It’s 4 a.m. Our marketing division is leaving Bratislava. This is our first time – we’ve never attended SEO Restart before. Seeing the list of lectures and the speakers, this day looks really promising. Hopefully the traffic will be on our side. If so, we should arrive earlier and catch some good places to sit. Well, we were a bit naive.  The traffic wasn’t on our side at all. Delays on the highway and traffic jams outside of Prague altered our plans a bit. We missed the introductory words of Filip Podstavec and half of Janek Januska’s presentation. The lecture hall is packed with SEO people. If somebody had dropped a bomb in here, the whole Czechoslovak SEO community would have been wiped out.  We barely found two empty seats. But we are finally here, let’s begin.
 

LECTURES:

Janko Januška. spotibo.com

Unfortunately, we didn’t catch Janko’s whole lecture, but since we’re interested in linkbuilding, we tried to capture some basic points. So, remember, if you want to create “linkable content”, Janko has a great recipe for you. A shareable content should be:

• Linkable
• Reaching the target audience
• Stroking the ego
• Supported
   

There were other interesting tips as well, some useful tools and other information. You should definitely check out Janko’s spotibo blog. You’ll find his presentation from the lecture, various pre-made templates of approaching people, sources and articles that Spotibo used to approach people about linkbuilding. You’ll also discover helpful tools that help you with linkbuilding and its evaluation.

Quality content is not enough (Ján Januška) from Taste Medio

Zdeněk Nešpor – Exorcist on 404. - 3XX

Tools, tips and tricks on how to redirect URLs. During the redesign of websites, unprofessional redirecting of URLs is very common, which results in a significant loss of organic traffic. High traffic URLs are suddenly without any content, displaying hideous 404 errors. Nobody will find the new URLs with the old content that brought the big amount of organic traffic. How to properly redirect these pages and how can you automate the process as much as possible? Zdeněk Nešpor from  LINK-BRAIN gave us some excellent tips and a great tutorial on how to efficiently redirect URLs and get rid of all the 404 errors – Excel formulas for standardizing URLs (getting rid of unnecessary URL parts) or creating a redirection table, paring of old and new URLs in OpenRefine with the help of the Reconsile - CSV plugin. Considering that we mainly deal with publisher websites and more complex ecommerce solutions, we’ll surely make use of Zdeněk’s tips in the near future.

3xx - SEO restart 2018 from Zdeněk Nešpor

Link to the presentation: https://link-brain.cz/seo-restart-2018/ 

Michal Voják - Finding the Causes of Slow Loading Websites and How to Solve It

In July 2018, Google will release one of its upcoming updates. The Google Page Speed Update will consider the site speed on mobile devices as a ranking factor, determining the position of the website in the mobile SERP. That’s one more reason why you should test and optimize the speed of your website.

Michal Voják z aw-dew.cz prepared for the participants of SEO Restart a checklist – a list of steps you should follow to discover the causes of slow websites and as well list of speed measurement tools: 

• Google Chrome Dev Tools / Lighthouse (F12 in the Chrome web browser)
• webpagetest.org
• developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
• testmysite.withgoogle.com/intl/en-gb
• analytics.google.com
• tools.pingdom.com
• loadimpact.com
• gtmetrix.com  

Useful tip: you can test how your website performs on the slower 3G network in Google Dev Tools (right-click and Inspect or F12 button)
Causes to look for in the backend: speed, connectivity, geolocation and workload of the server. Type of database, database cache, GZIP.
Causes to look for in the frontend: size and format of images and videos, loading of CSS and JS files, external JS and many more.

Finding the Causes of Slow Loading Websites and How to Solve It from AW-dev, v.o.s.

Link to the presentation: https://www.aw-dev.cz/checklist-rychlost-webu 

Richard Klačko – Google Took Our 3 Million and Got Behind Bars

The title of this presentation was like from a gossip magazine. It indicated that it would to be something big. What was hidden behind the mysterious title? A little sensation in the world of technical SEO – a case study about how Google got behind the # hashtag (which it’s not supposed to do by default) and started indexing duplicated URLs from the filter. It caused an increase of indexed pages from 20,000 to 3 million. Why did this anomaly happen and how did the boys from Taste Medio tackle it? While crawling the web, Googlebot found a big number of URLs with / #, which convinced it about their importance and started indexing them. He rendered the pages with the # link via JavaScript. What was the solution? Find out below.

Google Took Our 3 Million and Got Behind Bars! (Richard Klačko) from Taste Medio

Martin Šimko - Semantic web

The lecture introduced the Semantic web as the next evolutionary stage of Internet development.

Birth of HTTP, World Wide Web, HTTPS and the first browser. After a brief and interesting trip down memory lane, back to the roots which preceded the need for more structured data and storing according to standardized rules, Martin explained what the Semantic Web is and why this concept will be popular in the upcoming years.

The second part of his presentation was about structured data and how it relates to the semantic web and why you should implement them. Structured data help search engines better understand the content on your website and further operate with it. Google rewards sites using structured data by extending their search results with “rich snippets”, which give the website extra visibility in the SERP and provide a competitive advantage (increasing CTR, not the position.) Which kind of structured data should you use? Find out on Martin Šimka’s blog.

Semantic Web (Martin Šimko) from Taste Medio

Pavel Ungr – Indexing Analysis by Using Server Logs

Pavel Ungr showed us a practical example how to perform indexing analysis with the help of server logs. Great technical lecture with lots of useful information. 

Indexing Analysis by Using Server Logs from Pavel Ungr

 

 

 

 

Marek Prokop - Google Search Analytics

Google Search Console has a special place in our hearts. It’s our most favorite tool.

Marek demonstrated what you can find in Google Search Analytics and how to use the Google Search Console API to acquire more data with better structure. He taught us how to do it with simple scripts using RStudio or RStudio Cloud and showed an example on how to transform all that data into an elegant graphical overview.
He also pointed out various perspectives on averages the GSC provides. Although we are constantly working with GSC and we are aware of the limitations around averages, some of the information (e.g. that the average position is the average of averages of averages) need to be said out loud in order to fully realize them.

Google Search Analytics (Marek Prokop) from Taste Medio

Martin Kirschner, Petr Vondrášek - What’s new in Seznam.cz search?

Martin is the leader of the product team of SeznamBot and Peter manages the product team of Seznam.cz search relevance.
Although most of our projects are focused on Google, it is always good and inspiring to take a look on “the other side”. Seznam always reveals a lot of technical information from under the hood of their search engine. This year’s SEO Restart was no exception. We learned about the journey of a website traveling from the Internet through Seznam and finally to the SERP. They also introduced the upcoming changes of Seznam, important ranking factors of search results and future plans of Seznam.

From the perspective of indexing, it was interesting to hear that the decision about indexing takes place right at the URL address level. The robot based on some patterns can determine from the URL, whether it could be relevant or not. We also found out that URLs from the sitemap are of higher priority and that Seznam looks at seasonal pages differently.
Seznam uses 3 important factors to determine the relevancy of websites – Accuracy, Usefulness, Quality – similarly to Google, which uses expertise, authoritativeness and trust (E-A-T).

• Accuracy – relation between the website and the search query
• Usefulness – significance of the website to the search query
• Quality – usability of the website’s content

What’s new in Seznam.cz search? (Martin Kirschner, Petr Vondrášek) from Taste Medio

Other Lectures in a Nutshell

Milan Fiala - Competitor Analysis

Why is the SEO analysis of the competitor important, how to execute and interpret it properly? Milan Fiala from eVisions Advertising gave us some useful insights. He talked about who should take advantage of this analysis, how to find out who your competitor is and which tools can help you conduct this analysis. SEO Benchmark, Market share and opportunity analysis. He also mentioned the tracking of new links, mentions, new keywords and gave tips on how to avoid and learn from the mistakes of your competitors. The entire process in more detail can be found here: Checklist – Competitor analysis

Competitor Analysis for Beginners and SEO gurus (Milan Fiala) from Taste Medio

 

Matěj Velička - Taste Perfect Storage: Search Rocket to The Moon

Matej Velička from Taste Medio presented a case study about the optimization of the Perfect Storage website. The main message of the lecture was that by using sophisticated and well thought out SEO activities, you can achieve amazing results even with a small budget. It’s all about keyword research, competitor analysis, audit of the website and a good marketing strategy. Examples, numbers, graphs and tutorials – it contained everything that a good case study should contain.

Taste Perfect Storage: Search rocket to the moon (Matěj Velička) from Taste Medio

 

Adam Ježek - Linkbuilding in 2018

Adam Ježek from Getfound shared his know-how and tactics that helped him obtain backlinks. He also talked about the practices that are less useful for linkbuilding in 2018. The current trends are bloggers, microinfluencers, combining the online and offline world and connecting different campaigns together. Broken linkbuilding, registration in catalogs, posting on forums or buying old domains are practices of the past.

 

 

 

Jakub Chour - SEO APPSide down

SEO for mobile devices. What influences the ranking? How to get to the top ten? ASO metrics = traffic + conversions. Differences in optimizing for iOS and Android devices. Which methods and tools to use? Jakub Chor from appagent.co broadened our horizons. His lecture was a bit different than the other ones, but it brought a great diversity to the conference.

Seo app side down (Jakub Chour) from Taste Medio

 

 

Martin Kůra - How Do They Do SEO in The United States?

Martin talked about the specifics of the American market in terms of SEO. He revealed, that on one side, it’s a hypercompetitive market with high entry barrier. On the other, it offers a lot of opportunities, mainly for startups or local business which prefer the traditional way of business – only 40% of them have a website. He gave us many interesting tips, e.g. strategy based on the weaknesses of a competitor or a content plan template. If you are interested in international SEO, you should definitely check out his presentation.

How Do They Do SEO in The United States? (Martin Kůra) from Taste Medio
 
Finally, we want to thank the organizers for this amazing conference. See you next year!