SEO Developers
-
I have a team of inexperienced SEO developers and the argument we continually have is that its a marketing role - however most of it is technical, no view state, no js, page load time, csssprite, metatags, frequency of updates to server, duplicate content via coding methodology, lioading content prior to ads, not spidering ads (IT says impossible yet google says required) etc.
I looked at your referrals for developers and couldnt find any that recognized SEO as part of their skill set - do you believe tehre aer developers that specialize in this?
Thanks,
Michelle
-
one option is to have all ad code in separate files that get loaded on page-view, through an include. If you then place all ad files in their own folder, you can then noindex the entire folder in the robots.txt file.
Engineering and Marketing go hand - in - hand regarding SEO. What engineers say is "impossible" regarding SEO is due to their lack of specific methodology and the human condition that tends to cause people to instantly conclude that if they have never done it, never seen it done, or never been shown, then it must be impossible.
This is an existential concept common with people who are extremely logic oriented. Rather than arguing, it's much more efficient to do the research, and find the answers. Only at that point is it then wise to go back and say - here's a way it can be done. Show them links to actual blog articles or discussion forum pages where the topic is discussed, if need be.
It comes down to understanding that it's a teaching moment, with no ego involved. Purely educating others, so everyone can work together for the common good.
-
It sounds like they want you to disallow those components in your robots.txt file to keep them from getting indexed by search engines. Here's what the Google Webmaster Help says about robots.txt. If the ads are in an iframe, you can disallow the page the iframe points to. If it's an Flash file for example, and the link is in the Flash, you can block robots from indexing any of these ads if you put all of them in their own directory. For ads that will get indexed (if they're in the HTML), if you put a "rel=nofollow" on the links, I think search engines consider that enough?
For page speed, there are a few free tools people to help with page speed. In Chrome, you can install Page Speed. You can install the add-on in Firefox as well if you've installed Firebug first. This will test your page and give you a list of things you can do to improve performance. Once it's installed, you can have it test any page on your site, and it'll give you a list of things to do to improve performance. Another similar Firefox add-on I haven't had much experience with is YSlow.
-
DART is the industry standard software used to serve ads on a site. Google webmastertools indicates that ads should not be crawled utilizing the robot text function.
I admistrate mopst of this software as a marketer but several items such as page speed, etc are out of my range of skills.
-
Sorry, but what is DART code? Looked around a bit but couldn't find any info about it.
Depending on what you want IT and marketing to do... mostly I monitor the tools, and tell marketing and IT what needs to be done. I don't think IT would need to be in there, you should probably be able to tell them what changes need to be made without them digging through data and reports. Marketing could use tools to find good keywords to target, and especially if they do link building to find opportunities for that.
-
Thanks - Do you know how to have the robots not crawl the DART code - as my developer is saying that is not possible. Also would you expect IT and marketing access your tools or marketing only?
Thanks, Again,
Michelle
-
Good developers should do a lot of these things by default, like optimize page load time, use sprites, avoid duplicate content, load page content prior to ads, etc. A good SEO should be aware of all of these things, and when things need to change, should be able to communicate those changes to a developer. Identifying these issues are more on the SEOs themselves, not the developers. In my experience, most tasks are more front-end tasks, and a few are back-end, so depending on what your developer does, they should be able to handle the tasks within their niche if you point them out.
I don't think they need to put "SEO" in their skill-set.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How does changing sitemaps affect SEO
Hi all, I have a question regarding changing the size of my sitemaps. Currently I generate sitemaps in batches of 50k. A situation has come up where I need to change that size to 15k in order to be crawled by one of our licensed services. I haven't been able to find any documentation on whether or not changing the size of my sitemaps(but not the pages included in them) will affect my rankings negatively or my SEO efforts in general. If anyone has any insights or has experienced this with their site please let me know!
Technical SEO | | Jason-Reid0 -
Do long UTM codes hurt SEO?
Since most UTM codes/URLs are longer than 70ish characters, is this hurting my SEO? If it is, how can I solve the problem while still using a UTM code? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Cassie_Ransom0 -
AJAX and SEO
Hello team, Need to bounce a question off the group. We have a site that uses the .NET AJAX tool kit to toggle tabs on a page. Each tab has content and the content is drawn on page load. In other words, the content is not from an AJAX call, it is there from the start. The content sits in DIV tags which the javascript toggles - that's all. My customer hired an "SEO Expert" who is telling them that this content is invisible to search engines. I strongly disagree and we're trying to come to a conclusion. I understand that content rendered async via an AJAX call would not be spidered, however just using the AJAX (Javascript) to switch tabs will not affect the spiders finding the content in the markup. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | ChrisInColorado0 -
Local SEO and Penguin
All, One of my client's sites was hit by Penguin. The business has lost almost all of its organic rankings but is still holding on for a handful of local searches for some of its satellite offices. We've built a new site and are slowly building domain authority. My question is this: at what point do I swap out the new site's location URL for the old URL in Google places? I don't want to risk the existing local placement which is all they have left for the time being. Thanks, John
Technical SEO | | JSOC0 -
Significance of Page speed to SEO?
I am in the middle of optimizing sites for SEO, and am wondering how big of a factor it is to get page load speed under 1.5 seconds? I am prioritizing tasks and I want to know how much this could affect trafiic? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Zachary_Russell1 -
Site redesign/cleanup SEO Advice
Hi Everyone, New member here, but loving it. I have some questions that I couldn't find the answers to. We are radically changing our site. Over the years it has accumulated thousands of garbage files, WP installations, etc. We enjoy good rankings for lots of our keywords. Are there articles/advice/suggestions on how to do this with the least harm to our rankings? One of the largest concerns is for pages currently ranked and we want to move them to blog posts with a preceding /blog/ in the url. The filename, title, etc. will all remain identical. the url is www.wulongforlife.com Sure appreciate any advice. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | okuma0 -
SEO Tomfoolery
Oh Hai, I recently changed the permalink structure on my Wordpress based site, southwestbreaks.co.uk from the standard ?p=123 to a more SEO chummy /%postname%/. As a result, my site has completely dropped off the board for all my previously well ranked search phrases. Having since gotten into SEOmoz a bit more, I can see there are WP plugins available that apparently would've done this a lot more smoothly. I'd be most grateful if someone could explain if this drop off is just temporary, or have I somehow entered Google's shun book? The site has been like this for about 48 hours. Thanks, Tim
Technical SEO | | Southwesttim0 -
Huge and sudden fall in SEO traffic
Hi, I’m writing you because we have noticed in Google Analytics account, a huge fall in the SEO traffic of mywebsite, starting suddenly in one precise day. The difference between this day and the previous one is: -46,36% . Traffic has fallen in all parts of the site in the same way. Some details: - we did not make any relevant change to the website - we haven’t been banned by Google (or we don’t have any message about it in GWT) - the number of the landing pages remains approximately the same - the number of indexed keywords falls from 9.000 to 4.000. - around 2 weeks ago we found out around 120 pages with 404 error, but the error now is solved and the pages are currently working we open the content to Google about 4 months but still we have not published our Site Map. I know that the 404 error could could affect the indexation, but do you have any other idea, apart of this, of what could have happened? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | bodaclick0