When you hear the words Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, you automatically think of improved traffic from the search engines, particularly Google. The process includes, site content, search words, relevancy, etc. 
Webmaster and companies are currently paying thousands to ensure their site has the highest ranking possible for their selected search words. 
There are also companies out there who offer their services to help these webmasters and companies in their efforts.

Sadly enough, there are also scammers out there who are only interested in separating the unsuspecting from their money. 
They prey on those who do not know enough about the search engines to know what to do or where to go for info. 
Currently, there are not as many of them out there as there are for other traffic scams, but it is still worth mentioning to help you stay alert for them.

One of the first flags to watch for is did they contact you first? Whether by e-mail or a telemarketer, it is best to be very cautious when dealing with anyone, or any firm, soliciting their services. Another red flag to watch for is “guaranteed rankings“. 
If they tell you they can guarantee the ranking of your site or guarantee “the top ten in search results“, beware. 
The guarantee alone should be sufficient to warn you as none can make that kind of guarantee. 
This is especially true if they tell that they can do it without making any changes to your site.

One thing you should do is check them out to verify their legitimacy and services. 
You can do this through forums and WHOIS. If they operate under multiple aliases, or have fake info in their WHOIS, it is best to walk away. 
You can look in other forums and articles related to the subject. If in the forums, ask questions and wait for the answers. 
A timely warning here can save you thousands down the road.

One tactic used by SEO scammers is the use of front pages and a demand that they control the URLs. 
Front pages are used to redirect traffic to your site using different search words and phrases. 
Controlling the doorway URLs simply means that they use their own domain in the doorway page URL. 
The promise is that these pages will get you a wider search result as they use more keywords relevant to your site.

This is a lie as individual pages are rarely relevant in keyword searches. 
Furthermore, these pages will often contain hidden links to other clients or the SEO firm itself. 
This tactic will diffuse the traffic that would otherwise come to your site and drain away your link popularity.

It is always important to understand exactly what the SEO firm is planning to do. 
Get specific information on how they plan to set up their service and where your money is going. 
If they won’t tell you, or use a sales pitch that sounds to good to be true, walk away. 
Beware the hard sell or high pressure sales tactics.

Ultimately, it is your responsibility what the firm does, or does not do. 
When choosing any advertising or SEO optimisation firm, always protect yourself and check them out. 
Be thorough in your research. A wise choice will help you along in your search engine traffic while an unwise one can cost you dearly.

A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.

1. Navigation purposes

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

2. Conveying your site’s theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.

3. Site optimisation purposes

When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.

4. Organisation and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organised site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accessible and neatly organised for everyone.

Search Engines avoids indexing multiple copies of the same content – this is what we call it “Duplicate Content“.
Not only does a search engine not index such pages, but it also penalises a site for having the duplicated content.

Having Duplicate Content will not improve your website rankings in any of the major search engines, therefore should be avoided.

There are two major cases of Duplicate Content:

1. Duplicate content as a result of Site Overall Structure

  ♦ Print-friendly pages
  ♦ Exactly same website content different domains (domain.com -> domain.ie or domain.net)
  ♦ Affiliate pages
  ♦ Navigation links and breadcrumb navigation 
  ♦ Pages with similar content that can be accessed via different URLs
  ♦ Pages with items that are very similar in description and name, but they are different in (e-commerce catalogue) colour, size, etc.
  ♦ Pages with the same Title or Meta Tags values.
  ♦ Using URL-based session IDs
  ♦ Canonicalization problems. (eg. domain.ie versus www.domain.ie or /index.htm versus / )

Example using .htaccess to redirect domain.com to www.domain.com

RewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com  

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

There are times when a  website has to contain duplicate content, as in the case of Printer friendly pages, which can be easily excluded from being indexed by SE using meta tag:

meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"

You can also make use of the robots.txt file to exclude directories and files from being visited by search engines.
The robots.txt file should be placed in the root folder of your site and below you will find few basic things that will help you dealing with duplicated content:

#forbid all robots from your site
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Disallow any URLs that start with a certain word:

#disallow ggogle from indexing URLs that starts with /blog ( note the leading / )
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /blog
#a particular page
Disallow: /page-name.html

You can also use wild-cards to disallow any URLs containing the sub-string of your choice ( in this case “print=”):

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /*print=

2. Duplicate content as a result of content theft

CopyScape is a service that helps you find content thieves by scanning for similar content contained by a given page on other pages.

If you are a victim to content theft, and want to take action, first let the individual using the content illicitly know by sending him a “Cease and Desist” letter, using the contact information you can gather from his website or in the WHOIS record of the domain name.

Failing that, the SE have procedures to alert them of stolen content:
  Google: http://www.google.com/dmca.html 
  Yahoo!: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/copyright/copyright.html 
  MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_CONC_AboutDMCA.htm

Search engines may make the assumption that pages not linked to, or buried within a web site’s internal link structure, are less important, just as they assume that pages that are not linked well from external sources are less important than those that are.
Linking from the home page to content that you would like to rank can improve that page’s rankings, as well as linking to it from a sitemap and from various related content within the site.

In some cases, pages like “Terms & Condition, Help, FAQ, etc…” doesn’t go well with the main navigation links, so a good practise is to include them into the footer of you web site.

e.g. home | terms | help | faq...

Another example is when the links structure are created using flash or form select menu. 
Search engines are known for not being able to read images, flash content, etc. and they can not submit forms, so creating a sitemap and adding a link to it from the home page, or adding those links at the bottom of the page, helps search engines in finding to pages included within the web site.

Talking about forms submission.
    It’s a good practise to offer your visitors a search form, especially when you have an e-commerce website with 1000′s of products.
As I said above search engines can not submit forms, and so the search page is not that relevant to them, but there is a way in making it important and gain from it.
One solution I found to be very useful, is to log all searches done by users into a database or text file, and with a bit of coding you can create a large sitemap (over a period of time) that could turn your search page into a relevant source for search engines.

For instance Google Sitemaps. 
With Google Sitemaps using a XML format, you can inform Google of all pages you have on your website. 
XML Sitemap files can include settings for each URL as 
  :. their priority
  :. page last modified date 

Pagination, used for navigating through few pages related to a search or product category. Very useful, but can have side effects regarding search engines if not implemented right.
For example:

consider the following navigation: 

home page -> page1 -> page2 -> page3 ->page4 ->page5 ->...... 

or 

prev | next

The fifth page is harder to reach not only by users, clicking the least 5 times, but also by search engines, which can very easily treat the fifth page as less important then  the first one, also called “Death by Pagination“.
Ways around it:
  :. create a plain HTML sitemap with links to all the pages
  :. create an XML sitemap and submit it to the search engines for crawling
  :. create a better pagination like:

prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | next

It is likely that keywords contained by URL, both in the domain name or in the file name, do have a minor but apparently positive effect on ranking and plays a very important part into search engines optimisation.

It also likely has an effect on CTR (Click Through Ratio) because keywords in the URL may make a user more likely to click a link due to an increase in perceived relevance.

The URL, like the Page Title, is also often selected as the anchor text for a link.
This may have the same beneficial effect as mentioned in SEO Page Title

If your website is hosted on Linux, you can make use of the .htaccess file to create Rewrite Rule and redirect long query strings pages to nice looking, friendly URL’s.

Example:

Current URL could be

www.domain-name.ie/pagename.php?a=1&b=2&c=3

From a search engine point of view, this type of URL format tells nothing about the page itself, but this example should:

New URL:

www.domain-name.com/details-Product-Name-Here-a1-b2-c3.html

To achieve this type of url’s, create a new file and name it .htaccess and ad the following line at the very top of the page:

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteBase /#new rule

RewriteRule ^details-(.*)-a([0-9]+)-b([0-9]+)-c([0-9]+)\.html?$ /pagename.php?a=$1&b=$2&c=$3 [L,NC]

#where L = last rule, NC = case insensitive, (.*) = anything, ([0-9]+) = numbers only

Now change the link format on your page as shown in the example above and you are done.