Solving Technical Problems to Improve SEO

1. 1
Solving Technical
Problems to Improve
SEO

2. 2RALEIGH SEO MEETUP

3. “If I couldn’t handle not being good at
something, then how could I consider
myself a successful person?“
3RALEIGH SEO MEETUP

4. TECHNICAL SEO CAN BE COMPLICATED
4RALEIGH SEO MEETUP

5. Most technical SEOs were not always
very technical
5RALEIGH SEO MEETUP

6. BIOS NOT FOUND
6RALEIGH SEO MEETUP

7. DEGREE IN POLITICAL SCIENCE
7RALEIGH SEO MEETUP
• Lowest number of credits needed to get a degree
• Focuses on social sciences, which is very much not
technical
• Future lawyers
• Fun Fact: I wanted to be a computer scientist… until I took 1 computer
science class

8. TECHNOLOGY WAS MY HOBBY
8RALEIGH SEO MEETUP

9. 9RALEIGH SEO MEETUP
FBI JOB – SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT

10. “You can do anything you
set your mind to”
- Benjamin Franklin
10RALEIGH SEO MEETUP

11. Why should I care about being
technical when SEO is about
“creating great content”?
11RALEIGH SEO MEETUP

12. It doesn’t matter how great your
content is if google can’t read it,
doesn’t trust it, or it’s old & broken
12RALEIGH SEO MEETUP

13. Rendering problems can keep your site from being properly indexed
SEARCH ENGINES CAN’T READ IT
13RALEIGH SEO MEETUP
• New website launch
• Drop of 33% in organic traffic - mobile visitors
• More active crawl from Google Smartphone bot

14. HOW WE FIXED IT
14RALEIGH SEO MEETUP
• Crawled with Screaming Frog
• Reviewed with Fetch & Render
• Manually Tested
• Identified the problem
Improper implementation of
location request was blocking the
site from Google’s Smartphone
bot.
Pro Tip: You can Download Chrome 41 (https://bit.ly/2qKj0WT) to get an idea of how Google
may be rendering your site

15. Subdomain vs. Subdirectory
SEARCH ENGINES DON’T TRUST IT
15RALEIGH SEO MEETUP
Many times content is placed on a subdomain because organizations
don’t want to put a CMS on their main infrastructure

16. Provided proxy configurations to allow rendering a different server as a subfolder of a domain
HOW WE FIXED IT
16RALEIGH SEO MEETUP
• Works with Apache & IIS
• Displays content from
another server at a subfolder
of a domain
• Keeps primary domain
infrastructure and security
independent of CMS

17. HOW WE FIXED IT – MOD PROXY
17RALEIGH SEO MEETUP

18. Large sites with lots of content
CONTENT IS OLD & BROKEN
18RALEIGH SEO MEETUP
• Content back to 1855
• Millions of pages
• Different Architecture and
templates

19. HOW WE FIXED IT
19RALEIGH SEO MEETUP

20. 20RALEIGH SEO MEETUP
WHY TECHNICAL SEO?
Don’t be afraid to “be technical”

21. 21
THANK YOU