Slides in English of my talk about Advanced on-page SEO covering topics such as content inventory, architecture of websites and PageRank, anatomy of URLs, visualization of websites and Graph theory, Single Page Applications with AJAX and markup of structured data.

1. Advanced on-page SEO
Rubén Martínez
Paradigma | CAMON
Madrid, Nov 18th 2013

2. Search flow on the WWW
Optimize
User
Understand
SEO deals with the bottlenecks in the information flow

3. What is On-page SEO?
Technical or On-page SEO
is everything that helps a website generate
more revenues from search engines
and that webmasters have full control over.
Technical
SEO
Off-page
SEO

4. Why does technical SEO matter?
It helps close the gap between web
servers, search engines and human
beings
Source: http://knowledgeoman.com

5. Content inventory
Count your content, its conversion rates and the rate of
publication and obsolescence
The search operator
“site:” can be used to
get a rough estimate
of the number of
pages indexed by
Google of a given
website
Compare the count of
indexed pages of
close competitors for
the same target
audience
Root domain
Orange.es
Movistar.es
Ono.es
Vodafone.es
Yoigo.com
Simyo.es
# pages indexed by
Google.es
10,300,000
1,810,000
960,000
922,000
4,030
541
Table populated by querying Google for the count of indexed
pages. E.g.: http://www.google.es/search?q=site%3Aorange.es

6. Organization of the information

7. Organization of the information

8. Links as proxies to importance –
PageRank algorithm

9. Value of a linked webpage
Where
p1,… p2, pN are the pages whose value we are determining,
M (pj) is the set of pages that link to pi
L (pj) is the number of outbound links on page pj
N is the total number of pages

10. PageRank for Larry Page
Larry Page before the algorithm

11. …not for web “page”
Larry Page before his algorithm
Larry Page after his algorithm
Source: http://www.google.com/press/images.html

12. Organization of the information

13. Simpler organization is more effective

14. Visualize the graph of your website
Crawl with Xenu’s Link Sleuth (desktop application for Windows)
Filter fields on a bash shell
$ head crawl.txt
$ cut -f1,2 crawl.txt | sed -e 's/http://www.{domain}.{tld}//g'
-e 's/t/,/g' | grep -v ".jpg|http:|.css|.js" >filtered.csv
$ head filtered.csv
Visualize the network and analyze with Gephi

15. Graph – Example 1
Website of an annual event

16. Graph – Example 2
Website of a shopping website

17. The power of weak links
Thin connections tend to link the clusters, allowing information to move between them
Source: Giles, Jim. Making the links. Nature Aug 23rd 2012

18. Anatomy of a URL
Friendly URLs need to
bear in mind the URL
encoding, the presence of
delimiting characters and
the organization of the
information of the
website.
URI = scheme ":" hier-part [ "?" query ] [ "#" fragment ]
Example:
Googlebot does not reach
the optional last part of a
URL for a document from
the hash onwards.
foo://example.com:8042/over/there?name=ferret#nose
_/ ______________/_________/ _________/ __/
|
|
|
|
|
scheme
authority
path
query fragment
| ___________________|_
/ /
urn:example:animal:ferret:nose

19. Topology of on-page links
PageRank random surfer
PageRank reasonable surfer

20. Single Page Applications
Single Application Applications (SAP) pages free client browsers from querying web servers. SAP are
now growing in use thanks to AJAX and frameworks like backbone and angular.js.
This is a major challenge for search engines because the fragments in the URLs prevent crawlers to
scrape the content.
Google are asking webmasters to make their AJAX-based websites crawlable

21. Single Page Applications

22. SEO for Single Page Applications
Modify the URL fragments for stateful AJAX pages http://example.com/page?query#!state
Use a headless browser that outputs an HTML snapshot on your web server rather than a client
machine
Allow search engine crawlers to access these URLs by escaping the state
http://example.com/page?query&_escaped_fragment_=state
Show the original URL to users in the search results

23. She is thinking keywords.
Again.

24. A document's relevance given a user query
Example: Query “SEO” on Google.es
Match keyword
Search engine optimization - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization‎
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's
"natural" or un-paid ("organic") search
SEO/BirdLife
www.seo.org
Se trata una federación de ámbito estatal de grupos territoriales, tiene como fines el estudio y la defensa de las aves y
está integrada en la ONG mundial
Co-ocurrence of keywords
SEO <> search, search engine, website
SEO <> aves, ONG
TF*IDF (Term Frequency x Inverse Document Frequency)
Topic modelling – Latent Dirichlet Allocation

25. TF*IDF
tf–idf is the product of two statistics, term frequency and inverse document frequency
With
t the number of times that a term occurs in document d
D the number of documents in the corpus
denominator: number of documents where the term t appears

26. Latent Dirichlet Allocation LDA
Source: http://moz.com/blog/lda-and-googles-rankings-well-correlated

27. Topic modelling - LDA
LDA based feature selection is reliable and generally better than document frequency based
feature selection
Source: http://mengjunxie.github.io/ae-lda/index.html

28. Structured data

31. Markup detected by Google
Example of the webpage of an event - Structured Data Testing Tool

32. The section with a salmoncoloured background contains
text links of Google Adwords
“Normal” organic results, the
second enjoys sitelinks for
higher visibility and CTR
Exceptionally visible organic result
with itemised deep links thanks to
Structured Data tagging

33. These are sitelinks – they are great
for visitibility and CTR but you do
not have prior control over them
Note: Sitelinks can be removed via Google Webmasters Tools

34. Example of structured markup in retail
Prominent results at the top of Google SERP
Source: groovecommerce.com

35. Other examples of structured data
Classifieds, aggregators, online music stores…
Source: http://support.google.com

36. Engagement
Tools: Google
Analytcs and server
logs
Usage metrics, e.g.
conversions (goals),
time per page,
pages/session, social
signals, etc. are now
part of SEO.
Google Analytics lets
you detect losses in
the navigation flow of
your website

37. Thank you
If you enjoyed it, engage with us!
@tucamon
@paradigmate
@rubenmartinezs