What’s Really Important for Technical SEO? – SMX London

Top tips from Rich:

1. The single biggest problem impacting most eCommerce or large sites are having internal pages without unique content or with boilerplate content. Justify it by means of writing persuasive and beautifully written content to inspire your customers to trust, be inspired and buy!
2. Internal links from the homepages to key internal category pages remains an important part of your strategy and one that is often unexplored. Linking to the key category pages still makes a huge difference.
3. Be very careful with faceted navigation or pagination as excessive duplication of content is inexcusable, as is waiting for Google to sort it out for you. Key point here would be to noindex but follow a lot of pages. Rich also suggested not using robots.txt to accomplish this where possible but was a bit coy as to what he would use instead.
4. Indexed staging server (absolutely essential and something I covered at a4u London last year).
5. Google will index other subdomains beyond just www. and the top level domain (e.g. ww.reddit.com) – uh oh!
6. Always check that your site is performing a proper 404 error (not a soft error) Rich mentions that you should use Live HTTP headers for this (which doesn’t work on Firefox 4).
7. Some custom built CMS do some wonky things, make sure you have the most important files (e.g. sitemap .xml) and that they respond with the correct server header response.
8. Use SEOmoz’s toolbar to test out differen user agents – and disable JavaScript and CSS for an even better look at what they search engines are seeing.
9. Avoid too many 301 redirects. Rich referenced an example of a site with 40,000+ internal 301 redirects. Leaking link juice everywhere! Internal 301 redirects is never a great solution.
10. Make sure your search boxes and form functionality to make sure HTML is stripped particularly for sites that create user profile pages and search results.