Search-Friendly Web Development at RubyNation
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This document discusses search engine optimization (SEO) best practices. It covers the search engine pipeline of crawling, indexing, and ranking pages. It provides tips for improving discoverability through sitemaps and internal linking, as well as guidelines for optimizing content, titles, and metadata to influence search engine rankings. The key takeaways are to think like a searcher, create a sitemap, optimize titles, use Google Webmaster Tools, and follow advice from search engine blogs.
Search-Friendly Web Development at RubyNation
- 3. Search Engines comScore February 2011 Rankings Google AOL Bing Ask 65.6% 1.7% Yahoo 13.1% 3.4% 16.1%
- 4. Why?
- 7. White Hat vs. Black Hat
- 10. A Story...
- 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 ?les. 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-speci?c 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