https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4WYMFHIOpY: Video automatically transcribed by Sonix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4WYMFHIOpY: this watch video file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

All right, everyone, welcome back. If you’re just joining us, then you’ll be pleased to know you’re here at the time. We’re talking about site structure, and indexing, obviously, super important. Something we haven’t covered in years, but we need to go back and have a look at what are we going to talk about today? We’re going to talk about utilizing certain tools to understand what your what? Google seeing we’re going to talk about internal linking structure. We’re going to talk about Mobile versus desktop indexing, which is mobile all versa.

As desktop obviously are things that we discussed in detail yesterday. So we’re going to continue on a little bit from that joining us. We have mr. Luke has so lesney and he is the head of organic acquisition at you switch.com ladies and gentleman Round of Applause. Please for Lucas.

Thank you. Good morning. Thank you very much for coming Saturday. It wasn’t easy for me to wake up Saturday, but at least I have motivation. I am Lukas zelezny and, you know, I don’t want to take too much time out introducing myself. So, for this year, specially, I have a very short introduction in a nutshell, five years, five years in use which 10 years in UK, 15 years in a CEO. Okay, I can hear my accent. I am from Poland.

Years here and it’s amazing that I can stand here in front of you today and share a bit about what I know about indexing and SEO. So, we will talk about introduction, URL structure, content, readability, languages, sitemaps, and log analysis. After my speech, there is a coffee break. If I will take five extra minutes, please don’t blame me. And, you know, we can always catch up there and there will be also an epilogue.

You have product, you always have an epilogue. So, let’s start as a prologue. If you don’t know much about the CEO. I’m always saying, like, you remember this from school, that’s, that’s amazing periodic table. And why you remember, probably because it’s a really nice structure and someone very smart created. Something similar you can find typing into Google SEO, periodic table and if you click or press enter Then

Can see something like is called SEO success factors or SEO, periodic table on page of page and the bit of description. So if you would really like to have a condensed form of SEO, not only what I’m talking about today. But everything, that’s the first place to go as a summary of the prologue. If you never heard about the co start from a co-product table and that’s the best way to present an on-page and off-page aspects of

Seo. And for people who would like to know what’s the difference between on page and off page on page is everything what you’re doing with your website and off page is everything what you doing outside your website but it’s also in affecting positively your rankings so point to URL structures.

And when I Was preparing this, I was thinking like, okay I’m working for you switch. Lots of things is similar to gambling and affiliate and so on, and so on, but which website, I could take an online as an example, Steven before mention a tool called semrush. So when I Was preparing this presentation, I went to semrush and I type poker. Who was the first pokerstars.com? First of all, they are not there because of an accident, they are doing a greatest CEO, and I could see that preparing this

It was like a music for someone who like an opera it was like a poetry. I was like, oh my God, it’s so beautiful. And I’m not applying for a job to PokerStars. So if anybody is here just and know people who are working there, say them hi from me and we talking about URL structure here and take a look. I just compared PokerStars, who is Undisputed leader? If you take a poker keyword versus a poker scout.com, which I

And in the bottom of the, of the table. Yeah. On the on the place 50-ish or 60s and it’s very difficult to see that but I will, I will explain you. Every URL, they have PokerStars is a very easy to understand. For example, / poker /, Texas Hold’em /, poker / strategy. When this guy’s got more like all the reviews dot aspx question mark a equal 118. Okay?

Simple honest. URLs are always way to index better. And if I type poker strategy to Google, I wasn’t really shocked. That poker strategy page that belongs to PokerStars is first right below the adverbs

Another thing that is very, very important. When we talking about URL. If you have a great URLs, you can go a bit deeper into that and do something like in that example. 888poker is doing with their website. You can see that they don’t have a classic. You are, they have a breadcrumb, how to do? This is very simple. And if you have a developer in-house or external developer, they will be more than happy to encode this. The slides will be shared so we

See, the HTML code, which is generating, but this is not the most important. The most important in that place is why you see this code because 888poker.com is using breadcrumbs, which looks like that. Do you see below poker games? There is a breadcrumb, first of all, bread Crump is allowing you to find where you are on the page. It’s like a little map like this presentation, you know, that you are on the point 2 and on the

Inning. I said that there would be seven points and absolutely Revolution on the bottom, there is a progress bar, very difficult to do was working in our on this, but you know where you are in my presentation. The same like, you know, where you are with this website. Yeah, if you put a coat around this breadcrumbs, the breadcrumbs will appear in Google.

Another thing canonical tag. Have you ever heard about canonical tag? Rise your hand. Wow. Some people had some people did not, I gave at three examples of URLs, if and that’s are just made up. So canonical is saying, that’s the version I want to index. And if you have lots of items and you can sort them ascending descending, you can narrow your content. You don’t want every version of the one-page to be in.

Google Google May interpret that Pages as duplication and us an intention to artificially inflate the number of URLs because of that you’re doing canonical talk. And you saying if there is any parameters sword or something, whatever, do not Index this there is a main version, which is that URL without a query strings. And that’s a one line of code, which solve so much pain.

Another thing sometimes, if you go to Google Search console, you may see that. Despite from the fact that you had canonical tags, which Google is treating. As a polite suggestion, there are still some parameters, indexed in a Google and this is an example. I took from my website zelezny dot U k– and that’s a very early Michael. This nice cute little purple website. There is only 16 Pages indexed all about.

Even some speaking and what I’m doing day by day, but I saw that there was lots of parameters from the previous version of the website I had before. I could go quickly to search console and say don’t Index. This use the representative URL. Do not treat this parameters as something important,

So, let’s summarize keep you a structure as simple as possible, use keyword in the URL, like poker strategy, but do not use keyword stuffing. Do not over optimize do not do. We like some people with insurance Market, sometimes they doing /, instance, Insurance, / car insurance /, car insurance in London, that won’t help you.

Avoid query string in URLs utilize Brad, breadcrumbs use canonical tags review. Google search console.

.3, content. The first place to go. If you thinking about content is that software, copyscape copyscape can answer a very fundamental question for a CEO.

Is my content you think so? I know that lots of you have a copy writers and so on and so on but sometimes you may have a Freelancers who are trying to be smarter than you and they are giving you the same content they were writing last year for someone else.

Copyscape will help you to identify if the content is unique because unique content is a fundamental thing to index in Google copy paste. The copy paste method doesn’t work anymore. Another thing about content is if your website is big enough, so we’re not talking about website that being established last month. We talking about website, which got kind of History, okay? You can try to rank on something that I call answer boxes.

Has or featured snippet or position 0. And here is an example. How does the a PR work? Very common questions. Lots of people don’t know how, when they see a credit card there. They, they want to know what IP our means. And take a look, you switched.com is on the first place and you switch.com is on the second place. But in fact, this is the result. This is the this is the first result here. 1 2 3, 4 5 6 and this is position zero.

We rode the content that is purely answering that question. Google was like, okay, we will expose them above and now think hypothetically, if we would start beating on this keyboard on PPC, we could secure three slots. First on PPC, second answer box and the Third on organic results, believe me or not. The click to rate on. This sometimes is 50%. So it’s really really worth to see how your content is written. And can I rank there? There is

No magic trick about HTML. There is no magic kind of formula you really need to try. I think the best example is to go to Wikipedia and see articles written in simple. English does the English that probably kids from foreign country when they are like 10 years old they can easily understand that’s very often the language that Google a I can understand. And here is simple like how I pr works is best explained, with example, if you bought a 1,000 pounds on credit and so on and so on. So you can see that is a very

Easy, very straightforward answer.

Another thing we are using a new switch tools and there are two reasons why we are using them first added value. So people can do something second. The time on page, the time people are spending on our website is going up tremendously, and this is one of the signal, which is important to rank better.

Finally, internal links, which are, which makes you click and jumping to the specific sections. Wikipedia stylings, that’s something that helps to navigate people and again, makes your content better finally videos and we are using two types of videos. I mean, generally we hosting them on YouTube but sometimes we not only hosting the video here, but we also doing a transcript. Whatever is written, what do you have? Whatever is said during the video is also written as a text below.

That way, we have more text more content and also Google can kind of understand what is in the video.

We are not the library, so we always thinking about business in that case, even the best article always need to have a call to action, and there is an example, would be like a credit card with low. IPR low IP, our credit cards call to action. So we giving the information, we’re giving the answer for a question, but also we trying to make people to convert

Now, this is very, very important section and you may not find a lot of articles about this is my content visible. I went to PokerStars and I was saying lots of good things about them, but I also as an SEO, could find some things that they can improve. This is an article about some kind of I’m not really familiar with poker that much, I know that you using cards and but but you know, like I should probably read this and he’s a really well-written for human being.

Like me, I could read this and probably play with fee live in next 20 years. But you can see that there are this expandable tables. And what does it mean if you opening this website beginning is like purely visible content. But then you going here and you have this expandable tables, fantastic user experience, you might see not so good for Google, not so good for Google every time. Text is not visible. Every time text is behind.

Something like tabs or expandable accordions this text got, much lower value avoid is as a plug and I don’t a test, I took a piece of text from the upper paragraph and put to the Google and you can see that it’s bolded. This text being founded and is involved in the results page, that was the text. But then, I took another part of the text, which is from this expandable table.

And Google show me the right page, but nothing was bolded. I was expecting to see that phrase. I copied and pasted in the Google. Nothing was there. So the conclusion is tried to avoid Taps. And all this element sometimes is difficult, especially in the smart smartphone world, but this is the best way to the best website. Or the best page is always like you can scroll

So, as a summer, is my content unique and written, well, fresh and up-to-date, and Evergreen. We have a two types of content. First type is something like knew something happened today, tomorrow and this content ranks very well, we are also in Google news as the only price comparison website. And this content, right? Rank very well for three days. But also, we writing guides and guides have Evergreen content, which means there is no day.

There is no author. We not referring to anything like last year because this article will be there for many years. So last year sentence will not be right then. The year after this year,

Is my content long enough? My Golden Rule is make your content at least 800. Words, don’t go with many articles by 200 words because it’s cheaper, if you can write something really interesting for two thousand words, go for it but again like inflating two two two two three four, five thousand words just only for ranking is also not good idea. 800-word guide is a something that you can spend time attention span is good and

My content internally linked should be.

In the site, map should be external link should be.

Readability and basic optimization. This is a screenshot from amazing tool written in somewhere near Oxford, or Cambridge called URL, profiler, anybody heard about, you are a profiler. We have couple of people, it’s quite geeky tool but it’s amazing. So one of the function is that you can take bunch of URLs, put their Andre and kind of threw a pi by third party platforms. Get lots of information for example, what is how well,

Content is written and there is couple of a couple of outside Matrix. One is flushed inside reading is gunning Fox course. Moog index. I would like to keep focus on the first one mainly because the first one is expressed in the easy. Not easy, difficult, not in the numbers. I don’t like the other two because they are saying like, five or ten and you don’t know if 10 is good or bad. And I took 280 URLs from

Ours. And I put this to this URL. Profiler and you are profiler. Just went through this and then show me Excel spreadsheet. I don’t quick pivot and this is the result. Take a look. 166 75 is fairly easy or standard difficulty. So everybody even the guy like me who have no knowledge about poker, except of I know that there is Phil Ivey and he doesn’t react. Even like there is, I saw this adverts, amazing and then fairly difficult is only 29.

Easy and nine difficult. I just preparest a nice chart and you can see that someone who wrote this content for PokerStars is really kind of thinking that okay we want to generate an added value. I went a bit deeper, I was like, okay, what about title tags in my in my own SEO practice, I always trying to have a title tags between 40 and 60 characters or 63 majority.

A of title characters were in this range from PokerStars meta description, another topic, which is very important and you always see, in Google results, around 150 characters should be. So, 155 page has been in that range on the nine had meta description too long and 109 meta description to short again music for my eyes because I could see that someone was working hard.

And this is not like an accident, okay?

Finally, because I get so much data from you’re a profiler. I could not resist to see how many integers is there. And how many of them has missing my old talk? Every image you have in an HTML code, should have an Old Tag, it’s an old rule, thanks to this old, tug Google, kind of Cannon know, what is on the picture. Obviously, you can use this tricky way to optimize your website a bit. And finally, we have 4180 to withhold tuck and only

One with missing old tug, fantastic result.

As a summary title tag, stay safe around 60 character, meta description, stay safe around 150 character, use keyword, Rich image files, utilize alt tag, use Simple language, simple honest, direct avoid jargon, avoid jargon guides. And this information are not to show people who are coming that we know so much it’s rather to give them some added value.

Five languages State Steven was talking about. There was a question about going with sub domain name. Domain, when you have a language, should you go with subdomain folder or separate website? Lots of studies online? Lots of opinions online. My personal is, I would go with folders. But generally, then you can contradict and say, like hold on, Lucas Wikipedia is going with subdomains and a ranking so well, obviously, because

Will you go? It’s not that much important. What is important is href Lang? A right implementation of a tree flank. So if you have a website which operates on different areas of the Europe, or of the world on different languages, you should use HF land and I will just give you two links. The first contain the right codes for countries and the other one contained the right codes for languages. I was born in Poland for me.

It would be easy, PL – PL, which means polish Poland for UK and I’m doing this intentionally. It’s not a UK is GB, Great Britain. Some people are sometimes using in a chair flanks, UK, word, or EU as European Union. That doesn’t exist in his so you cannot use this that way. Okay, so that’s from Wikipedia, the right names for each country, and the right names.

Each language and why it’s so important? You may think like that’s obvious well for a Polish person who got this crazy language polish and living in Poland, maybe it’s obvious. But if you going to to Luxembourg Switzerland or Belgium, the things are a bit more complicated. Because, in, in Luxembourg, you can, you may have people speaking French in Switzerland, you may have people speaking, French German? Yeah. So now depends on your

It is in in French, for people in Switzerland, or your website is in German for people in Switzerland. Thanks to HF long. You can Define what part of pages should rank. Well, another way to rank, and to do this, correct is to go to search console for my website, zelezny UK. Search console is intelligent enough and know like, okay, hold on. He’s using dot u k. So probably you want to rank in United Kingdom, that’s correct.

But my friend have a shop on dot EU. And in his case, there is a list where he would like to rank. We are not using this this because we want to run across the whole Europe but we could Define like only UK only France.

Sitemap and orphan Pages. Another very, very, very important thing and that is a screenshot from a tool called deep growl. Deep crawl, amazing tool written. Not far from here, they have an open Office on the opposite. Side of the river. I think is a crawler. Deep core is doing exactly what Google is doing for your website is crawling using internal links.

And you can configure this debt that way. Yeah, but I mentioned orphan Pages. What our orphan Pages pages that we never linked from any other page, they are orphans. And some people are like, okay, put this to the Deep core –decor will find this deep core may find this on. If you configure deep called the specific way, normally crawlers, like deep core screaming frogs are using internal links to build a list of all pages. If

Age never be linked from any other page. The only way to find this page can be to prepare a list of URLs from somewhere else. For example, if you’re using WordPress there is a plug-in to download all the URLs and then upload them into the deep code. And then let’s get deep Crow, two crows, all the URLs and then you can see like, oh, the crow is saying that that page and that page had no links from other Pages. That’s probably an orphan page.

And I don’t accrue to my little cute purple website zelazny, okay. And you can see that there is none indexable Pages, 80, that’s quite a lot. And only 16 Pages as indexable, why it’s like that, I’m doing this intentionally because obviously, I can generate site map as well after this Crow. But why am I doing only 16 Pages? Why? I’m keeping 16 Pages indexable because this page has got enough content or other pages.

Like information about my events and so on and so on. I don’t want this to be indexed because he’s very thing page. Which looks like which looks like that. Okay. Only like one picture information about conference in Bristol, no content. I don’t want Google to say like oh, Lucas is trying to cheat, US is trying to inflate. I rather want to rank on less keyword, but I want to have a stable position and successively adding more and more and more content.

As a summary, generate sitemap.xml with reputable crawlers, like for example, deep core. Because after crawl, you can download all the URLs that been found in an XML format.

Do no index on thin content Pages, try to include or fan pages into sitemap.

Or front pages cannot be found by normal crawling. Through internal links that’s very important or fan pages. Can be identified by crawling additional sources of Euros. Export external, I coming links server logs, Google analytics data and so on.

And as the last part, local analysis in a nutshell. If your website is operating on cpanel very popular, or you can do the same with Amazon Cloud, you can download row locks locks which contain all the visits to your website. All the people, all the robots, everything then you can see, what were the visits from googlebot and that way, you can Define where Google should not visit you.

Say to Google. Hey Google visit that part because it’s important for me and that part because it’s important to me, you can reverse, you can say, you know what, Google don’t visit this. Don’t visit that and don’t visit this and then there’s two parts you will keep and Google will be only growing these two parts. So there is another tool. That’s how the export looks like, but there is another tool called lockfile analyzer. I think it cost like 99 pounds, a year, the same author, who wrote screaming frog. And you can import

Art, this big monsters spreadsheet into local analysis localizer and you can clearly see where our errors were googly struggling, what potentially should be turned off.

So when you will go home today, try to download trial version, try to ask your, it guy to prepare a server log. If you have big website, try to narrow the period, you want to download me, even if that’s one, two, three days. That, that can be very often enough.

As a summary look, analysis is to understand how googlebot is crawling your website to block Google from these areas of the website that doesn’t need to be crawled.

To save crew budget.

And as an epilogue, we I show you on the beginning. This Periodic Table of SEO factors.

That’s are the elements that we were talking today.

Okay, so we can see that there is 7-Elevens and that’s our elements that left. So we can go home and start reading or send me e-mail if you would like to have a chat. And finally maybe one day together, we can sit and complete. This table on another conferences. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to be here.

Thank you, Luke ski covered quite a lot. A short amount of time, very well done. I want a lot of questions. Let’s start with yours, okay. You mentioned that you recommend writing articles. Eight hundred words long. My question is, why do you recommend this article? Because Google like long articles or because long articles encourage users to stay longer on the page and reducing the bounce?

That is very good question. And my answer is straightforward is both is both you keeping people especially at the bottom if you if you say did you like my article? Hey, read more and people are going deeper because the fact that they will spend long long time on your page, doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be no bounce rate. They can still bounce back. Yeah. And so the longer article, let them to go through and on the bottom, there are read more links and so on and so on. But also for

A Google internal kind of brain. It’s enough content that you spend so much time to do research and so on and so on. And so on that, this is yet another signal to rank, you higher. Very good question. I have a second part question. Now, a video is a big thing. So what is your recommendation for video post blog? When the most of the information is conveyed in the video. So there is no point to write the long article. So what’s your point of view from the perspective of search a

Optimization how long the article should be. Thank you very, very good question. I think you should find and you can do this for very little money. Find somebody on Fiverr on people per hours, give them all this video and let them write a transcript transcription. Rand fishkin from most is using transcript. Neil Patel is using scratch, transcripts. I have a couple of videos on my website as well as New York. A there is a, there is a link videos and I have just a

Big video. But below there is a transcript of everything. What we talking that way, you can kind of, you know, it’s a it’s a big debate. If this is good for users, but generally, you always need to balance between, I want to rank and I want to give the user value. You can technically say, like, oh maybe someone want to read that or something like that. Yeah. Also you can see that more and more videos on Facebook. Good subtitles. Yeah. So there is a logical consequence that transcript could be good. So let them to rewrite everything. What you talking on the video?

And put this below the video as a plain text. That way, you will be ranking and you will keep still attention for the people. Okay, so we’ve got some, we got some questions on slide out and slider. You can see which ones are most important. So, the first most important, the most important question is, should H1 tags be different from title tags. That’s what I would really like to meet person class this because it’s very, very, very deep question. Semrush is treating as an error, if you using the same H1 and

Same title tag. I personally would say the same thing that semrush would say rather try to differentiate from title duck and H1 H1 relatively should be shorter than title tag. Title tag, should be around 60 characters. When 60 characters, H1 tag look a bit creepy. So, you know, it’s it looks a bit like, let’s put one more key word here because we have a bit of space. So, you know, rather I think I would say that they should be different. Okay. Next, most important question is, we use?

Yeah, we use a Rel next and Rel pref and we usually usually find page X, where X in the results instead of page one. Do you use next?

Well, well, this is brilliant question. One of the best ever on the conference especially the second part. Do you use next prep or prefer canonical to the first page? Never come on? Go to the first page. This is the error, this is the mistake. This is why people are suffering in this world. This why people are failing interviews as soon as co-executive? So now don’t you know, I cannot answer why you always see because you saying that,

Usually find Pages x equals something. Maybe just maybe Google things because if you implement Rel next and prep talk, yeah, and you have plug-in pagination and you can find by connected pages in The Google probably. There is a reason that Google is thinking that they should keep this in the index. And I personally after implementation of rather next breath seeing my my web site specific deep pages, indexation in the Google search, I would be very happy.

P and I would go step deeper and try to find through such Matrix, like Stephen said, or a CEO, a semrush or sis tricks or spyfu. If there are any keywords that are making this long Pages, the patinated pages ranking, but never never do the canonicalization on the first page. That’s an error we have time for one more. So, what about pictures? That expire on 4 March is now finished shy redirect these to the main page or should I keep okay, as the original URL

I love this question. Another great question generally, they have good practice is to make them 404. However, if you are an SEO and you know the value of Link’s, you should first go to Majestic and a chips and check if any page that you going to make not found will be with links. So if there are links pointing to some pages that you’re going to make expire this Pages, rather you should 3012 something relevant that way, you will re utilize

The link juice. Okay. So let’s say we have a holiday website and we’re going to Egypt and and and Sri Lanka, and right now we won’t be going to Sri Lanka anymore, but there was so many links to Sri, Lankan page, should we do this for a? For? Of course not. We should redirect the somewhere. Else can be home page can be Egypt page. Yeah. But 301 this page to something that exists if links are there. Okay. Looks like I’m afraid we’re gonna have to we’re going to wrap up. Let’s take one more because we there is actually like so I have got loads of dynamic.

And related client Side by JS, rather than in original HSN will Google rank that final content whether well, that’s very that’s very, that’s very, very deep question. Generally, if the content is unique after generation to JS, the answer is yes. The content will be generated because Google is better and better with growing JavaScript. So I wouldn’t worry about this that much brilliant. Everyone. Big round of applause for Lucas.