SEO Cheat Sheet

The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet

Important HTML Elements HTTP Status Codes Webmaster Tools

Title tag Best Practices 200 OK/Success Google Webmaster Tools No longer than 60-80 characters 301 Permanent Redirect https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home Page Title Important keywords near the beginning 302 Temporary Redirect Each title should be unique 404 Not Found Bing Webmaster Tools Meta Description Tag 410 Gone (permanently removed) http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/ No longer than 155 characters 500 Server Error Well written descriptions influence click-through rate More information at http://webmaster.yandex.com/ http://mz.cm/HTTP-codes Image Hyperlinks Canonicalization

Text Link Hyperlinking Best Practices Common Duplicate Homepage URLs Canonicalized URL Best Practices Keyword in Anchor http://www.example.com http://www.example.com/ Text Use "nofollow" for paid links and untrusted content http://example.com rel="canonical" NoFollowed Link rel="canonical" /> Keyword in Anchor Text http://example.com/index.html Image Link

URL Best Practices 1. Protocol SEO Tips for URLs 2. Subdomain Common URL Elements 3. Root Domain • Use descriptive keywords in URLs http://store.example.com/category/keyword?id=123#top 4. Top-Level Domain • Watch for duplicate content when using multiple parameters 5. Subfolder/Path • When possible, place content on the same subdomain to preserve domain authority 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 6. Page 7. Parameter Recommended: http://example.com/blog 8. Named Anchor Less Ideal: http://blog.example.com

Robots.txt Robots Best Practices For robots.txt, robots User-agent in HTTP(S) requests Location: http://example.com/robots.txt meta tags & X-Robots-Tag User-agent: googlebot While robots.txt may restrict Disallow: /no-google.html crawling, only Meta Robots and Googlebot (can be Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap.xml X-Robots will remove URLs from used as default for most +http://www.google.com/bot.html) search results. Google crawlers) More information at http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html Googlebot-News Googlebot-News X-Robots Arguments can be: Location: Sent in the HTTP headers Googlebot-Image Googlebot-Image/1.0 X-Robots-Tag: noindex Nofollow (do not follow links) Noindex (do not index) Googlebot-Mobile [various mobile device types] (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www. More information at http://noarchive.net/xrobots/ Noarchive (do not archive) google.com/bot.html) Meta Robots NoODP (Do not show Open Directory Location: In the html Project description) ...Or combined (noindex, nofollow) Googlebot-Mobile Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 (Mobile Smartphones) like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 If the robots tag is not defined, Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7 (compatible; More information at http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html the default is "INDEX,FOLLOW" Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google. com/bot.html)

Mediapartners-Google [various mobile device types] (compatible; Sitemap Syntax (Mobile Adsense) or Mediapartners-Google/2.1; +http://www. Mediapartners google.com/bot.html) XML Sitemaps Default Locations

http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml Mediapartners (Adsense) Mediapartners-Google http://www.example.com/ http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml.gz Bingbot Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; 1970-01-01 +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) monthly 0.8 http://www.example.com/sitemap.gz Baiduspider Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +/web/20130307230956/http://www. baidu.com/search/spider.html) Sitemap Index File Other Common Sitemap Types: Yandexbot Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; Mobile +http://yandex.com/bots) http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz News 2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00 FacebookExternalHit facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www. Image facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php) http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz Video 2005-01-01 Rogerbot Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; rogerBot/1.0; UrlCrawler; http://moz.com/help/pro/ rogerbot-crawler)

Facebook Open Graph Google+ Authorship

For author information in Google search results: 1 Link your content to your Google+ profile (e.g., "article") Google Link back to your site from the ‘Contributor’ 2 section of your Google+ profile More information at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/ More information at Twitter Cards https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2539557

Google+ Publisher For businesses, brands, products and organizations: More information at https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards 1 Link your homepage to your Google+ profile Google+ Google Google+ will extract information from Open Graph properties, title and meta description tags, or Schema.org microdata (recommended).

2 Link to your website from your Google+ page's profile More information at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1708844

More information at https://developers.google.com/+/web/snippet/

The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet V2.0 | moz.com | © 2013 SEOmoz 3 Targeting Multiple Languages Mobile Web Development Declare language attribute in the HTML element 1 Responsive Design Uses CSS to alter the rendering of the page on the device using media queries URL Structures for Country & Language Targeting Example: ccTLDs (Country Level Only) Subdomains with gTLDS /* Phones */ @media (max-width: 767px) { ... } example.de de.example.com/

Subdirectories with gTLDS /* Tablets to Desktops */ @media (min-width: 768px) and (max-width: example.com/de/ 992px) { ... } rel="alternate" hreflang="x" /* Large devices */ @media (min-width: 1200px) { ... } Annotate alternate language & country versions of content

HTML version in Dynamic Serving via Vary HTTP Header (Specifies Default) 2 (Specifies Language) Serves different HTML and CSS on the same URL, varied by user agent (Specifies Language + Region)

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Sitemap version Content-Type: text/html Vary: User-Agent Content-Length: 5710 http://example.com/english (...rest of HTTP response headers...) 3 Separate URLs http://example.com/deutsch/ Identify mobile and desktop versions using rel="alternate" and rel="canonical" Desktop page: http://example.com/ es Spanish US United States en English IN India More region codes can be found at Mobile page: http://m.example.com/ ar Arabic JP Japan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2 hi Hindi BR Brazil