Amongst his many talents, Martin Splitt is a technical SEO specialist and came to WebExpo to get us up to date with the new evergreen Googleboot. He allows us to get up close and personal with the process of getting your site indexed from start to finish with plenty of tips and actionable information along the way.
Firstly, let’s look at the fundamentals of SEO
When it comes to SEO, Martin explains, you should start with the content, then move to strategy, finishing with tech development explains Martin. Technical SEO isn’t necessarily just about the technological side, it’s where the tech side works with the content and strategy.
‘In my understanding of SEO you should start with the content’ says Martin ‘content is the most important thing you have on your website’.
In essence:
‘To have good technical SEO you need good content and good strategy’
To begin with, Martin kicked off by going over roughly how a Google search works as a refresher to those in the room.
We start with a list of URLs, they are passed into a crawler that makes a HTTP request and processes this, the content gets passed to the indexing stage and then once its been categorised, the user can make a search, the search looks into the categories that the URL has been put into at the indexing stage and gives them to the user in a predetermined rank.
Martin speaks about Tech #seogoals and discusses the three pillars of ensuring the best technical SEO for your site.
Discoverable
‘You should look into making the pages that you care about discoverable, because if it’s not ending up in the URL or crawl queue, we’re not going to crawl it or index it and it’s not going to show up in the search’ says Martin
Crawlable
You will need to start by optimising your crawl budget. By watching the talk you will gain an insight into how this is done, however, Martin also points us in the right direction of where we can access some great ideas in this area when it comes to managing your crawl budget.
Indexable
When Google wants to find out about your website, it begins to read your site content and scripts. Googlebot runs javascript and uses a stable chrome.
During Martin’s talk he also gives pointers on Google blog posts to check out in order to get even more tangible information on the topic.
Another really important thing for SEO specialists to master is making your website stand out to get noticed.
But how do you do that? you might be asking. Martin lays it down in a number of simple steps.
- Use helpful description and information
- Explain what is useful content
- Images should not include important text
- Use alt images
- Descriptive file names
- Make your site faster
After working through the above processes it’s also important to think about site speed.
Martin Touches on:
- Server side rendering
- Pre rendering
- Dynamic rendering
Testing
To finish up, Martin touches on the importance of testing the site using g.co/mobilefriendly and g.co/searchconsole and goes on to explain that applications like these are here to help developers articulate what they are doing to ensure the most efficiently indexed site possible.
Watch the whole talk by Martin for even more insightful information on the points above. By watching Martin’s full talk you will be able to watch as he dives in and explains in even more detail how you too can master the Googlebot by working together from all areas of business.