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Will Hattman

A 10-Minute Hreflang Tag Tutorial

June 20, 2017 by Will Hattman Leave a Comment

International SEO is a complex affair that demands reckoning with questions far beyond the scope of traditional SEO. First, there are the concrete matters of where your product or service is sold, and which languages your company offers customer support in. Beyond that lie more nuanced considerations like the level of locality at which you want to be competitive in search within each country, the extent to which your product (or at least your branding) differs from country to country, and the breadth of geographical distribution of your site’s servers.

These considerations, along with the others that spiral out from them, will inform your optimal web infrastructure, your messaging, and nearly everything else, and accordingly they’ll have to be hammered out carefully over the course of conversations with just about every department you’ve got. [If you’re starting down this road in earnest right now, do yourself a favor and look to this post from Aleyda Solis, by consensus the world’s foremost expert on the subject, on State of Digital, then move on to the checklist post she wrote for Moz as often as you need to.]

Once you’ve gotten those questions answered, and you’ve finally got a site (or network of sites) that covers your entire global customer base, there will be this one last — crucial but comparatively simple — step: setting up your hreflang tags. Introduced in 2010 by the Internet Engineering Task Force, the hreflang tag is an HTML element that webmasters can use to tell search engines what language and country a given page is intended for, and where (if anywhere) its translations or equivalents for other countries can be found. Failure to use them properly could result in Google serving up the wrong version of a page to a particular location, or placing translations of the same page in competition with one another for rankings within the same area. So while hreflang tags aren’t a panacea for international SEO, the efforts you make in addressing all the big-picture concerns from the above paragraph will be fruitless without them. And compared to all of the stuff in the above paragraph, they’re relatively simple. So, in the interest of keeping to my 10-minute promise, let’s assume that you’ve got all that stuff figured out already, and skip to this, your last step. [Read more…] about A 10-Minute Hreflang Tag Tutorial

Filed Under: SEO

Why You Should Never Blanket-Redirect All Your Invalid URLs

May 9, 2017 by Will Hattman 4 Comments

Here’s a conversation I’ve found myself having too many times with clients over the years not to feel like it would be worthwhile to make my sentiments public. So here goes: it’s well-intentioned but short-sighted to configure your server to redirect all invalid URL requests to the homepage.

At first blush, the idea seems like it would offer a clear enough user experience benefit to be worth considering. Instead of the cold-water shock of a 404 page — which, however gentle, is still at its core a message that the user has done something wrong — you’re offering the front door of the site, from which the user would theoretically have the easiest time finding the page he or she was originally looking for (or any other). But the signal of the 404 error page is sent in two ways: in the form of the error message and available options presented to the user, and in the form of the 404 response code presented to the server making the request. There’s a reason why that code exists.

[Read more…] about Why You Should Never Blanket-Redirect All Your Invalid URLs

Filed Under: End-to-End, SEO

How to Combine Multiple Schema.org Itemtype Declarations in a Single Script

March 7, 2017 by Will Hattman 21 Comments

Because “educator” is among the many hats that someone in our line of work must wear on any given day, I really cherish those moments of role-reversal when I find one of my clients educating me. It brings a welcome balance to the relationship and a dose of the kind of humility that all anointed “experts” should take from time to time. In a neighboring spirit, I also enjoy those moments when I discover some novel feature or quirk of one of the tools I commonly use that empowers me with a new perspective on the tool and makes me a more capable user.

In January, on one of UpBuild’s first days back following the holidays, I had a doozy of a day that gave me both of these experiences in quick succession. First, a client taught me something about SEO that I didn’t know. Then, in seeking to apply the new wisdom with the pertinent toolkit, I immediately encountered a problem that I’d never seen before. Then, a small amount of research online led me to a solution to that problem, granting me a new and deeper understanding of the toolkit along the way. Any day full of learning like that is worth remembering. If what you learned should be shared, it’s worth blogging about too. So, in that spirit, welcome! [Read more…] about How to Combine Multiple Schema.org Itemtype Declarations in a Single Script

Filed Under: SEO

7 Reasons Why You Should Switch to HTTPS Right Now

February 9, 2017 by Will Hattman 1 Comment

With the announcement of the Linux Foundation’s Let’s Encrypt project, the thought of migrating a website fully to the secure HTTPS protocol quickly, easily, and free of charge has passed from fantasy to reality. Accordingly, I’m sitting here scratching my head trying to dream up reasons why you still ought to hesitate to make this change on your site, or other considerations that you should mull over before pulling the trigger, and I’ve got bupkis. And now that our very own upbuild.io has taken the initiative, we’d be safe from charges of hypocrisy should we badger others to do likewise. So let the badgering begin!  [Read more…] about 7 Reasons Why You Should Switch to HTTPS Right Now

Filed Under: SEO Tagged With: https

What I Learned at MozCon 2016

September 19, 2016 by Will Hattman 2 Comments

Another year, another MozCon. You get a new theme and color scheme and Roger toy, you get a speaker list refreshed with new faces, and other trivial features of the Northwest premier marketing conference change as well — I’ll have you know the whole shebang moved across the street this year, and also I’m pretty sure it isn’t July right now — but the spirit of the thing endures beautifully and dependably, and that’s what keeps us all keep coming back. If you’re in this line of work, there’s simply no better conference on earth. You’re all but guaranteed to walk away thinking about 1) new big ideas that hadn’t occurred to you before it began, 2) new tactics that you can get cracking on immediately for the benefit of your clients, and 3) how much fun you had. How many other digital marketing events can offer up that trifecta?

Another traditional part of the MozCon experience for me, in each of the years I’ve been fortunate enough to attend, has been to blog about the presentations after the fact, and it’s a tradition that I don’t intend to break now. So come with me on a voyage back in time (one week) and have a look through my eyes at MozCon 2016 in all its glory. Here’s what I learned. [Read more…] about What I Learned at MozCon 2016

Filed Under: Analytics, SEO Tagged With: mozcon

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