Technical SEO features of the OM4 Platform
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complex and rapidly evolving field.
On one level it can be very simple – just follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
But once you delve into these guidelines technical complexities rapidly become apparent.
Business owners that take the Webmaster Guidelines seriously may find that complying with certain guidelines can require a significant level of technical skill. Because most OM4 clients are business owners who just want to run a business, we have gone to some trouble in the area of technical search engine optimization (Technical SEO) to:
- Automate: we build a lot of the technical aspects of the Google Webmaster Guidelines in to the OM4 platform so that compliance is automatic where possible. Our platform is based on WordPress, so this means building on innate features where possible, configuring it correctly where required, and supporting access to appropriate plugins where necessary. In some cases we provide our own plugins to facilitate SEO that is compliant with the Guidelines.
- Educate: we educate business owners in how to add content to their websites that is compliant. Our own Terms of Service require business owners to commit to business practices that are compliant with the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
For those who are interested in the nitty gritty details, what follows is two tables:
- Search Engine Friendly Principles: a list of search engine friendly features that are built in to the OM4 platform to assist a business owner with the technical aspects of search engine optimization (there are a whole bunch of things you need to do in relation to the marketing side of SEO, but that is for another article).
- Webmaster Guidelines Compliance: a review of the Google Webmaster Guidelines and an indication of how the OM4 platform helps business owners comply – in some cases we have baked features in to the platform to automate compliance, in other cases all we can do is educate and monitor.
As the Webmaster Guidelines can and do change, we cannot guarantee we are always up to date – if you notice a gap or have a question or comment, please contribute via the comments section at the end of this page.
OM4 Search Engine Friendly Principles
| Search Engine Friendly Principle | OM4 Features | |
| Unique page titles and Descriptions: Creating unique and relevant page titles and descriptions help search engines and searchers understand the content of a website. | OM4 websites keep a current version of All in One SEO available for all OM4 websites. This creates relevant, unique defaults for titles and descriptions for each page and post, and allows users to write specific relevant titles and descriptions for each post and page of their website if desired. | |
| Identical content: Serve the same content to human and search engine visitors. | OM4 websites serve identical content to humans and search engine visitors. | |
| Popular and Related content: Popular and Related articles and posts should be featured to improve access for visitors. | OM4 websites can utilise Related Posts plugins (automatically displays posts related to the current post being viewed) and the Feature Articles plugin ( displays a randomly selected article snippet in a sidebar widget that changes on each page view). | |
| AdSense: Use Google AdSense to earn income from your content. | OM4 websites support AdSense – register your AdSense details and drag and drop AdSense widgets to a sidebar. | |
| Social Media: allow visitors to share your content to social media networks, display your social media presence. | OM4 websites allow for user-friendly tagging of posts to Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious, as well as many other social media networks using ShareThis. Social media plugins for Twitter and Delicious allow recent activity to be displayed in a sidebar widget. | |
| Sitemaps: Maintaining a current sitemap.xml in the correct format can assist search engine spiders. | OM4 websites keep a current version of the Google Sitemaps plugin, allowing sitemap.xml to be automatically created and updated. OM4 websites provide page templates that automatically display lists of frequently updated content such as blog posts to assist in manual sitemap creation for visitors other than search engines. | |
| Robots: Maintaining a robots.txt file can guide search engine spiders. | OM4 websites allow maintenance of robots.txt from the dashboard. No ftp required. | |
| Domain redirects: Alternate domain names for a business should be redirected to the primary domain with a 301 (permanent) redirect. | OM4 websltes allow business owners to specify 301 domain redirects from the WordPress dashboard. | |
| Page redirects: Pages or posts that have been moved from one URL to another should be redirected using a 301 (permanent) redirect. | OM4 websites keep a current version of the Redirection plugin available to support 301 page redirects. | |
| Duplicate content: Blog posts should not appear to search engines in duplicate form. | OM4 websites allow default to noindex for categories, tags and archives, and allow user friendly Categories to be maintained using the OM4 Category Pages plugin. | |
| Paid links flagged: Where a business accepts money in return for a link the link should be flagged with the nofollow attribute. | OM4 website comments utilise the nofollow attribute. OM4 websites can utilise the Edit Own Page plugin – if there is a payment involved website owners can set a parameter to ensure that all links in user editable pages are set with the nofollow attribute. | |
| Server locality: choose a website server that is geographically close to the locality of your visitor base to serve fast web pages. | OM4 websites can be hosted in the US, Europe or Australia to minimise delays associated with network hops. OM4 websites use Amazon CloudFront technology to serve static WordPress files close to the visitor. | |
| Avoid webspam: take steps to secure your website to avoid unauthorised or spam content. | OM4 websites are administered by a professional administrator who takes steps to secure the OM4 platform and reduce the risk of OM4 websites being compromised by hackers, being used for spam, or being used for unauthorised content. |
Google Webmaster Guidelines
| Google Webmaster Guideline | OM4 Features |
| When your site is ready | |
| Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. | We advise our clients to focus on earning quality natural links to launch their website, a good link is a far better way to ’submit’ a site to Google. |
| Submit a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages. | OM4 webites can optionally activate the Google Sitemaps plugin to automatically create (and update for new blog posts) a sitemap.xml for their website. |
| Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online. | OM4 educates business owners in this approach. |
| Design and content guidelines | |
| Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link. | OM4 websites allow automated and manual creation of navigation links using menu bar, sidebar and footer bar text links. |
| Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages. | As well as supporting the sitemap.xml file, OM4 provides a Sitemap page template that allows you to present a user friendly sitemap of static pages with a dynamically updated list of blog posts. |
| Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content. | OM4 educates business owners in this approach. |
| Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it. | OM4 educates business owners in this approach. |
| Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. | Where images are used, OM4 provides for user friendly maintenance of alt text to provide a description of images. |
| Make sure that your <title> elements and alt attributes are descriptive and accurate. | OM4 websites have facilities that automatically create relevant title and description attributes, and also allow users to manually set descriptive and accurate titles and alt text if desired. |
| Check for broken links and correct HTML. | OM4 websites have a public link to validate XHTML against W3C Transitional to ensure it is easy to identify correct HTML. |
| If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few. | OM4 websites default to user friendly page URLs without special characters or unnecessary section text (such as category folders in post URLs). |
| Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100). | OM4 educates business owners in this approach. |
| Technical guidelines | |
| Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site. | OM4 has developed a WordPress theme that is search engine spider friendly. OM4’s rollover menus use CSS rather than Javascript. OM4 allows for Flash files to be embedded, but does not incorporate Flash in a way stops spiders. |
| Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page. | User friendly URLs are also search engine spider friendly. Session IDs are not visible. |
| Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead. | OM4 websites support the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. |
| Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you’re using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools. | OM4 websites provide a default robots.txt file that will not block Google from legitimate pages. The robots.txt file is user updateable from the WordPress Dashboard. |
| If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site. | WordPress does provide a CMS that can be crawled by spiders. |
| Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines. | OM4 websites automatically prevent the indexing of WordPress search results pages (by means of robots.txt). |
| Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers. | The OM4 WordPress theme is regularly tested for cross browser compatibility using Browsershots.org |
| Quality guidelines | |
| These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit. | OM4 Terms of Service include compliance with Webmaster Guidelines. |
| If you believe that another site is abusing Google’s quality guidelines, please report that site at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts. | This is a Google facility available to any website owner. |
| Quality guidelines – basic principles | |
| Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.” | OM4 educates business owners in this approach. OM4 websites do not have any facility for cloaking. |
| Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?” | OM4 educates business owners in this approach. |
| Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links. | OM4 educates business owners to follow Google’s recommendations on earning quality links. |
| Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google. | OM4 educates business owners in this approach. |
| Quality guidelines – specific guidelines | |
| Avoid hidden text or hidden links. | OM4 educates business owners in this approach and includes this requirement in its Terms of Service. |
| Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects. | OM4 educates business owners in this approach and includes this requirement in its Terms of Service. OM4 community websites by default strip Javascript based links. The OM4 platform allows business owners to use a 301 redirect to direct alternate business domains they own to their primary domain. It also allows business owners to use 301 redirects when page or post names change (using the Redirection plugin for WordPress). |
| Don’t send automated queries to Google. | OM4 educates business owners in this approach and includes this requirement in its Terms of Service. The OM4 platform does not have any facilities for sending automated queries to Google. |
| Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords. | OM4 educates business owners in this approach and includes this requirement in its Terms of Service. |
| Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content. | OM4 educates business owners in this approach and includes this requirement in its Terms of Service. By default OM4 websites set Wordpress category, tag and archive pages to noindex to avoid duplicate content. Category archives using unique pages are supported. |
| Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware. | OM4 educates business owners in this approach and includes this requirement in its Terms of Service. |
| Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content. | OM4 educates business owners in this approach and includes this requirement in its Terms of Service. |
| If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first. | OM4 educates business owners in this approach and includes this requirement in its Terms of Service. |