The SEO Battlefield

Chapter 7. Technical SEO Elements for Success

Over the years I’ve seen many mistakes happen in various parts of the website maintenance process. All humans make mistakes. As lovable as we are, it’s simply bound to happen. We have to allow for humanity to happen and even plan for these errors by having a staging process. Staging servers allow us to test before we update and therefore roll out pages with minimal drama. Web development roll-outs can happen either on a scheduled date or at the developer’s discretion (unscheduled). If you are clued into the timing of the website updates, then you can monitor for issues as well as document when changes are rolled out in analytics. If you spot a bump in traffic or a dip after an update—how handy to be able to figure out what happened! Clear annotations in analytics help everyone understand the true impact of a website’s performance on SEO.

Setting Up for Ascendency

Let the analytics for your site guide you meaningfully to understand what the user really wants from you. If visitors are staying on your site three times as long when they arrive from organic search rather than paid, consider tweaking those paid campaigns a little more or revisit where you’re sending them. Site bounces from paid traffic should be analyzed separately from organic traffic, because the use cases are different.

One of the first pieces of building a website is determining the architecture. It’s very popular to use tools like all-in-ones (Marketo, Eloqua, etc.) ...