Dan White House -SEO Presentation - Xbox

8/3/2019 Dan White House -SEO Presentation - Xbox

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SEO Audit & Recommendations

http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/

Lets Jump in.

Presented By: Dan Whitehouse

Date: Tuesday 15th March 2011


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Agenda

Technical Summary

Keyword Summary

On-site Considerations

Localisation

Top Pages

Link Strategy

Social

Offline

PPC

Expectations


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Domain Information xbox.com

Factor Value

Domain Age 12/18/1996

Domain IP 65.55.42.140

Domain Google PageRank 7

Alexa Rank 861

Compete Rank in Compete.Com 348

Traffic according to Compete.Com 4,120,683

DMOZ Listing Yes

Yahoo! Dir Listing Yes

Pages indexed in Google.co.uk 2,710

Pages indexed in Yahoo!(UK) 47,366

Pages indexed in Bing 3,470 Domain Authority 93

Page Authority 92

Linking Root Domains 6,630

Total Links 134,693

Analytics Omniture


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Technical

Technical Considerations

Validation Errors

Load Times


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Technical Considerations

Doctype - XHTML 1.0 Transitional

Root element - HTML

Javascript drop down menus

Ajax

Jquery Silverlight top banner

Encoding / character set utf-8

meta keywords n/a

CSS in separate folder and not embedded in text

Xbox.com UK - Xbox.com


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Validation

Site not created in full flash

No frames

Not valid markup -21 errors, 3 warnings as per W3C validation

service. 6 external style sheets

9 external script files

File types PNGs

Custom 404 page added

No canonical tag


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Load Times

GB page second fastest

Fast load times across the board apart from UK Playstation

site


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Keywords

Out of top 100 keywords surveyed for UK versions of

Nintendo, Xbox and Playstation they shared 0 suggested

keywords across the board. Data from Google AdWords Tool

Comparing Game, Gamestation and Xbox UK generated

different slightly


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b. Keywords

Out of the 13 keyword shared by GameStation and Game 12 of

them are listed below and show global and local search volumes for

each.


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Keyword Analysis

Top five keywords for Google.co.uk & Google.com in terms of search

volume. US page ranks even in local search results.

Out of 100 keyword surveyed 64 of them appear on page one of search

results for Google.co.uk. For Google.com the same set were surveyed for

Google.com and which 95 appeared in positions on page one.


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5 on-site considerations

Canonicalisation

Title Tags

Redirects

Robots.txt & sitemap

404s


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1. Canonicalisation

Multiple versions of pages exist

Implement canonical tag

Link benefit placed on one page rather than many


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Canonical - Recommendations

Add rel=canonical to all pages for duplicate content


Place in of markup on page

Advises search engines this is authority content

Xbox GB - Cached on 10th of March 2011

Few days to a month to see results


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2. Title Tags

Canibilisation over keywords

Localisation UK, United Kingdom

Replace - with |


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3. ?xr=shellnav

Enable MOD_REWRITE in config.php

Turn RewriteEngine on in .htaccess

http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/xbox360/wheretobuy?xr=shellnav

http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/xbox360/wheretobuy

96 instances found on http://www.xbox.com/

Google Search: site:http://www.xbox.com/ "?xr=shellnav"


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4. Robots.txt & sitemap

Google.co.uk site:http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/

URL http://www.xbox.com/en-gb/kinect

Original URL P2 in search results

Duplication or URLs being indexed

Use compressed sitemap for faster indexing

Possible inclusion of noindex in duplicate URLs markup to be safe.

Example Robots.txt with one example on next page.


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Robots.txt Example

User-agent: *

Disallow:

Disallow: /en-GB/kinect?ysmwa=jVYPmIdCEUsZkzmylbQeVpZYcifgjdwc6_Cn

FpipehKsL0U0ICwLFhrsj2YHfB25

Disallow: /en-

GB/kinect?ysmwa=ioLShxykOmrERpdLFjgcztPmHVyLrUzH62rD0FU5kbjieILLCbLX0vsNLK1ENI_O

Sitemap: http://www.xbox.com/sitemap.gz


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4b. Sitemap

No sitemap exists

Sitemaps help search engines crawl pages

Easily create and upload via Webmaster Tools

Faster indexing of pages

Compress sitemap for faster downloading

Reference sitemap location in Robots.txt


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5. 404s

253 404s in total

Table shows top 10

301 to nearest relevant URL

Gain added link benefit


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Localisation


Create sub-domain http://gb.xbox.com/

301 /en-GB/ to /gb.xbox.com/

Omit old pages from search results noindex


Move site content http://gb.xbox.com

Pages already using sub-domain

- http://marketplace.xbox.com

- http://live.xbox.com Google.co.uk search for xbox

Top result http://www.xbox.com/

Redirects to http://www.xbox.com:80/en-US/


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Localisation Benefits

New content on site

New approach

Spin most viewed content to featured page

Involve gamers and web owners

Contact 291 .co.uk webmasters who currently link to /en-GB

to link to new sub-domain


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Link Strategy

Top pages Internal

Top pages external

Competitor analysis

Local link analysis Competitive link analysis

Shared link summary

Average page authority

Linking root domains

Redirects

Competitors


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Top Pages Internal

en/GB/ not in top pages

Duplication of content

Redefine anchor text


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Top Pages External

301 / follow

Multiple domains omitted


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Competitor Analysis

Geographic summary

Vast difference in metrics


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Local Link Analysis

Xbox - http://www.xbox.com/

Xbox UK - http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/

Xbox US - http://www.xbox.com/en-US/


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Competitive Link Analysis

Xbox UK - http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/

Nintendo UK - http://www.nintendo.co.uk/

PS UK Xbox US - http://uk.playstation.com


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Shared Link Summary

Link summary

Links shared by Nintendo UK and Xbox UK

Identical domains omitted


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Average Page Authority

301 follow / no follow

Big difference in Page Authority

Due to low volume and quality of links

Brand comparison Linking inbound links


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.co.uk redirects

Links to US Xbox - 150,813

.co.uk links 291 (from 10,000 surveyed)

Approach web owners ask to re-direct to UK Version of Xbox

site


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Top 10 anchor text distribution http://uk.playstation.com/

Sorted by linking

root domains

301 & follow

Anchor text contains key

brand sony or playstation


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Summary..

Out of all linking anchor text surveyed (155 phrases) 398 (516)

linking root domains contained either playstation or sony,

which is 70.36%. Similarly links from web pages showed asimilar trend of 75.96% containing key core terms.

Heavy on brand

en-Gb/ low on links


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Link Building Actions

Game reviews for product page links

Contact web owners to forward relevant .co.uk links to /en-GB/

Competitions

Gaming forums, blogs, sites, general web owners

Infographic

Locality

Link bait quality content, blog, distribute


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Social

Countdown to launch of major titles

Press releases

Digital outreach

Contact journalists for exclusives

Create different channels for on-going big competitions

Spin top content from forum on Twitter

Monitor and react


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Facebook

Microsites

Source top relevant content and users from channels such as

YouTube, Facebook. Spin best content weekly or monthlyacross channels

Competitions

Interviews


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Facebook Creative

Call of Duty

Endorse major gaming events / sponsorship

Xbox record attempts Tagging products

Give away days

Applications

- Community page run by users similar to Coke page.


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Twitter

Playstation

Source - http://bit.ly/u/sceablog

Xbox

Source - http://bit.ly/u/msxbox


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Social & Blog

Playstation is outperforming Xbox

Mainly due to content from Playstation blog

http://blog.us.playstation.com/

Massively improve followers & CTR

Implement social share buttons


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Video

http://www.youtube.com/xbox

Similar amount of video views as Playstation

Viral video seeding

Digital outreach

Distribute content


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Micro Sites

Easy way to spin featured content

Pull in from different channels

Fulfill one niche Long tail targeted keywords

Create in conjunction with Facebook FBML page

Social bookmark

Small directories


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Offline Kinect

http://twitter.com/#!/xbox

Huge news release!

Offline PR

Celebrate by giving away 10 Kinects

Lottery

Best videos

Etc etc

Create a limited edition

Offline outreach journalists, offer exclusives

Making of

How it happened

Keys to success

Innovation

Has this piece of kit gone platinum how many sales publicise


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PPC

Micro sites

Target traffic to specific landing pages

Use high profile non-brand competitor keywords for ad

groups


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Couldnt fit in..

News

Press releases

Surveys

Most current content on forum

Ask other forums to endorse Xbox forum Paid directories

Discount codes

Social bookmarking / tagging

Wikipedia citations

Domain catching Donations

Sponsor

Guest posting


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Expectations

Within days..

Ranking increase for geocentric terms.

On-site pages starting to rank.

Paid campaigns initiated - PPC

Within weeks..

Big relationships built with major players in industry.

High traffic social traffic being distributed throughout online channels.

Micro sites increasing exposure.

Major press releases being picked up organically offline.

Within months..

Creative and major on-site and social campaigns integrated. Expect relationships, traffic and buzz

around brand to have increased significantly.

Major traffic increases and referral sources increased. Major increase in Twitter followers, CTR and Facebook likes.

Increase in authority organic links and paid links increasing traffic and positions for product related

non-brand organic keywords.


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Questions..?

Dan Whitehouse Email: [email protected] Twitter ID: @dannywhitehouse

Documents

Dan White House -SEO Presentation - Xbox