Technical SEO Flashcards
Why is cross-team support in SEO important?
Maintaining a healthy relationship between SEOs and developers is vital to successfully tackling SEO from both sides.
DNS
“Domain Name Server” links the IP address (a series of numbers that identify your website) to the website name you’ve chosen.
How does a website get from server to the browser? (List the 6 main steps)
- user requests domain
- browser makes requests (this involves requesting the DNS lookup and converting the name into it’s machine-read IP address and then the browser requests the code of your website)
- server sends resources/website files to assemble website in the searcher’s browser
- browser assembles the web page
- browser makes final requests (a browser will only show the web page if all the code is received so if it needs any additional code, it makes a request to the server)
- Website appears in browser! Rendered from code to what’s visible to you.
DOM
Document Object Model - what the browser creates while parsing and executing the web pages’s resources. you can see the DOM by “inspecting element”
Domain Registrars
Companies that manage the reservations of domain names (where you go to purchase your domain name) ex. godaddy, namecheap, etc.
Async
An attribute in computer programming languages that shortens the critical rendering path, saving the web page load time. Async tells the DOM that it can continue to be assembled while the browser is fetching the scripts needed to display your web page
Name the 3 most common computer programming languages/codes used to construct web pages and what they each do.
HTML (structure) , CSS (appearance), and Javascript (action)
HTML
“Hypertext Markup Language” - serves as the backbone of the website, the structure.
CSS
“cascading style sheets” - the style of your web page including font, color, and layout
What should SEOs know about CSS?
- External CSS files make your page less code heavy, which makes it load faster
- compressing your CSS files make your page load faster
- content heavy pages are better than code heavy pages
- using CSS to hide links and content can get you penalised by google and removed from the index
JS
JavaScript- how your website behaves, can make websites interactive/dynamic vs. static
What SEOs should know about JavaScript
It has caused some problems for SEO bc search engines don’t view JS code the same way humans do - client-side vs. server-side rendering. Search engine crawlers don’t see what’s in your JS initially.
What are the potential problems a JS framework can present in SEO?
- your server cannot handle the requests to crawl your content
- your JS is too outdated OR too complex for Gbots to understand
- doesn’t load properly for Gbots to view in time
How can you check to see if Gbots view your page the same way your viewers do?
Go to the Google Search Console, past your page’s URL into the GSC URL inspection tool, click “Test Live URL,” click “View Tested Page,” click “Screenshot” tab so you can view the page
Structured data
a system of pairing a name with a value that helps search engines categorize and index your content, also referred to as “Schema markup” The process of structuring your data is often referred to as “markup” because you are marking up your content with organizational code
Schema
a set of ‘types’, each associated with a set of properties, they are arranged in a hierarchy
How many types, properties, datatypes, enumerations, and enumeration members are there currently? (2021)
The vocabulary currently consists of 778 Types, 1383 Properties 15 Datatypes, 73 Enumerations and 367 Enumeration members
schema.org
a collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet - a project that provides a particular set of agreed-upon definitions for microdata tags
Microdata
one form of structured data that works with HTML5, used to nest metadata within existing content on web pages
Schema markup
a way to label or organize your content so that search engines have a better understanding of what certain elements on your web pages are. This code provides structure to your data, which is why schema is often referred to as “structured data.” The process of structuring your data is often referred to as “markup” because you are marking up your content with organizational code
Google’s preferred schema markup guide
JSON-LD or “JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data”
{
“@context”: “http://schema.org”,
“@type”: “WebPage”,
“breadcrumb”: “Homepage > Category > Great Hypothetical Widget”,
“mainEntity”:
{
“@type”: “Product”,
“image”:”http://www.example.com/image-of-the-great-widget.jpg”,
“name”: “My Great Hypothetical Widget”,
“description”: “The description of the great
hypothetical widget and an overview of its
greatness.”
}
}
example of how JSON-LD appears in code in HTML
{
… mumble mumble code stuff …
}
example of JSON-LD within the HTML of the rendered page
the only data type that google uses for rich snippets that doesn’t work with JSON-LD. Microdata or RDFa is needed, as well as BreadCrumbList and some Properties for that Type
“breadcrumb” Microdata or RDFa is needed, as well as BreadCrumbList and some Properties for that Type
Tips for implementing structured data/schema markup
- Pay attention to required Properties: Make sure the essential Properties are in place for the Type you reference (e.g. events require a date and time)
- Don’t use special characters or quotes
- Develop familiarity with your vocabulary: Schema.org is the most common vocabulary used, and it’s robust
- All schema.org Types and Properties are case sensitive, so make sure to double check your capitalization
- Do not misrepresent the information on the page
- try to use the most specific type of markup for your page
How do you test your schema markup?
Use google’s schema markup testing tool parsed or to identify any issues with the code
What’s the best way to study schema markup?
Analyze websites that know more than you. Take a look at their page and run it through Google’s schema markup testing tool
Why is schema markup important to SEO?
It allows search engine crawlers to better understand what your particular piece of content is about AND it can enable rich snippets.
Can you use multiple types of schema markup on the same page?
Yes, but if you markup one element, you need to markup the other elements like products for example.
Can you markup content that is not visible to your users?
NO! bad practice
If you have duplicate pages, can you markup just the canonical page?
NO! You should markup each page if you have duplicate pages.
Can you use marked up reviews that are written by the business?
NO! You should only use review markup for genuine reviews written by your customers.
Canonicalization
a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a “standard”, “normal”, or canonical form
rel=”canonical”
an HTML element (technical NOT a tag) that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues by, often called the “canonical link”
Is there a penalty for duplicate content?
No! There is no penalty for duplicate content BUT duplicate content can create indexing issues.
Faceted Navigation
any way to filter and/or sort results on a webpage by specific attributes that aren’t necessarily related. For example, the color, processor type, and screen resolution of a laptop
How does canonicalization factor into your XML sitemap?
When you submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, the URLs you choose will help google search understand which ones you prefer if there are duplicate pages.
Can you use the canonical link element across domains?
No! You can only use the canonical link element within your domain.
What’s the difference between the canonical link element and a 301 redirect?
The main difference is that the 301 redirect can cross domains but the canonical link element cannot. Many people think of the canonical link element as a mini 301 redirect.
Do the pages have to be exactly the same to use a canonical link element?
No. They don’t have to be identical, BUT they should be similar.
Relative URL
does not use the full web address and only contains the location following the domain. It assumes that the link you add is on the same site and is part of the same root domain. The relative path starts with the forward slash and leads the browser to stay within the current site
Absolute URL
Basically, it’s the full URL of the page that you link to. contains the entire address from the protocol (HTTPS) to the domain name (www.example.com) and includes the location within your website in your folder system (/foldernameA or /foldernameB) names within the URL
Is it better to use the canonical link element for absolute or relative URLs?
It’s better to use it on an absolute URLs bc if you mess it up on a relative URL it’ll be messier to fix.
Can you follow a chain of canonicals?
Technically, yes, but it’s not recommended.
List the 3 main types of duplicates
True duplicate, Near duplicate, and Cross-domain duplicates
List 3 tools for diagnosing duplicates
- Google Webmaster Tools, 2. Googles Site: Command 3. Moz’s Campaign Manager (and of course some detective work on your own!)
List 19 examples of duplicate content - taken from https://moz.com/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
- www vs non-www
- staging servers (when dev team opens up an test subdomain but they forget to block it to crawlers)
- trailing slashes (“/”) - however majority of sites get the extra slash at the end by Google to solve the problem
- secure https pages (be careful when fixing this!)
- home page duplicates
- session IDs (fix by removing session IDs and store in cookie instead, OR implement canonical tag site wide, OR block parameter in google webmaster tools
- Affiliate tracking (similar to session ID)
- Duplicate paths
- Functional parameters
- International duplicates
- Search sorts (these are “near duplicates”, not “true duplicates”)
- Search filter (fix: don’t index the filters)
- Search pagination
- Product variations
- Geo-keyword variations
- Thin content
- Syndicated content (across domains)
- Scraped content (is like syndicated content but you didn’t ask permission which is breaking the law!)
- Cross-ccTLD domains - same language across countries
List 14 ways to fix duplicate content - taken from https://moz.com/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
- 404- not found
- 301 redirects
- robots.txt
- meta robots or meta noindex
- Rel=Canonical
- Google URL Remove
- Google Parameter Blocking
- Bing URL Removal
- Bing Parameter Blocking
- Rel=Prev & Rel=Next
- Syndication Source
- Internal Linking
- Don’t do Anything (let the search engines sort it out for you)
- Rel=”alternate”hreflang=”x”
Responsive Design
an approach to web page creation that makes use of flexible layouts, flexible images and cascading style sheet media queries. The goal of responsive design is to build web pages that detect the visitor’s screen size and orientation and change the layout accordingly
What code/computer language is used for responsive design?
CSS
AMP
Accelerated Mobile Pages- delivers content to mobile visitors at speeds much greater than with non-AMP delivery. AMP is able to deliver content so fast because it delivers content from its cache servers (not the original site) and uses a special AMP version of HTML and JavaScript
Mobile-first indexing
Google rolled out this update in 2018- With mobile-first indexing, Google predominantly crawls and indexes the mobile version of your web pages
Mobile-friendly
means simply that the website will present a layout appropriate to the size of your screen, makes a website accessible to a mobile user- this is not the same as mobile-first
Lighthouse
An open-source, automated tool, for improving the quality of your web page. It can audit for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO and more. You can access it through Chrome Dev Tools OR GMT Metrix
Should page speed factor into your SEO?
YES! Page Speed is important for SEO
Think with Google
Think with Google or thinkwithgoogle.com
Think with Google
thinkwithgoogle.com offers tools designed to help improve your brand’s marketing, web performance, analysis, digital experience, and more. They currently (2021) offer Google Trends, Market Finder, Find My Audience, Grow my store, Create with Google, Data Shorts, Test My Site, & Rising Retail Categories
Rel=”Alternate” Hreflang=”x”
hreflang attribute allows you to show search engines what the relationship is between web pages in alternate languages
10 blue links
The format search engines used to display search results; ten organic results all appearing in the same format
Featured snippets
Organic answer boxes that appear at the top of SERPs for certain queries.
Image carousels
Image results in some SERPs that are scrollable from left to right
Intent
refers to what users really want from the words they typed into the search bar
KPI
“key performance indicator” is a measurable value that indicates how well an activity is achieving a goa
Local pack
A pack of typically three local business listings that appear for local-intent searches
2xx status codes
class of status codes that indicate the request for a page has succeeded
4xx status codes
class of status codes that indicate the request for a page resulted in error
5xx status codes
class of status codes that indicate the server’s inability to perform the request
Bots
“crawlers” or “spiders,” these are what scour the Internet to find content
Caching
A saved version of your web page.
Cloaking
Showing different content to search engines than you show to human visitors
Crawl budget
The average number of pages a search engine bot will crawl on your site. If you have a large site, Google might not be able to crawl your entire site as often as you’d like, so you might need to point Google to the most important pages on your site. The best mechanism for doing so at present is to list your most recently updated or most important pages in your sitemaps, and (possibly temporarily) hiding your less important pages using robots.txt rules.
Geographic modifiers
Terms that describe a physical location or service area. For example, “pizza” is not geo-modified, but “pizza in Seattle” is.
Scraped content
Taking content from websites that you do not own and republishing it without permission on your own site.
SSL certificate
A “Secure Sockets Layer” is used to encrypt data passed between the web server and browser of the searcher.
ccTLD
Short for “country code top level domain,” ccTLD refers to domains associated with countries. For example, .ru is the recognized ccTLD for Russia.
Critical rendering path
The sequence of steps a browser goes through to convert HTML, CSS and JavaScript into a viewable web page.
Lazy loading
A way of deferring the loading of an object until it’s needed. This method is often used to improve page speed.
Minification
To minify something means to remove as many unnecessary characters from the source code as possible without altering functionality. Whereas compression makes something smaller, minification actually removes things.
Pagination
A website owner can opt to split a page into multiple parts in a sequence, similar to pages in the book. This can be especially helpful on very large pages. The hallmarks of a paginated page are the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags, indicating where each page falls in the greater sequence. These tags help Google understand that the pages should have consolidated link properties and that searchers should be sent to the first page in the sequence.
Rendering
The process of a browser turning a website’s code into a viewable page.
Render-blocking scripts:
A script that forces your browser to wait to be fetched before the page can be rendered. Render-blocking scripts can add extra round trips before your browser can fully render a page.
Rich snippet
A snippet is the title and description preview that Google and other search engines show of URLs on its results page. A “rich” snippet, therefore, is an enhanced version of the standard snippet. Some rich snippets can be encouraged by the use of structured data markup, like review markup displaying as rating stars next to those URLs in the search results.
SRCSET
Like responsive design for images, SRCSET indicates which version of the image to show for different situations.
DA
Domain Authority- metric used to predict a domain’s ranking ability; best used as a comparative metric
Directory links
an aggregate list of local businesses, usually including each business’s name, address, phone number (NAP) and other information like their website.“Directory” can also refer to a type of unnatural link that violates Google’s guidelines: “low-quality directory or bookmark site links.”
Editorial links
When links are earned naturally and given out of an author’s own volition (rather than paid for or coerced), they are considered editorial.
Google search operators
Special text that can be appended to your query to further specify what types of results you’re looking for.
What are the 5 components of a URL?
Internet protocol (IP-http or https), ://subdomain (either www.or separate custom subdomains), domain name, top-level domain (.com, .net, or similar), the slug- subfolder, page address, the actual address for the specific page
What is the best practice for multiple words in the slug?
Use hyphens to connect words and don’t repeats keywords
How do you set up a url redirect?
source, type of redirect, and destination 301 redirect (most common, permanently moved to new address) or a 302 redirect (temp redirect like site maintenance)
TLD
top level domain, it follows the domain name, “.com, .net, .gov”
Is there a penalty for duplicate content?
No, it technically doesn’t penalise duplicate content, but it seems to reward sites for original content
List four ways to name a url that would be perceived as duplicate content even though it refers to the same page
domain. com
www. domain.com
domain. com/index.html
www. domain.com/index.html
What is the easiest way to fix the various url paths being duplicate content?
Set up a server-side redirect. you could also set up rel=canoncial element in the header of the page
What are the two methods to add schema markup to your page?
In-line (manually adding micro data to your page) & JSON-LD
What do the status codes mean? 200, 301, 302, 404, 500, 503,
200-everthing is good 301-redirect, moved permanently 302-temp redirect 404-doesn't exist/not found 500-server error 503-temp unavailable, tells spiders to come back later
What is a soft 404?
when a page that doesn’t exist returns a code that is not 404 (it’s like a hidden 404 so it can be tricky to find)
What are the best tools for technical audits?
Inspect element, the Moz Bar, Screaming Frog
Is a naked url or anchor text better for seo?
There’s not necessarily a better way to do it bc it is situational. What is important is to make it look natural and not use generic text like “click here” also you don’t want to repeat the same type of anchor text all over your links
PWA
“Progressive web apps” application built to work in web browsers
How do you make the phone number on your website clickable?
Using the “tel” parameter within the link tag
Should you design your website for desktop or for mobile phone?
First design your website for mobile phone bc of Mobile first indexing and then go and update for desktop afterwards
local content silos
a method of building relevancy in a city/location where you are not physically located by creating geo optimized anchor text in content silos
What is the proper way to make your links crawlable?
Google can only follow links with an <a> tag and an href attribute:
</a><a>
</a><a></a>
How should you make paid links, links that require login, and untrusted links?
rel=”nofollow”
AJAX
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML - a technique for creating fast and dynamic web pages. AJAX allows web pages to be updated asynchronously by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes. This means that it is possible to update parts of a web page, without reloading the whole page.
What are the best practices for URLs that change states like posting comments, creating accounts, adding items to a cart?
Block changing URLs with robots.txt
Does google prefer http or https?
https! bc it provides security to your site and your users
What are 6 main questions to ask when dealing with technical SEO?
- Can search engine bots crawl/find your page?
- Can search engine bots index your page?
- Can search engine bots render your page?
- Can bots understand content on your page?
- Are you sending search engines the proper signals for dealing with ranking content?
- Is this page worthy of ranking?
robots.txt code to block search engine crawlers from every page of the website
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /
What is the difference between “regular” sitemaps and an XML sitemap?
Regular sitemaps aka html sitemaps are for website visitors/users to find content on your website. An XML sitemap lists all the pages in your website in a single place which helps search engines easily map your whole website.
What are the general rules for XML sitemaps?
Keep the XML Sitemap up to date with your website’s content.
Make sure it’s clean: only indexable pages should be included.
Reference the XML Sitemap from your robots.txt file.
Don’t list more than 50.000 URLs in a single XML Sitemap.
Make sure the (uncompressed) file size doesn’t exceed 50MB.
Don’t obsess about the lastmod, priority and changefreq properties.
What optional properties can you add to the URL definition?
Priority (relevant to your site from 0.0-1.0), lastmod (date last modified), and changefreq (how often you expect to change content on your site)
