for more
info about
◦ Are they using Google Analytics or another analytics tool? the page
◦ Which social plugins do they use?
 Canonical- http://bit.ly/MMPgAY
◦ Shows if page has a canonical tag different from the page you are
currently visiting

4.  SEO Site Tools - http://bit.ly/MMMLyH
◦ Lots of Info about your Site and your page
◦ What type of server are you running?
◦ External link data – PR, data from open APIs – SEOmoz, Alexa, SEMRush, indexed
pages, lots more

5.  Mozbar - http://bit.ly/LyWhWi
◦ Nice clean interface
◦ On page data
◦ Backlinking data
◦ HTTP status codes, canonical tags, and much more

6.  User Agent Switcher- http://bit.ly/OJTJUb
◦ Allows you to change your browser’s user agent
◦ View a webpage as Google does
◦ Use this for checking if website is cloaking

7.  Quirk Search Status-
http://bit.ly/LyYZuZ
◦ Lots of SEO information – like Chrome
plugins previously mentioned
◦ Show other domains on IP – shortcut
to Bing search
◦ Highlights nofollow links – other tools
do this too – I leave this on by default
in Firefox and use Chrome as primary
browser

8.  Web Developer Toolbar- http://bit.ly/Nf7DsH
◦ Disable elements to mimics search engine bots
◦ Quickly disable:
 Cookies
 Css
 Images
 JavaScript
◦ Show link information by default if checking links and are not broken

9.  Is the site trustworthy?
 Would you buy from them?
 What is the site about – does
the homepage convey this?
 Would you give this site your
credit card?

10.  Is the site cloaking – showing different
content to you and Googlebot
 How to Check – view cache in google
◦ In Chrome, just add a cache: to the URL and hit
enter
 Change user agent in Firefox to
Googlebot and then view the page
 Compare to the live version you see in
Chrome and other browsers

11. Normal User Sees What Googlebot Sees
www.kesherisrael.org

12.  In our example – cached version of the
page doesn’t show the cloaking/hack
 Google Instant preview does though
 Always check with multiple resources –
cache, instant, user agent switch
 If detected, work with developer to
clean up

13.  Does the homepage redirect to another page?
◦ What type of redirect – 301 or other?
 www vs non-www- is there only one version
of the page?
◦ HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
http://campshutaf.org/
◦ HTTP/1.1 200 OK
http://www.campshutaf.org/
◦ Note – wordpress sites usually pretty good with
this, other cms’s cause lots of problems
 Is there a canonical tag pointing somewhere
else?

14.  Title tag
◦ Proper length?
◦ Keyword stuffed?
◦ Descriptive?
◦ Incorporates brand name?
 Meta-description
◦ Proper length?
◦ Keyword stuffed? Descriptive?
Unique?
 Keywords Tag
◦ Is it in usage? Is it unique?
 Canonical Tag
◦ Is there a canonical tag
pointing somewhere else?

15.  Is the navigation crawlable?
◦ Turn off javascript, images and CSS in Firefox
with developer toolbar
◦ Can you still navigate to the main sections of
the site?
 URL site structure
◦ Does the main navigation point to clean urls or
search engine unfriendly URLs?
◦ Do the URLs contain capital letters or spaces?
Does the server force lower case letters in the
URLs?
 Live pages - http://ishopforisrael.com/Deals/ and
http://ishopforisrael.com/deals/eSportsonline/

16.  site:www.wdcgroup.com
◦ Searches only the domain you specify – tells you how
many pages indexed
◦ Shortcut to this query from tools like Searchstatus & SEO
Site Tools
◦ If not many pages indexed, could be problem with
navigation
 cache:http://ishopforisrael.com/deals/esportsonl
ine
◦ Checks if page is stored in cache
 More advanced search queries:
http://bit.ly/OKcLd9

17.  Robots.txt
◦ Check if the site has a robots.txt – check to see what it’s
blocking
◦ Use Google Webmaster tools to check their access and
see if specific URLs are blocked by robots.txt
◦ Are they accidentally blocking access from all search
engines? This means they’re blocking everyone:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
 Sitemap
◦ Does the site have one? Is it linked in the robots.txt file?
◦ Does it include errors or URLs no longer live

18.  Content
◦ Is there enough content?
◦ Is it organized, laid out nicely?
◦ Interlinking
◦ Crawlable by the search engines
◦ Check for duplicate content – text in quotes
 Meta Data
◦ Title tags, meta descriptions, keywords
◦ Meta robots – are these pages blocked by the search engines

19.  Why check SEO info on one page when you
can look at the whole site, sections of it, etc?

20.  Check crawl errors, etc.
 Supplement this data with Webmaster Tools
data

21.  Does a lot of good
stuff as well
 Not specifically an SEO
tool, but does
produce relevant
reports
 It’s Free (Screaming
Frog full version is
£100 a year – free
version doesn’t have
all features and only
crawls 500 URLs)

22.  It gives a lot of data and information about the site
 Is free and easy to install (if you have Windows 7) – follow the
instructions here - http://mz.cm/MdaTuw

23.  Independent SEO Consultant
 @markginsberg
 www.marksginsberg.com
 Google+
 Skype: msginsberg