Im not going to get to down and dirty here with technical seo, but if you’re like most SEO, you have a set way of optimizing websites; your own process A-Z. What tools will you use to perform your keyword research on a particular project, is the content appropriate and lengthy enough to support your potential rankings, how you intent on positioning your phrases in the meta title etc etc etc…

But what else is there? Are we missing a significant factor of SEO that we are well aware of but we let it cruise in one ear and out the other? Ahhh yes, that’s right, there is not only SEO but “Technical SEO”.

Jon Myers with Search Cowboys simply states “Technical optimization is a part of SEO often not given the attention it deserves…” in his Technical with SEO post. I could not agree more.

In Jon’s post he identifies three key points in which he believes Google takes into consideration in relation to the importance of hosting and geo targeting.

1.    Top-Level Domain – One way Google can establish where a site is from is by looking at the extension of the domain. For most effective country specific

targeting, domains used should be utilised to cover the core countries targeted (particularly if these are non US. This will help ensure that the site is included in ‘pages

from country’ searches.
2.    Hosting Location – Where the site is physically hosted. This aids the search engine establish the locality of the site – particularly where .com sites are

concerned. Hosting location can have secondary knock on effects in terms of site performance.
3.    Context/Language – Both in terms of inbound links and site content. This becomes very very important in the current ranking model and especially if we are

dealing with server hosing location problems. Best practice would be to have a site in English and in the native language of each country you are looking to target

I myself have recently been transferring files and URL’s between this blog an my old blog in which I migrated.  There is no doubt that figuring out the new URL destination of blog posts to a new blog URL and performing 301 redirects is considered technical seo.  I could have simply used a standard redirect script but the search bots would not follow to the new URL.  Which is why I chose the 301 redirect, a technical seo step to ensure my performance on those existing pages will maintain.  More or less, it takes time to perform technical seo (especially 301 redirects from blog to blog), a ton of time… Jon goes further to explain:

…In the sense of the 301, the best way to look at it is the requested content (or webpage) has been assigned a new permanent URL and any future references to this page should use one of the returned URLs. Webmaster with link editing capabilities ought to change the existing URL to the new URL if it happens to rank for a given keyword.

There is no doubt that a 301 redirect was the way to go in my case.  You can even play ‘dirty seo’ by simply creating a site or blog, let it gain authority with time while performing minor seo tweaks and when your ready to deliver a powerful product or service and want almost instant performance on a new or existing URL with little  authority…BAM…301 redirect that bad boy into your newest project… and all the love and compassion from the search engines is sure to follow.

In my search for more info on technical seo, I ran across Outspoken Media which provides a very strong and detailed list of technical SEO issues for developers that all SEO’s should pay attention to which I know will help any SEO out there.

Review Dynamic URLs

-Recognize by name/value pairs
-Implement often with cookies to hide user details

Create patterns for crawlers to process efficiently.

Crawl most important content first and put the rest in a bucket to tackle later. They have algorithms to run over name/value pairs.

-Disallow the actions that Googlebot can’t perform (ie shopping carts). This will reduce the number of URLs they have to look at so you get to the good stuff.
-Disallow login pages
-Disallow “contact us” forms: Especially if each “contact us” form contains a unique URL.

Avoid maverick coding practices

-Discourage alternative encodings.
-Eliminate positional encodings. Expand/collapse navigation can be infinite, limit to only one category expansion.
-Remove session IDs from path or position. This creates infinite crawl possibilities.

Create an intelligible URL structure

-Disallow bots from useless URLs
-Standardize mavericky behavior
-Consider using all lowercase URLs for safest implementation. Robots.txt is case sensitive, thus mixed case URLs can be a hassle.
-Implement dashes for word separation

Uncover Issues in CMS

-Join your local Web beautification program. Verify your site in Webmaster Tools for message center notifications for crawl space issues
-Help correct bugs in content management systems.

…SEO starts with the developer. Developers used to be able to get what they needed to design, code it, return it and everything was fine. Then the marketing team would apply SEO to it. That’s not the case anymore.

Developers and SUMIA (because the industry didn’t have enough acronyms…)

SUMIA: Sitemaps, URLs, Meta tags, Infrastructure, Analytics

S: Sitemap - A sitemap is an easy way for webmasters to inform the engines about the pages on their sites. It doesn’t directly improve rankings but it does show Google all the pages you want indexed. You want both a human sitemap and an XML sitemap.  Be proactive with your sitemap.

U: URLs

Canonicalization: You need to decide if you’re going to be www or non www. You want to keep your structure the same through your entire Web site. Make sure all your internal links are set up the same.  Work with redirects to protect you if people link from the wrong format.

-Structure: Use keywords and have consistency. Use hyphens, not spaces. Be conservative, use short URLs.

-Return Codes Part of doing URLs properly is outputting the right HTTP status code in the header. The important return codes for SEO are:
o 200 OK
o 301 Moved Permanently
o 302 Moved Temporarily
o 404 Not Found

-Mod Rewrite: Redirect anything that’s not a real file, then you can handle it anyway you want.
* 404 Pages :It shouldn’t be a soft 404. Give out the Header 404 Not Found.

-Meta and Title tags – Make sure you have different title tags on each page.

Infrastructure:

Code - Keep it clean: XHTML/CSS. Use necessary tags for important content.

Links - simple/global navigation. Use nofollows when appropriate

Robots.txt - Be smart in choosing.

A: Analytics — You can’t live without analytics in SEO. It’s like taking a survey and not looking at the answers. If you’re not tracking your site, you won’t know if your campaign is working. SEO can’t live without analytics. Choose 1 or 2 and learn them.

SUMIA Recap

-Be forward thinking
-Improve your value
-Contribute to the SEO campaign
-Periodic audits

Crawlable architecture

Follow standards. Establish the bedrock of your Web site by following these simple constructs to become more crawlable and search engine friendly

HTML Standards

-Follow W3 standards
-Be browser agnostic
-Consider semantic standards, such as MicroFormats and RDF

Content:

-Static HTML for key content, structure and navigation
-Use meaningful page titles
-Use simple clear and descriptive anchor text
-Good internal linking that is balanced
-Don’t link to spam

URLs: The Good and the Bad

Brevity is more. Use clean URLs without session IDs and with few query parameters. Your URLs should be easily readable and describe your content. Should scream COPY ME!

Avoid excessive redirection chains.  Use stable URLs that people can refer to in their blogs, etc, that continue to work over time. Don’t lead to the same content pages with different URLs.

Crawlable Architecture

Evolve with more elaborate schemes leveraging Flash, Video, AJAX, Javascript only if needed. When using Flash or JS, create text alternatives for crawlers. If you’re using AJAX, ensure that each page is bookmarked with a unique URL. If you’re using JS for navigation or menu items, have complementary static links available on the same page.

Enhanced Presentations Through MicroFormats and RDF

Open Standards: Yahoo is committed to the Semantic Web. The more publishers commit to adding semantic data to their sites, the easier it is for Yahoo to create metadata-aware improvements to search.

Easier Extraction: MicroFormats represent standardized vocabularies providing semantic structure.

Crawl-able Architecture: Discovery

Improve crawler discovery by leveraging sitemaps. Inform the search engines about pages on your sites that are available for crawling. Provides page importance, update date.

Robot.txt/meta tag exclusion. Use robots only if required and fully understood. It allows most frequented/important areas of the site. Protects private/restricted access of your duplicates. Disallows nonessential areas of your Web site.

In simple terms, SEO goes beyond keywords, density counts, meta tags and analytics.  Technical SEO can be as simple as a 301 redirect, proper URL naming, setting up sitemaps, robot txt files, infamous canonicalization, or just verifying that you’re hosting is not in India when you want to rank locally in Vermont.  Do your part and make sure you tie up the technical seo loose ends.  In the end, it counts.

Don’t forget to share your technical seo stories, questions and comments below if you like the post.