The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet 2.0 | Hacker News Reader

The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet 2.0

moz.com

111 pointsEcio7815 comments

It's a funny thing http://schema.org/ syntax is not there anywhere. I think sites based on dynamic UGC content (especially media oriented) should seriously consider adding semantic markups.

Since adding them our Google webmaster's tool is much "happier".

Did some digging and found them on Schema.org. Here are some of the creative work schemas: http://schema.org/CreativeWork.

They use it in the Google+ section under "Important Metadata". It drives me nuts that Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and whoever else all don't use one thing.

Wow! It is great to see Schema.Org mentioned on hacker news! I gave this domain to Google as part of my open source project http://www.OpenDomain.Org - they still have not given me accrediation, but it nice to see it is being used to support Open Source

Pretty good stuff, but the second suggestion about mobile development should, at the least, be given a big asterisk if not removed entirely.

When differentiating content based on user-agent and including the "Vary: user-agent" header in responses, you are effectively disabling HTTP caching. Because of the huge number of user agent strings, neither the server's output cache nor any CDN/intermediary cache will be effective at reducing request processing load. This is a very poor trade-off, and typically unacceptable.

If you must serve dynamic content based on user agent, the third option on the cheat sheet is probably better: use rel=canonical with separate URLs per device class. On each request, the server would still sniff the device class from the user agent string, but if the sniffed class does not match the one designated by the URL, the server 302-redirects (temporarily) to the device-specific URL (else, it serves the appropriate HTML). This requires a little more programming effort, but is usually worth having both caching and SEO.

(I dislike URLs that essentially represent the same content to vary in domain or path, so I distinguish them with a simple "?lite" query parameter. It's also very nice to have the server take into account an override cookie when sniffing the device class, which the user can set through UI in the site header/footer.)

I've found from personal experience that having a bot-friendly page is just the first step in many that can deliver SEO results. For those interested, I've written a quick primer on executing a long term SEO strategy on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Marketing/What-are-some-of-the-most-ing...

This may sound snarky, but I'm absolutely serious: the first step in SEO should be to put link-worthy content on your own site(s), not someone else's.

Good point, here is the blog post on our company blog: http://www.tintup.com/blog/improve-your-seo-how-we-increased...

Had you up until Quora. I can't support their view of a closed web.

And this is why I hate pg's policy of not showing vote scores next to a post. OP will never know how many of us upvoted your comment, thus he will likely ignore your comments because you are just @moron4hire. Without the context that comment scores provide, information like this is lost. If 500 people upvoted you, yet only 2 upvoted his comment, that would be an important signal/context IMO.

Agreed. I love Quora's newsletter, I like a lot of what they do, but I don't like their approach. It's enough to make me avoid them as much as possible.

I hesitated clicking the giant neon "Download" button. Just the design, wording, and prominence of it gave me an instant feeling: "When I click this, they are going to make me 'sign up' and then spam me, and this 'free PDF' will probably be useless sales crap." I was wrong, but it is amazing what a few words can do.

Good feedback! We usually try to make all our stuff easy to get and don't put people through a sign up form, but it's good to know that the crazy big button looks a bit spammy. (I work at Moz. :)

Thanks for the feedback thus far (especially the media query inputs), let me know if there is anything else you think should be updated/corrected! (Context: I wrote the applicable post)

Thanks for this. I'm just wrapping up a game and part of my marketing is going to be via social media so those social media cards on my landing page will be key!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com