Rand Fishkin uses the ludicrous title, Wizard of Moz. He’s founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand’s an unsaveable addict of all things content, search, & social on the web, from his multiple blogs to Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a shared Instagram account. In his miniscule spare time, he likes to galavant around the world with Geraldine and then read about it on her superbly enjoyable travel blog. – Read full auto-biography here
Below are requirements Rand Fishkin believes a well optimized page should strive to meet:
Uniquely Valuable
- Page provides authentic, obvious value beyond self-promotion of the host site /author
- Content quality stands apart from the crowd by a significant margin
- Text , images and multimedia are remarkable
- Page would be described by 80%+ of visitors as useful, high quality and unique
- Searchers who visit would b unlikely to go “back” from the page to choose a different result
Provides Phenomenal User Experience
- Content and navigation elements are easily consumed/understood by users
- Design is aesthetically polished, high quality and fit authenticity with the brand
- Page layout makes scanning easy and important content elements obvious
- Page renders fast (<0.5 secs to first response; <4 secs to primary content loaded)
- A minimum number of browser requests are required to fully the page
- Page is browser or device responsive(or specifically optimized to each as appropriate)
Keyword-Targeted
- Page targets a single searcher intent (and associated keyword phrases)
- Primary keyword is the first words of the title element
- Primary keyword phrase appears in page URL
- Content logical and comprehensive, employing related terms/ phrases
- Keyword phrases are highlighted with bold/italic/sizing/etc as appropriate
- Primary keywords are used prominently in the page headline
- Primary keyword is found in the body content 2X+
- Secondary keywords appear in headline/title/body as appropriate
- Images on the page employ descriptive, keyword-rich alt attributes
- Descriptive anchor text is used in links pointing to the page
Built to be Shared through Social Network
- URL is descriptive and makes the pages topic obvious
- Includes sharing options to the optimal social networks for page’s audience
- Page has inherent sharing value (i.e. those who share it will be praised by their audiences and additional amplification is likely)
- As appropriate, employ tags for Facebook Open Graph, Twitter Cards etc.
Multi-Device Ready
- Renders in every (popular) browser properly
- Optimized to render legibly and elegantly on every screen size
- Employs the same URL when requested/loaded on every device
Crawler/Bot
- URL is static (contain no parameters)
- Content is unique to this URL (all duplicates canonicalize to it)
- Content loads in page’s HTML (not via post-load JS/AJAX/iFrames//etc)
- No more than 4 clicks are required from any page on the site to reach the URL
- Redirects from other/older versions use 301s or rel = canonical (not 302s)
- Redirects from other/older versions come from direct (no redirect chains)
- If the page is temporarily unavailable, status code 503 is returned by the server
- As appropriate, page is included in an RSS feed; RSS URL is canonicalized /redirects to original
- Meta robots tag allows crawling and indexing
- Robots.txt file does not block crawler access
- Host server does not restrict search crawler IPs
- Key page elements are character length limited:
- Title <75 characters
- URL <90 characters
- Meta Description <160 characters
- URL is included in site’s XML Sitemap file
Meta Data, Schema and Rich Snippets
- As appropriate to the content/topic/vertical, page includes schema.org microdata markup options
- As appropriate to the content/topic/vertical, page includes Google’s rich snippet markup options
- Employs primary and secondary keywords in the meta description
- Meta description inspires interest and click-through from SERPs/Social
- Generally avoids meta keywords (unless used for internal search)
- As appropriate to country/language, page employs hreflang
