MOZ SEO Cheat Sheet PDF

The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet Get technical insights...

The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet Get technical insights with Moz Pro: mz.cm/free Important HTML Elements These affect how you show up in search results Best Practices HTTP Status Codes Webmaster Tools Title Tag Best between 50–60 characters 200 OK/Success Google Search Console Important keywords near the beginning search.google.com/search-console/about Page Title 301 Permanent redirect Well-written descriptions influence click-through rates (CTR) Bing Webmaster Tools 302 Temporary redirect bing.com/toolbox/webmaster Meta Description Tag Best around 160 characters 404 Not found Each description should be unique Yandex Well-written descriptions influence click-through rates (CTR) 500 Server error 503 Unavailable (retry later) Image Providing image height and width improves page speed Canonicalization Best Practices Common Duplicate Homepage URLs Preferred URL = https://example.com/ Place the following in section to https://www.example.com Hyperlinks Best Practices indicate preferred URL: https://example.com Text Link Use “nofollow” for paid links and https://www.example.com/index.html distrusted content More information at mz.cm/canonical Anchor Text https://example.com/index.html Use “sponsored” for sponsored or compensated links https://example.com/index.html?sessid=123 NoFollowed Link Use “ugc” for links within user-generated Anchor Text For image links, the alt attribute serves as the anchor text Image Link “URLs” next page | The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet | v5.0 | moz.com | Copyright 2020 © Moz, Inc. 1 URLs Best Practices Common URL Elements Choose shorter, human-readable URLs with descriptive keywords h t t p s : // s t o r e. e x a m p l e. c o m / c a t e g o r y / k e y w o r d ? i d = 1 2 3 # t o p Exclude dynamic parameters when possible (see “Canonicalization” and “Pagination”) When possible, place content on the same subdomain to preserve authority 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Recommended: https://example.com/blog Less ideal: https://blog.example.com 1. Protocol 2. Subdomain 3. Root domain 4. Top-level domain 5. Subfolder/path 6. Page 7. Parameter 8. Named anchor Robots Exclusion Standard Best Practices Important User Agents Robots.txt Only Meta Robots and X-Robots-Tag remove For Robots.txt, Robots Meta Tags, and X-Robots-Tag: Location: https://example.com/robots.txt URLs from search results Googlebot (can be used as default for most Baiduspider Don’t block CSS or JavaScript files with Google crawlers) User-agent: googlebot robots.txt FacebookExternalHit Disallow: /example.html Googlebot-News Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml Applebot Googlebot-Image More information at mz.cm/robotstxt Slurp AdsBot-Google Twitterbot Mediapartners-Google (Mobile Adsense) Rogerbot X-Robots-Tag Important Parameters or Mediapartners Location: Sent in the HTTP headers Dotbot Googlebot-Video Noindex (do not index) X-Robots-Tag: noindex Wildcard for all robots: * Bingbot Nofollow (do not follow links) More information at mz.cm/x-robots Yandexbot Noarchive (do not show cache)...or combine (noindex, nofollow) Meta Robots Location: In the HTML If the robots tag is not defined, the default is "INDEX, FOLLOW" Don’t block noindex URLs in robots.txt. More information at mz.cm/x-robots They need to be crawled to be respected. “Sitemap Syntax” next page | The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet | v5.0 | moz.com | Copyright 2020 © Moz, Inc. 2 Sitemap Syntax Important Social Metadata XML Sitemap Example: Default Location: Sample Meta Tag Template: "Article" RSS and text sitemaps are also options https://example.com/sitemap.xml Place this data between the tags of your website. sitemap: parent tag for each sitemap http://www.example.com/foo.html 2019-06-04 lastmod: the last modified date Large websites should use multiple sitemaps listed under a single sitemap index file. Images 2019-01-01T18:23:17+00:00 News https://example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz * Don't forget to submit your sitemap to Google 2019-01-01 via Google Search Console. Mobile Best Practices Best Practices There are 3 ways to implement a mobile website: Your mobile version should display the same content as your desktop site Responsive web design (adjusts for screen size) Page title tags & meta descriptions should remain the same Default to Open Graph Platforms that support Open Graph protocol include Facebook, Dynamic serving (serves different content based on Use the meta name="viewport" tag in the head of your page Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. a user’s device) to tell the browser how to adjust the content. Separate URLs (different URLs that serve mobile-optimized For example: Twitter: Minimum 144x144 px Check to see if your site is mobile-friendly: Increase speed by optimizing the critical rendering path, No larger than 4096x4096 px or 5MB mz.cm/mobile-friendly using HTTPS & HTTP/2, eliminating render-blocking resources, removing unused CSS, and deferring offscreen images. Facebook: Minimum 600x600 px More information at mz.cm/mobile-seo Try to use images that are at least 1080 px in width More information at mz.cm/social-meta | The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet | v5.0 | moz.com | Copyright 2020 © Moz, Inc. 3 Rich Snippets and Structured Data Enhance search results and help search engines understand your content. Common Vocabularies: schema.org Common Structured Data Types: Local business Product Popular Formats: JSON-LD, RDFa, Microdata FAQ page Article Person Recipes Breadcrumbs How to QApage { More information at mz.cm/rich-snippets "@context": "http://schema.org", "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", Security "position": 1, "item": { "@id": "http://example.com/dinner", "name": "Dinner" } When using target="_blank" to open a link in a new tab, make sure you're implementing }, rel="noopener" }] or } rel="noreferrer" to avoid exposing your website to a surface attack. SSL certificates are table stakes today. Your website must have one. Reviews Lighthouse (mz.cm/lighthouse) helps to identify these vulnerabilities (and more) in the audit. { "@context": "http://schema.org/", "@type": "Review", "reviewBody": "The restaurant has great ambiance.", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Restaurant", "name": "Fine Dining Establishment" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": 5, "worstRating": 1, "bestRating": 5, "reviewAspect": "Ambiance" } } Review stars won’t show up in search results. “Targeting Multiple Languages” next page | The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet | v5.0 | moz.com | Copyright 2020 © Moz, Inc. 4 Targeting Multiple Languages Help search engines understand your location/language targets. URL Structures for Country & Language Targeting Popular Languages Popular Regions ccTLDs (Country-Level Only): example.de en English US United States Subdirectories with gTLDS: example.com/de/ es Spanish GB Great Britain Subdomains with gTLDS: de.example.com/ zh Chinese CN China hi Hindi IN India rel="alternate" hreflang="x" ja Japanese JP Japan Annotate alternate language & region versions of content More language codes can be found at More region codes can be found at mz.cm/langcodes mz.cm/regcodes HTML version in Each version must identify all versions, including itself (Specifies Default) (Specifies Lan- guage; English) (Speci- fies Language + Region) Sitemap Version http://example.com/english/ http://example.com/deutsch/ “Performance” next page | The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet | v5.0 | moz.com | Copyright 2020 © Moz, Inc. 5 Performance Page Speed Image Optimization The most common culprit of poor page speed is images! Page Speed Tips: Image Optimization Tips: Compress and minify your code Compress your images & experiment with quality settings Reduce page redirects Remove unnecessary image metadata Remove render-blocking JavaScript Explore lazy loading Use treeshaking Leverage SRCSET for different screen sizes Leverage browser caching Ensure that your images have alt text Use a CDN Invest in automated tools that can help ensure your image assets will always Leverage preconnect, prefetch and preload be optimized (example: mz.cm/imageopt) Analyze your critical rendering path performance for additional opportunities in Chrome Dev Tools. Test your Page Speed with: Lighthouse: developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse PageSpeed Insights: developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights Thanks for GTmetrix: gtmetrix.com WebPageTest: webpagetest.org reading! Modern JavaScript Sites JavaScript Tips: Keep JavaScript bundles small (especially for mobile devices). Small bundles improve speed, lower memory usage, and reduce CPU costs. Use server-side or pre-rendering to improve site speed, user experience, and crawler accessibility. Stuck with client-side rendering? Try pre-rendering to help Googlebot get a more immediate HTML snapshot of your page. Use Chrome Dev Tools “Performance” tab to test your runtime performance and network “throttling” to simulate different device capabilities. Explore Chrome DevTools’ Timeline & JavaScript Profiler to analyze the impact of your JavaScript. | The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet | v5.0 | moz.com | Copyright 2020 © Moz, Inc. 6