Spring is in the air, the pubs are back open (in the UK at least...) so I hope what we're seeing truly is light at the end of the tunnel, and not just another dastardly covid-mirage.
Here's what we've been enjoying lately:
Recent Tech SEO Stuff We Love
The Ultimate Guide to Indexing SEO
via @TomekRudzki
Sometimes you come across an 'ultimate guide' only to discover such meh-level content that it makes you question your understanding of the word 'ultimate' in the first place.
This is no such article! Tomek has absolutely gone to town on how crawling, rendering and indexing works in Google. It is indeed ultimate.
How To: Do Dynamic Product Meta Data in Magento Using GTM
via @dave_ashworth
I love the philosophy that underpins this post - can't get dev resource, just figure out how to do it yourself using Google Tag Manager. But Dave does not just use GTM to manually re-write a couple of title tags, he uses it to dynamically format title tags and meta descriptions for thousands of products across a whole bunch of languages, resulting in improved performance in terms of impressions, clicks and CTR.
Clapping hand emoji.
3 Vital Click-Based Signals for SEO: First, Long, & Last
via @CyrusShepard
As Cyrus points out almost immediately, this is NOT a post about the CTR debate! This post instead assumes that click-based interaction data is used as ranking signals, and presents three simple metrics: first click, long click and last click. And whether or not said assumption is correct, these are all metrics you would want to optimise for anyway...
Critical & Common E-commerce SEO Issues that Need to Stop Happening
via @aleyda
Another beast of a post from Aleyda, who demonstrates six critical technical SEO issues that commonly hamper ecommerce websites. She goes through how to diagnose these issues and provides a range of suggestions for fixing them too.
Other Cool Stuff You Should Check Out
- Perfecting On-Page SEO for Ecommerce Product Pages – A Cheatsheet
Looking to re-design or optimise your product pages? This is the cheat sheet for you, with everything you need to think about to perfect your design.
- Generating Six-Figure Profits from $40 SEO Audits
A really interesting exploration into how Glen scaled the production of really cheap, quick video website audits, and how they could then sell $4,000+ audits off the back of these.
- The Visual Revolution in Knowledge Work
A core job of an SEO is to influence people - clients, developers, bosses etc... In this article Tom makes the case for SEOs to learn and use canvas-based tools, to give greater opportunity for influencing across departments.
What We've Been Up To
- Geoff starred in the (sadly virtual) BrightonSEO conference in March, with his talk 'SEO Audits are (mostly) bollocks'. The video is available via a paid pass, however Geoff also did a comprehensive write-up on the same topic, with a less-offensive title: How to Approach Website SEO Audits.
- We welcomed Wayne Barker back and invited him on as a regular contributor, he published a truly excellent post on Internal Link Optimisation for SEO, a comprehensive write-up of orphaned URLs, and a super interesting piece on How to Audit Websites on Different CMS Platforms.
- I recorded a new video 'Website Audit Workflows', which provides a walk-through of the software and the intended audit workflows that are built into the software. According to feedback it provides at least one 'a-ha' moment for plenty of folk.
