How We Increased Organic Traffic by Over 50% Using Technical SEO Updates

We've got a confession to make: We've been making a few新秀SEO我们自己的网站中的错误。

对于应该在入bob全站app站营销和SEO的最前沿的公司来说，这并不是我们完全自豪的。但是，即使是专家犯错，对吧？

我nstead of shying away from these oversights, we thought we'd show you where we went wrong so that you don't make the same mistakes. More importantly, we'll show you what we did to fix them and how these solutions resulted in us在短短一个月内将我们的自然流量增长了50％以上。

The Importance of Technical SEO

技术SEO通常是您第一次将网站放在一起时考虑的事情。它通常基于最佳实践，其中包括以下内容：

• Only having one H1 on each page
• 从主要导航中链接到最高价值页面
• Adding alt attributes to all of your images
• Creating clean URLs without dynamic characters
• Ensuring page load times are kept to a minimum

While these factors are all fairly simple, you'd be surprised how many websites get this stuff wrong. For example, making on-going technical tweaks can do wonders for your有机交通增长, yet a lot of companies only look at technical issues once and then never look at them again.

When I joined HubSpot last year,我有机会仔细研究我们迄今为止所做的一切，并开始询问有关我们策略的越来越多的问题。我们是在犯这些小错误吗？我着手找出答案。

我开始看的第一件事是the factors contributing to the success of some of our best content。从这里，我可以对我们的网站进行详细的审核，以确定潜在的问题和有成长机会的领域。我很快开始意识到我们没有我们想象的那么完美...

7 Technical SEO Problems (And Solutions) We Learned the Hard Way

Problem 1: Broken Links, Redirects & the 404 Page

Whenever someone tried to visit a URL that didn't exist on our website, it redirected them through to our 404 page. For example, when you visitedhttp://www.hubspot.com/science-of-social-media/，将301重定向您this page。

This is usually a good thing because it says to Google, "此页面不存在，所以不要爬网。”如果Google要爬所有这些不正确的URL，那么它们将浪费大量时间，最终花费更少的时间来爬上我们想要的页面。

Unfortunately our 404 page wasn't actually resolving404服务器响应。我nstead, it resolved a 200 response. In other words, it said to Google,“嘿，我是一个真实的页面，所以来爬行和索引我！”

这是一个巨大的问题,因为谷歌是佤邦sting a ton of its time crawling and indexing non-existent content on our site. But that was justone问题...

另一个（更大的）问题是，许多这些错误的URL发生了，因为人们与其他网站错误地联系在一起。以此网址为例：http://www.hubspot.com/products/inbound-marketing/。我t has 370 links from 84 domains pointing to it, including a .gov link --and it doesn't exist.

通过将所有这些页面重定向到解决200响应的“/非发现”页面，我们正在做什么PageRank为此"/not-found"页面而不是将其引导到正确的URL或相关页面。是的。

这是一个疯狂的统计信息：“/not-ungroung”页面已经结束来自2,000多个不同领域的8,000个反向链接。我f only we were trying to rank that page ...

我们为此做了什么

The first thing that we've done is remove the 301 redirect pointing any page on theoffer.hubspot.comorwww.hubspot.com子域一直到“/非创建”页面。这意味着，如果不正确的URL没有将301重定向设置为正确的页面，则它将转到404，并告诉Google不要将其包括在其索引中。

我们完成的第二件事是删除“/非创建页面”，以使其浏览到404页，并且不会将其视为我们网站上的站点页面。

我们所做的第三件也是最后一件事是为已链接到的所有不正确的URL设置301个重定向，以便它们指向相关或正确的URL。

为什么这很好？

Google索引的页面的数量应大幅度下降，GoogleBot将重点放在更频繁地爬行页面，而不是较大的URL量更少。

最重要的是，所有可爱的Pagerank将被推入我们想要排名的内容，并从正确指向它的新链接的涌入中得到了巨大的推动。

Problem 2: Blog Pagination

的一件事曾是directly affecting the blog content on our website was the way that pagination was being handled within the listing pages. There had been issues with the way that we linked through to the listing pages in the blog, i.e.www.eigoj.com/marketing/page/1,www.eigoj.com/marketing/page/2， ETC。

我们所拥有的只是一个“下一个”和“以前”按钮，这些按钮甚至还没有正确地设计。这不是一个UX问题，因为我们的访客点击它们非常罕见 - 在哪里曾是搜索引擎中有一个问题。

When Google crawls our site to find content, it has to follow links on our webpages until it can find the page it's looking for. To find a page that was written say, a year ago, it had to navigate to the blog and then follow each 'Next' link until it reached the blog listing page with a link to that article.

每次Googlebot（以及任何其他搜索机器人）遵循链接，它在网站的体系结构中更深入地挖掘一个级别。它越深入，网页在搜索引擎眼中的权威越少，爬行越少。在某些情况下，如果页面在架构中很深，那么它可能根本不会被爬走。

我们为此做了什么

我们想以博客的方式设计分页导航，使Google能够一次爬网跳下多个页面，并在网站架构中提出大部分博客帖子。

为此，我们实施了以下导航：

为什么这很好？

该解决方案的灵感来自我才华横溢的同事，帕姆·沃恩。Pam正在围绕重新发布博客上的旧内容以将其提高到架构中，并最终排名更好。（（单击此处以了解有关她的历史优化项目的更多信息。)

我f this works well, we could see a number of blog posts all receive a ranking boost as a result. This is a simple and small change but it could add a ton of value. In any case, this is a big improvement to our blog content architecture and to the general UX of the blog.

问题3：博客模式标记

迄今为止，我们还没有在我们的任何博客内容（或我们的任何内容）上使用任何schema.org标记，以便Google可以分解并了解我们网页中的各个元素。哎呀。

那是什么？

用外行的术语，使用schema.org标记，以便搜索引擎可以了解网页上的内容类型。

我们为此做了什么

就我们的博客而言，我们在所有博客文章上标记了代码，以告诉Google以下内容：

1. This is a blog post.
2.这是博客文章的特色图像。
3.这是发布的日期和时间。
4. This is the headline of the article.
5. This is the body content of the article.
6. This is the category which the article falls under.
7. This was published by HubSpot.
8.这是帖子作者的名称。
9.这是作者页面的URL。
10.这是作者的图像。
11.这是文章的简要说明。

您实际上可以使用Google的结构化标记工具。Simply click on获取URL，输入我们的博客文章之一的URL，然后单击Fetch and Validate.Once you do that, the tool will show all of the data under theBlogPosting落下。

为什么这很好？

This is a good thing because Google will be able to better understand our content and can make more informed decisions on how to display it. Google often uses this data to help customise search result snippets and results within their Knowledge Graph.

我t's not going to make a revolutionary impact but it's well worth doing.

问题4：主题页的自定义H1和介绍

在我们的博客中，我们最近建立了一个新的改进主题页。启动时，我开始查看一些单独的主题页面，并注意到没有什么可以真正区分他们彼此之间的方式。因此，很难为Google辩护这些页面为什么在搜索引擎中排名。

我们为此做了什么

For each of our博客topicpages we had a generic heading to the page that didn't explain what it was. It would just say it was the HubSpot blog and give a feed of posts. We've now added in a custom H1 relevant to the topic, such as "CRM Blog Posts," as well as a short custom description for the topic.

这是一个例子:

除此之外，我们还向每个国际网站添加了一个“/主题”页面，以改善博客体系结构。

为什么这很好？

这些博客主题页面都相同，实际上没有任何独特的内容可以帮助它们在搜索引擎中排名。我们已经从SEO和UX的角度添加了它。

问题5：hreflang标签

原来，我们手上有一个很大的Hreflang标签。

什么是Hreflang标签？出色地，hreflang标签are used to let Google know what alternative versions of a page exist in different countries/languages. For example, if we want to tell Google what the Spanish equivalent of our .com homepage is then we can use one of these tags to do this.

They work in a similar way as a canonical tag does to show when a duplicate version of a page exists. But in this case, it helps Google index local content easier within local search engines. (单击此处以了解有关它们如何工作的更多信息。)

我们为此做了什么

Previously, our HREFLANG tags were all over the place, and in most cases, implemented incorrectly. This wasn't doing our international SEO efforts any favours.

After a lot of hard work, we've managed to set these up for all of the core pages that have country-specific variations -- all the product pages, homepage, etc. An example is on the/productspage:

为什么这很好？

现在，我们在.com网站上的主站点页面内容与国际域上的内容之间创建一个可靠的链接。这将通过我们的网站传递信任，并改善Google抓取这些页面的方式。

Problem 6: Language Meta Tags

Ever heard of Language meta tags? Well, it turns out we were missing those, too.

语言元标记与hreflang标签略相似，因为他们告诉搜索引擎写了什么内容。将它们索引。我n特别，Bing经常使用这些标签。（是的，Bing仍然是一回事。）

我们为此做了什么

Up until now we'd never had any language meta tags set up across any of our web properties, including our international sites. An example would be within our German site where we now have the following code implemented into each page:

为什么这很好？

Whilst this isn't going to give us massive spikes in traffic, it will help search engines crawl, index, and rank our local content more efficiently.

Problem 7: XML Sitemap

在我们的优惠中。简而言之，这是我们用来生成潜在客户的所有内容 - 我们的电子书，模板，网络研讨会等。这是我们的内容reallywant to rank well in the search engines.

Guess what? We didn't even have an XML sitemap set up for this subdomain.

我们为此做了什么

We went through and created a brand new XML sitemap for all of our offers content and have submitted this to Google. (Want to learn more about sitemaps?读这个。)

为什么这很好

该子域中的架构仍然需要大量工作，但是这将在帮助Google发现我们发布的任何新内容并更快地排名方面做得很好。

结果

上图确实说明了自己。故事的道德启示：Don't underestimate the power technical SEO changes.

What technical SEO issues have you run into? Share your experiences in the comment section below.