Dan whitehouse seo presentation - xbox

SEO Audit & Recommendations
http://www.dannywhitehouse.com

Let’s Jump in.

Presented By: Dan Whitehouse
Date: Tuesday 15th March 2011

Agenda
• Technical Summary
• Keyword Summary
• On-site Considerations
• Localisation
• Top Pages
• Link Strategy
• Social
• Offline
• PPC
• Expectations

Domain Information – xbox.com
• Factor Value
• Domain Age 12/18/1996
• Domain IP 65.55.42.140
• Domain Google PageRank 7
• Alexa Rank 861
• Compete Rank in Compete.Com 348
• Traffic according to Compete.Com 4,120,683
• DMOZ Listing Yes
• Yahoo! Dir Listing Yes
• Pages indexed in Google.co.uk 2,710
• Pages indexed in Yahoo!(UK) 47,366
• Pages indexed in Bing 3,470
• Domain Authority 93
• Page Authority 92
• Linking Root Domains 6,630
• Total Links 134,693
• Analytics Omniture

Technical
• Technical Considerations
• Validation Errors
• Load Times

Technical Considerations
• Doctype - XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• Root element - HTML
• Javascript – drop down menus
• Ajax
• Jquery
• Silverlight – top banner
• Encoding / character set – utf-8
• <meta name="description" content="Xbox.com is your ultimate source for
all things Xbox and Xbox 360. Get news updates; game
trailers, screens, previews, strategy, hardware information, community
buzz, the latest Xbox LIVE and My Xbox coverage, forums, support, and
much more!"/>
• meta keywords – n/a
• CSS in separate folder and not embedded in text
• <title>Xbox.com UK - Xbox.com </title>

Validation
• Site not created in full flash
• No frames
• Not valid markup -21 errors, 3 warnings as per W3C validation
service.
• 6 external style sheets
• 9 external script files
• File types – PNGs
• Custom 404 page added
• No canonical tag

Load Times
• GB page second fastest
• Fast load times across the board apart from UK Playstation
site

Keywords

• Out of top 100 keywords surveyed for UK versions of
Nintendo, Xbox and Playstation they shared 0 suggested
keywords across the board. – Data from Google AdWords Tool

• Comparing Game, Gamestation and Xbox UK generated
different slightly

b. Keywords
• Out of the 13 keyword shared by GameStation and Game 12 of
them are listed below and show global and local search volumes for
each.

Keyword Analysis

• Top five keywords for Google.co.uk & Google.com in terms of search
volume.
• US page ranks even in local search results.
• Out of 100 keyword surveyed 64 of them appear on page one of search
results for Google.co.uk. For Google.com the same set were surveyed for
Google.com and which 95 appeared in positions on page one.

5 on-site considerations
• Canonicalisation

• Title Tags

• Redirects

• Robots.txt & sitemap

• 404s

1. Canonicalisation
• Multiple versions of pages exist
• Implement canonical tag
• Link benefit placed on one page rather than many

Canonical - Recommendations

• Add rel=“canonical” to all pages for duplicate content
– http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/
– <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.xbox.com/en-
GB/"/>
– Place in <head> </head> of markup on page
– Advises search engines this is authority content
– Xbox GB - Cached on 10th of March 2011
– Few days to a month to see results

2. Title Tags

• Canibilisation over keywords
• Localisation – UK, United Kingdom
• Replace ‘-’ with ‘|’

3. ?xr=shellnav
• Enable MOD_REWRITE in config.php
• Turn RewriteEngine on in .htaccess

http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/xbox360/wheretobuy?xr=shellnav

http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/xbox360/wheretobuy

96 instances found on http://www.xbox.com/

Google Search: site:http://www.xbox.com/ "?xr=shellnav"

4. Robots.txt & sitemap
• Google.co.uk site:http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/
• URL http://www.xbox.com/en-gb/kinect
• Original URL P2 in search results

Duplication or URLs being indexed
Use compressed sitemap for faster indexing
Possible inclusion of noindex in duplicate URLs markup to be safe.
Example Robots.txt with one example on next page.

Robots.txt Example

• User-agent: *
• Disallow:
• Disallow: /en-
GB/kinect?ysmwa=jVYPmIdCEUsZkzmylbQeVpZYcifgjdwc6_Cn
FpipehKsL0U0ICwLFhrsj2YHfB25
• Disallow: /en-
GB/kinect?ysmwa=ioLShxykOmrERpdLFjgcztPmHVyLrUzH62rD
0FU5kbjieILLCbLX0vsNLK1ENI_O
• Sitemap: http://www.xbox.com/sitemap.gz

4b. Sitemap
• No sitemap exists

• Sitemaps help search engines crawl pages

• Easily create and upload via Webmaster Tools

• Faster indexing of pages

• Compress sitemap for faster downloading

• Reference sitemap location in Robots.txt

5. 404s
• 253 404s in total
• Table shows top 10
• 301 to nearest relevant URL
• Gain added link benefit

Localisation
• http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/
• Create sub-domain http://gb.xbox.com/
• 301 /en-GB/ to /gb.xbox.com/
• Omit old pages from search results – noindex
• http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/
• Move site content http://gb.xbox.com
• Pages already using sub-domain
- http://marketplace.xbox.com
- http://live.xbox.com
• Google.co.uk search for ‘xbox’
• Top result http://www.xbox.com/
• Redirects to http://www.xbox.com:80/en-US/

Localisation Benefits
• New content on site

• ‘New’ approach

• Spin most viewed content to featured page

• Involve gamers and web owners

• Contact 291 .co.uk webmasters who currently link to /en-GB
to link to new sub-domain

Link Strategy
• Top pages – Internal
• Top pages – external
• Competitor analysis
• Local link analysis
• Competitive link analysis
• Shared link summary
• Average page authority
• Linking root domains
• Redirects
• Competitors

Top Pages – Internal

• en/GB/ not in top pages
• Duplication of content
• Redefine anchor text

Top Pages – External
301 / follow
Multiple domains omitted

Competitor Analysis

• Geographic summary
• Vast difference in metrics

Local Link Analysis

Xbox - http://www.xbox.com/

Xbox UK - http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/

Xbox US - http://www.xbox.com/en-US/

Competitive Link Analysis

Xbox UK - http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/

Nintendo UK - http://www.nintendo.co.uk/

PS UK Xbox US - http://uk.playstation.com

Shared Link Summary

• Link summary
• Links shared by Nintendo UK and Xbox UK
• Identical domains omitted

Average Page Authority

• 301 – follow / no follow
• Big difference in Page Authority
• Due to low volume and quality of links

Brand comparison – Linking inbound links

.co.uk redirects

• Links to US Xbox - 150,813

• .co.uk links – 291 (from 10,000 surveyed)

• Approach web owners ask to re-direct to UK Version of Xbox
site

Top 10 anchor text distribution http://uk.playstation.com/

• Sorted by linking
root domains

• 301 & follow

• Anchor text contains key
brand ‘sony’ or ‘playstation’

Summary..

• Out of all linking anchor text surveyed (155 phrases) 398 (516)
linking root domains contained either ‘playstation’ or
‘sony’, which is 70.36%. Similarly links from web pages
showed a similar trend of 75.96% containing key core terms.

• Heavy on brand

• en-Gb/ low on links

Link Building Actions
• Game reviews for product page links

• Contact web owners to forward relevant .co.uk links to /en-GB/

• Competitions

• Gaming forums, blogs, sites, general web owners

• Infographic

• Locality

• Link bait – quality content, blog, distribute

Social

• Countdown to launch of major titles
• Press releases
• Digital outreach
• Contact journalists for exclusives
• Create different channels for on-going big competitions
• Spin top content from forum on Twitter
• Monitor and react

Facebook
• Microsites

• Source top relevant content and users from channels such as
YouTube, Facebook. Spin best content weekly or monthly
across channels

• Competitions

• Interviews

Facebook Creative

• Call of Duty
• Endorse major gaming events / sponsorship
• Xbox record attempts
• Tagging products
• Give away days
• Applications
- Community page run by users – similar to Coke page.

Twitter
• Playstation

• Source - http://bit.ly/u/sceablog
• Xbox

• Source - http://bit.ly/u/msxbox

Social & Blog

• Playstation is outperforming Xbox
• Mainly due to content from Playstation blog
• http://blog.us.playstation.com/
• Massively improve followers & CTR
• Implement social share buttons

Video
• http://www.youtube.com/xbox

• Similar amount of video views as Playstation

• Viral video seeding

• Digital outreach

• Distribute content

Micro Sites

• Easy way to spin featured content
• Pull in from different channels
• Fulfill one niche
• Long tail targeted keywords
• Create in conjunction with Facebook FBML page
• Social bookmark
• Small directories

Offline – Kinect
• http://twitter.com/#!/xbox

• Huge news release!
• Offline PR
• Celebrate by giving away 10 Kinects
– Lottery
– Best videos
– Etc etc
• Create a limited edition
• Offline outreach – journalists, offer exclusives
– Making of
– How it happened
– Keys to success
– Innovation
• Has this piece of kit gone ‘platinum’ – how many sales publicise

PPC

• Micro sites

• Target traffic to specific landing pages

• Use high profile non-brand competitor keywords for ad
groups

Couldn’t fit in..
• News
• Press releases
• Surveys
• Most current content on forum
• Ask other forums to endorse Xbox forum
• Paid directories
• Discount codes
• Social bookmarking / tagging
• Wikipedia citations
• Domain catching
• Donations
• Sponsor
• Guest posting

Expectations
• Within days..
– Ranking increase for geocentric terms.
– On-site pages starting to rank.
– Paid campaigns initiated - PPC
• Within weeks..
– Big relationships built with major players in industry.
– High traffic social traffic being distributed throughout online channels.
– Micro sites increasing exposure.
– Major press releases being picked up organically offline.
• Within months..
– Creative and major on-site and social campaigns integrated. Expect relationships, traffic and ‘buzz’
around brand to have increased significantly.
– Major traffic increases and referral sources increased.
– Major increase in Twitter followers, CTR and Facebook likes.
– Increase in authority organic links and paid links increasing traffic and positions for product related
non-brand organic keywords.

Questions..?

Dan Whitehouse – Email: me@dannywhitehouse.com – Twitter ID: @dannywhitehouse

Dan whitehouse seo presentation - xbox

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