Questions tagged [seo]

Note: General SEO questions are off-topic. Only programming-related SEO questions are acceptable on Stack Overflow. Non-programming SEO questions should be asked on Webmasters.SE at https://webmasters.stackexchange.com. If someone has directed you here to read this warning, go back and delete your question.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a methodology for helping websites to improve search engine rankings.

Most search engines return results based on relevance to a set of input keywords, or a query, provided by a client (typically a user visiting a search engine's website). Ranking well in any given search for a popular keyword can mean more traffic for a website, which translates into pageviews, comments and most importantly, sales.

Most SEO questions are off-topic

Questions must relate to programming to be on-topic. This means you must have a specific programming problem you are trying to resolve.

On-topic examples include:

Off-topic examples include:

  • Will using a specific programming technique harm my rankings in search engines?

Most SEO questions fall into the category of how to get better rankings or what tactics can be employed to improve robots crawling a site. These and other general SEO questions that are not specifically about programming should be asked on the Pro Webmasters Stack Exchange site. The questions should include the SEO tag. See this discussion on Meta Stack Overflow for details.

WordPress-related SEO questions should be tagged as or . However, generic SEO questions with regards to WordPress belong on WordPress.

Related Tags

Books

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What is the purpose of the "role" attribute in HTML?

I keep seeing role attributes in some people's work. I use it too, but I'm not sure about its effect. For example: Or:
jeroen
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How do search engines deal with AngularJS applications?

I see two issues with AngularJS application regarding search engines and SEO: 1) What happens with custom tags? Do search engines ignore the whole content within those tags? i.e. suppose I have

Hey, this title is…

luisfarzati
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When should I use a trailing slash in my URL?

When should a trailing slash be used in a URL? For example - should my URL look like /about-us/ or like /about-us? I am fully aware of the SEO-related issues - duplicate content and the canonical thing; I'm trying to figure out which one I should…
Denis
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How does Stack Overflow generate its SEO-friendly URLs?

What is a good complete regular expression or some other process that would take the title: How do you change a title to be part of the URL like Stack Overflow? and turn it into…
wusher
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Replacing H1 text with a logo image: best method for SEO and accessibility?

It seems like there are a few different techniques out there, so I was hoping to get a "definitive" answer on this... On a website, it's common practice to create a logo that links to the homepage. I want to do the same, while best optimizing for…
Andrew
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What is the etymology of 'slug' in a URL?

Is "URL slug" a completely arbitrary word? Or does it stand for something? I used the word in a conversation with someone and when they asked me why it's called that I realized I didn't know. I know what it means of course. The Stack Overflow tag…
Matthew
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How to request Google to re-crawl my website?

Does someone know a way to request Google to re-crawl a website? If possible, this shouldn't last months. My site is showing an old title in Google's search results. How can I show it with the correct title and description?
Manish Shrivastava
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URLs: Dash vs. Underscore

Is it better convention to use hyphens or underscores in your URLs? Should it be /about_us or /about-us? From usability point of view, I personally think /about-us is much better for end-user yet Google and most other websites (and javascript…
lubos hasko
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Can a relative sitemap url be used in a robots.txt?

In robots.txt can I write the following relative URL for the sitemap file? sitemap: /sitemap.ashx Or do I have to use the complete (absolute) URL for the sitemap file, like: sitemap: http://subdomain.domain.com/sitemap.ashx Why I wonder: I own a…
Easyrider
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How to make a SPA SEO crawlable?

I've been working on how to make a SPA crawlable by google based on google's instructions. Even though there are quite a few general explanations I couldn't find anywhere a more thorough step-by-step tutorial with actual examples. After having…
beamish
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"Single-page" JS websites and SEO

There are a lot of cool tools for making powerful "single-page" JavaScript websites nowadays. In my opinion, this is done right by letting the server act as an API (and nothing more) and letting the client handle all of the HTML generation stuff.…
user544941
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Why do some websites add "Slugs" to the end of URLs?

Many websites, including this one, add what are apparently called slugs - descriptive but as far as I can tell useless bits of text - to the end of URLs. For example, the URL the site gives for this question…
David Webb
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How to force telegram to update link preview?

Telegram show description meta tag as link preview. I changed the description meta tag but the link preview of my website didn't changed. How to force telegram to update link preview?
Ali Seyfollahi
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3 answers

Ignore URLs in robot.txt with specific parameters?

I would like Google to ignore URLs like this: http://www.mydomain.example/new-printers?dir=asc&order=price&p=3 In other words, all the URLs that have the parameters dir, order and price should be ignored. How do I do so with robots.txt?
Luis Valencia
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What's a `` in a `head` section do?

I got this link but didn't understand well. Saw: in a…
Asim K T
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